I’ve finally bitten the bullet and gone paperless. I hardly ever look at any of the junk I accumulate in my filing cabinet anyway so it’s all gone in the bin or the shredder. Everything I need (except a few things which will be scanned) is now in digital format. So why did I keep […]
Our pilot roll-out of Google Apps is going well. To date we’ve invited 12,000 students and nearly 2,000 of them have signed up. At the moment it’s up to students what they do with the tools and we’re staying out. The possible uses for formal learning though are intriguing and I just had a chat […]
I’ve been getting a bit obsessed recently about the importance of annotation functionality, as a number of my long-suffering colleagues will testify. Here’s my logic: iPads and other ebook readers will increasingly replace paper Some learners, particularly children, will make the transition away from paper now very quickly and be happy to study considerable amounts […]
This post is nothing to do with elearning but I thought I’d log my experience today of chairing my first meeting using just an iPad. For years I’ve taken a laptop along to meetings and increasingly I’m not the only person to do so. This has the advantage of having everything accessible, together with access […]
People have been blogging about the ipad and its potential for education ever since the thing was announced. I got my hands on one last night and here are my first impressions. I have a laptop and I have an iPhone. I’ve not had a desktop computer for many years – nor do most students. […]
The OU is working on a number of iPhone applications as well as optimising some of its websites for mobile delivery. One example of an iPhone app is Devolve Me where you can see how you might have looked back in the mists of time. Strangely, I end up looking pretty much as I do […]
I’ve recently been working with colleagues across the Open University, in particular Liz Burton-Pye, to define a roadmap for our future learning systems. Moodle lies at the core of our online learning provision and its usage is growing rapidly with 50,000 unique users accessing it every day. Elluminate is used for synchronous communication and Google […]
The Open University has taken the decision to adopt a suite of online tools provided freely for education by Google. In our first foray into cloud computing, Google will be hosting for our students: email (gmail) contacts instant messaging and presence calendar document creation, storage and sharing websites All of our 200,000 or so students […]
The UK government recently released a paper: Higher Ambitions: The future of universities in a knowledge economy. There’s a short section on digital learning hidden within this 115 page document on p78-79. Three points emerge clearly: University leaderships will have to take responsibility for driving the use of new technologies throughout institutions. That can be […]
Last week I was sent a message on Twitter from a strange new follower: my beard. Visiting its home page on Twitter I discovered someone had set up an account using my picture and linking to my blog. Initially I took this in a light hearted manner and even sent a jokey message to it […]