Allan Carrington is a Learning Designer with the Centre of Learning and Professional Development at the University of Adelaide. Email | Professional CV
Dr Ian Green teaches and researches in areas of researcher education, elearning and linguistics at the University of Adelaide. Email
OK, so it’s 2010, and everybody who knows what’s what about state-of-the-art education is talking multi-media. But go back some 20 years ago, and how many of us realised what directions personal computing was heading in, and how important multi-media was going to be? Well, Roger Wagner was one of those rare people. And not only did he have a good sense of what the next two decades were going to bring, he developed his own application for them.
That application was HyperStudio, a multi-media/project authoring tool, which rose out of the ashes of Apple’s much-loved HyperCard, and which was hailed through the 1990s as one of the leading-edge Mac programs. And while things on the HyperStudio front went quiet for a few years subsequently, the application – and Roger – are now back on the scene with a vengeance.
Roger presented the opening session in the CUE Educate stream at MacWorld, and he spoke to Ian and Allan afterwards. During his presentation Roger showed us some mighty impressive examples of what can be done with HyperStudio in a K-12 environment, and demonstrated how seamlessly the application can pull together a range of different media formats. You can see some demos for yourself, and link into all the news and information from HyperStudio users, through the HyperFest Central group on Facebook. Below here we have embedded a simple example of output from a HyperStudio project. This one was done by a 7th grade student. Find lots more on YouTube. These are relatively simple, yes, but powerfully dynamic for learning and teaching purposes.
Of course, there is a challenge to be met here. In fact there are two of them. For as much as Allan and I have nostalgic memories of the visionary HyperStudio of the 90s, we have to admit that in 2010, when it comes to multi-media project authoring, there are more than a few applications out there that might seem to present as worthy competitors to it. So Allan and I have grabbed a couple of fully functional licenses for the latest version of HyperStudio, and when we get home after MacWorld we are going to put it to the test. We’ll report the results in this blog in a few weeks time. In the meantime, if you have tried it out, please comment below and let us know.
And of course the second challenge is the degree to which this application, much celebrated in the K-12 context, might be of benefit in the higher education sector. Immediately we can see some real pluses – the neat way it manages sources and attributions (and thus makes copyright management that much easier), the intuitive drag-and-drop approach that means you don’t have to have a PhD in file format conversion, not to mention its potentially powerful transmedia communication uses. But again, we will put our initial enthusiasm to the hard empirical test, and will get back to you with the results. Watch this hyperspace!
How do children of the net generation, the so-called digital natives, spend their time? Do they devote endless hours to arranging their social lives on Facebook? Or are they up every night gaming until dawn? Are they totally geeking out?
Milton Chen, executive director of the George Lucas Educational Foundation, the publisher of Edutopia, might have some answers for us. Milton has just overseen a project which has produced multi-media portraits of the lives of 10 American kids, ranging in age from 9 to 18, tracing their activities from the time they wake up in the morning until the time they go to bed. We have included below a video on one of these kids, taken from the Edutopia web-site.
And what are the results? Well, according to Milton, they are quite reassuring; in fact, they are more than reassuring. They are quite exciting. Over all, he says, the kids lead balanced lives. They’re not 24 hour a day slaves to their computing devices; they are doing other ‘normal’ stuff, like playing sport, for example. But at the same time they seem to be using the technology to push the boundaries of what preceding generations could do, putting together information in exciting ways, and, who knows, maybe (maybe maybe??) even starting to work in different sorts of cognitive paradigms.
As if the portrait project isn’t enough to keep him busy, Milton is also writing a book, Education Nation: Seven Leading Edges of Innovation in Our Schools, to be published later this year by Jossey-Bass. The book distills much of the experience and learning of the George Lucas Educational Foundation over the last few years, but also adds a comparative perspective, looking at educational innovation internationally. Have you heard, for example, of the Glow project in Scotland? It’s a world first, a national intranet for education. Check out their website, and find out a lot more, as Ian and Allan talk to Milton in this interview.
This was a podcast episode with a difference. First, I was asked to be interviewed by an articulate 13 year old student together with a classroom of peers located some 8 hours’ drive from San Francisco and who were connected to the seminar by iChat. Kelly Swarze is a regular to Macworld, and after she interviewed me I had the opportunity to interview her. It was a very rewarding experience.
Kelly wants to learn with technology and is forthright with her opinion about teachers who refuse to use it and to teach with it. Ouch! Kelly boldly claims that the majority of teachers don’t know what they are talking about with technology and don’t want to learn different stuff … that’s humbling.
When I was reflecting on this experience I had a personal flashback. In 2005 I had the wonderful experience of visiting Prof Stephen Heppell in Dublin Ireland. Stephen has been called by the press “Mr ICT” he consults at the highest level on learning spaces and teaching with technology. During the visit he told me about a program he was pioneering as a member of the board of the BAFTA awards (the UK Oscars). They are giving awards to young people for creative uses of technology. With pride he declared he had a T-shirt for me. In big bold letters it said “Be Very Afraid” (BVA). I asked what that meant, and he said that this is the message that young people are sending to professional filmmakers like Lucas and Spielberg. Four years on, Professor Heppel makes this disturbing observation:
We should all worry about the gap that has opened up between the institutions, teachers and learners who have embraced – and are busy astonishing us with – this complex mix of technologies and services, and those institutions that mindlessly ban phones, YouTube, international links, social networking, joy, challenge. The gap is rapidly becoming a chasm.
