Looking to the future of education: learning spaces and mobile devices
Tomorrow, I’m off to a school – the one I attended as a teenager – that will form part of Northumberland Church of England Academy. I’m going there as Director of E-Learning after my successful Twitter-powered interview. I start officially in September! It’s the first of a series of meetings looking at the ICT/E-Learning systems for the Academy and we’ll be looking at ‘Devices and Learning Spaces’. This post, therefore, is a result of my reading around this subject and interaction with colleagues on Twitter. 😀
Futurelab
Any time I want to get up-to-speed quickly with an area of educational technology or the future of schools, I head straight for Futurelab. I’ve worked with them many times as part of their Teachers as Innovators programme, was interviewed for their website, and have presented with them at the BETT Show. Futurelab’s Publications, reports & articles section has freely-available PDFs and, if you’re in the UK, you can request hard copies to be delivered for no charge!
In terms of learning spaces and mobile devices, I believe the following Futurelab reports to be most useful:
- Transforming schools for the future? (Feburary 2009)
- Reimagining outdoor learning spaces (January 2009)
- 2020 and beyond (June 2007)
- Learning with handheld technologies (December 2006)
- What if…? Re-imagining learning spaces (October 2006)
- Social software and learning (July 2006)
- Personalisation and digital technologies (November 2005)
- Games and learning (October 2005)
- VISION: Issue 1 – The future of mobile technology: learning ‘on the run’? (July 2005)
- Mobile technologies and learning (December 2004)
- Designing educational technologies with users (September 2004)
Futurelab have also been responsible for some great projects that use mobile technologies – read about them in the project reports section. They’ve also got a project called Beyond Current Horizons that looks into the future of education in 2025 and beyond. Interesting stuff!
Suggestions from my Twitter network
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the people that form my network on Twitter were most helpful when it came to mobile devices: most of them are educators rather than school designers (with the exception of Christian Long who is – or has been – both!)
Here’s what they recommended:
Mobile Devices
- bMoble & bMoble blog (@twm2912)
- Bradford Mobile Learning Network (@markbezza)
- Handheld Learning (@andykemp)
- Learning 3.0: Mobile, Mobile, Mobile (@derekeb)
- StudyWiz Mobile (@andykemp)
- m-learning (@daveterron)
- mLearnopedia (@andykemp)
- Radstock Primary School – mLearning Project – Link 1, Link 2, Link 3 (@pilgram)
- Sony unveils new education initiative (@raff31)
Learning Spaces
- DesignShare (@ChristianLong)
- Imagine: inspirational school design (@twm2912)
- Partnerships for Schools (@ChristianLong)
- Teachers.tv – Future School (@andykemp)
- The Saltire Centre (@Emmadw)
- The Sorrell Foundation (@twm2912)
Finally, there’s Becta’s Next Generation Learning site. There are, no doubt, many resources and sites that should be added here. If you know of one, please let me know in the comments section and I’ll add it! 🙂
(Image by Dan Zen @ Flickr)
