IDEO's Future of the Book video shows three different possible concepts for near-future books.
I like the look of the third version the best.
The Future of the Book. from IDEO on Vimeo.
On another note James Clay’s ‘The iPad, the future of reading’ video from The Future of Technology in Education Conference (#FOTE10) is worth a quick look.
A video of my presentation from #FOTE10 is now up on the Future of Technology in Education Website. The title of my presentation was ‘Unlocking Learning – Computer Games in Education’ where I talked about some of the work that we do at Learning and Teaching Scotland in the Consolarium.
During my presentation I covered:
You can watch the full video here and I’ll post the slides and a more detailed description of what I covered over on the Consolarium blog soon. You can also watch the videos from the other FOTE presenters.
As always I would welcome any feedback.
Jeremy Spellers spoke about the mobile university at FOTE10.
As well as talking about the mobile university I also felt that Jeremy had another key message and one that he had previously written about on the FOTE Blog.
‘One thing many people are doing is providing information via smart-things. There are native apps, mobile Web sites, mobile stylesheets and all or none of these. It’s the technological wild west – nobody is quite sure whether there is a best way to do it so the techies debate endlessly.'
'Providing information via mobile devices is a good thing of course and at UCL we’ve been providing the campusM service for students since the spring. I’m just urging people not to get too hung up on particular technologies. While there’s no money around we have to choose what we get into carefully and try to gaze into the smart-ball and avoid here today gone tomorrow technologies.’
He reinforced his point really well when talking about capital spend and lecture theater design.
Mentioning that the last big lecture theatre that ULC built had the capacity to plug in an Ethernet cable into each seat of the lecture theatre. This cost the university thousands of pounds and by the time the lecture theatre was built wireless technology had become robust enough that no one really used Ethernet cables any more.
Currently another lecture theater is being built and in this one power was one of the main concerns of the designer, so every seat will have a power outlet - again costing thousands of pounds.
Jeremy made the point well, battery life is improving and now his iPad easily lasts a day at a conference. Will those power sockets be redundant as soon as the facility is built and has the investment in them been really worth it? Could the money have been spend better?
Both examples illustrate how we often waste money to support current technology solutions rather that trying to research and develop more flexible and sustainable solutions.
We are about to start building a lot of new schools in Scotland and we can’t afford to make the same mistake.
Banner photo: ULCCEvents
James Alliban did an excellent presentation on Augmented Reality at FOTE10.
I first came across James Alliban a number of years ago while doing some research into Augmented Reality (AR) and how it might be beneficial to education. If your interested in AR then you will already know one of James's first AR development – its been viewed thousands of times on the Internet. It’s the AR Business card – I’ve embedded the video below.
During his presentation James gave a whirlwind tour of some of the current and possible future developments in augmented reality and possible links to education.
I still think AR has a massive place in schools – I commented on this during my 2010 BETT round up. But what we lack at the moment is good pedagogy to support and develop learning through the use of this type of technology.
We have started to do some work on this at the Consolarium at Learning and teaching Scotland where we have been using the Sony Eye Pet with some of our partner schools. There was a good write up on this (and some of our other Early Years work) in the Times Educational Supplement last Friday. You can read the on-line version of the article here.
If you have not seen the Eye Pet before have a look at the Trailer for the Play Station 3 below:
I think one of the reasons that the Eye Pet has been so successful is that it creates suspended disbelief with children and that allows you to develop quality learning tasks around the augmented reality.
Related to this, I really liked the idea of one of the videos that James showed which I feel could also develop the notion of suspended disbelief but in a more complicated science environment. The AR is also being used to do something that you can’t normally do due to safety reasons but I also think the immersive nature of the simulation adds value.
Basically you have an AR source of radiation and an AR Geiger counter. You can measure the levels of radiation using the Geiger counter.
But you can also try to contain the radiation with a variety of AR materials including lead and tin foil. Depending on what you use as your containment field will effect the reading on your Geiger counter.
Finally, Augmented reality was one of the technologies that I suggested would change the way we live, work and play during a series of posts that I wrote earlier in the year. One place where it will definitely have an impact on education is in vocational skills training. In his presentation James showed a VW example – I really like the BMW example that I have embedded below.
Ray Fleming (@rayfleming) opened up the FOTE10 Conference and used the Microsoft Vision of the Future video to illustrate some of the possible changes in technology that could impact on learning in the not to distant future.
If you have not seen the video it is worth watching. It was produced about 14 months ago and its interesting to see how many of the ideas in the video have already started to become reality, how many of the ideas will never become reality (because we have already found better solutions) and how many of the ideas that I want to become reality very quickly!
Ray then provided a more detailed overview of some of parts of the video. He also talked about some of the other things that have been built as concept models in Microsoft Research Labs.
These included:
MS Soap (I’ve not heard about this for a while) but I thought it was a pretty good idea when it was first rumored in 2006. Basically it’s a mouse that you can use to control a computer wall from anywhere in the room with a high degree of accuracy.
Round Screens (Microsoft Sphere) I like the idea of both rounded screen and surface computers because I think they encourage collaboration. But they still need to reach an appropriate price point for schools and be developed along with pedagogy.
Video Walls again been around for a while. I would love to see some of this technology in schools. For example, imagine a classroom that you could make to look like the rainforest if you were studying the Amazon.
Touch sensitive phone but on the back of the device so you can always see what you are looking at. In interesting idea but I’m not sure how it will catch on in a device as small as a phone – I think that your hand holding the phone might get in the way?
Microsoft Kinnect was the last technology that was mentioned – again I just think that this has huge potential for education.
Anyway, I enjoyed Rays talk and I’m pretty sure he was using PowerPoint Plex for his presentation – it was a pretty slick performance and he handled the questions from the audience really well.
Banner Photo: ULCCEvents
I first attended The Future of Technology in Education Conference (FOTE) last year (2009) and I said at the time I aimed to go back. I was delighted to be asked to speak at the FOTE 2010 conference and I was able to talk to the assembled audience about some of the work that we do at Learning and Teaching Scotland within the Consolarium
FOTE is a good idea – it is free to attend and consists of short 20-minute presentations by people from a variety of backgrounds. It is also a good networking opportunity and attracts nearly 400 delegates – this year it sold out in just under 90 minutes. Most of the audience come from the further and higher education sector.
One of the things that FOTE does well is its pre conference website and its during conference sharing. Other conference organizers could learn a lot from what they do here.
Also, during the conference it is live streamed and also broadcast within Second Life. Both of these things are fairly easy to do but again it allows for more remote participation and attracts a wider variety of audience.
Chris Smith (who runs the popular education website shambles.net) just stumbled across the conference on the morning that it was due to start. He tuned in via second life and twitter – and even though he lives in Thailand he was able to participate as a full conference delegate.
Usefully, Chris has posted some of his conference feedback as a Screener recording:
I wonder what we can learn from FOTE for events like the Scottish Learning Festival. I'll post some of my other thoughts about this years FOTE 2010 Conference.
All Photos: ULCC Events
Recent Comments