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1 July 2011

Newsletter July 2011

Newsletter July 2011

Newsletter July 2011

New MirandaNet service for consultants

Membership of the MirandaNet Fellowship has been free to members since 1992.  A small team of consultants donate their time and an overhead from projects to pay the running costs of MirandaNet which is an international not-for-profit professional organisation. 

Many of our members are also consultants in digital technologies in teaching and learning. Since Coalition government won the election last year in England and the cut-backs have begun to bite these members are reporting that although the market overseas is buoyant, consultancy work is suffering from financial uncertainty in England.

We have, therefore, designed a new service for MirandaNet members who are consultants in digital technologies in education. We are offering to advertise members’ consultancy services on our new web zone (www.mirandanet.ac.uk/consultancy). This will cost £25 a year for individuals and £50 for groups who have formed a consultancy company. This will also alert us to MirandaNet members who might like to work on our projects.

We have a different scale of charges for companies who want to market their education products and services to educators world-wide. This membership promotion will be launched on our new consultancy website which show-cases what kinds of projects the MirandaNet team undertake in research, running unconferences, consultancies  and continuing professional development (www.mirandanet.ac.uk/consultancy).

This promotion of consultant members will offer value for money as we have more than 750 members in 80 countries. Our newsletters reach about 2,500 others. MirandaNet currently has over 750 members in 80 different countries round the globe. The web site is well indexed and features prominently in Google and  other search results. The site is very well patronised and on average over 1300 pages are viewed each day excluding robots.These fees for advertising consultants will support the maintenance of the website and also go towards expanding the MirandaNet services to members.

Please apply to Christina Preston if you are interested in pursuing this opportunity further.

Free MirandaNet services

We would be glad to hear from members who have suggestions for other services we can offer that will benefit from and develop MirandaNet’s international reputation for high quality services. This is our current portfolio:

Profiles

Have you updated your profile recently? You might want to make some changes. If you Google your name you might be surprised at the ranking that names on MirandaNet can achieve.

Recommendations

Do you have anything to say about what your have gained from our Fellowship over the years? We’d like to publish some recommendations. Please contact me.

New Fellows

Allison Allen

We are delighted to award Allison Allen a Senior Fellowship for her support for the MirandaNet Fellowship and her work in research into digital technologies that is of outstanding value to our community.

For her Fellowship she has offered an article about models and theories in relation to working with people and ICT evaluation of courses.

You will find her article here:

http://www.mirandanet.ac.uk/consultancy/2011/models-and-theories-in-relation-to-working-with-people-and-ict-evaluation-of-courses/

Her Senior Fellowship award is based on the voluntary work she has done developing MirandaNet activities and events and on several publications: three have involved MirandaNet members:

Roger Broadie

We also have a new Fellow, Roger Broadie, who has contributed an interesting piece about the cost of computers related to their value in teaching and learning. Those are trying to justify the costs in these straighten times will find some useful arguments in this article.

This quotation indicates the size of the task that Roger sets himself in trying to establish a theory about the impact of ICT in the classrooms.

“There have been many attempts to study the impact of ICT on achievement. It has proved possible to causally link certain uses of ICT to raised achievement when these are limited in time and purpose – for example us of revision software in the weeks leading up to exams. However broader studies such as Becta’s Impact2, analysis of the ICT Test-bed schools and investigations by Ofsted have largely failed to prove that use of ICT has caused raised achievement while at the same time being able to show correlation between schools with good pupil achievement and those making good use of ICT. Internationally there is a paucity of studies showing that ICT has raised achievement in schools”.

It is possible that this failure to link use of ICT with raised achievement to any great extent is that it is fundamentally impossible to do so?”

Roger also provides some fascinating examples of innovative uses of digital technologies in the classroom like the use of flip video cameras.

“If you give the pupils a flip video camera and tell them they have to choose to be a beetle or a butterfly (with a camera) making a podcast, you get a whole new dimension.  The beetles will all be lying flat on the ground, crawling through the grass and pushing their camera through the jungle of stalks, bumping into other bugs, looking up and seeing huge birds and so on. The butterflies will hold their cameras facing downwards and fly around swooping down towards brightly coloured flowers”.

You can see Roger's article here:

http://www.mirandanet.ac.uk/casestudies/mnet/265

MirandaNet chapter launched In Zimbabwe.

Ben Semwayo, chair of our Zimbabwean chapter and one of our senior Fellows, has summed up a discussion in the group that will be used to raise funding for the group’s activities.

They have written a report about the kind of training that Zimbabwean educators need now that Nelson Chamisa has announced that “Zimbabwe is on the verge of becoming an “information tiger of the continent.” This announcement followed the commencement of the laying of an optic fibre link connecting Zimbabwe to the Beira under-sea cable. Expectations are high in Zimbabwe following news that the landlocked Southern African state is on the verge of being wired to the rest of the world through an undersea cable.

Desderio Chavunduka a Lecturer at Chinhoyi University of Technology has compiled a report from the discussions in the new chapter. He is pleased that they have had the chance to applaud this news and debate the implication.

