I’ve read five of the case studies now (all the ones without videos. Downloading videos without a broadband connection is generally a waste of time).

As individual studies they’re all exciting and whizzy but, as a whole, I find them rather soulless. They’re all about the equipment, they’re not about the people or the learning. Or, rather, the people and the learning are there, but they’re buried under details of how many PDAs are available and how many interactive whiteboards there are.

And the administration seems to get mixed up with the learning – it’s good to have a lot of computers because then you can do registers on line, and contact parents if children aren’t there, and you can teach the students as well. This seems to be confusing two very different things.

Some of these projects will have horrendous operating costs: in-service training, student training, software licences, equipment upgrades, maintenance contracts.

Perhaps I’d better stop looking at them en masse and start looking at them individually to see where there is genuine innovation and where there is just technology.

Gill commented:
Hi Rebecca,

I think it is very easy to get caught up with the excitement of the new technology and to forget the underlying reasons for using it in the first place. I’m having to fight that temptation all the time!

I’ve also agreed to do this H807 activity. Wonder when I’ll get the materials?

Or do I have them already – perhaps lost amongst the electronic clutter of my inbox.
cheers
Gill
Comment from euphloozie – 05/12/05 19:26

Reading through the H807 case studies – the course materials require me tomake blog entries.

The one I’ve just read is ‘Any time, any place learning: Multimedia learning with mobile phones’. It’s based on an initiative at City College, Southampton.

They provide ESOL students with whizzy mobile phones which have camera and PDA abilities.

Then eg the lecturers upload an image such as a map of the college campus and create zones within it. Learners work in pairs to send images and messages from each zone, and a composite picture is built up.

This is to help students integrate and to help them develop linguistically. As the course goes on they can be asked to do more grammatically complex things and to find out information and answer questions.

There’s a claim that learners are practising ‘grammar, idiom and pronunciation’. I’m not quite sure how this works. They get to record audio files, but there doesn’t seem to be much talking going on.

I must say, I’d be wary about teaching people English in an environment which requires a lot of texting. Is there not a danger of developing some bizarre Pidgin English style based on learning the language via text messages?

It does sound good fun, though, and I think I’d enjoy learning a foreign language in this way. They don’t say what happens if you come from a background that uses a different character set.

I’ve started looking at the H807 course materials, which I’m reviewing. I’m supposed to jot down a few initial ideas of my own on innovation in e-learning. E-learning is to be understood as ‘learning facilitated and supported by the use of information and communications technology (desktop and laptop computers, mobile and wireless devices, electronic communications, software and virtual learning environments)

It specifically says don’t bother to examine the concept of e-learning, so I won’t waste time trying to pick that definition to pieces.

Innovation, then. Well, it’s doing something new. Except it’s not quite, because I’d be doing something new if I went to Slough, but I don’t think I could claim that was innovative. And it’s not the same as invention.

Is it using existing objects and methods in new ways? How long would things stay innovative? Are they innovative the first time they are done, or the first time someone new does them, or for a few months or a year?

So an innovation in e-learning would involve using ICT for some learning purpose for which it had not been used before. Or it could be using a familiar bit of ICT for a new learning purpose. Or it could be using a familiar bit of ICT in a familiar way but using it with a new set of learners.

For example?

Well, picking on the video ipod. If I used that to show a video clip of Pride and Pred to a seminar group, that would be innovative. It would probably still be fairly innovative the next term, and it would be old-hat after a year.

If we had the video ipod for a year and I gave them to everyone in a seminar group and asked them to work together to identify the elements of an ideal happy ending, that would probably be innovative again.

If I then took the video ipods to a nursery class and showed them clips from Disney movies and talked with them about what made them happy, that would be innovative.

I guess it’s pretty easy to be innovative with a new technology, because anything you do with it in an elearning context is going to be innovative.

‘Innovative’ has a sort of shiny, happy flavour for it, but I guess most new uses/applications of technology must be unsuccessful. So perhaps it only counts as true innovation if it endures, or influences others or is successful in some way.

Inventing a car with red headlights thus wouldn’t be classed as innovative, but as stupid.

OK. That’s enough on innovation.