Information Technology has a more
important function and a faster changing role in the academic sector than ever before.
In a competitive market where students are demanding cutting edge IT services all
day, every day, institutions are judged not just on their pedagogic
capabilities but on the value-added services they provide to students. IT is seen
by students as one of the most significant areas when choosing a college or university.
Herein lies the problem: the MySpace and Facebook generation now expects more
from their IT, and these expectations are not just putting demands on institutional
infrastructure but are also challenging the essence and methods of learning
delivery.
With this in mind, the University
of London Computer Centre's (ULCC) [1]
held the Future of Technology in Education event (FOTE) on the 3rd October 2008
at Imperial College London. This brought together leading technology
organisations and nearly 250 e-learning/IT practitioners from the academic
sector. There was a total of twelve
presentations during the day with opportunities for delegates to ask questions during
panel sessions after each block of presentations. Tim Bush, ULCC’s Sales & Marketing Manager and
organiser of the event, explained that he wanted an event to showcase the potential
of new technologies and methodologies (e.g. cloud computing) [2]
for the education sector and to focus on its use in building communities.
This report reviews six of the
presentations, which were particularly engaging. The event started with Samantha
Peter, who works for Google Enterprise in Business Development. Sam introduced
the concept of cloud computing, which many of us use without even realising.
The three main drivers for innovation in this area are the falling costs of storage for increasing amounts of available space,
broadband becoming ubiquitous and an increasing amount of content. Sam
talked about the struggle that enterprise technology has in order to keep up
with consumer requirements and the challenge of enabling collaboration in tools
created for individual users. She explained how Google has aimed to ease these
difficulties by developing tools such as Google Mail, Google Chat and Google Documents. These tools utilise the
cloud by leveraging Google’s reliable infrastructure, enabling collaboration in
a way that was not possible before (as in the case of Google Docs), and
benefiting from the fast moving pace of innovation. Sam concluded with the
prediction that by 2010, 20% of all business applications will be in the cloud.
She recommended that organisations focus on their core business to succeed in
this competitive world. Employees, teachers and students will need better tools
- and will find them whether or not they are supplied by the organisation. She
said “the move to the cloud is imminent – it is a case of when, not if.”
Ian
Forrester from BBC Backstage talked emphatically about portability and why we -
the users - should make sure that our personal data belongs to us and is under
our control. Every online user has rights and users need to be educated in how
to assert them. Ian worryingly highlighted how users are not able to delete all
traces of themselves; Facebook claimed that deleting users would cause errors
in the social network links however they were overruled. Ian explained that data
must be portable; users should be able to licence their content and specify how
it is used. He recommended the use of creative commons licensing wherever
possible and to use online services that allow this. He also suggested reading
the end-user agreement when you use a service. For example, the original
licence for Google Chrome (Google’s web browser) claimed ownership of
everything users did in their browser; public pressure made Google realise their
mistake and the licence was changed.
Alastair
Mitchell, co-founder and CEO of Huddle.net, talked about social collaboration tools
for staff and students. He suggested that the name web 2.0 encompasses many
myths and fictions, and that it may just be a new way of describing what we
already do. Alastair’s view was that, rather than reinvention, we are doing the
same things but better with new tools and means of information and
communication. Collaboration is confusing, complicated, crowded and costly. It
is not just about email, wikis, intranets or forums; using these tools alone may
form a part of collaboration but Alastair
explained that it involves using all of these tools together. Users’ needs are
easily forgotten in the push to use social tools; Alastair pointed out that
companies can learn from social networks by looking at how they engage with
users and identifying what makes them easy and fun to use.
John M
Hickey from Apple spoke about building 21st Century learning environments and
how the shift from passive consumer to active participant changes the expectations
of students and the role of the tutor. Podcasting, as an “anytime, anywhere”
solution to learning that can easily integrate with existing virtual learning
environments, was an example. According to John, experience with podcasting in
US institutions has indicated that this technology makes learners more engaged
in class; they are using podcasts to preview content and to review and/or catch
up on lectures. John also talked about iTunes U which helped US universities to
reach a worldwide audience by making their lectures publicly available. iTunes U
provides the opportunity to set-up internal and external profiles, which can be
managed separately to maximise exposure and engagement.
From the academic perspective, Tom Abbott
(Warwick University) and Miles Metcalfe (Ravensbourne College) talked about the
institution of the future. Tom, the University’s online communications officer,
described a number of projects at Warwick to demonstrate how institutions
should be deploying new and creative media technologies in a usable and sustainable
way. The need for a tighter network supporting
creativity at Warwick was identified to enable staff and students to work together
and create something which truly reflected the essence of Warwick. This meant a
challenge to do more than just film lectures and add them to YouTube. Tom
explained that digital content must be generated in other ways. Warwick has
three spaces to enable creativity and allow project work to take place: the
Learning Grid (student-owned), the Teaching Grid (staff-owned) and the Post-Graduate
Reading Room. An example of such a project is the locally designed flat-pack
video booth, which provides a cheap, portable and collapsible unit containing a
PC, a touch screen and a webcam, which can be put up anywhere to make video
capture ubiquitous. “Warwick Shoot Out” invites students to create films, shot
over a weekend and edited on the camera. This enables skills development and
gets students used to handling equipment and software. Warwick also runs a podcast
competition. In conclusion, Tom advocated supporting the extraordinary and the
innovators, but building sustainable structures for the ordinary.
Miles
Metcalfe, Head of IT, delivered an entertaining yet thought-provoking
presentation on Ravensbourne’s 2010 move to a bespoke modern building and how this provided the College with an
opportunity to review how it delivers learning and teaching. Design and
communication have been transformed by computers which, in Ravensbourne’s case,
are generally becoming user-owned. With this model in mind, Miles suggests that
IT departments will have more money to spend on more sophisticated equipment,
which will integrate with any user-owned technology, for example, adding
services that are not freely available on a laptop. Miles
proposed that proprietary software could be loaned to students and that SaaS
(Software as a Service) or open source substitutions be freely recommended. He then asked what the function of IT services
might be. As learners become practitioners, there is a need to negotiate a
public identity. IT services will need to integrate extra-institutional
practice, for example students’ MySpace pages, into institution-bound learning.
Learners will be bringing a personal part of their environment into their
learning space and will integrate it with services provided by the institution.
“IT departments are good at making a silk purse out of a pig’s ear”, said
Miles. Finally, he advocated that institutions become
OpenID providers (and allow OpenID logins) as well as Shibboleth Identity
Providers. He recommended Open ID as his preferred vehicle for authentication
because it applies a user’s, not an institutional, identity.
In conclusion, the
FOTE conference gave delegates a wide-variety of engaging speakers from a
carefully-selected group of technology organisations and institutions. Speakers
provided their own insights and opinions about web 2.0 technologies and how
these will be deployed in the future. ULCC’s Tim Bush and Frank Steiner were
delighted by the huge interest made by so many in the community – so great,
they had to change the venue to one with a larger capacity - and even then
there was still a waiting-list for delegates. Perhaps this indicated a need for
a one-day technology-focused event. FOTE 2009 is planned for the summer and it
is recommended that potential delegates sign up as soon as bookings are open.
For further information
(including the FOTE newsletter and registration details for FOTE 2009), visit www.fote2008.com
To view videos of
the 2008 presentations, visit: www.ulcc.ac.uk/pressroom/events/fote2008/
Sarah Sherman
BLE Service Manager, The Bloomsbury Colleges
s.sherman@bloomsbury.ac.uk
Frank Steiner
Sales and Marketing Assistant
ULCC
f.steiner@ulcc.ac.uk
