Visit www.Learningathand.info for more details.

Download the PDF: Learning@hand Keynote Speakers

(Disclosure: Assisting OLPC Australia to support schools has been one of my primary employment duties since mid-2009).

(Full PDF with higher res figures can be downloaded HERE).

There has been a new buzz word added to the education lexicon of late (as if one were needed) – the flipped classroom. This is an idea thats not so much brand new or revolutionary as it is one whose time has come. Technology now allows anyone (ie. any teacher or lecturer) to quickly and easily record and share lesson demonstrations online. Access to such a capability is now allowing teachers to schedule the content-consumption aspect of the curriculum as pre-lesson time work so students view it in their own time and come to a lesson already with a basic understanding. Thus the lesson is ‘flipped’ and class time can focus on discussion, interaction and tasks that build upon the basic content, rather than just on the content itself.

Case in point is Salman Kahn whose prolific creation of online science and maths lessons is often cited as one of the best examples of the flipped classroom. Salman is not a trained teacher, but through his creation and sharing of the online Khan academy, and indeed by using tools like a video camera and YouTube, or even a mobile app like ‘Explain Everything’, any teacher can provide students with content that prepares them for lessons that they can access in their own time, at their own pace. Indeed, students world-wide can also access (and create) such content themselves, without having been directed by a teacher to do so.

There is understandably much potential in this model thanks to the extra ease and accessibility current technology such as ubiquitous video cameras and internet access is providing it, but it is by no means an answer of itself. In fact, too much focus on the technological side of this model could be its downfall if educators use this aspect as a substitute for a solid curriculum and pedagogy underneath the learning itself. This is a trap that many ICT in education programs have fallen into in the past.

One high-profile example where the focus on the tech itself has at times become the problem rather than the enabler is the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) initiative started by Nicholas Negroponte at MIT university in the United States. This project has five core principles: child ownership of devices; low ages as the target; saturation of whole schools; connected learning; and free and open source software. It has delivered over 2.5 million XO personal learning devices to countries across the world. But what does their strategy for supporting and nurturing the learning experiences that the XO can enable look like?

Some sense of the OLPC thinking in regards to this may be gained from the recent plan announced by Negroponte to deliver XOs by helicopter (‘I Want To Give Poor Children Laptops And Then Walk Away’, New Scientist, December 2011) and have no actual contact with those receiving the devices until one year later. Not to mention how many extra devices could be procured for the cost of the helicopter hire. If there is no local buy-in, planning or commitment – what is the purpose of such an exercise? A research experiment?

As my own experiences over the last four years supporting technology deployments here in Australia have shown me, the initial stage of getting the hardware out to schools can be such a massive job, and the excitement of the students when it arrives so rewarding, that its often easy to confuse this stage with what George Bush once called ‘mission accomplished’.

An example of this is a 2010 OLPC laptop deployment that I now have mixed feelings about having been a participant in. A remote community in Western Australia was taking delivery of 60 devices in the middle of a busy term. Teacher training that had occurred prior to delivery? None. Planning by the school on how such laptops fitted with their existing learning goals? None. Time until the school stopped returning our calls or replying to our emails? Three months. And yet this model of bringing the hardware, meeting with teachers for a few days, and then leaving has been a common one here in Australia whether it’s laptops or interactive whiteboards or any of the other technologies regularly deployed into classrooms.

Also known as ‘shiny object syndrome’ or ‘miracle transformation falacy‘, the belief that a new piece of technology is itself enough to ‘transform’ education is either an agenda of supreme hope or extreme negligence. Hope and belief are necessary traits for those working in difficult schools and regions, but placing that hope entirely onto a device, no matter how well designed (and the XO is one of the best education-tailored devices) leaves no room for investing in people, ie. those whose lives and futures are at stake.

So we’ve seen briefly that some of the best intentions of OLPC have foundered at the delivery stage, the ‘engaging with the very people expected to run, operate and learn with the XO’ stage. Indeed, the failure to provide teachers with appropriate guidance in a rural OLPC deployment in India led to the Write activity being used simply as a ‘routinised’ worksheet substitute almost to the exclusion of other XO tools such as “the group and community collaboration features, the Internet, the Chat activity, pedagogical activities such as Turtle Art, and the Hindi keyboard language feature”(2009, p154).

