OPLS blog

Although it’s been out for a while, we haven’t seen any this side of the Atlantic until quite recently, so it was quite a privilege to be able to play with a Microsoft Surface at the Future of Web Apps conference held in London a couple of weeks ago.

I took a few photos and uploaded them to Flickr with annotations.

While I was having a play, my mind was buzzing with possibilities for how it could be used in teaching in learning. Obviously it would have immediate appeal to spatial learners and those who want to ’show’ what they know or have learned. I could also imagine a small number of students brainstorming together, perhaps using some mind-mapping software and working on individual elements of an issue in ‘their part’ of the display/screen.

There are already some great software and applications written for it (check out the photos on microbiology in the stream above and how it renders 3-D imaging) and the list will only grow as it becomes more mainstream.  What’s really important, though, is the notion that it can receive multiple instructions simultaneously through touch - and that makes it immediately appealing for an educational context; even if the price tag doesn’t at US$15,000.

Here’s Microsoft’s original promo video:

And the inevitable parody

…And if that wasn’t enough, Google have just launched an audio indexing engine for YouTube. Now you can search a video according to what is said within it and not just on the tags, keywords or title describing it.

It’s in beta at the moment, but will graduate into a fully supported technology soon, I’m sure.

As an update to the previous post, Chad Hurley (the CEO and co-founder of YouTube) has just blogged on the future of online video.

Some key comments:

“Today, 13 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, and we believe the volume will continue to grow exponentially.”

“Our goal is to allow every person on the planet to participate by making the upload process as simple as placing a phone call.”

“In ten years, we believe that online video broadcasting will be the most ubiquitous and accessible form of communication.”

“Over the next decade, people will be at the center of their video and media experience. More and more consumers will become creators.”

A typical response to presentations I have given to IB leadership on social media and education technology is, “That’s all very well, but my school district or education authority bans this technology.”

Well, for all those who are faced with this problem, this video by Michael Wesch is for you. It’s an academic’s response to the transformative power of YouTube and why we need to understand it better. It was presented in June this year, at the US Library of Congress.

The video is nearly an hour long, so it’s best viewed with colleagues and coffee (and possibly at home?).

Michael has published a timeline, which I have copied for convenience below.

0:00 Introduction, YouTube’s Big Numbers

2:00 Numa Numa and the Celebration of Webcams

5:53 The Machine is Us/ing Us and the New Mediascape

12:16 Introducing our Research Team

12:56 Who is on YouTube?

13:25 What’s on Youtube? Charlie Bit My Finger, Soulja Boy, etc.

17:04 5% of vids are personal vlogs addressed to the YouTube community, Why?

17:30 YouTube in context. The loss of community and “networked individualism” (Wellman)

18:41 Cultural Inversion: individualism and community

19:15 Understanding new forms of community through Participant Observation

21:18 YouTube as a medium for community

23:00 Our first vlogs

25:00 The webcam: Everybody is watching where nobody is (“context collapse”)

26:05 Re-cognition and new forms of self-awareness (McLuhan)

27:58 The Anonymity of Watching YouTube: Haters and Lovers

29:53 Aesthetic Arrest

30:25 Connection without Constraint

32:35 Free Hugs: A hero for our mediated culture

34:02 YouTube Drama: Striving for popularity

34:55 An early star: emokid21ohio

36:55 YouTube’s Anthenticity Crisis: the story of LonelyGirl15

39:50 Reflections on Authenticity

41:54 Gaming the system / Exposing the System

43:37 Seriously Playful Participatory Media Culture

47:32 Networked Production: The Collab. MadV’s “The Message” and the message of YouTube

49:29 Poem: The Little Glass Dot, The Eyes of the World

51:15 Conclusion by bnessel1973

52:50 Dedication and Credits (Our Numa Numa dance)

Enjoy!

We’ve been having a look at some new developments in web-based technologies to improve and evolve the user experience of the browser.

