education

I was really lucky this week to be able to attend the Game Based Learning Conference 2009 in London, one and half days of presentations that never failed to be thought provoking and very interesting with the latest ideas and practice surrounding the use of computer games to assist learning. It is a topic which can immediate provoke scepticism, many people associate games with having fun and few people associate having fun with education, so how can games help in education? The answers could be found in this conference, with teachers and researchers finding out how to use games to make a real difference and use them to build up all sorts of skills such as numeracy, literacy, business acumen, military skills and many others. I mention military skills as it is a good reminder that using games in learning is not actually a very new concept, e.g. in the Middle Ages, Chess was used to teach war strategy.

It can be quite a strange experience to read a book where you know you are not the target audience, I'm not a teacher or an academic, but I work for a university and use Drupal, and, of course, like most people have been on the receiving end of the education system! Despite this though I still enjoyed reading Drupal for Education and E-Learning by Bill Fitzgerald after being asked if I would review it by the publisher Packt Publishing. The book is not aimed at developers like me, but instead to those who want to use Drupal “to support teaching and learning” and to explore opportunities to use social media in the classroom in a safe way. You don't even need to know PHP. However, even though it has this non-techie targeting it could still prove very useful to many people using Drupal in other contexts. Occasionally though a tension would surface in the book between the desire to talk to a non developer audience and the subjects being discussed.

The Course Profiles application for Facebook has been praised in a report by Childnet International and funded by Becta, the UK Government body for learning technology.

Last week I had the pleasure of being at the SocialLearn workshop held for OU students, staff (including many Associate Lecturers - the vital members of staff who act as learning mentors to students) and alumni to discuss and get input for the SocialLearn project (a next-generation educational social network platform, more information can be found in Martin Weller's slideshow).

I can't help noticing the number of Asus EEE PCs around now, it is strange to think that twelve months ago these weren't really about and there was still discussion of when will be the "year of the Linux desktop". Of course, events took a different turn, and suddenly the desktop didn't seem so important anymore. The real prize was a computer that was small and convenient, inexpensive and easy to carry about.

After the relative ease of getting a local Moodle installation going on Kubuntu, is it possible to shrink this whole situation so we can get a few Moodle powered OpenLearn courses onto the Asus EEE PC and then take them with us wherever we go?

You might find your self in the situation where you have a bit of time to spare, but sadly with an unreliable, absent or just very expensive internet connection. This might happen if you are travelling, maybe on a long distance flight, or staying somewhere without internet facilities. Well now you could be using that time to pick up some new knowledge, maybe taking a course on a subject that has always interested you, or learning new skills to enhance your career. I'm not talking about one of those cheap CD-ROMs you see in computer shops promising to teach you vast amounts of knowledge, but are often disappointing, instead I'm talking about genuine Open University materials that can be loaded onto your computer absolutely free and used interactively when your are offline.