In ‘OLPC laptop: Educational Revolution or Devolution’ (2007) authors  Bastiaens and Carliner own survey revealed that before there could be any guarantees regarding the XOs potential to provide an education, a deployment program that includes planning around curriculum and evaluation needs to be developed. Further, a 2009 review of global OLPC projects by the Australian Council for Educational Research suggested that all future projects needed to “embed an evaluation framework at the very beginning of a deployment, preferably at the project design and planning stage” because the paucity of evaluation conducted by deployments to that point meant it could not be known what impact they had had, if any.

Around the world however, there have been regional OLPC organisations that have recognised the need to flip the XO deployment model that early on assumed countries would sign up for 1 million devices without ever having run a trial – to move the emphasis from the pre-delivery to the post-delivery stage in much the way that the flipped classroom attempts to move basic remembering of content from being the centre of a lesson to just the setup for the lesson.

- Figure 1

OLPC Australia is one such regional arm, and they are accomplishing this ‘flip’ in several ways. The first is by putting school-based demand at the top of their deployment model (figure 1) such that the program is one done for schools rather than one done to them. A second is that remote and disadvantaged schools themselves contribute funds ($80 per device) to the project to cover training, spare parts and ongoing support. This local ‘skin in the game’ as it is called, means that the chances of schools abandoning their initial work are greatly reduced, while still allowing the program to exist at a low cost-of entry.

Another unique modification has been adding of two extra ideals – empowering teachers, and community engagement – to the five OLPC core principles. Take note that both of these could not be delivered on from a helicopter in the sky, nor from a delivery visit of a few days. Instead, it means that OLPC Australia interacts with schools over a longer term to initially provide training (through the laptop.moodle.com.au course) even before class devices are scheduled for delivery. This training (which is itself another major investment not often seen in technology deployments) is targeted not just at teachers, but includes tailored versions for local teacher aides and assistants, as well as for community members.

Following the pre-deployment training, which includes planning and lesson-creation, other training modules are available for staff to become local trainers so their use of the XOs becomes one that is driven by local knowledge and know-how (see figure 2). Even community members can now become an ‘XO-local’, while students now have targeted modules where they can become ‘XO Champions’ and ‘XO Mechanics’ as a way of recognising the skills they are developing. To further build on and support the knowledge staff in XO schools develop, the program in Australia also has a dedicated Yammer social network where support can be provided by OLPC Australia staff but also by other teachers and community members.

- Figure 2

Finally, OLPC Australia have begun to work closely not just with schools but with state education departments, (and in my case, the Indigenous Education and Training Futures Division) to ensure that the program can be aligned with existing education frameworks (such as the Smart Classrooms Professional Development Framework in Queensland) rather then existing separately (and thus adding to teachers’ workloads). They are also partnering in training events such as the Learning@hand mobile learning forum to share what they have developed.

This engagement has also seen them develop localised versions of the Sugar OS that XO devices run which can be easily updated from USB drives, and seen OLPC Australia supply its own unique warranty for XOs as another sign they are supporting schools on a longer-term basis.

In starting with school demand, being committed to teachers and communities, providing pre-deployment training and post-deployment followup, as well as by working with education departments, OLPC Australia is now in a position where all their work on fundraising can translate to an ongoing project with a chance of sustainable connected learning in schools that in the past have often been the ones to miss out on the benefits of such an approach. Hopefully the flipped classroom movement can similarly learn from past experience to keep focused on the learning, not just on the technology that enables it.

Visit www.laptop.org.au to read more on One Laptop per Child’s yourself.

Looks great, but I’ll need to see the software optimized for touch (can’t believe they demo’d it without this!), & an actual ship date… In the meantime, the XO 1.75 will be available from March (my brief hands-on with one showed it to be way faster).

Nearly two years ago, I closed down my Google top ten Mobile Learning blog after 3 years and over 10,000 hits. I felt that the time of calling from the roof tops that mobile learning existed was over. People had started paying attention to the rise of mobile phones etc as the preferred computing platform of those who education should be centered around, ie. students. Reports like New Media Consortiums ‘Horizon Report’ were including mobile learning as one of the top educational trends. Game-changing next-gen devices like the iPhone were just appearing, and when I went to write an mLearning paper for my Masters thesis, I discovered there were plenty already.