One great example is PicLens by Cooliris. This transforms your browser into a full-screen, 3D experience for online photos and videos. It’s a small download, but once installed improves the user interface significantly and offers all sorts of possibilities when displaying content. We’re trialling it with Visual Arts folders for example. Highly recommended.

Another is Tag Galaxy. This is basically a cool way to display shared photos from Flickr. Just type in a keyword and wait for the results to display in a planet-like orb. Related tags are then displayed in a solar system arrangement. Great fun.

Just launched, as a proof of concept, is Aurora from Adaptive Path. The best way to describe this is that people, places and things are represented by objects in a three dimensional space. Closely related objects are clustered together and users can rotate through these as required. Try this video for more details (sorry about the link only - the embed code didn’t work in Wordpress)

Clearly, as more learning takes place via the web, anything that can be done to improve the experience and facilitate access to information will ensure that learners are, in turn, more inspired and engaged.

Please find below a YouTube video B Nesbitt created to “inspire teachers to use technology in engaging ways to help students develop higher level thinking skills. Equally important, it serves to motivate district level leaders to provide teachers with the tools and training to do so.”

Paul Fairbrother and I used it at the most recent IBNA conference in San Francisco. It went down very well with school leadership who told us they will show it to their teaching faculty as soon as the new school year begins.

I hope it helps you too:

On 18 April 2008, the IB celebrated its fortieth anniversary in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. On this occasion, the annual Peterson Lecture was delivered by His Highness the Aga Khan, the spiritual leader of the Shia Ismaili Muslims, and the founder and Chairman of the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN).

His Highness the Aga Khan spoke on “Global Education and the Developing World”, a topic of great relevance to the IB itself and also to IB schools and teachers.

We invite IB teachers to watch the Peterson Lecture and to comment on some of the big questions that it poses to educators worldwide - at a time when the IB looks back on 40 years of international education, and considers new challenges for the future.

A video of the speech, with the ability to comment, can be found here (please feel free to circulate to colleagues):

“Global education and the developing world” - His Highness the Aga Khan

For those of you who enjoyed Michael Wesch’s first video, the Machine is Us/ing Us, you might want to have a look at his follow-up, Information R/Evolution:

It’s a great exposition of the power of tagging.

“Technology is not about productivity”

“Technology is about motivation”

“Don’t consider your own curriculum without first looking at what others are doing around the world”

Three messages from Stephen Heppell to help us frame our understanding of educational technology and curriculum design.

Here he talks to Connected Magazine’s Nicola More about bringing his unique vision of learning to Scotland:

We knew it would only be a matter of time before the IB learning community began to inhabit media sharing sites such as YouTube and Flickr. Here are two examples we’ve come across recently - both from YouTube.

The first is a PYP exhibition sample, contributed by students and teachers at the International School of Tianjin, China.

The second example is from a TOK student in the Diploma Programme. We don’t know who he is or where he’s from, as there are no end credits, but we think you’ll enjoy it nevertheless:

With either video, we make no claims as to their adherence to programme requirements. What we do want to do, though, is use them to highlight a number of important issues.

The first is that they’re two examples of students using new technologies to get a message across and show evidence of learning. This is something we will need to come to terms with as a curriculum and assessment authority, and particularly as an awarding body, in the future. Recognising student learning, when evidence of it is so dispersed on the web, will be a real challenge for us in the years ahead.

The second is that they’re both examples of resources which can help teachers in furthering their understanding of the programmes. Discussions around what’s good, and not so good, about them are invaluable for teachers as they attempt to come to terms with programme requirements and continuously improve their practice.

Thirdly, and as a corollary of the above two points, where these examples are located will increasingly be irrelevant. What is important is how we describe them (ie what metadata will we need to establish and use in order to tag these resources?) and how we link to them (ie how can we make use of the semantic web to go beyond a closed teacher resource exchange, such as that on the OCC?)

Something to think about anyway.