Stephen says a lot more and I recommend that every teacher read the entire piece. And I think that at least once every year every higher education academic and teaching faculty member should be interviewed by a class of 13 year old college students of tomorrow. This will rekindle their passion for teaching and contribute to their professional development. Do you agree? Please add your comments to this blog, join the dialogue and be part of the wisdom.
Can Podcasting be interactive? Does it really improve learning? What makes a good podcast for education? These are some of the questions that Ian put to educational podcasting expert Burt Lo, from the California Technology Assistance Program, or CTAP for short, after Burt’s workshop in the CUE Educational stream at Macworld. The CTAP website is really worth a visit and shows what can be done to provide an online portal for professional development for teachers.
Burt is a highly successful podcaster in his own right, with his Edtechclassroom.com program. In this interview Burt provides excellent tips for the podcast newbie on how to get started, how to get effective learning happening, and how to think outside the box. He also reflects on the challenges ahead for podcasting.
Listen to this interview and think about how you could be using this powerful medium. Any insights or success stories will help build knowledge for others, so please add your comments to this blog, join the dialogue and be part of the wisdom.
The BTB team are always on the alert for people talking about education here at Macworld. John Soward of the University of Kentucky and John Turner of Assistronics , LLC were just sitting in the common area and Allan couldn’t help talking to them.
The conversation led to a novel idea: John S. talked about how smartboards have been around for at least 10 years but in the last 3 years the demand and number of installations have skyrocketed. He posed the question: could it be the iPhone? We throw around the idea of the “touch revolution” and if the iPhone multi-touch interface might be changing the way people want to interact with content. As a result, is teaching becoming more touchy-feely? Good grief there’s a research grant application waiting to happen, don’t you think?
We moved to the challenge of accessibility of mobile technology in institutions. How many universities and schools are considering the problem of everyone and that means students and teaching staff having iPhones – that’s a biggie
We couldn’t avoid the hot issue of do we need Flash on iPhones? Told you the conversation got interesting. How do we develop interactive e-assessment on an iphone without it? – hope a lot of innovative educators are working on it.
John S. leaves us with an interesting thought … does an iPhone really cost anymore than a few textbooks? Maybe we should rethink the actual cost thing, the requirement thing and the subsidy thing? What do you think? Please add your comments to this blog, join the dialogue and be part of the wisdom.
In any institution today, especially schools and universities, there is constructive tension between the innovative, ‘enveloping pushing’ practitioner and the oh-so-necessary ITS (Info Technology Services) Department. ITS Departments work hard to secure the networks, prevent technological meltdown, and try to keep every aspect of the institution happy and productive. It is a mammoth, and often, thankless task.
In this episode Allan talks to Ben Greisler of kadiMAC Corp . Ben is a presenter at a Power Tools workshop called “Mac Enterprise Integration”. Also with him is Mark Szota of Monash University in Victoria Australia. Mark is part of the workshop, and attending Macworld courtesy of the Apple University Consortium.
We talk about some big issues… issues that can make or break an enterprise using technology effectively. Such things as how techie people (ITS departments) need to train their people in teamwork building skills while the people people (teaching and support staff) need to develop project management skills and understand the dynamics of building a business case for their needs to be adopted across the enterprise.
Allan asked about the challenges of the next five years. Ben and Mark discuss how do you reasonably deal with all the variables – more than one platform, more than one, excellent software solution for every problem? This isn’t new but it is accelerating. How everybody wants everything yesterday and why is it imperative to take time for testing and for others needs
Do you think Ben nails it when he says “Technology is easy, people are hard and people need to learn to work with people the technology part just follows.” Please add your comments to this blog, join the dialogue and be part of the wisdom.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Les Posen is the king of Keynote. For those of you who haven’t ever heard of Keynote (where have you been?), I would be inclined to describe it as ‘Apple’s version of Powerpoint’, but I would more than likely be jumped on by indignant macophiles before I finished the sentence. For, according to its aficionados, Keynote is not just another slide presentation package; it is a pathway into a new world of creativity, design and communication.
So for two days at MacWorld 2010 Les runs a workshop, called Presentation Magic, which takes people down that path. And if you imagine that it’s just about finding lots of pretty pictures and fancy animations simply to dress up your presentations, then think again. It’s more about developing into a better presenter and, ultimately, a better teacher, through coming to understand how your design elements work together to tell the story that you want to get across.
Les trying to eat his lunch, flanked by the zealous BTB team.
But Les suggests also that there may be a crunch coming, with the demands of the multi-media digital era seeing some educators crash out, as they fail to prove effective with the new technologies. Just like some of those silent movie era actors, he says, who turned out not to have a respectable voice once the audio got turned on. Scary, hey, for some of us teachers and lecturers?
