Image by lanier67 Att-NC-ND

Last week Will , Steve and myself from Netskills went down to this year’s Eduserv Symposium in London. It was on the theme of The Mobile University and it was a thoroughly enjoyable learning experience.

The slides and videos are available here. Particularly worth a look are Paul Golding’s keynote and Christine Sexton’s presentations. They both give a great picture of how patterns of use are changing but from very different perspectives.

(Sorry about the wierd ratio. Best to click full screen anyway…)

Set aside a few hours if you can over the next few weeks to have a look.

I set out what I wanted to get from the conference in an AudioBoo.

What I found most interesting was that I had a bit of a reality check and had to reframe my expectations for what students were demanding from the university in terms of mobile learning.

I love using my phone for learning and reflection. I’ve got relatively easy access to my blog dashboard, I’m using AudioBoo more regularly and all the usual stuff like Tweetdeck, DropBox, capturing images and video etc. I find the idea of using my mobile to break my learning out of the training room or lecture theatre and to bring my daily experience into my learning world. Although devices like the iPhone are designed mainly for accessing and consuming media the most exciting aspects are the ones where learners can particpate in, explore and discover the world around them.

What surprised me (and I know this makes me look naive) was that it seems most students don’t view their technology in the same way.

Both Chris Sexton and Simon Marsden’s talks highlighted that students wanted something altogether more functional.

What they wanted was information. The things that are important to a student are things like where is my next lecture, can I view my library record, can I easily access my email, can I see maps of the campus.

This leaves me with one or two unresolved questions in my head:

• Do students partition their use of mobile technology? i.e. This is my social fun time and my learning time is different.
• If they were encouraged to use their mobile devices as a creative learning tool would this actually appeal to many of them?
• Should it be down to teaching staff to lead students towards this sort of use or should students be given the freedom to explore themselves? Will it happen anyway as mobile use increases?

I hope I don’t sound dismissive of student’s expectations of mobile learning. I was just one of those moments where you find your own perspective unexpectedly shifted for you. I realised that the majority of my use of my own device was for routine information purposes. The app I used most often over the few days I was in London was Tube Exits, helping my provincial self navigate the Underground. I highly recommend it by the way – well worth the money.

Ironically, this reframing was helped by a conversation I was having on the conference backchannel with Carl and Chris back at the office.

I still want to explore the use of mobile technology for creative uses but I think it’s important for me to keep my pragmatic hat on as well.

Image - gordon2208 cc on Flickr

It struck me earlier this week how much of a role technology has played in helping us with our move to new jobs in Newcastle. Some aspects were fairly bland but others have been a little more interesting. I thought I’d itemise the different ways and then draw some tenuous conclusion as I usually do. I’ll try to keep it brief.

Getting a job

Using Google Reader to keep tack of job adverts from various sources – There was a lot of irrelevant stuff to wade through but that may be down to how well I configured my searches. I didn’t want to narrow this down too much in case something came out of leftfield that looked interesting. It was the rss feed from Newcastle Uni that threw up the Netskills job.

Twitter - part of researching the role and the organisation was to start with the website and read around it but more useful was actually following the Netskills employees on Twitter. This did feel a bit like stalking initially and I was a bit cautious about what impression I was giving through my own Tweets when they started following back. One of the most important things about jobs for me is the people I’d be working with so this was an opportunity to see whether I thought I would fit with the general feel of the place. It have me a window on Netskills that more traditional research methods couldn’t have done. Twitter was also useful for getting my networks opinions on the topic I was given for the presentation.

Blogging - Candidates were asked to provide a sample of their work as part of the interview process and to bring it along to the interview. My work at the CLC involved only a little bit of materials writing and I didn’t think this gave a good account of what I was capable of. I had a few videos I’d produced, a podcast or two and actually the blog itself is a good representation of me as a learner. So I created a showcase page on this blog and embedded the various bits of meida hoping that it demonstrated I was at least competent with the technology. It was like making a mini e-portfolio.

Prezi - oh Prezi, how do I love thee. Let me count the ways… Both my wife and I had to do interviews with presentations, both of us used Prezi and both got the jobs. See my effort here – obviously you miss out on the sparkling repartee that went with it (and the grilling I got from the Netskills audience afterwards) but it’s a flavour.

Finding a house

So you can search for properties on the internet. Yada yada, so far so normal.

