Blogs

10 Global Trends in ICT and Education is a post by Robert Hawkins on EduTech, the World Bank’s blog on ICT use in Education. It’s a great list, an “aggregation of projections from leading forecasters such as the Horizon Report, personal observations and a good dose of guesswork.”

Last year was a good one for me on Slideshare. In 2009, I uploaded 13 presentations and got:

At the Geek Retreat at Stanford Valley Lodge I brainstormed two key questions for the future of m4Lit. The idea generation was awesome (despite some Geek Retreaters being wildly hungover). Below is what we came up with.

In a 2007 article titled Has txt kild the ritn wd?, Geoff Strong (writing in The Age) makes a delicious contribution to the txtng and language debate.

The most recent coverage of Kontax has been on the Soul Beat Africa site (from December 2009).

The HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition will soon be accepting applications. There’s good money to be secured for your projects and it’s open to South Africans. I was a judge for the competition last year and can confirm that they look for innovation from developing countries — so we should go for it!

What did I do in 2009 as the fellow for 21st Century Learning at the Shuttleworth Foundation?

I have focused on mobile learning. Why?

Kontax won a Bronze “Pixel” in the Bookmarks Awards, the only medal in the Mobile Publishing category. Kontax “beat” M-Net, Football365, EntertainmentAfrica, CAR magazine and Soccer-Laduma, which is the most visited mobisite in South Africa. One of the competition organisors told Steve Vosloo that Kontax won a medal because it showed creative thinking and innovation in its category.

Coverage of Kontax continues as follows:

Kontax has been read by 4,000 people in it’s first 10 days on MXit. I asked a friend in publishing to put that figure in context in terms of regular teen books sales in SA: is that low, high, ok? While we can’t really compare m-novels to printed books — they’re so different in so many ways — her response is still very interesting:

At the Africa Media and Broadcasting Congress I presented m-Novels for Africa: A South African Case Study.

At mLearn 2009 I presented m4Lit A teen m-novel project in South Africa. The presentation covered the paper of the same title co-authored with Ana Deumert and Marion Walton, as well as some interim results of the in-progress project.

Kontax is published in two places: as a mobisite and also on MXit. As we begin to see the statistics for the viewings per chapter, a clear trend is emerging: high volumes in the beginning, then a sharp drop-off and stabilisation of the die-hard fans who read all 21 chapters.

Coverage of Kontax continues as follows:

m-Novels on the rise is a piece by Steve Vosloo about m-novels and Kontax in particular for M&G’s Tech Leader.

In the week after the launch of Kontax, we’ve had the following coverage:

Kontax is exploring what South African youth make of cross-media stories. We have a couple of tricks up our sleeve, with the first one being unveiled tomorrow. In the story, Sbu is trying to find Adelle. He has her cellphone so he goes through her contacts and calls each one. We’ve used real numbers and created voice messages for each so that readers can call or SMS the contacts.

Kontax is the m-novel that we’ve just launched as part of the m4Lit project, which I lead. It’s the world’s first English and isiXhosa m-novel. Check it out!

Kontax launched yesterday. Here is some of the coverage that it’s been getting:

Tonight Sam Wilson, author of Kontax, and Steve Vosloo, m4Lit project leader, launched the teen m-novel at the Book Lounge. The crowd asked some thought-provoking questions and seemed genuinely interested in the project.

On 30 September 2009 Kontax – the m-novel created for the Shuttleworth Foundation’s m4Lit project – launches in South Africa, making world history as the first of its kind to be offered in both English and isiXhosa.

Two press releases for Kontax are online.

The English version of the Kontax story is finished — yay! — and is being translated into isiXhosa right now. Some initial images are also complete and available on Flickr.

On Saturday we held a focus group with 11 learners from the Centre of Science and Technology (COSAT) in Khayelitsha, a township in Cape Town. COSAT is a school, based at the False Bay College, that focuses on maths and science. The learners go through a rigorous application process to be accepted there, and once in they work hard to keep up with the high standards (they have school every Saturday morning!)

What do 14 year olds living in South Africa’s townships (slums) want to read about? To help answer this question we did some research — first of the desktop kind, reading existing popular stories, magazines, etc. and then by holding focus groups with teens.

Everyone knows that the mobile phone is revolutionising the way people communicate, work, play and live in Africa. Below are three ideas for mobile learning (mlearning) on the continent.

Last week I presented Engaging a participatory culture at the Accenture South Africa CRM Executive Summit in Johannesburg.

I haven’t blogged here for a while … because I’ve been doing a lot of posting at mLearning Africa, which I started in May. It’s about news, projects and research about mobile learning in Africa. Check it out!

