So the iPad has finally been launched!

The long awaited iPad from Apple has finally been launched after much speculation.

The technology within the product is slick, taking forward the technologies that enables intuitive access to the software we have come to know from the iPhone. The big plus, of course, is the size of the screen - opening a whole new way of interacting with information located on the internet and processed via the kind of applications we have come to expect. Together with the standard range of goodies you would expect there is an integral ebook reader as well as the option to purchase word processing, spreadsheets and presentations using a multi-touch version of the iWork suite of software.

As well as the ease of use and improving access for learners with visual and hearing impairment or with physical or learning disabilities, the key to educational success will be the quality of applications to extend the potential as an educational device.

The integration with the Apps Store via iTunes means existing applications on the iPhone platform can be used straight away. However, these apps can be re-written to take maximum advantage of the technology built into the iPad. These will be appearing over the next 12 months or so.

As with any new product, the real potential can only become apparent once educators and learners have it in their hands to evaluate first hand. We have a while to wait before we have opportunity to explore the potential of this new product and decide whether iPad is now heading the list of the the ultimate "anywhere, anytime" learning device for learners both young and old.

Information literacy

Everyone, everywhere makes use of the ubiquitous search engines to find and locate a wide range of information via the internet. The algorithms driving the listing of web content and search routines are very powerful and, above all, quick.

In educational settings, searching and locating information is a pre-requisite of the personalised learning agenda but developing the capacity of learners does not seem to feature highly, especially for children and young people. Often, the learner searches with just a few key words which, in turn, lead to an overwhelming and, sometimes, frustrating list of possibilities.

Where effective learners use of information literacy strategies they display cognitive and transferable skills - problem solving, evaluation and communication skills. The key to effective use of search engines in educational settings is for learners to apply such skills and associated information expertise in a systematic way.

There would seem, therefore, a clear role for developing at the very least awareness of information literacy. In the UK, information literacy is defined by the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals as:

"Information literacy is knowing when and why you need information, where to find it, and how to evaluate, use and communicate it in an ethical manner."

For educators, a useful starting point on this topic is the Information Literacy Website which features a good range of valuable resources and associated links, materials and links to other websites. These include a small number of case studies about the use of information literacy in schools, public libraries and higher education.

Using search engines to "turn up" the most useful information in the most accurate and efficient way via information literacy strategies is essential in our fast moving world. As educators, do we pay sufficient attention to sharing and using information literacy strategies with our anytime, anywhere learners?

Podcast Special: Professional Series

We are delighted to announce that the first podcast in our new series has been posted and is available via our RSS feed, on our website and is also listed on iTunes.

In this podcast, we feature a selection of podcast channels from our category on educational news and items for professional educators. You can locate further details of all the featured podcasts, their associated website URLs, RSS feeds and iTunes information at our Podcast Directory for Educators.

The channels we feature in this first podcast are:

• Critical Literacy in Practice : CLIP Podcast
• Inside Learning
• John Merrow Podcast
• Learning and Teaching Scotland
• Wisconsin Center for education Research News

Do you know of other good quality podcasts that would be ideal for use by professional educators and their professional development? If the answer is "yes" then do please let us know or, alternatively, just submit details about the podcast for review. We are always keen to showcase and promote educational podcasts from around the world.

Collaborative working

Every day, new opportunities for collaborative working appear. The ubiquitous "wiki" demonstrated the potential and the power of online, collaborative working for websites but was somewhat limited in terms of producing other documents.

Nowadays, the likes of Google have entered the fray and provide products that could accelerate online collaboration in two key areas - word processing and spreadsheets. These are the most popular applications used in education and business environments and the move to using effecivie online word processing and spreadsheet applications heralds a bright future. At present, this online products only work with the following web browsers: Camino (1.0a1 or higher), FireFox (1.0.5 or higher) and Mozilla (1.5 or higher).

