Connect

Conference Speakers - Anne McMorrough - Marino Institute of Education

Anne McMorrough - @annemmcm, is a primary school teacher currently seconded to Marino Institute of Education, Dublin where she is lecturing in ICT/eLearning. In 2009, Anne completed a Masters in Education at the School of Education, University College Dublin. The focus of her dissertation explored the creative and innovative use of digital technologies within an infant class setting, using eTwinning (etwinning.net) as a catalyst for collaborative learning and teaching.

As an Ambassador for eTwinning in Ireland, she has actively participated in a wide range of eTwinning projects and teacher professional workshops. She also participated in the recent Mission V Project (missionv.ie) aimed at enhancing children's learning through creative interaction and construction in a virtual world. She is a member of the National Executive, Computers in Education Society of Ireland (CESI, cesi.ie) where she networks with teachers from around Ireland and beyond, sharing ideas and showcasing the potential of digital technologies in education today. In 2010 Anne began her doctoral studies under the supervision of Dr. Conor Galvin, PhD. at the UCD School of Education.

Conference Speakers - Stephen Howell, IT Tallaght.

Stephen Howell – Kinect2Scratch

We're really delighted to have Stephen presenting at our conference. I've been meeting with Stephen on and off for the past 5 or 6 years through the Connect School Project and other mutual interests. One of the highlights along the way was the time when Stehen contacted me to say he had something I might be interested in - a way of controlling the Scratch sprite using the xbox kinect. What followed simply blew me away and it was also great fun! Myself and my colleague Gary Warren spent some "quality" time playing at being the missile launcher in Space Invaders! I remember Gary was particularly good at composing music by poncing about in front of the kinect controller. What particularly strikes me about Stephen is the way that he brings fun and learning together - I'm really looking forward to his presentation. Below is the official line on Stephen.

@rherron

Stephen Howell, @saorog, is a Computing lecturer with the Institute of Technology Tallaght where he lectures on Interactive Media & Software Development. Prior to joining IT Tallaght, Stephen was a lecturer in Dublin City University and a software engineer at IBM Ireland. Stephen is a proponent of teaching children the 3Ds of software: Design, Develop & Debug in schools from an early age. To encourage this model, he developed free educational software (Kinect2Scratch) that allows children to program the Microsoft Kinect motion capture controller in the Scratch Language from MIT. This software is used in schools & universities internationally and has been presented at the Art & Code Conf. in Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Scratch@MIT 2012 Conference and nationally on many occasions.

Conference Speakers - Lord David Puttnam

Lord David Puttnam – Educationalist and Film-maker.

We're delighted to have Lord David Puttnam as our headline speaker at the Connect Education Conference. Here's a short biography of Lord Puttnam. This material is from wikipedia.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Puttnam

David Terence Puttnam, Baron Puttnam, CBE, FRSA (born 25 February 1941) is a British film producer and Educationalist. He sits on the Labour benches in the House of Lords, although he is not principally a politician. His successes as a film producer include Bugsy Malone, Midnight Express, The Duellists, Chariots of Fire (which won the Academy Award for Best Picture), Local Hero, Memphis Belle, Meeting Venus and The Killing Fields and The Mission, which won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1986.

He was for 10 years chairman of the National Film and Television School and taught people such as Nick Park. He founded Skillset, which trains young people to become members of the film and television industries. In 2002 he was elected UK president of Unicef. Lord Puttnam was the first chancellor of the University of Sunderland from 1997 until 13 July 2007. He was appointed an Honorary Doctor of Education during the School of Education and Lifelong Learning's Academic Awards Ceremonies in his final week as Chancellor. In 1998 he founded the National Teaching Awards and became its first chairman.

He was the founding chairman of the General Teaching Council 2000-2002. He was appointed as chancellor of the Open University in 2006. He was also the Chairman of NESTA (The National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) from 1998 until 2003. He is also chairman of Futurelab at NFER, which is committed to developing creative and innovative approaches to education, teaching and learning.

Speakers as listed on Lanyard

Speaker list for Connect Education Conference on Lanyrd

Maps for the Connect Education Conference, leave a comment or dm me @rherron, and I'll share the map with you so further useful stuff can be added.

View Connect Education Conference in a larger map

The OpenStreetMap below shows more fine-grained information. The DWEC is at the top right and the Luas stop is bottom left.

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Connect Education Conference 2012

The Connect Education Conference takes place on October 11th in the Dublin West Education Centre with the theme "The Future's not what it used to be".

The nature of ICT in the classroom has changes so much over the past few years that at times its difficult for teachers and school managers to know the correct direction to go in. And so while some technologies have seemed like a sure bet, invariably disruptive technologies have emerged that have challenged long-term thinking. Current disrupters would, I suppose, include the ipad and the self-publishing revolution, while netbooks and laptops would have been disrupters in the past.

So while it is true that "The futures not what it used to be" it is also true that stronger concensus is emerging on what the future of the classroom looks like. This concensus would probably adhere to the idea that:

Classrooms should be internet-connected.
Students should have personal learning devices.
Textbooks should be on those devices and interactive.
Schools should have an online aspect to their educational community, VLE's etc.

