eLearning Blog Dont Waste Your Time

Reflection on #LWF12 (updated)

David Hopkins — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 09:55:49 +0000

This week was the Learning Without Frontiers conference at Olympia (Jan 25/26). Below are a few pictures from the day (if it’s not mine, then credit is given below the picture where credit is due).

I also used Instagram for my photos, just to add something ‘different’ to them. I have learned, however, that it is better to use the standard phone camera for the original picture and then process that inside Instagram then to take the picture with the app, the result is slightly better quality).

Here are some picture galleries for you, from LWF delegates who’ve uploaded and shared them:

Instagram (from Inkstagram) - ink361.com/#/tag/lwf12
Flickr - www.flickr.com/search/?q=%23LWF12

Lego Ducks

Jacob Kragh, LEGO Education President – each of us was given a pack of 6 bricks and asked to make a duck, here are mine!

Stephen Heppell (@heloukee)

Stephen Heppell engages the audience in his usual amazing and inimitable fashion showing us students and learning spaces designed for the modern world … and a great picture of his boat too! He is championing ‘shoes off learning’ and ‘bring a browser’ (like bring your own device, but simpler) and captured the mood of the audience.

Graham Brown-Martin

Graham Brown-Martin introducing the final sessions of the day.

Martin Rees – ‘From Here to Eternity’

Stehpen Heppell / CloudLearn.net

Stephen Heppell in one of the amazing ‘pods’ (see below) showing the results of the CloudLearn.net project. I have read (and re-read) the report and hope to blog on it at some point, but I’ve a few ideas to get clear in my own head first.

Andrew Eland / Google (@heloukee)

TED Talks (@heloukee)

As someone who enjoys the TED talks it was great to hear from one of the main people responsible for them, and about it’s history.

Dame Ellen MacArthur

Dame Ellen MacArthur demonstrated a very focussed and amazingly simple view on life: go out and embrace it (my words), from her early sailing adventures to the completion of her world famous sailing exploits, to the formation of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.

BBC Model B, in the BBC ‘pod’

Nostalgia in the BBC pod – I didn’t have one of these but I started out on a ZX81 and ZX Spectrum, while my friends had the BBC Model B (as did my primary school, and only the one, on a trolley … !). No, I couldn’t remember any code other than “10 Print ‘Hello!’”

Noam Chomsky on The Purpose of Education (@heloukee)

The opening keynote from Noam Chomsky (disappointingly pre-recorded) was interesting but a rather dry start to the conference. Noam said in his opening keynote “Be obedient, don’t ask too many questions, don’t cause a crisis of democracy”, as well as the “purpose of education is to teach people how to learn on their own” and (at last, just what I’ve found all my life) “a person can do magnificently on a test, and understand very little”.

Watch Noam Chomsky’s keynote on Blip.TV here: Noam Chomsky – The Purpose of Education

Pod-tastic! (@heloukee)

QR Code Trend Infographic #QRCode

David Hopkins — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 08:28:48 +0000

For those interested in QR Codes, whether it’s for marketing or generally linking paper-to-digital materials then this infographic is worth looking at. It’s just using the basic facts that have been reported in the past few weeks (e.g. 14 million US people scanned a code last year – 2011).

Click the image to view the full infographic.

I’m not surprised that nearly half of the scans were to get some form or discount, the whole point of the encouraging people to Scan the code is to somehow give them something in return.

This Calvin Klein video is a good example of giving the public something, giving them a reason to scan the code – the advert was too ‘raunchy’ for the billboard (deliberate?) so you scan the code to get the explicit video. Good marketing.

Dont’ forget the BU and HEA joint workshop on January 31st, 2012 on “Using QR Codes in Higher Education”. More information here: bs1.bmth.ac.uk/QRCodes/

Learning Without Frontiers #LWF12

David Hopkins — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 08:53:10 +0000

For all those who are as equally excited as I am, next week is the 2012 Learning Without Frontiers Conference. If you’re going and would like to meet up then please drop me a line, leave a message, tweet me, etc, etc.

I received an email this morning and have set up my LWF Profile page, which you can find here (plus links to find me on different networks, not that you needed telling):

LWF12 Profile Page

So, what am I looking forward to:

Sir Ken Robinson: Unfortunately Sir Ken is going to be closing the Conference via video-link, but it is something not to be missed, if his other speeches are anything to go by.
Stephen Heppell:I’ve had the pleasure of meeting and talking with Stephen several times here at Bournemouth University – what seems a random journey through his thoughts and ideas at the time, when Stephen speaks, will end up as a carefully constructed story with which you will lose youself in. Amazing and inspirational.
Steve Wheeler:The ‘VLE is dead’ is here again … should be good if we get the kind of debate this topic has had before … ?
Dame Ellen MacArthur: Speaking about her foundation and it’s linking of “education and business to inspire young people to re-think and re-design their future”. Should be good.
Conrad Wolfram: The man behind the Wolfram Alpha ‘computational knowledge engine’ … say no more!
Keri Facer: Looking at the changes change in education that are emerging around economics, personal data and social movements.
Jacob Kragh (Lego Education): Anything with Lego is fine by me, but what’s even better is how it can be used to educate and learn, “from renewable energy to green cities, after-school clubs to robotics from pre-school through the secondary education”
Andrew Eland (Google UK): the “Google story, the importance of STEM education, the UK’s failure to capitalise on its record of innovation and engineering and Google’s position on this” could be interesting, and worth a little time to listen to Andrew.

… and of course meeting so many of my Twitter buddies! See you next week.