Google Docs and Spreadsheets is an easy to use system of creating word processed documents and spreadsheets with in-built support for collaboration with other authors. The Google system supports documents and spreadsheets in a variety of formats, so it is very easy to upload and use existing offline files in formats such as .doc or .xls for example. Revisions to documents are logged automatically, making it simple to see the changes, switch to an alternative version ansd save the file in a variety of formats.

What advantages does this offer for e-learning?

In reality and with imagination, there are so many possibilities but here are a just few. For identified groups working collaboratively at different time and in different places:

• brainstorming ideas and creating document outlines;
• creating narratives and storylines;
• producing schedules, action plans, cost profiles,and financial models.

In addition, the opportunities for sequencing online tutorial activities with groups of students are extensive. The online tour provided by Google provides a useful overview.

As the world shrinks further with the internet, it would seem that chances to educationally collaborate grows with online products such as these!

Interactivity in learning

Increasingly, teachers and lecturers are begiining to make use of student response systems (SRS), sometimes referred to as "clickers", within teaching and learning. There is a stong and obvious link between assessment and SRS. Most products provide a battery of techniques for analysing, collating and presenting information gleened from "respondents" in a variety of different formats.

So what are the educational benefits?

Input "student response systems" into your favourite search engine will produce a list with some evaluations and research reports into the use and effectiveness of SRS.

The main benefits appear to be related to increased engagement, motivation and particpation as well as claims of gains in retention of knowledge and understanding. For example, a pilot scheme into raising the attainment in some of the UK's most challenged secondary schools, supported by the Department of Education and Skills (DfES), suggested that there were improvements in the performance of lower ability learners.

Q: Is the use of SRS just confined to the classroom or lecture hall?
A: Certainly not- for it can also become a powerful evaluative tool.

With the increased emphasis on school improvement and evaluation within the UK, a SRS product could also be used to obtain feedback from key groups of learners on a variety of topics and in different ways. For example, evaluating the effectiveness of the Every Child Matters (ECM) agenda is complex and the challenge for senior leadership teams in schools is how to effectively evaluate the five outcomes:

• Be healthy
• Stay safe
• Enjoy and achieve
• Make a positive contribution
• Achieve economic well-being
  

With the creative use of SRS, you could systematically quantify a range of the qualitative aspects through the careful design of prompts or questions. SRS can provide a 100% partcipation from targeted groups of learners, with results used for gauging, recording and giving feedback on the effectiveness of provision. Such feedback and related action on improvement could be incorporated as evidence in the School Self-Evaluation (SEF) form used by Ofsted for example.

As ever, the potential is only limited by the imagination and application of such technology by the educator.

Convergence and e-learning

The spectre of covergence in the use of Web 2,0 technologies across hardware and software platforms appears to becoming more achievable every day. Will this truly create a flexible and dynamic e-learning platform for anytime, anywhere learners of all ages?

To find some answers at this stage may be premature. As ever, the driver for such convergence is, in fact, the technological advances within the current batch of mobile devices on the market - such as the latest generation of portable devices whether these are mobile phones, PDAs or audio/video players.

Over the past few months there has been an increase in the number of ways that convergence is becoming apparent. Take, for example, the phenomenon of podcasting that combines the use of RSS to signpost the location of related audio or video podcasts published on the internet. RSS is portable and is not only the mechanism for signposting the location of podcasts, but also the driver that is increasingly ported into different streams for media distribution.

With the right technology, hardware and software configurations, you can select and listen/watch a podcast via:

• your PC or laptop
• your RSS reader or "podcatcher"
  
• your portable media player
  
• your PDA
• your mobile phone

Assuming you have access to the technology, the most popular are the "free" options but a range of mobile phone services are now beginning to offer the opportunity to promote podcasts and use the funding models and associated revenue streams that generate the cash flow within the mobile telecommunications service industry. Whilst this approach may be of particular interest to business communities, it is not an option that would attract support amongst within the educational world.

It will be intersting to see whether this convergence trend in podcasting succeeds. With luck, technological convergence may lead to "free to access" solutions that can be widely used within education and make the prospect of personalisation a reality in due course!