“The first MirandaNet-Zimbabwe chapter discussion came up with the following recommendations:

The momentum generated by the president when he launched the Presidential Computerization Programme which donated ten computers per school to nearly all the secondary schools in the country in 2010 should be continued.

The rest of this report is available for download from MirandaNet. The chapter are particularly keen to come to BETT12 to learn about new ICT practice, to develop contacts in English schools. They also want to visit schools in other countries.  Do you know of a source of funding we can use to allow our Zimbabwean colleagues to travel? Let me us know if you do: Benjamin Semwayo btsemwayo at yahoo.co.uk,  christina at mirandanet.ac.uk

Research news from Australia

When we were in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia last year Marilyn Leask and I talked to Elizabeth Hartnell-Young and her colleagues about building professional communities on line. Elizabeth’s

Office of Policy, Research & Innovation were working on a the development of new learning platform at the time. She has now sent for members a link to the latest edition of our Research eLert newsletter at http://www.eduweb.vic.gov.au/edulibrary/public/researchinnovation/marchelert.pdf

She would like to receive feedback and ideas for collaboration:

hartnell-young.elizabeth.a at edumail.vic.gov.au

Summarising MirandaLink debates

A key aspect of our activity is debating current issues. Members are encouraged to start debates on MirandaLink. We will always help you with the wording if you feel you need this support. Fellowship awards are available to members who initiate and summarise debates

For example, following a post by Tim Rudd on the ICT Research Network on June 22, John Cuthell posted a message on MirandaLink the next day which you might remember.

Is there a specific brand of mobile learning device? Or has the iPad/iPhone label become, like 'biro', a generic name?

Colleagues who subscribe to the ICT Research Network listserv will already have seen some interesting contributions to this debate. There would appear to be a divide between mobile devices used by many students in Higher Education and other learners. The suggestion is that, whilst many HE students use iPhones and iPads, across other sectors of education there is a more varied picture, with many learners using Blackberries or Android devices. Indeed, the recently-published report 'Safeguarding vulnerable young people online', by Stephen Carrick-Davies, identifies the role of Blackberries and Android devices, and the reasons that young people use them. Ray Tolley and Karl Royle have made similar observations.

What is the experience of colleagues in the MirandaNet network?

Could it be that, apart from other factors, Blackberry and Android devices are available on tariffs that are more accessible to young people?

I would be most interested in your observations.

John’s final summary picks up the main points of the discussion. These summaries are also useful to members who have to report on the issue in hand.  John’s summary is available for download from MirandaNet.

Another summary was sent in by Lawrence Williams who had set up a debate:

How do teachers learn about digital technologies?

Lawrence Williams summed the debate he began  like this:

The general theme seems to be that we should be looking to develop independent, thinking teachers (rather than "trained" ones) who can start to make their own judgments about what and how to use ICT tools appropriately, while simultaneously steering them to develop the use of on-line tools for collaboration, and the co-construction of knowledge.

This was, after all, Berners-Lee's purpose in creating the web, in the first place!  It's not his fault that the web turned, initially, into a gigantic library. This accords well with my own views about how web 2.0, in particular, needs to be understood - driving education away from Gove-type learning objectives, towards a more radical approach to learning, entirely.  It's an exciting prospect.

Best wishes, and thanks for a stimulating debate.

Lawrence

ITT stands for Initial Teacher Thinking, rather than Training, courses. (?)

So are you ready to initiate a debate?

Blog roundup

Learn4Life

Leon Cych has recorded and audioBoo interview with Theo Kuechel for the #purposedfutured campaign.

Theo answers to  two questions:

A) How should we educate people in the future?
B) What do we need to be doing now to enable that?

Leon says that Theo’s  response was typically pertinent, highly creative and very amusing. Worth looking at.

http://www.l4l.co.uk/

You can also find the latest news about the Teachers’ TV resources on Leon’s blog:

Feedblitz

Terry Freedman has an interesting article about data protection on Feedblitz which comes from his ICT in Education blog:

Data protection is actually pretty easy. True, there are all the legal niceties, and for some courses students have to learn all the principles in the sort of detail that nobody except a lawyer can remember. (A pretty pointless exercise too, given that you can always look them up.) Even so, in my experience students find it easier to learn stuff if they understand the underlying principles. Here are what I believe the underlying principles of data protection to be:

You can pick up the rest on:

http://www.ictineducation.org/

Merlin John on Line

Merlin refers to a new research report by Don Passey bears evidence that ICT improves learning and saves time for teachers.

This independent research conducted by Don Passey, senior research fellow at Lancaster University, reveals that digital resources which are integrated into classroom work, and are used early with children can improve their achievements. His study of the use of Espresso in primary schools found that it saved teachers time and was associated with higher scores in key stage 2 SATS.

You can find out more here:

http://www.agent4change.net/resources/research/991-lancaster-research-shows-espresso-helps-with-sats.html

Stop press

Look out for news of our eight MirandaMods at BETT12, 11th – 14th January in the next bulletin. We are looking for researchers, policy makers and practitioners to contribute to debates about the uses of digital technologies in teaching and learning.

Have a wonderful summer,

Regards to you all,

Dr Christina Preston

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