Newton’s reincarnation?

July 17th, 2011 1 Comment
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by Derek Morrison, 14 July 2011, updated 17 July 2011

I’ve noticed more and more people turning up at various higher education conferences or seminars with iPads rather than the traditional laptop. My interest lay not in the iPad’s obvious attraction as a highly portable media access and consumption device but rather in how it is being, and could be, used as a creative device at the simplest level, i.e. for taking notes.

Theoretically, as a tablet computer the iPad could be a powerful writing machine. But … (that Auricle “but” again).

It depends what we mean by “writing”. If we actually mean typing there is always the iPad’s on-screen keyboard and that is what I see most HE conference delegates using. Alternatively, touch typists can plug in a bluetooth keyboard thus converting their iPad into a quasi netbook/laptop. I’ve not seen too many do the latter because after all it’s the convenience of touchscreen computers which has gained them such traction.

But why shouldn’t it be easy to use the iPad and similar for ‘real’ cursive writing which in efficiency terms going to be streets ahead of the hunt and peck that even skilled typists are forced into when using the iPad as a notetaking device? So I set off to see if I could find out.

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Quote: Publishing may be in trouble but storytelling is not.

June 29th, 2011 1 Comment
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Posted in The Auricle (www.auricle.org)
by Derek Morrison, 25 June 2011, updated 28 and 29 June 2011

“Publishing may be in trouble but storytelling is not. Authors such as Amanda Hocking are understandably giving the industry the jitters. Hocking didn’t succeed in getting her young adult novels into print in the traditional way, so she uploaded digital versions on to the web, making them cheaply available. At first she sold only a few copies. Soon, however, she was selling hundreds of thousands of virtual books, and only now has she signed a deal with St Martin’s Press.” (Erica Wagner, Literary Editor, The Times, 25 June 2011).

I would like to share the link to the above quote with Auricle readers but Rupert Murdoch’s walled garden (sorry paywall to his UK newspapers) prevents me from doing so; please forgive me. Some columnists offer a copy of their articles on their own web sites but Erica Wagner doesn’t appear to do so.

As I find myself reading more and more epublications on various mobile devices (and, yes, actually reading more as a result) it’s easy to empathise (but not sympathise) with the growing sense of panic from traditional publishers who must by now see the latest digital tsunami building mass and momentum off-shore.

Viewed from an HE perspective it’s now way past the time to start thinking creatively about the opportunities that this presents; and not just focus on the

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Click in the Classroom

June 26th, 2011 No Comments

by Derek Morrison, 26 June 2011

Screenshot from BBC Click episode 25 June 2011The first 6 minutes of the BBC’s Click program for 25 June 2011 contains an interesting item about how some schools have taken radical decisions about the role of technologies in their classrooms and whether “the cheque is worth the tech”. Featuring New York City’s Hudson High School (Twitter @hudsonhslt), the private Long Island University, and New York City’s iSchool the item contained such assertions as “… expensive multi-year services service contracts are no longer necessary and some schools and colleges have gone so far as to design their own software solutions to further drive down costs” followed by a sequence of Long Island University students using an in-house iPad app earthquake simulator. The item then segued to how the NYC iSchool exploited Skype to provide their students with remote access to outside speakers, experts, authors, and other students from sites thousands of miles away. Cue the Skype in the Classroom initiative which at the time of reporting was used by over 12,000 teachers in 186 countries. Although primarily an upbeat Click item, the concluding minute acknowledged the issues that learning technologies have brought to the fore, e.g. equity of access to devices and connectivity, plagiarism, and the need for the technology to blend into the background. On the question of plagiarism Alisa Berger, the founder of NYC iSchool offers a useful message that should give pause for reflection everywhere ” We have found that when kids feel what they are learning is valuable to them they don’t want to cheat because they feel there is value in knowing it, and I think that is a cultural shift that will occur in our society”.

You can watch the item on BBC iPlayer. The episode also appears to be available from the previous episodes section of the BBC Click site so that may work for non-UK residents. There doesn’t appear to be another source for non-UK residents as yet although YouTube does appear to have an ad hoc collection of Click related items.