Amidst the hubbub and noise of Moscone West, Les talks here to Ian Green and Allan Carrington. Have a listen. And put in your two-cents worth as well, via our comment facility.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
If you could wave a magic wand and in the blink of an eye cause all slide presentation software to cease working, higher education in Australia would come to a sudden halt. Lecturing down under is almost totally dependent on slide presentation software, a syndrome I’ve referred to elsewhere as sliDEISM. But for something so ubiquitous the pedagogical uses and abuses of presenter software are somewhat under researched.
Ross Arnett, from the Flexible Learning Development Service team at Southern Cross University, however, has some firm views on how we should and should not be utilising slide presentations. In particular he is telling us that our propensity for loading up slide after slide of summary bullet points is doing our students no good at all. Instead, he says, we need to have a few good pictures.
Have a listen to what Ross has to say in this interview conducted by Ian Green. And please add your comments to this blog – there are some big debates to be had here.
References
The book Ross refers to in the interview is Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery, by Garr Reynolds (2007, New Riders, Publisher Link, Amazon Link).
Early in MACWORLD are the Powertools workshops, two intense days of hands on training using different software packages and applications on the Mac … a wealth of professional development. Colette Giltrap, a graphic designer from Southern Cross University, and Trixie Barretto, from web marketing at the University of Sydney, travelled across the “pond” from Australia to take part in the Final Cut Pro (FCP) workshop. Allan talks to them here about how the ideas and techniques they encountered might be applied to their roles in their universities.
Visual communication and the use of video is expected from today’s students – the age of the talking head is over, and there is more and more demand for educators to use tools like FCP. Colette and Trixie talk about the challenge of video production for education, touching on such applications as medical demonstration and scenario based learning.
Please tell us, by adding your comments to this blog, how you use video in education. How do we manage the balance between high-end “Spielberg-like” production, where specialist support is imperative, and the point-and-shoot low-end approach? Should we be encouraging our educators to grab a video cam and “just do it” or does that inevitably end up with poor quality material that does not achieve the desired learning outcomes? Let us know what you think – share the wisdom and build the knowledge.
So after several years of wandering opportunistically from URL to URL, BetweenTheButtons finally has what we hope will be an enduring home – on this very site. And what better way to celebrate than to pack our bags and head off to San Francisco for MacWorld 2010, courtesy of the Australian Apple University Consortium (AUC)), and the wonderful people at CUE (Computer-Using Educators) in California.
That’s how we ended up in the vast cavernous space of the Moscone West late this afternoon, getting our registrations done before the rush tomorrow, and happening to run into a bunch of other Aussies, also here through the sponsorship of the AUC.
MacWorld gets most of its popular press as a result of its massive consumer exhibition, but it’s educational matters that we have come to pursue. That’s both an exciting and challenging task. Exciting because there is no doubt that, love or loathe the Mac, love or loathe the fanzine Mac community, you just have to admit that there is a real sense of genius at this event – a love of innovation, a love of collaborative problem solving, a love of getting computers to do really cool and beautiful stuff.
And for higher educators there’s a challenge as well. The educational spotlight here is more on the K-12 sector than on tertiary education. There’s nothing wrong with that; educators from all spheres and sectors have much in common, and there are many principles of learning and teaching that apply universally across the sectors. But there are perhaps some points of difference and specialisation as well, that emerge as we discuss our mutual interests.
These then are the twin tasks we are assigning ourselves this week – to distill from all the events around MacWorld some key messages for educators in general, and to see how the broader pedagogical messages might (or sometimes might not) apply to higher education. So while we will no doubt be all agog about the pedagogical discoveries we will make here, we’re going to keep an eye to the implications for hedagogy as well.
Join us! Make sure you bookmark this site. Keep coming back to us and see how we do. Oh, and give us your comments as well, please.
(Of course, my other personal challenge for the week is to get someone to give me a 3G iPad, to be used for higher educational testing purposes only, of course. Any help for that campaign is also greatly appreciated.)
Allan Carrington is a Learning Designer with the Centre of Learning and Professional Development at the University of Adelaide. 
Dr Ian Green teaches and researches in areas of researcher education, elearning and linguistics at the University of Adelaide. 
This was a podcast episode with a difference. First, I was asked to be interviewed by an articulate 13 year old student together with a classroom of peers located some 8 hours’ drive from San Francisco and who were connected to the seminar by iChat. Kelly Swarze is a regular to Macworld, and after she interviewed me I had the opportunity to interview her. It was a very rewarding experience.
Can Podcasting be interactive? Does it really improve learning? What makes a good podcast for education? These are some of the questions that Ian put to educational podcasting expert Burt Lo, from the 
The BTB team are always on the alert for people talking about education here at Macworld. John Soward of the 
In any institution today, especially schools and universities, there is constructive tension between the innovative, ‘enveloping pushing’ practitioner and the oh-so-necessary ITS (Info Technology Services) Department. ITS Departments work hard to secure the networks, prevent technological meltdown, and try to keep every aspect of the institution happy and productive. It is a mammoth, and often, thankless task.
