BeBettr Afternoon Session Pt3

Everyone has left for a coffee or a wee or both. We’re on the final stretch and James is a little panicked that he’s in the ‘save the best til last’ category. The MC chap (I didn’t get his name edit: apparently he’s Kevin Gibson!) is thanking Matt Jukes for setting up and running the days event. He gets a well earned round of applause! The next speaker is Kari Paulson from EBL, the EBook Library. She’s talking about e-books in education. EBL is an Australian public non-listed company founded in 1997 and is part of ebookscorp.com. The company started from a bookstore in Perth which is a hotbed of digital media (I’m not sure if this was meant as an ironic statement. She’s American so I can’t tell!). She was asked to create a ebooks solution for libraries so took a collaborative approach. They had to assess the needs, firstly in academia and work down from there. She describes this as the pointy end! They needed to understand the market to pulled in librarians from CERN and from Brown and started to look at how ebooks were used in academia. Some would check books in and out to single users, but this doesn’t make sense any more. Others tried to use a subscription model like online journals. For books this doesn’t make sense, books are more for purchasing one by one because you might not want more than one book from a publisher! They tried to develop something more flexible but were unsure how to price this. The model they came up with is called non-linear lending. They had books that could have multiple users but they were limited to 365 loan outs a year, over than and you had to purchase a second copy. Other places just wanted to put the content out there and get the user to buy/pay for them. They also introduced a pay per access model. The books can be read online, downloaded to laptop until the loan period expires. They are also transferable to reader devices. They have 175,000 titles from 450 publishers that are available. You can browse titles free for 5 minutes and the publisher can decide what model is used for purchasing. Some publications can be paid for over time 1 day, 2 days etc… you can either pay for this yourself or the transaction can be invisible to the user if their library (academic) is paying for use. There is a cost to libraries to store actual books, something like $4.46 per volume to store in open stacks or $1.99 in storage. That’s about $199,000 in storage for books that are mostly unused. This presents a massive saving to libraries to use the ebook model. Also more titles can be made available to libraries. Ebooks are used 2.5x more often, by 2.3x more unique users. From a publishers point of view, will this affect academic publishing with end users making selections rather than librarians. Will the same things be published and how should they change their marketing strategies to target the end users with publications. On the horizon is printing on demand from an Espresso Book Machine or buy a digital copy. That is the end… kept perfectly to 15 minutes.

Next on stage is the BBC’s very own Mr James Richards, he’s a development exec for the Learning Development team. They are a small multiplatform development unit based in White City for the time  being (soon to be Salford) targeting formal learners. He introduces the audience to the BBCs prime aims to Inform, Educate and Entertain. We see a photo of the Deptford Working Mens Institute in 1929, they were the University of the Air. This was facilitated by the BBC and learners could get a certificate signed by the head of learning!! We see a grab of the BBC Networking Club homepage moving forward to a more up to date BBC Learning homepage and more interactive beta page. James started on the Hull project doing Interactive TV. James works with George Auckland who is head of innovation for the BBC. They are a small team with a small budget to show value of innovation and then sell the technology internally to producers and directors. Now there are 6 areas that they focus on; user generated learning, pervasive media, social networks, games and play, open technology and knowledge enablers(how they contextualise content for learners). Thisdeveloped into the following areas; Open web, Pervasive, TV, Enhancements, and he’s changed slide… thanks James!! btw way, he showed a cool picture of George Auckland done by Nathan Barry. I’m sure you can find it on Flickr if you search for it! He’s on to a project called over the bridge which is a drama about young people in a school that appears on mobile. It includes film, text messages, text content and you can follow the narrative by being a part of it. Acts a part of citizenship curriculum and as a catalyst for discussion in the classroom. The content is all very bitesize and appeals directly to the audience of secondary school kids. This was produced as a trial to discover how it could be used and distributed. The infrastructure turned out to be quite flakey. A second trail was done where content was handed out buy people where value is created by the fact that this content was handed to you by a trusted person. The next project is ‘subtext’ which is a high concept project. It harks back to schoolbooks with notes, drawings and annotations. How would transfer into the 21st century? We watch a film…. great product. Users can read a book, comment on points, comment on other peoples comments, share them, separate them, access them via text to speech or reach speech, make scrap books, or organise the content in anyway they deem suitable. Beautifully presented film from BBC Learning Development. The client for this was BBC Bitesize for GCSE and A Level revision. Adding tags and comments to book makes it more searchable and adds a subtext to the book (tada) The product is called booknotes and is actually live at bbc.co.uk. This could be adapted for use for a future Shakespeare season on the BBC and include annotations from the actors. Also shows BBC Draw encouraging young people to draw and pulls in brands from the BBC. BBC Data Art using BBC Data to unlock data and render it in unusual ways and others… Up from the streets about secrets in sounds. Another using in car GPS and locates you and feeds you content that is local to you on your journey. iPhone ap that helps you to learn to sing. You can ask more questions to James @kidhelios

As we career towards the end of the day, we come to Anna Debenham who’s talk is intriguingly entitled EPIC FAIL: The sorry state of  web education in schools. She also seems to be having a few issues with setting her laptop up… I’m saying nothing!! She’s been making websites since she was 16 which makes her incredibly young! She talks us through how she worked her way through the web, learning how to make websites and manipulate pages including things like mySpace making pages for other people. THis talk is about Scrunchup for young developers. She references the Royal Society and some OFSTED reports about the state of ICT in schools. The slides have flown past too quickly to copy down the document names but I’m sure they are Google-able. Apparently GCSE ICT is down 44% between 2006-2010 also a 33% drop in A-Level ICT in the past 6 years. 57% in A-Level computing and a 60% drop in university applications for computer science. This is bad for the economy and will force work to be outsourced in future. This has happened because there are not enough teachers, students don’t have to take ICT exams. Teacher don’t really know what they are meant to be doing and are not confident in teaching ICT. She is OK with maing ICT a cross curricular subject but teacher not trained in ICT are expected to teach ICT and there is a lot of duplication. There will be a massive shortfall in jobs in the region of 500,000 people. Higher attaining students are insufficiently challenged and student often have more knowledge than teachers. Software is out of date and they are not teaching programming. She referes t a list apart called elevate web design and university level, another one called brighter horizons for web education… look those up! She demonstrates that the curriculum is woefully inaccurate and out of date in the way it describes some approaches to ICT. Even exams are asking incorrect questions. Students are being trained to pass exams rather than answering questions correctly. The exam examples are, quite frankly, shocking. The teacher guidance is frightening. It’s no wonder we are not producing world class ICT specialists. Students are not rewarded for doing something different. Students are encouraged to make webpages using PowerPoint or even Word. YIKES!! We’re all dooooomed!! Back on to the topic of open source and why third world countries are using OLPC laptops and we aren’t. Schools aren’t interested in using opensource software or OS’s because of the fear that they will bring networks down. This could be pointed to the comfortable relationship that government has with certain large software providers. Industry doesn’t think that students come with the right skills and that they won’t receive value for money. She points out that kids aren’t going to be learning stuff that they don’t know. She’s showing us sites that are build by school kids that demonstrate that they are well versed in technology but are not being supported by education. Schools just can’t keep up. Anna wants industry leaders to work with exam boards to make the learning more engaging and accurate. A large round of applause for Anna, she is well received.

Bar a few questions, that is all for today. It’s been a good day and great to hear what people are up to in learning without  being sold at (BETT I’m looking at you!). If you ever find this little blog then Matt Jukes thank you for organising a fantastic day and for hanging in there. I think it was well appreciated.

Until the next conference I go to…

Advertisement