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Quote: Twitter lessons for spammers and spinners?

June 23rd, 2011 No Comments

by Derek Morrison, 23 June 2011

“… do not use Twitter as an old-fashioned marketing tool. Because it isn’t. The old way of marketing is sending, the new way of marketing is about dialogues, personal conversations, and one-to-one advice.” (Pay With a Tweet is Spam, FutureBook, 20 June 2011)

A message there for us all to reflect on, even non Twitter-oriented individuals, organisations, and corporates.

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All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

June 17th, 2011 2 Comments

by Derek Morrison, 22 May 2011 updated 27 May, 31 May 2011, 3 June 2011, and 17 June 2011

Adam Curtis describes himself modestly as “a documentary film maker, whose work includes The Power of Nightmares, The Century of the Self, The Mayfair Set, Pandora’s Box, The Trap and The Living Dead” but that understates his unique approach to employing visual imagery to help the viewer construct and deconstruct. Those open to having their comfort zone regarding the digital world we are creating made somewhat less comfortable may be interested in his latest three part documentary All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace which explores “the idea that humans have been colonised by the machines they have built”. Given Curtis’ provenance, system and managerialist ideologues may be too discomfited to watch.

For everyone else it starts tomorrow (23 May 2011) on the UK’s BBC 2 television channel and should be available on the BBC iPlayer thereafter. A streaming video taster is offered on Adam’s own The Medium and the Message blog. Non UK readers may be interested in the OLDaily reference in the Further Reading/Viewing section at the bottom of this posting.

Memorably, the British author Bryan Appleyard describes Curtis as the BBC’s “in-house video philosopher and archive-crawler” who believes “that ideas change the world … but they don’t have the consequences people expect”.

Curtis’ latest documentary series should perhaps be followed by reading Dan Gardner’s Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Fail and Why We Believe them Anyway and then Tim Harford’s Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure. Follow that aperitif with a revisit to Francis Fukuyama’s book The End of History and the Last Man (1992) in which the right-wing neocon Fukuyama and champion of rugged individualism asserted that the collapse of communism and the Soviet Union evidenced “western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”. Twenty years later the realities of the turbulent world we now live in and the rise of authoritarian capitalism has led to a new more left-leaning Obama-supporting Fukuyama revising his views. His change of perspective is perhaps hinted at in The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (2011) which acknowledges the limitations of self-interest as the underlying model of human social development (see also Fukuyama’s own web site at Stanford).

And the obscure title of Curtis’ documentary series? That comes from a poem contained in a 1967 collection of the same name by Richard Brautigan in which cybernetics has restored nature’s balance and human labour is no more. Read it and shiver, read it and shiver!

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The personalisation of a learning environment: student-led connections online and offline

June 1st, 2011 No Comments

by Derek Morrison, 1 June 2011

Hugh Davis and Su White led an interesting and challenging session at an invitation only workshop organised by the UK’s Higher Education Academy as part of their Enhancement Academy initiative. The meeting was hosted by the Learning Societies Lab at the University of Southampton last Thursday (26 May 2011). Hugh and Su’s session was titled The Personalisation of a Learning environment: Student-led Connections Online and Offline. It certainly demonstrated a welcome potential to begin the process of stimulating a much needed deep reflection about escaping from the gravity exerted by what are still fundamentally first generation virtual learning environments being employed by HEIs and other educational entities – albeit with some Web 2.0 bells and whistles added.

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Why Are So Many Students Still Failing Online? – reblog

May 29th, 2011 No Comments

by Derek Morrison, 29 May 2011
The concept of the “retweet” is now well established and so there was also scope for an older sibling the “reblog”

This one was spotlighted by Stephen Downes’ excellent OLDaily last week but the topic is so important I’ve decided to spotlight Rob Jenkins’ article Why Are So Many Students Still Failing Online? (Chronicle of Higher Education, 22 May 2011) again here. Rob raises some pretty uncomfortable points regarding the, at times, questionable employment of online learning for reasons other than the purely pedagogical. Although we should be cautious of direct application to other cultures it would, nevertheless, certainly be useful to get a sense of what are the comparative attrition figures in the various European HE sectors for: undergraduates; postgraduates; and those undertaking continuing professional development (CPD). The long term impact of employing online learning for CPD which is linked to maintenance of a position on a professional register rather than providing (or insisting upon) the more expensive face-to-face development experiences is also an area worthy of further study. Don’t get me wrong, my enthusiasm and belief in the power of technology to generate good when utilised ethically and in an informed way is undimed but my enthusiasm is increasingly being tempered by a growing caution; and Rob is right to want us to look at his “elephant in the room”.

