One last comment on a case study – Gill, have a look at the Gloucestershire satvan. It looks whizzy, exciting and high-tech, and it lets you do your learning down the pub!

Right – that’s enough about case studies. Gill, let me know if you want me to blog anything more quotable on any of them.

We have to study this case study, so I thought I’d better put in some notes on it.

It’s a very first-world view of learning without boundaries as it requires a huge amount of technology, infrastructure and technical support.

I think it’s the only one of the case studies to pick up on the use of MP3 players and podcasts.

It does seem to get very over-excited about new technology. It appears that the university of the future will have dumped every previous technology. We’ll never read a book, write a word or see a printed piece of paper again. Everything we do will be in our e-portfolio and available to the university authorities. We’ll spend our day from the time we get up to the time we’re asleep linked in with university technology.

I think that this case study, like many of them, glosses over the problems of PDAs. Particularly how difficult it is to input substantial amounts of text, the need for frequent upgrades, the implications if you lose a gadget which contains all your information, the problems if everyone has a different model…

The video clip begins with a scary amount of technology – looks like one of the editing suites at television centre. However, it homes in on, I suppose, software – on a way of accessing and sharing files that students can use on a tablet PC, the Interactive Logbook. They can do this at college or at home and, when they are at college, the tablet PC works out where they are and prompts them to find the right files.

I don’t think this innovation comes over very well in the video presentation – and we don’t see any students enthusing about it. It doesn’t look a particularly exciting online environment – functional, but uninspiring.

This clip mentions, as do many of them, the importance of a wireless network. Many of these innovations in e-learning rely on a wireless network being available throughout the learning environment.

I haven’t seen this technology before. They’re mini-electronic voting gadgets. The lecturer asks a question – people vote on the answer, see the voting results on the interactive whiteboard and then get together in groups to argue their position. Then they can vote again.

I’m dubious about the expense here. I’ve seen exactly the same thing done in primary classrooms, only each pupil has a wipe-clean whiteboard on which they write their answer and hold it up for the teacher to see. Presumably, if they’d thought along these lines, the Victorians could have done it with slates.

The key element here is enthusiasm. The students are motivated, they pay attention, they enjoy the class and the lecturers enjoy the class. The technology adds a feel-good factor. One professor says it radically changes the whole dynamics of what happens in a typical large class.

This is one of the video case studies. It’s easy to watch with broadband, and a pain without, so I’m doing it at the OU. The transcripts are very useful to download, partly because they include quotes and small images that could be used in a flier.

I can’t see that a flier is going to be very useful to people who want to introduce a university-wide policy – it’s going to be more useful to people who want to see how these projects could work on the ground, so I think the projects with PDAs, pen drives, and that voting device they’re using up at Strathclyde will be the most useful.

Hmm: better put in some sentences that Gill could quote if she wanted.

The video shows clearly how PDAs are used in college, in workplaces, in outreach centres and during field work. Students use the PDAs in groups, individually and with their tutors. Students can access a huge range of learning materials, including video clips and websites. As at Southampton, hand-held technology is used to support and encourage students who are learning English.

This is what I distilled from the OED:
Innovation is the alteration of what is established by the introduction of new elements or forms; something newly introduced; a novel practice, method, etc.

I’d add that it’s a word with a positive flavour and that, to be classed as an innovation, something must endure or have a noticeable effect.

I’d say that it differs from creation because creation is to make something new, whereas innovation is to employ something in a new way, or to introduce something already created.

It’s got a techie flavour, not an arty flavour.

Who was that discourse guy who talked about the flavour of words? Was it Volosinov?