So I was forced to research where mLearning was going, and to think about what was the next phase that the world of education needed to be hearing about. It seemed logical after a time that of course as computing became more miniaturized and mobile, it would eventually become ubiquitous, or an unnoticed part of everything – invisible as all other technology that has proceeded it has after enough time has passed. So in a world such as that, what will ubiquitous learning need to look like?

I’m still not really sure exactly what it will look like, but as you know if you’ve been following this uLearning blog, I’ve been continuing to follow several mLearning developments as a way to track the overall journey. There are two in particular I’m most involved with here in Australia, and I’d like to detail whats been happening and what learning that takes them into account looks like.

1. Single use – multi-use – ubiquitous uses

The first is the continued convergence of the standard mobile device from being a phone or a mp3 player into one that does everything. Dedicated devices will always be around, but what has also occurred is that the average device, especially now that touch-screens have replaced buttons and mobile app stores are proliferating, is becoming ubiquitous-use devices. Its safe to say for instance that the 300,000 apps in the iOS App store provide at the very least thousands of potential uses, be it as a digital level tool for building, or a portable weather radar etc, as well as the more traditional phone, camera, GPS etc.

Learning?

In Australia, the uptake of the iPhone is the highest in the world. That alone has to tell you something about how deeply entrenched these kinds of devices are here already. The state of Victoria is trialling 800 iPads, and I personally know of over 40 schools (there will be many times that number I don’t know about) here in Queensland who have deployed iPod touches and now iPads. In fact the second Slide2Learn conference focusing on these devices in education recently sold out 80% of its places in only 2 1/2 days.

Here are some links to explore more of what the actual practitioners are doing:

http://epsipadtrial.globalstudent.org.au ,

http://www.applesforkids.net/Apples_For_Kids/Apples_For_Kids/Apples_For_Kids.html

http://louiseduncan.globalteacher.org.au/

http://slidetolearn.ning.com

http://www.slidetolearn.info

http://ipadtrial.posterous.com

https://ishare.plc.wa.edu.au/groups/mlearningplcperth

http://ipad.redlands.qld.edu.au

Also significant has been the spread of educational net-book programs into countries that have skipped the desktop PC era (for various reasons) and gone straight into the mobile computing one. In this category we have the One Laptop per Child XO laptop, as well as the Intel Classmate. OLPC has seen over 2 million XOs deployed, with many more ordered. Classmate numbers are harder to get a hold of, but large orders have been placed in addition to the many schools that have opted for standard netbooks.

Learning?

Like the iPod touch and iPad deployments happening here in Australia, the OLPC XO laptop is much more in the complementary/ personalised learning device category. What this means is that most schools already have PC labs and other ICT infrastructure, but they don’t have mobile devices that allow students constant, anywhere access to the potential benefits of having connected, personal tools in student hands. The rugged nature of the XO device in particular makes it ideally suited to use by early and primary school aged students, especially in remote locations far from repair sites.

Here are some links to see more of what has been happening:

http://laptop.org.au

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68p4kmKilyI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykzcQIh9-8c

http://www.olpcnews.com/countries/australia/journal_of_an_olpc_australia_d.html

http://www.olpcnews.com/use_cases/education/reflections_on_australia_class.html

Posted via email from Jonathan Nalder’s posterous

As I’ve blogged previously, I am currently privileged to be working towards bringing the ubiquitous learning benefits of 1:1 computing devices to remote schools in Australia as part of the One Laptop Per Child Australia initiative. I recently conducted teacher training and delivered XO devices to a school in the Pilbara in north west Western Australia as part of this role, and have written a journal of the experience for those interested in the project. Enjoy (right-click to download).

Warralong XO journal

Writing now some 14 months later, and being based in Australia as I am, I see currently three movements that indicate we as a country are further along the road to computing becoming just another human right/ utility in the same way as electricity say. The first is the rollout of the federal governments Digital Education Revolution (DER) – a catchy election promise that is becoming a reality such that all year 9-12 students will have 1:1 access to a computer by the end of 2011. The program is about halfway deployed at present, and its only 3 year timespan has meant that every high school in the country wether ready or not has had to adapt to suddenly embracing the digital world. Some are taking advantage of all the value-adds that 1:1 and digital environments can bring, others are struggling to take traditional pedagogy and make it work when students have such regular access information and the tools to re-shape and share it.