You spend a lot of time creating great content and attracting an audience for your blog. What if you could use that influence to make a positive social impact? Now you can.

Sorry for this being the latest wrap-up ever.

We’ve got two Yahoo! related news items today.

The first is that we’ve launched a Yahoo! 360 importer (listed in your admin screens under Tools → Import) to make migration from 360 to WordPress.com super easy.

• Commonwealth of Learning – Using Mobile Technology for Learner Support in Open Schooling.

  
  

Since opening up the comment reply via email feature to everyone last month we’ve been continuing to improve it. Here are some of changes that have gone in during the last few weeks:

You guys are generating an amazing amount of feedback on your blogs. Matt mentioned in the April Wrap-Up that there were 8.6 million comments! Comments are flying in every second of the day.

If you’ve looked at your WordPress.com blog stats today, you might have noticed the charts look a little different. We’ve replaced the old proprietary chart object with Open Flash Chart, an open source alternative.  Charts now look like this:

Have you ever wanted to fire off a post from your phone, Blackberry, Outlook at work…? Following on from Comment Reply Via Email we’re introducing our latest feature to make it even easier to publish to your blog: Post by Email.

You may have noticed that videos around here have been getting higher and higher quality.

In April we introduced Instant Findability, TED video embeds, a springtime theme, a cool new domain, and reply-by-email for comments, now open to all. A pretty busy month, with more awesome features on the way, plus WordCamp San Francisco, on May 30.

When we sat down at an Austin cafe in 2005 and wrote the stats system, Matt and I had no idea what we were getting into. He created the databases and drew the little smiley face while I wrote the code. We had milk and cookies. It was really cute. We were naïve!

Some of you may have noticed we’ve been experimenting with a new feature in comments here on WordPress.com, namely that you can now embed YouTube videos and PollDaddy polls directly in a comment.

In Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins says: “Our workplaces have become more collaborative; our political process has become more decentered; we are living more and more in knowledge cultures based on collective intelligence. Our schools are not teaching  what it means to live and work within such knowledge communities; but popular culture may be doing so.”

I posted a short piece about the pros and cons of an mhealth cellbook on Tech Leader.

Texting refers to the use of abbreviations and other techniques to craft SMS and instant messages. Texting does not always follow the standard rules of English grammar, nor usual word  spellings. It is so pervasive that some regard it as an emergent language register in it’s own right. This is largely due to the proliferation of mobile phones as well as internet-based instant messaging (IM).

It looks like permanent teachers will be provided with laptops, via a multi-year roll-out program. This is really great news. As someone who supports the effective, innovative applications of digital media that compliment and improve teaching and learning in the 21st century, I totally support this. ICTs provide huge opportunities to support teaching, and connecting teachers to resources and each other.

Last month I gave a presentation at the National Broadband Forum in Johannesburg, South Africa (SA), on what broadband enablement would mean for education here. The forum aims to collectively produce a strategy for making broadband a priority in SA post the upcoming elections, similar to the recent bb4us campaign in America.

I’ve been working on a short paper on the effects of texting on literacy (forthcoming soon). Texting — SMS-speak, IM-speak, abbreviated and misspelled words, etc. — is much hated by teachers, parents and linguists who complain that textspeak is creeping into formal writing assignments — which it is. There is evidence — formal and anecdotal — of this happening in schools around the world.

Last month I had the pleasure of heading up to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to meet Erin Reilly, Research Director at Project New Media Literacies (NML). This is one of six research projects within the Comparative Media Studies program at the university.

Today I gave a presentation at the 3rd Annual Education Conference in Southern Africa called …

At the Web4Dev conference in New York I met with the founders, inventors and creators of some pretty amazing mobile-for-development projects. Below are my top five, with some thoughts on how they could be used for education.

Last week I had the pleasure of lunching at Google in New York. My friend, Bruce Falck, who works there took me on a bit of a tour around the offices. He used to be based at HQ in Mountain View — aka the Googleplex — and showed me around there when I was studying at Stanford.

Yesterday I met with a team from Sesame Workshop, the non-profit organisation behind Sesame Street.

Last week I gave a presentation at the Web4Dev conference in New York about Access to Participation. The point I wanted to make is that while access to information is essential for development (this was the theme of the session I was presenting in), what we should really be aiming for is enabling access to participation. In other words, we need to exploit the emerging participatory culture in society that wants to create and share information, and not only consume it.

This is a repost from Tech Leader.

The article Video games encourage creativity is interesting, not because of any new findings in the study that it describes, but rather because the study was commissioned by the European Parliament Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection and that it endorses games as good for learning.