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Periodic Table of Videos

May 26th, 2011 No Comments

by Derek Morrison, 26 May 2011

The University of Nottingham’s Periodic Table of Videos is an excellent example of science outreach. All 118 elements in the periodic table now have supporting and stimulating videos hosted on YouTube. Even if you don’t have an interest in the chemistry you have just got to admire the enthusiasm and creativity of the various presenters. And it’s not a bad recruitment approach either. The Periodic Table of Videos has made YouTube stars of some Nottingham notables, including Professor Martyn Poliakoff and Dr Peter Licence. It was the video journalist Brady Haran who dreamed up the idea. Just click on an element and off you go.

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Open University does Moodle 2

April 21st, 2011 No Comments

by Derek Morrison, 21 April 2011

Some time ago I posted Open Opportunities, Open Threats? (Auricle, 30 April 2009) in which I opined that, far from breaking out in a fearful sweat or reinforcing the status quo barricades, the transition to an open source MLE/VLE solution could provide an invaluable organisation-wide opportunity to refresh and develop thinking and explore different ways of doing things. Anyone open to such a “nudge” may be interested, therefore, in the Open University’s free Moodle 2 in UK HE event on Monday 20 June at Milton Keynes.

It may appear to be a minor thing but I’m almost as interested in how information about and signing up for events such as this is moving to the “cloud” – in this case the OU’s use of “sites.google.com” and Google Apps for Universities; a nascent trend in the making? More reasons for fearful sweating etc in some quarters I fear.

P.S. I find Niall Sclater’s blog a good source of information and reflections regarding the use of technologies to support/enhance learning and teaching at the Open University. For example, his xtranormal generated movie Some of the latest learning systems developments at the OU may have the most deliberately excruciatingly naff dialogue ever created but it kept me listening with an almost fascinated horror and fixed the messages more effectively than if two genuine talking heads had done the job. Alternatively, in March 2010 he also offered a useful reflection titled Educational apps or mobile-optimised websites? He has also initiated a number of “clouds” on the OU’s Cloudworks. Niall is Director of Learning Innovation at the OU.

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RSA Animate – synergising animation and speech?

April 10th, 2011 No Comments

by Derek Morrison, 10 April 2011

If you haven’t come across the RSA Animate resources yet then head there post haste; the site offers many items that should be of interest to digital scholars. To me the RSA Animate resources are an excellent example of how further value can be added to what was once POA or POV (plain old audio or video); we’ll call it reuse or repurposing or “adding further value” if you like. A considerable part of the human brain is devoted to image processing and so it’s tempting to speculate that this type of enhanced podcast (or is it enhanced vidcast?) could tap into our inherent visual memory capability which far transcends our normal concept of memory of seven items plus or minus two. I referred to some of the work done on visual memory in my online essay Ebooks in the ‘e-filling station’? (Auricle, 20 May 201) when I said:

But a large proportion of the human brain is dedicated to image processing, albeit at an unconscious level. There is much written about this but a very accessible illustration of the power of visual processing and visual memory has been undertaken by the well known author and academic Richard Wiseman. For example Wiseman states in his book Quirkology “We don’t process verbal information anything like as efficiently, [as images] so associating names and lists with images is probably a good strategy.” The Quirkology web site also shows the live Total Recall experiment he ran to replicate the original studies undertaken by Lionel Standing in the 1970s. See also Think your memory is poor? Forget it (Times, 19 May 2007) or the VizThink blog.

RSA Animate offers some interesting pedagogical research question for someone to investigate perhaps?

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