The second sign is at the opposite end of the Australia schooling system – remote primary schools. One Laptop Per Child Australia (with and partly for whom I am currently working) is at the very beginnings of deploying up to 400,000 XO learning devices to remote schools in Western Australia, Northern Territory, and Queensland. About 1500 have been deployed in proof of concept rollouts so far, all with the express philosophy of saturation – whereby every teacher, aide and student receive the same machine. Similar to the DER and high schools, this can be a shock at first – but all signs point to the ubiquity of the approach as being a key to its success – there is no going back or choosing to be the non-XO class so to speak.

Finally, I turn to a computing movement that doesn’t even qualify definitional-y as one. You won’t find it (yet) being supported officially through Education Departments – but it is one that grassroots educators are embracing exponentially just as their students have – I’m talking about the iPod touch, iPhone, and soon (for us non-US citizens) the iPad. What started first as individual teachers spending their own money on an iPod touch for their classroom has spread to school-wide deployments of 30 or even up to 200 iPod touch’s. In my state alone we have well over 200 educators active on our iPhone and iPod touch in education discussion list. They have been called the first computer you can use without instructions, and they and their ilk (we need more Android mobile devices here please Google et al) seem to be building up a momentum that even more than the many hundred of thousands of laptops mentioned in the first two examples may be bringing Australia towards a ubiquitous computing environment (apparently over 1 million iPhone’s have been sold in Australia for instance).

And what should an educator’s response be? Possibly you’re already in the middle of deploying one of these options – and if so, my biggest suggestion is – reflect. While our sector has stood still for so long, the current rush might make us forget our usual values of tying everything we do our learning vision first. So reflect first then on how these devices can enhance learning – don’t make learning fit to them. I’ll be sharing more shortly on a guide to the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch for educators that may also be useful if that is your area (you can check out the beta HERE)…

1. Designed for children – yep, rather than being a consumer or business device that crafty educators are able to integrate into educational settings, the XO was designed ground-up to be in students hands. I mean its bright green! When a student first sees one, they know already this is for them – and that means their use of it for learning starts at a unique place. This is a factor not to be underestimated.

2. Automatic collaboration – while there are a growing number of  iPod touch apps that can use wifi or bluetooth to do some basic screen-sharing or sending of files etc, another of the distinguishing features of the XO laptop is that sharing and collaboration is built in automatically to practically every activity, even the camera. Its not something students even have to think – ‘oh can I work on this with someone?’ (or two, or four etc), but is simply a matter of switching to the dedicated ‘friends’ screen and sending the invitation.

3. Dual screen modes – the announcement of the iPad means that one of the XO’s advantages (larger screen) will shortly be neutered, but the ability of the screen to work as a regular colour LCD indoors, and a black and white screen outdoors with full readability in direct sunlight gives the XO a big advantage over the glossy  iPad as far as true mobile learning goes.

4. Ok I know I said three – but this one is not one of mine – Flash support. I don’t use flash hardly at all, but I know alot of educators that do rely on it for hundreds of interactive learning objects that are totally unavailable in the Apple mobile world. How long it takes for these to eventually be ported over to Java/HTML5 or turned into the mobile apps (via Adobe conversion software) that are becoming more of the standard for such software I don’t know, but until then, educators are great hoarders, and so Flash support remains an issue.

Of course there are downsides to the XO laptop also (such as the aforementioned aging hardware, and the fact that a more natural touch-based version may be more than two years away). As a final note to this comparison, I don’t know how many of the 140,000 iPod touch apps are educational, but a developer in that space recently mentioned a figure of 3-4000 to me. Anyone reading out there know how many XO activities (the OLPC name for apps) there are?

1. The ‘digital’ in this digital pedagogy ie. iPod touch’s and XO laptops are available to me in enough numbers now to be used by students as personal learning platforms
2. I have a supportive local and regional administration
3. I stand on the shoulders of the giants above
4. My education department recognises how key ‘digital pedagogy’ is
5. I feel confident enough to attempt it.

View this in full size via posterous

Posted via email from Jonathan Nalder’s posterous