At Web4Dev, Erik Hersman, the White African, spoke about Ushahidi, a free, open-source platform to crowdsource crisis information. It allows anyone to submit crisis information through text messaging using a mobile phone, email or web form.

At day 2 of the Web4Dev conference, Kazi Islam, CEO of Grameen Solutions, spoke about Innovations for the poor: Challenges OR opportunities. He described a number of projects and companies within the Grameen family.

Dr Christopher Dye, Director at the World Health Organisation (WHO), spoke at Web4Dev about his work around TB. WHO works with top-level governments and large networks to try to obtain TB information in a country. What he’s realised is that the information is at the bottom, with the people. If only they could be brought into the information sharing network.

The Heroism of Innovation by Tony Salvador, Intel, at Web4Dev. He is an anthropologist and ethnographer, who spoke about following the Hero’s Journey as a tool to think through innovation. He touched on complex adaptive systems and about preparation around innovation.

See it live at Ustream.tv.

Ann Venemon, Exec Dir of UNICEF and John Gage introduced the Web4Dev conference:

Tonight the Web4Dev conference kicked off with a pre-conference reception. It felt pretty good to be at UN headquarters in New York, overlooking the East River and listening to Ann M. Veneman, the UNICEF chief. It doesn’t get more hifalutin than this.

Since the theme is Innovation for Access, let’s hope the conference includes great networking, sharing of ideas and showcasing innovative projects!

Copyright Confusion Conquered is a great post from MIT’s Project New Media Literacies about the use of copyrighted material for educational purposes.

My esteemed colleague. Steve Song, has written a blog post about an Annotate-ipedia, a shared mechanism to annotate content on the web. It is only an idea at this stage, but a damn good one. We first discussed this concept last year when considering submitting a paper to Innovate journal’s forthcoming special edition on the Future of the Textbook.

Last week I held a brainstorm at the Shuttleworth Foundation to generate ideas for an educational alternate reality game (ARG) for youth in South Africa (SA).

I’m exploring the expanded definition of literacy, which includes not only being able to read and write in print, but also read and write across different media. Living in a networked public — like many of us do — also affects how we think about literacy. This quote from the mission statement of the Institute for the Future of the Book is very interesting:

One major consequence of the shift to digital is the addition of graphical, audio, and video elements to the written word. More profound, however, is the book’s reinvention in a networked environment. Unlike the printed book, the networked book is not bound by time or space. It is an evolving entity within an ecology of readers, authors and texts. Unlike the printed book, the networked book is never finished: it is always a work in progress.

In a recent paper, a research team from Manchester University and the London School of Economics (LSE) makes a bold and very interesting hypothesis: that fiction, such as the novels The Kite Runner and The White Tiger, is a legitimate way for people to understand global issues like poverty and migration. It is usually the domain of academic reports and policies to cover developmental concerns.

In 2007/08, the South African government spent R105bn on education, while corporate social investment (CSI) in education amounted to R1.3bn. While a significant amount of money, the CSI contribution is a relatively small (about 1%).

A success story of improving the reading and writing skills of learners is the Zimasa Community School in Langa, Western Cape. Having spent the weekend in Langa for the CSR in Education conference, I realised just how under-resourced most of the schools there are. The attendant ills of poverty are evident in Langa: overcrowding, litter, crime and lack of infrastructure. These factors make it difficult for teachers to deliver a sound education. Similarly, learners struggle to find the space and quiet to do their homework. Imaging trying to study for a test while living in a hostel originally designed for 16 men and now housing 16 families?

October was a busy month: I attended three conferences. I took a fair amount of notes, which aren’t polished enough for blog posts, but definitely worth sharing. Read ‘em at:

Next up at the Handheld Learning 2008 conference: Steven Johnson, cultural critic and author of Everything Bad is Good for You.

He spoke about three types of increasing complexity in popular culture experiences: content, participation and interface.

The Handheld Learning 2008 conference, held in London, UK, kicked off this morning.

First up: Andrew Pinder, Chairman of Becta, which focuses on how to use technology to support teaching and learning in schools. It will launch a “surge” to address the lack of effective and productive use of technology in schools. Why? Because research proves that, when correctly used, technology does support educational attainment and raise grades. For young people, probably the only time they’re not using technology is when they’re in school. This is puzzling and demotivating for them, especially as they know that ICT literacy is required for 95% of jobs.

A truly interesting mLearn 2008 keynote was titled Wildfire activities: New patterns of mobility and learning by Prof Yrjö Engeström, Professor of Adult Education and Director of the Center for Activity Theory and Developmental Work Research at the University of Helsinki. Engeström is best known for his work around activity theory.