The VLE Conundrum

Q: When is a VLE not a VLE?
A: When it is used as a online content warehouse.

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It is interesting to see how VLE software such as Blackboard, Moodle and WebCT is actually being used within the world of education. As with any content free software, there are a wide range of different applications and uses. Nontheless, one of the popular applications of VLE software appears to be as a mechanism for marshalling content in the form of e-documents and hyperlinks to various resources available on the internet.

There is little doubt that VLE software in its various incarations is easy to use, especially for managing resources such as uploading, accessing and keeping secure key documents for example. This approach, together with the social-software tools provided, appear to be popular features of many of the "open" VLEs on the internet where a guest may enter.

Such approaches are valid and are valuable - but whatever happened to applying a pedagogy?

In reality, designing and producing a teaching and learning package within a VLE is a much more challenging task than simply collating information on various URLs (with the help of Google) and uploading documents.

• First you have the task of planning a structure for the course.
  
• Then, within in each section, you must define learning objectives for the anticpated audience (unless developed for specific, known groups this is much harder than it might at first appear and requires skilful use of optional branches).
  
• From the plethora of options and available techniques, you decide on the most effective way to present the learning material, activities, tasks and associated assessments.
  
• Finally, you need to summarise the section and provide some feedback or evaluative loop for the course.

Does this seem familiar? These are certainly the kind of "building blocks" used by educators in developing, planning and executing most teaching and learning programmes. Incorporating these elements within a VLE is a much more daunting and certainly requires a large investment in time to ensure good quality experiences for learners.

Then there is a question of how to gain a proper return on such investment. The answer to this question will depend on the context, whether the course is a commercial product or targeted at members of an organisation such as a school, college or group of educational professionals.

The VLE is no "quick fix" to presenting good quality teaching and learning materials. Like most educational activity, there is always the need to establish a pedagogy for effective e-learning in practice.

Perhaps that is why there are more implementations of a VLE as forms of an "online content warehouse".

Is this the Wiki era?

The ubiquitous blog has become very popular for one-to-many publication over recent years. Whilst blogs provide various degrees of feedback on postings, they do have limitations. For example, they are not an effective means for many-to-many applications, such as producing a collaborative document.

The wiki concept has been around for some time and there are many different software implementations to suit most situations. Even virtual learning environments - such as Moodle - incorporate wikis as a resource for course design. In fact, the Moodle website makes extensive use of the wiki format to produce and publish its own documentation.

One of the most prominent examples of a wiki is, of course, the popular and very extensive Wikipedia. Thinking of a wiki implementation in terms of such a large scale would be a daunting prospect for any prospective user.

Gradually, it seems that the wiki is beginning to be used for collaborative work within educational and professional development settings. David Warlick, for example, is a great fan of wikis and highlights both the advantages and disadvantages of wikis in his own presentations. Increasingly, forward thinking educational conferences and organisations are beginning to use wikis to capture and share the views of registered users on various topics.

As an educator, it is best to consider a wiki as an interactive resource for small-scale collaborative work. We have been working with various groups on developing the use of wikis for a range of collaborative activities. Not only does it provide online access for a group of users anytime and anywhere, changes and edits to the content are logged and can be tracked over time, making it easy to moderate content or re-publish an earlier version. It is unadvisable to have free-for-all access to a wiki for obvious reasons!

If you are an educator working with a small group who need to develop a shared document, the wiki offers tremendous scope for such many-to-many collaboration as well as extending the range of e-learning experiences. One challenge is selecting a wiki implementation, although there are also a small number of online wikis that you can choose to register with. Perhaps the biggest challenge is the ease of creating a "solo" blog rather than a "group" or "community" wiki. As our collective knowledge and understanding of using wikis in educational settings evolves, it is possible that the wiki era within education could soon be with us.

