Derek's Blog

I'm always interested in trends and thoughts about future directions, particularly with regards to technology. This morning I read an article on Network World titled Gartner's 10 Strategic Technologies for 2008. No real surprises here - but interesting to read the summary and to keep it in mind for planning future strategies and investment etc. Gartner's 10 strategies are:

1. Green IT - the recent computer re-cycling interest in NZ would support the fact that this is now being taken seriously. Not only the environmental concerns here, but power usage as well.


2. Unified communications - this is a hot topic where I work at the moment, with discussions on how we can unify the core systems we use such as email, calendaring, IM etc within an IP infrastructure in order to increase our effectiveness as a distributed, collaborative organisation.


3. Business Process management - involves planning systems to provide the greatest level of agility (and future proofing?) - key thing here is developing systems based on a Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) which is now the focus of development in the MoE work that I am involved with.


4. Metadata management - this has been a biggie in my view for some years now. The challenge in the future is going to be reconciling the traditional uses of metadata schema with the emerging use of social tagging etc.


5. Virtualisation2.0 - I agree that 2008 will be a big year for this - particularly as more schools join local urban fibre networks and discover the benefits of virtualising many of their management systems and services.


6. Mash-ups and composite applications - ask any teenager and they'll tell you all about the 'mash-ups' they've created in environments such as facebook, Beebo, Netvibes, PageFlakes etc. Many schools are beginning to understand the potential of simple standards like RSS for creating mash-ups within their intranet for instance.


7. Web platform and WOA (Web Oriented Architecture) - several people I work with have been saying this for years - the move from "desktop to webtop". Recent developments with apps such as Google Docs have me believing the time is certainly ripe.


8. Real World Web - this is the one area that has yet to emerge in what I'm seeing in NZ at the moment - it will be dependent on the emergence of supporting or enabling technologies to allow the sorts of things described in the report. Closest thing I've experienced so far would be the use of mobile phones to upload photos to Flickr and then port across to a blog for 'instant' publishing.


9. Social Software - not much to be said here, use of social software and Web2.0 applications is taking off at a great pace within the education community in NZ if the interest shown at the recent ULearn conference is anything to go by. I'm predicting we'll see a greater consolidation

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 9:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Day three (final day) of the ULearn07 conference ended with a challenge to all delegates from Tony Ryan in his final keynote address. He provided a set of questions for each of us to ponder and contemplate just how we plan to act on some of the things we'd heard about or discussed over the past three days. Tony's questions are:

1. What could you do?
   
2. What will you do?
   
3. How and when will you do this?
   
4. How will you maintain success?

With such a range of ideas, challenges and new thinking emerging for everyone over the past three days I'm sure there'll be no shortage of actions we can take in response to these questions - it'll all boil down to how committed we are to turning these ideas into action!

Just a few of the highlights of this year's conference for me were...

• the number of principals who were present with groups of staff from their school - such a great model of excellent leadership and commitment to building a sense of collaboration and 'team' among staff.
  
• a secondary teacher who came to me at the end of day one to share how deeply he'd been challenged about the 'mediocracy' of his teaching and what he currently does in his classroom - then returned to speak with me on the final day to share some specific actions he'd take to begin making some changes in his thinking and practice when he gets back to his classes on Monday
  
• the 100 or so early childhood educators who participated fully in the conference, with many presenting workshops that were well attended and appreciated by their school sector colleagues
  
• the lines of "back-chat" that were occurring throughout the conference, with many people using their blogs to record reflections with others commenting etc, and the increasing use of Twitter by a small but growing group of participants who found this a great way to maintain discussions about the workshops they attended and keynotes they listened to. Proving that participation in conferences such as this extends well beyond the synchronous here and now of the three days we were together!

I'm off now to make the trip back to Christchurch (driving from Auckland with my family) - so will have plenty of time to think about the things that affect me personally and are challenges that I need to act on when I get back.

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 9:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Day two keynote presentation was provided by Helen Baxter, a digital age entrepreneur from Auckland. Helen's address was presented entirely using a MindMeister online mind-mapping tool, and began with an overview of her own "learning journey". From there her talk traversed a wide range of issues relating to what she refers to as Rennaisance2.0, looking at such things as Learning2.0 and Careers2.0, and considering how our education system needs to change in order to educate the "new Leonardos".

Her Mindmeister brainstorm diagram, with links to the many sites and references she gave, can be found here. Or you can explore it as it is embedded below:

On a slightly different note - in response to what Helen shared with us, I managed to sneak in a brief screening of the hilarious performance by Tripod on Youtube, which, if you haven't viewed yet, is embedded below:

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 8:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Day one of the ULearn07 conference began today in Auckland in style with 1254 delegates from all over New Zealand, 200 workshop presenters - and including 100 early childhood educators!

Ewan Mcintosh was the opening keynote speaker, and presented a fascinating talk covering a variety of aspects relating to the use of ICT in education. For me there were two things that stood out in what he spoke about. The first was the significance of audience in terms of learning and achievement and how the online technologies are providing a far greater reach in terms of audience, and the second was the potential contribution to the assessment process that many of the web2.0 technologies are enabling.

Ewan has written a bit about his thoughts from the conference, including a summary of links to information relating to his key points on his edu.blogs.com blog.

Reference to games and gaming featured quite a bit in his keynote, and Ewan shared with me the link to the recently published Consolarium website, published by the Scottish Centre for Games and Learning, a part of Learning Technologies Scotland (LTS). There are some wonderful clips in the sharing practice section of students explaining why they like games and what they believe they are learning from playing them.

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 8:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)