Google Streetview – as we’ve been moving to an area we’re not familiar with and that involves a 2.5 hour car drive to get there having Streetview as a way of getting a closer look at the outside of a property has been invaluable. I’ve always been frustrated that brochures for houses never give you an clear picture of the surroundings but with Google’s various mapping tools you can see how a house fits into the neighbourhood, proximity to services, noise sources etc.

iPhone/iPod Touch – I’ve jumped on the iPhone bandwagon the the last week but had access to an iPod Touch from work for the majority of time we were looking at properties. Aside from the fact that checking emails has been a cinch Rightmove have a nice app for doing quick property searches where you can see the pics of the property, find it on the map and request further details. Viewing a house yesterday having the iPhone to take pics and video of the rooms has been a useful aide memoire.

Choosing a school

Oh the shame of it. Most of our research on schools was done via the OFSTED site. I felt like a complete Judas! The schools’ websites varied so much in quality and content that it made it difficult to draw comparisons. A decent school website can give some indication of their approach to ICT and other things and for people coming into the area from outside with few contacts and local knowledge it’s a nice starting point.

Social Networking – On the subject of local knowledge using Twitter and Mumsnet to help us navigate the confusing set up for mid-year admissions in Newcastle City Council was a boon.

And so the the contrived moral of this tale…

Organising this move up to the North East would have been perfectly possible without all this technological input but having these tools at ones disposal can really improve the way you build connections,  the range of choices you have, remove some (not all, definitely not all) of the anxiety and also introduce a bit of fun into the proceedings.

…and that is one of the reasons why I think it’s worthwhile me helping people become more confident with technology.

Cell by skatejpg CC on Flickr

This idea has been knocking around in my head for a few days. I’m not even sure it’s a practical suggestion but when you’ve got an itch you gotta scratch.

There’ve been quite a lot of new developments regarding CPD in the UK recently, the most obvious being the arrival of VITAL so it’s occupying a bit of my brain.

I’ve blogged before (and here) about my disillusionment with traditional CPD models where learners choose courses from a list, turn up and then hope to goodness that it changes their skills/behaviour. In many cases it might, but it seems like a hopeful scatter-gun approach to learning, not very effective if you are managing CPD for your staff.

I really like the Enquiring Minds model that Futurelab has written about where learning is directed by the learners, establishing a community that effectively teaches itself or drafts in outside help (professional or otherwise). It’s worth a look at and it’s being put into practice all over the shop (this for example).

The thing that interests me is the challenge of managing this group of learners especially if you are in a large organisation like a school or university. Groups of learners would have to be of a size that was self-sustaining without being overly big.

Also, not everybody wants to learn about the same things at the same time so how do you manage learning where the needs are so fluid?

And this got me thinking about Cell Groups. If you’re not familiar with the term, in a nutshell they’re a way of organising fellowship groups in churches (no wait, come back!) where a large congregation organises itself into small fluid groups where membership can grow and change over time. If a group becomes too large to sustain it is free to split. If members of one group feel they are a better fit elsewhere then they can join a different cell.

I was wondering whether this sort of model would work for CPD.

• In a school different cells would be formed for different special interests depending on where individuals’ needs for development lay, for instance, aspects of SEN provision, social networking as a learning tool, new literacies etc.
• Each cell would direct it’s own learning, collaborate, share experience and comment on each other’s progress.
• Within a cell, leadership wouldn’t necessarily be by any one person. It could be fluid or even non-existent, relying on leadership by consensus.
• When an avenue of development is judged by the group to be exhausted then the cell changes its focus or disperses and members join other cells or split to investigate other avenues.
• If individuals feel they are better served in different cells then they can switch mid-stream with the new group helping to support the new arrival in catching up.

The key thing is that these mini-communities

It’s all quite Darwinian. If it worked well then, with a bit of gentle direction,  the cells would form around topics that were of most professional benefit to the learners themselves and therefore the institution.

It could also be quite chaotic and difficult to manage from the leadership’s point of view. Is that necessarily a bad thing? Not sure. The role of the leadership team would be to support learners in taking their development seriously and helping them to reflect and put into practice. With learners owning their own development the benefits would be greater than just plonking someone on a course and hoping for the best.

I’ll probably find that it’s already been in use for years and I just hadn’t noticed. Typical, really.

So, itch scratched. I’ll probably read this in a few weeks time with my head in my hands but the reason for having this blog was to record ideas, however naff.

If you have any thoughts on this I’d love to hear from you.

Go on, put me straight.