Last week the Bett show took place at London Olympia, before setting out I’d been thinking about whether the show could get any bigger. Well, after a first walk around Olympia which seemed to take hours, I found that it had grown! The side hall (Olympia 2 I think) was used to house many more exhibitors. The sheer size of Bett must make it difficult for anyone to get round in one day.

Some of my favourite things were:

Microsoft Surface and the SMART multi-touch table

Ed and I were able to get a demo of the SMART table and tried many of the applications that were available. SMART told us that they were currently working on new development for the table and that the initial cost was over £4000 but they said that this would come down once it went into full production. There was a very neat addition activity where you are asked to sum 2 numbers and the users provide the answers by making contact points with the screen.

Surface uses similar technology with Microsoft also demonstrating its authentification process which can be used by placing a card on the table.

Garageband Live Demo

Apple had a great stand featuring live demos on all days of the show. James and I both watched a great session with Joe Morreti of makemoremusic. Joe did a session showing the new features of Garageband 09 including how to use the app as an applifier. With a guitar and a sax his session provided a great insight into online digital music education.

I also spent time talking to Sony about how the PSP is being used in Education and also by the Navy to deliver e-learning. Becta had a lot of information regarding next generation learning, including information for suppliers and developers which was great for us. Many of the hardware suppliers were showing off new notebook machines with one stand having their laptop section virtually ignored when I was there.

The standard of visual and interface design was very impressive with some of the primary content showing some fantastic graphic and character design.

As we work through all of the material that we collected we’ll share some more of our thoughts about the show….In 2 days we are heading to Open Innovation in Norwich and then next week it is off to Learning Technologies.

Hello to all of our friends that we managed to meet and bump into at Bett!

It is the day before Bett and I’m getting a list of stands that I want to visit, near the top of the list is the SMART stand where they are demonstrating

“the world’s first multi-touch, multi-user table for primary education”

I’m really interested in seeing this technology as I’ve read a lot about touch-screen tables in the press over the past year. The Microsoft Sphere also generated a lot of interest and media buzz so it will be interesting to see the effect that the SMART table has.

SMART are on Stand G40

Writing in the Guardian, Julie Ferry has looked at the increasing number of students who are choosing to study and travel at the same time. The article looks at 3 people who have successufully combined their studies and travel. With a number of companies offering paid sabaticals to try to avoid redundancy and an increasing number of training grants on offer could we see more people escaping the british winter to travel and study online overseas?

Liverpool University already offers an online MBA and there are many other online courses on offer. E-learning and learning technologies allow learning and academic institutions to offer online courses and open up their courses to a whole new audience.

Norfolk County Council has already implemented an e-learning programme that lets children who are not able to get to a school to sit their exams at home. The programme allowed nearly 100 children to sit their GCSE’s in 2007.

The technology and programmes have fantastic potential to help a wide range of organisations from hospitals, schools and colleges to businesses.

Working in e-learning I’m often asked by people what the benefits of e-learning are. This can lead to quite a lengthy discussion covering Rapid development, induction modules, animations, instructional design and many other areas of e-learning.

E-learning and learning technology covers so many elements it can be difficult to cover all of the benefits and some of the issues that also arise.

After talking to some of our clients, friends and colleagues we’ve listed some of the benefits that they have come across!

Learning from home
Courses can be deployed over the internet and via a range of devices from Blackberry to a PC allowing the learner to access the content at a time that is suitable for them. Access to online materials also allows part-time, job share and employees who work from home access to training material.

Handheld devices are opening up e-learning to a new user base, check out the blog post on e-learning on a blackberry.

Reduction in travel time
The use of online learning can lead to a reduction in travel time and associated costs, one of our clients reported that they were able to reduce the number of training classes that were held each year. Team members were also pleased that they could reduce their personal travel time.

Deployment across multiple locations
For businesses with multiple locations, e-learning allows for multiple location deployment. It also allows learning to take place in environments where getting trainers and holding training courses may have been difficult. At Real Projects we developed an e-learning course that was used by employees on offshore installations which could only be reached by helicopter and had no internet access. We used a cd-rom to allow learning to take place on the installation.

Learn at your own pace
Many e-learning courses and modules allow learners to work through modules at their own pace. A well constructed module will also take the learner through all of the learning outcomes and ensure that they have covered all of the subject material.

Fast and effective content updates
e-learning content is often stored on a Learning Management System (LMS) that allows learners to access content from a PC, Mac or other device. The content is in an electronic form which means that updates can be performed quickly and effectively with new releases being deployed across an organisation in an instant.

This is not an extensive list, just a few of the benefits that we’ve come across over the past few months when talking to clients.

When I first has the idea to set up an e-learning forum in Norfolk I wanted to make sure that we listened to the people who came and improved the event. I’ve been able to move the event from an idea that I had last year to something that is well supported and valued by those who attend.

Reading this…you might be thinking….how does he know it is well valued!

At our last event I invited the customer feedback company, during the event they ran 2 live trials using their mobile phone feedback system. They asked a simple question about whether people found the event worthwhile and would they recommend the event. It was pleasing to see so many people post comments and then to read the positive ones! I still want to make improvements to the event and continue to improve the sessions.

The feedback system allowed us to view real-time feedback and we were able to collate the most feedback that we have ever had!

Jonathan Newcombe from the Customer Feedback Company was our guest speaker at the norfolk e-learning forum. He delivered a great session on the mobile phone feedbadck system demonstrating how companies such as Tesco are using the feedback system and the many possible uses for it.