E-Safety and E-Learning

The advantages and disadvantages of emerging Web 2.0 technologies for effective and personalised learning are being identified every day. As educators, one concern that we all share is the need to ensure a sensible approach so that learners, whether young or old, are safe when online. The key question is this:

• How can we develop effective policy and practice on e-safety for e-learning?

Rightly, many different groups including policy makers, educators, parents, carers and interest groups are becoming increasingly concerned at the way in which social networking websites are being exploited by unscrupulous people. Children and vulnerable young people are most at risk. In the US, the "Deleting Online Predators Act 2006" is proposing to remove the problem by banning such websites (Download PDF). In effect, the consequence of such an action would be to remove many of the valuable e-learning sources that are currently being used with many learners.

The Association of Colleges NILTA - the voice of the Further Education sector for ICT and e-learning in the UK - has raised concerns about the route to censorship in a recent post "DOPA, social networks and keeping young people safe". In particular, they emphasise the impact this would have on the development of online learning and for disadvantaged groups.

"In addition to commercial ownership, the bill defines social network sites in terms of those which elicit personal information, include a personal profile, support blogging or journals, and enable communication amongst users" (AoC NILTA, 2006).

Within educational communities, applying such a definition would simply result in sites such as Blogger falling directly into this category. This and many other similar sites are already being used effectively by educators to develop imaginative, effective and supervised learning activities for both children and young people. Removing access to such sites within the managed learning environment of a school or college would prevent some young people and their educators from particpating in carefully planned e-learning programmes. Without private access to the internet this could also further aggravate the "digital divide".

There are very genuine worries about the kind of information and material that is readily accessible and can be shared via social networking sites. Whilst organisations such as the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre are undertaking important activities in this area, the real dangers and potential risks for personal safety and well-being are a concern of us all. BECTA provides some good resource material about e-safety.

The essential task is to ensure an effective strategy for e-safety within learning communities. All young people, educators, parents, carers and communities need to accept responsibility and act accordingly, promoting understanding amongst children and young people about the benefits and pitfalls of social networking technologies in our digital age.

Retrieval skills: high or low?

Somewhere deep within the internal systems of the internet companies providing search engines will be information about the ways that we all use the facilities they provide. The most common will be the frequency of use for search words or terms.

Most learners with access to the internet use and depend on the kind of search facilities provided by the likes of Google, Yahhoo! and MSN Search to locate information. But what proportion actually make use of the advanced facilities or common (boolean) operators to refine and narrow down their searches?

There was a time when learners were being encouraged to use higher order skills to locate information and this will still be the case for systems provided in libraries, colleges and universities for specific types of academic search facilities. A particularly powerful approach is using the so called boolean operators to refine the search process. However, it would seem that the ease of access to the internet may encourage learners to depend on low order retrieval skills with search engines. Some search engines, such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN Search, do actually provide advanced options for searches.

On the advanced page (shown above) the range of options on the words used includes finding results with all the words, the exact phrase, at least one of the words or without the words.

However, there are already a range of options that exist in a basic searches. How many learners actually use the readily available common (boolean) operators? Examples include such common operators as OR, "" (the quote operator), - (the minus operator), + (the plus operator), as well as AND or & (the ampersand) can be incorporated along with the specific keyword(s) or phrase(s) to provide greater flexibility and refine searches on the internet.

Ironically, locating the information for your favourite search engine is not always easy and they do not always apply the same operators either!!!

Why not get the search engines to do the work for you buy entering something like "common operators" MSN Search provide a useful list of the common operators with examples, but you will need to scroll down the page to find the list.

For some time, Wyoming State Library has provided a good resource entitled "Finding and Evaluating Information on the Internet" with a section on common search engine operators.

As educators we need to encourage our anytime, anywhere learners to develop and refine their higher order retrieval skills. Perhaps the challenge is for us to start using such techniques ourselves to model good practice!

Learners in the digital age

There can be little doubt that the plethora of Web 2.0 technologies is creating new and exciting possibilities for anytime, anywhere learning.

