Categories
Learning

Learners and technology: enabled but not empowered?

As learning technologists, are we helping learners to be sufficiently critical of the tools they are using? We may be enabling students to use technology but are we empowering them to make informed choices? We should encourage learners to be as constructively critical of the nature of the technologies they use as the academic literature they read. This means thinking about business models as much as function and safeguarding.

Categories
Learning

Attack of the Drones! New perspectives on fieldwork learning

News stories and viral videos about drones seem to crop up on a fairly regular basis but what does the emergence of this new technology mean for education? Here are some of the potential uses of the technology, how it is being used in academia at the moment and considers some of the practical issues.

Categories
Learning

Twitter Analytics arrives, but just because you can measure something…

Twitter has just rolled out a new Analytics tool to the majority of its users so you can now see a little bit more about what happens in the life of one of your tweets. Just how valuable will this new data set be for most of us?

Categories
Learning

On yer bike! Cycling, tech & travel

We’re quite fond of our bikes at Netskills but it’s not often we get a chance to use them for work if you ignore the regular commuting. Recently, I took the plunge and brought my bike with me on a trip to a fieldwork showcase event in rural North Wales. True to Netskills’ principles, technology played a part in planning and recording the trip.

Categories
Learning

Using technology to write and publish a master’s dissertation

Recently, I found out I’d passed the final dissertation part of the MSc I’d been studying for at Sheffield Hallam University: Technology Enhanced Learning Innovation and Change.

What I learnt between 2009 and now can wait for another blog post (or two), but given my role at Netskills it makes sense to talk about how I used technology to help put my dissertation together.

Categories
Learning

What would fieldwork be like if you had one of THESE?

I wondered how people taking students out on fieldwork might make use of something like the AR Drone… For doing remote HD filming/imaging of locations… …and flips! (rad!) It’s not cheap, mind. And the range and battery life are limited (alth…

Categories
Learning

Magic Mountains – using PeakFinder to name the mountains round you

Hat tip to Google Maps Mania for posting about this. In my later years I hope to be able to walk around any part of Scotland, point to the horizon and exclaim without hesitation things like, “ah yes, Buachaille Etive Mor. A challenging climb but w…

Categories
Learning

AR in Education – some tweets from @markpower

Just a quickie (although it took me ages to get Storify to do what I wanted. Grr!)

Categories
Learning

Event report: Enhancing Fieldwork Learning Showcase 2012

Digested Read A welcome return for an event that really should be a regular feature of the calendar. The technology has moved on in the last year and there seems to be more confidence and a sort of academic mischief-making in the air! The full sto…

Categories
Learning

10 techie things I hope I never get used to…

In no particular order:1. USB – plugging stuff into other stuff and it (mostly) working.2. RSS – possibly the greatest thing on the web?3. Mobile connectivity – stood on a beach in Wales, downloading a program that knows where I’m standing and can…