EdTechUK

Gunpowder, Treason & Plot

Bonfire night (November 5th) is one of my favorite celebrations, a particularly English and pragmatic event, allowing people to either celebrate or commiserate Guy Fawkes failed nefarious plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament. With fireworks.

This year is 400th anniversary of the proposed explosion and the Parliamentary Archives have commissioned a great website - proof positive that the UK government is capable of commissioning a useful and usable online project:

"Produced in association with the History of Parliament Trust and the 24 Hour Museum. It is designed to provide an objective introduction to the Gunpowder Plot with information about its background, development, discovery and impact on the history of Britain and Parliament over a period of 400 years. The story is supported by documents, pictures, books and other items drawn from a range of institutions, which together constitute a unique learning resource."

There's some excellent uses of a wide variety of historical resources. The site has areas designed for 4-11 year olds, (with accompanying teachers notes) and older learners/adults. It's "a grisly, bloody tale of wars, murder, secrets and lies" which is "particularly suited to use with whiteboards". There's even competitions for you to factor into your classroom activities.

iStanford

Wow. Stanford is now officially on iTunes. Free and as easy to use as iTunes, there are currently 21 faculty lectures up (from Race, Class and Katrina to Why Zebras Don't get Ulcers), along with heard on campus (interviews, speeches and performances), Stanford Initiatives (multidisciplinary addresses) Sports news and interviews, Music performances by students, staff, alumni and visitors, and books & authors, interviews and commentary from Stanford's book salon.

Make the right thing easy

Once again, Kathy Sierra hits the nail on the head...

Shiny New Toys

...but not for me! Take a look at my lovely new Frapper map for UK & Ireland based edubloggers and see if you can spot what's wrong with it.

Frapper looks like being potentially a great service. it stands for Friend Mapper, and it's a simple way of producing interactive, geographic representations of communities.

Widen those horizons Frapper people!

M-learning roundup

Image by malias distributed under a CC 2.0 licence

Only a few days to go to mLearn 2005 - The 4th World Conference on Mobile Learning, "the world's largest conference on mLearning and emerging ambient technologies", taking place from 25 to 28 October 2005 in Cape Town, South Africa.  If like me there's little to no chance of making it there in person, you'll be pleased to know they're podcasting the keynotes. 

I also stumbled across Adam Burt's m-learning pages and blog. Sort out your about page Adam! All I know about you is that you're dyslexic and you work for Ravensbourne College of Design & Communication in London.

JISCs recently published ‘Innovative Practice with e-Learning’, a good practice guide based on 10 case studies of education institutions making use of mobile and wireless technologies.

TechDis, the UK's accessibility and inclusion advisory service for education, have some m-learning resources, including overviews of advantages and constraints.  In partnership with CETIS, The CETIS-TechDis Accessibility SIG (Special Interest Group) are holding an m-learning event on Wedensday 23rd November in Birmingham, which looks pretty good.

Still hungry? Ask Butler over at the new LSDA staff development site already has a few m-learning resources and events (although you can't search the directory by 'm-learning' - try 'mobile').

Games & Learning

Nesta Futurelab have just released their latest research handbook - Games & Learning, by Richard Sandford and Ben Williamson. You can download the 30 page pdf for free or read the web version over at the handbooks page - where you'll also find Designing technologies to support creativity and collaboration and Designing educational technologies with users.

Games & Learning gives an intro and overview to the current interest in using computer games to support teaching and learning, looks at non-educational use and examples of current educational practices. They also throw in a couple of case studies, an annotated reading list  and a key features table - in fact, everything you need to get up to speed on the current debates in one well-designed package.

There's also an accompanying article from Futurelabs new magazine Vision, by their Director of Learning and Research, Keri Facer Could computer games help to transform the way we learn?