The mLearn 2008 conference, held in Telford, UK, kicked off this morning. The 220 delegates come from every continent except Antarctica, and comprise academics, mobile developers, educationists, and others. About half the submissions were from outside of the UK.

This morning I delivered a keynote presentation at the Schools ICT Conference in Cape Town. The conference is attended by 500 people, mostly teachers, and is about the use of ICT in education.

A very interesting perspective presented by Prof Anna Sfard is that Maths should not be used as a ’measure of intelligence.’ Read the piece, it’s short and thought-provoking.

An article on games and learning that appeared in the Business Day on Fri, 26 September, with some quotes from me, Alan Amory and Danny Day. Most of the facts are right :-)

The Centre for Development and Enterpris (CDE) held a workshop entitled Doubling for Growth, to discuss ways to address the maths and science challenge in SA’s schools. A report with the same title was published last year that presented a plan to double the number of maths and science matriculants.

I recently attended the Rural Education Project (REP) Conference. The theme: Towards quality learning and teaching. Between 2006 and 2009, REP aims to develop the literacy and numeracy skills of primary school learners in under-resourced rural schools.

Yesterday the second Games and Learning Indaba took place at the University of Johannesburg. It was very different to the first indaba held in Cape Town, I think largely because more game developers attended the Jo’burg event. In total 33 people attended, including researchers from the Meraka Institute and various universities, members of civil society organisations (e.g. SANGONeT and Women’sNet) and a number of teachers.

At the Shuttleworth Foundation we seek innovative ways to improve the communication and analytical thinking skills of youth in South Africa (SA). One of the ways to potentially develop these skills is through digital gaming — be it on a PC, mobile phone, platform (e.g. Sony PlayStation), handheld (e.g. Nintendo DS) or some other device.

Dr. Marion Walton, senior lecturer at the University of Cape Town’s Centre for Film and Media Studies, invited me to present to her students on serious games and learning in South Africa. I introduced games and learning, serious games as a genre within that space, and then discussed how these relate to the South African context.

A very belated post on the International Conference on eLearning (ICeL), which I have blogged about. Some thoughts and reflections:

Whilst in New York I visited the offices of Global Kids. Barry Joseph is the Director of its Online Leadership Program, which “integrates a youth development approach and international and public policy issues into youth media programs that build digital literacy, foster substantive online dialogues, develop resources for educators, and promote civic participation.” It’s a program by the kids, for the kids, and involves gaming and virtual worlds, amongst other things.

The Teachable Agents (TA) project is under way.  In June two training sessions were held with natural science teachers as well as computer lab teachers from all of the participating schools. The teachers learned how to create concept maps using the Betty’s Brain TA software. The software has also been implemented at all of the schools.

We live in a world where information is being generated at such a rate, and existing knowledge being challenged so readily, that the best education we can give children is to teach them how to learn. They simply cannot memorise content any longer. More important than knowing information is knowing how to look it up and apply it. This is the true skill of the lifelong learner.

ED-MEDIA 2008 paper: Sick at South Shore Beach: A Place-Based Augmented Reality Game as a Framework for Building Academic Language in Science.

ED-MEDIA 2008 paper: Thinking About Thinking Through Multimedia: Undergraduate Learning with MicroWorlds.

ED-MEDIA 2008 paper: New Media Literacies, Student Generated Content, and the YouTube Aesthetic.

ED-MEDIA 2008 paper: Playing to Learn: Guidelines for Designing Educational Games.

ED-MEDIA 2008 paper: Social Constructivism in Games Based Learning in The South African Context.

There are hordes of really impressive yet undervalued resources for teachers, parents and kids to use. I keep mentioning that I want Kusasa to embrace other resources and facilitate their use.

One of the very cool things about Kusasa is that I get to visit schools and just hang around and observe. Often I am interested in trying to pin down scenarios where kids share ideas or assist each other to see if we can build similar scenarios into our own material.

What we do in this area:

Part of the idea for the Kusasa blog was to create a space for recording ideas and insights that are linked to the Kusasa approach. Kusasa is more that just the content we are creating, it represents a kind of head space. Last night while watching Cameroon trounce Ghana in the African Cup of Nations semi-final I started teasing out the following thoughts:

I have been slowly working my way through the The Black Swan audio book by Nicholas Taleb and apart from finding the work pretty interesting generally, I was struck by the introduction of the concept of domain specific knowledge.

Yesterday I came across A Short Course in Thinking About Thinking by Daniel Kahneman. What a fascinating resource! I was searching for “metacognition” but what I found there is relevant to so much of what we’re doing in Kusasa. For instance, in session one Kahneman talks about “inside” and “outside” views of planning or problem solving…