Perhaps the main point of access point for anytime, anywhere learners - particularly young people at universities, colleges and schools - are virtual learning environments (VLEs). These "learning platforms" are beginning to increase the scope for learners to access pre-selected material and resources, either as an intergral component of learning programmes or created to supplement more traditional teaching and learning techniques.

The very best VLEs provide the learner with a wide variety of good quality material presented in an imaginative way. Along with the usual elements such as the presentation of information and the course assessments, VLEs offer scope for more flexibility in patterns of learning and also can act as learning portals via RSS feeds and collaborative wikis.

Of course, the groundbreaking impact of the ubiquitous iPod® and similar devices such as mobile phones are not only providing some learners with the choice of accessing video, enhanced and audio podcasts 24/7, but the opportunity to access learning material and resources anytime and anywhere. However, this adds yet another layer into our understanding of the "digital divide". Some VLEs are incorporating podcasts to provide different learning opportunites and also to cater for different learning styles. Whilst this undoubtedly increases access, the flexibility afforded by portable devices is lost.

Ideas such as One Laptop per Child (OLPC), hold out the prospect of increasing access for every learner, wherever they are. The so called "$100 laptop" is a new initiative launched by MIT Media Lab. The success of this initiaitive will depend on the will of governments but as mentioned in a previous post, there is often a time lag in bringing such ideas to fruition within a life cycle of new technology.

Whilst there is the potential to support learners in the digital age, there are just as many challenges for the educators, adminstrators, policy makers and governments to make this a reality.

New challenges - new directions

Few can dispute the evolutionary nature of technological developments. With an increasing range and synergy of innovative Web 2.0 applications, the digital world that arrives tommorrow includes a wealth of opportunities for the imaginative educator and anytime, anywhere learner.

Unfortunately, inspirational or creative ideas are not enough. In practice, barriers exist that put a brake on both the innovation and adoption of new technologies. In that sense, Web 2.0 is no different.

In his book "Crossing the Chasm", Geoffrey Moore present a marketing analysis on the behaviour of consumers in relation to technological products. He presents a model to describe the market penetration of new technologies and the kinds of consumers groups that participate within a product's life cycle. In brief, he identifies the following groups:

• Innovators (2%) - always in pusuit of new technology for its intrisic value
  
• Early adopters (15%) - "buy" into new technology concepts early in the product life cycle
  
• Early majority (34%) - relate to the new technology but have a sense of practicality
  
• Late majority (34%) - similar behaviour to the "early majority" but lack confidence with technology, waiting for established standards and then requiring a lot of support
  
• Laggards (15%) - those not interested or want anything to do with new technology (unless this is so well embedded in other products that it appears "non-existant").
  

Moore modified the model to introduce cracks between the various consumer groups, the largest between the "early adopters" and the "early majority". He describes this crack as the chasm - the barrier to cross before a technology product/innovation becomes widely adopted.

Within an educational context, such patterns of behaviour can also be seen. As in day-to-day life, this pattern is likely to vary between different age groups. For example, it is much more likely that younger people will "buy into" new technology concepts and products compared to their adult counterparts (parents, carers, teachers, etc).

There may well be as many educational innovators as there technology innovators - all trying to embrace the potential of new technological innovations to support effective teaching and promote personalised learning. For some this will be easier than others, it all will depend on the politics and decision-making processes within the educational organisations they can influence or work in.

Often, policy makers and leaders in governments and key educational organisations - large or small - are not able to respond to a fast moving agenda. In part this may reflect the perspectives of individuals but is also a feature of decision and ploicy making processes. Stephen Heppell elaborated on this phenomenon in "Heppell's Technology Cycle", a podcast he posted in September 2005. There are always opportunities but also threats to development.

Ideally, there should be no limits on creativity, particularly if this can lead to more effective and high quality educational learning experiences. The challenge is: How to keep pace with, adopt and embrace technological innovation? New challenges need new directions. In our increasingly digital world, we have to find a way to invest in new ideas and innovation - sooner rather than later.