When I first met Jonathan we talked about what they did but it wasn’t until I saw the technology being used that I actually began to understand how it could be used and how many potential uses there were. Since that first meeting we’ve had loads of ideas abotu how it can be used and we are going to have an open day at our offices so more people can come and see some of our ideas.

The session today must be one of the only ones I have been to where you were asked to leave your mobile phone on! I didn’t hear any comedy ringtones so a lot of people must have been on silent!

After the session there was an excellent debate on the possible uses of the feedback system for a range of education and commerical uses. A number of attendees stated that organisations that the worked for were already using or were looking at ways in which the technology could be used.

We were also able to give out a 3 free whitepapers which were provided by Rob Hubbard, Real Projects and The Customer Feedback Company. For more information on the forum including how you can attend please visit http://www.realprojects.co.uk/about.php.

I’ve recently read a number of articles about the iphone, google phone and other pda’s which are apparently going to change the way that we think about out internet usage. These super fast devices are going to let us browse on the move, check email, get GPS positions and a whole host of other applications. Whilst reading the articles I thought back to my first mobile phone purchase: the size, the cost and the weight of the thing! Just when did mobile phones become so widely adopted in our society?

In 1993 I had access to a shared mobile (more of a breeze block than a mobile device) which was used mainly for incoming calls. It was pretty impractical and the thought of carrying it around let alone using it to check emails seemed a tad ridiculous. 5 years later I had my own mobile phone along with most of my friends. Along came flashing aerials, text messages, address books, using it overseas; it all became common place without anyone realising it.

When will I look back and think about how obvious it is to use my mobile phone to provide a gps of my position, which then pings me traffic news, food options, relevant shops and loads of other information via some kind of information burner. I can imagine a scenario where I am overseas trying to book some train tickets but need somehelp. My position is sent to my personal web profile, I’m then sent a series of learning packs to help me, a short podcast, time information, cultural information, perhaps a translation to show the assistant….or my profile generates a personal bar code which I pass over the ticket machine. My online ticket account is debited and the train ticket uploaded to my pda.

At Real Projects we’ve recently been invited to look at a number of touchscreen projects for clients. I looked at the possibilities of touchscreens in 1996, since then the technology has moved on a lot. the technology is now being used in many devices from information points in shopping centres to mobile phones. On the blog one of my first posts was about microsoft sphere. A few weeks before I came across sphere I was at Norwich University College of the Arts and some of the students and technicians had created a very cool table top touch screen to showcase the work of the computer games degree.

It was a very clever use of technology and displayed the students work in a really elegant and clever way. I then read last week about a project in Scotland (http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/sep/17/itforschools.elearning) where an interactive desk has been developed. The desk and its possibilities look fantastic. The Guardian article discusses how they could be used in the classroom but I can think of many commercial applications from designers to architects. There are also many custom e-learning applications that could be developed for these touchscreen tables.

After being invited to come up with some design concepts for touchscreens we started to wonder where they were currently being used…we all went out on a march across the city to see where the technology was in use.

• Pubs
• Betting shops!
• The tube
• Shopping Malls
• Train Stations
• Police Information Points
• Mobile Phones
• PDA
• Remote Controls

It was really interesting to see that the technology is already being used in many places and its become part of our technical landscape. I spend a bit of time travelling to clients in London and regularly look at how travellers engage with the video screens in tube stations. I wonder how long it will be before we see interactive adverts using touchscreens. (not on the escalators!)

Ever since a trip to Italy last year I’ve been trying to find the ‘perfect’ receipe for pizza dough. After much experimentation and comparing results with my friend Jay (http://www.thechilliking.com/) I’ve stumbled upon something I think works:

• 80g tipo 00 italian flour
• 20g strong bread flour
• 20g semolina flour
• 7g yeast
• 3 fluid ounces of water
• pinch of salt
• brown sugar

I only added the strong bread flour after running out of tipo. After kneading the dough and leaving it for an hour I was really pleased with the results. A quick compare with Jay over email confirmed a few things and we’ve agreed to continue to share notes.

Whilst the latest pizza was in the oven it made me think about my own continual professional development. I’m learning at my own pace, experimenting, using a mixture of research techniques (video, internet, books, tv) and I’ve actually created my own informal learning plan.

I’ll tweak the dough here and there, but my next task is to get the dough into some kind of round shape as opposed to square/rectangle. I’ll go through the same process: research, reviews, testing and measurement. Social networks and blogs have all helped with the quest for perfect pizza. It really did get me thinking about how social networking sites, informal and formal are of benefit to the learning process. I could even post my receipe on a site and have others test it and get all their feedback, a community of testers - carrying out pizza dough research.

….I thought some more about how this would translate to an e-learning module. The receipe and creation would be suited to linear process but I’d want to include decision and thought points where you could review your work. Getting comments from others who have tried the receipe and have their own thoughts.

In a large company this pizza experiement could lend itself to range of topics from the restaurant/bar group looking for feedback on new dishes or getting staff feedback on how difficult it is to create the dish. In a research area people like Johnny Lee are already doing similar things to great effect.

Scott

Custom or bespoke? Which one to use? Hot on the heels of e-learning v elearning we have had another word based debate in the office.

We were preparing a new version of our company brochure when a debate started about custom or bespoke. Custom cars, bespoke suits: everyone knows about Saville Row, West Coast Custom, MTV’s Pimp My Ride…after hours of discussion we’ve settled on custom.