These are just some of the ideas emerging. The beauty of the emergence of ICT in Schools is not that it allows schools to do more efficiently what has always been done, it's the fact that it allows schools to do things that may not have been considered before. Things like getting our Geography students to record and upload a gps trace of their local area, or having language students brush up on their grammar using apps, or having History students work with their County Library's local history group.

Our half-day conference will look at some of these ideas and speaker, David Puttnam CBE, will have some very interesting input. In a time when the Junior Certis undergoing change is there a role for agencies like the Local Authority or the County Library to get involved in co-developing short courses for the new Junior Cert. And what about the role of Local Authorities in Education, can we learn from the British experience? There have already been successful partnerships in the delivery of new schools.

Other areas we'll be looking at include how students learn outside of formal educational settings and also how improved administrative processes can free up teachers to do what teachers do best - teaching.

We anticipate that our conference will have lots to offer to teachers, student teachers, school managers, and also to other agencies which are informally involved in education. The Conference is free but booking is essential. To book your place add your details to this booking form.

For updates please keep an eye on this blog and our facebook page over the coming weeks.

FixYourStreet.ie

Fix Your Street dot ie.

I’ve been working on FixYourStreet since September of last year. I’m tasked with organising information events here in South Dublin County Council to support other local authorities in rolling out FixYourStreet. I’m the first point of contact for Local Authorities in rolling out FixYourStreet, the “Community Manager” if you like.

Fix Your Street (FYS) is a crowd sourced public realm fault reporting platform. What does that mean? It means that the public can use FYS to submit reports on faults like broken footpaths, overgrown trees, streetlights not working etc. And they don't need to login or set up an account.

Linus Torvalds, the lead developer of Linux, the open source operating system, famously said in relation to software development that “with enough eyes all bugs are trivial.” FixYourStreet aims to bring this same power, the power of “many eyes” to the management of the public realm.

At a time when government is leaner and we need to do more with less FYS has proven that the ideals of open source and crowd-sourcing can be applied to the public realm. The time was that a pothole, a litter problem or a broken public light necessitated a letter or phone call to the local authority to bring it to their attention. Now all the citizen need do is submit a report via the website or app (android only so far). This means that the many eyes of the citizens can have problems notified much more quickly which in turn means we can provide a better response. We can identify patterns and problem areas more quickly and can therefore better manage our resources.

So if you spot something amiss and you report it using fixyourstreet.ie what happens next?

First the report is moderated, it’s checked for inappropriate language or images. Then it’s published and assigned a county identifier. Local authorities who are not yet live will receive an email notifying them of the report and its details. Local Authorities who are already live with FYS will automatically get the report through their CRM (Customer Relationship Management) or other application. The Local Authority with responsibility for that area has the ability to update the report with comments and to change the report status from “Open”, to “In Progress”, to “Closed with Commitment” and finally “Closed”. These are the only relevant statuses applicable to FYS.

FYS is possible because of the profusion of gps or Global Positioning Systems in devices nowadays. To submit a report it’s as easy as dropping a pin on a map for where the fault is, taking a picture of the fault, adding a note and selecting the appropriate fault category.

FYS was developed, tested and piloted by South Dublin County Council. The underlying technology is open source. The mapping platform itself is Ushahidi, an open source system developed in Africa, originally as an election monitoring tool. And the infrastructure the platform sits on is the open source stack LAMP – Linux Apache MqSql and Php.

Because South Dublin County Council is committed to using Open Source Software and to Open Data, we have developed a Public API to allow 3^rd parties to integrate with the FixYourStreet dataset. This means that reports on FixYourStreet can be accessed by third parties and new reports can be generated outside of FixYourStreet and added to our database.

It is envisaged that FYS will go live throughout the entire country by the end of the year. At the moment FYS is live in the South Dublin County, Dublin City, and Galway County Council areas. A significant number of other Local Authorities are currently testing their integration with FYS.

The use of FixYourStreet by Local Authorities adds an element of crowd sourcing to the management of the public realm. The citizens’ eyes and ears on the ground become an invaluable tool in letting the Local Authority know of problems as they arise. This means that resources can be better managed by Local Authorities and patterns identified much earlier than through traditional methods. The use of FYS by the public is growing steadily and the response to date has been very positive. We find that our citizens appreciate the ability to report issues directly to their Local Authority and receive updates on those reports that are timely and meaningful.

by @rherron

NDRC's Design for Learning 2012 Competition.

I absolutely have to give this National Digital Research Centre competition a quick mention for a number of reasons:

Firstly it combines a number of my favourite things, education, innovation, invention and technology.

And secondly because I was lucky enough to be involved briefly in the NDRC's Swequity Program this summer. Unfortunately I felt couldn't continue with my involvement as I was going to be away from Dublin for much of the programme. But the swequity finals are on tomorrow and I intend being there.

I got involved with Swequity by entering a few ideas early in the summer. Although my ideas didn't make it into the 16 selected, the process was very informative. I then joined a team and the idea was that the 16 "idea owners" would present to the teams and the teams would then bid to work on the various ideas in exchange for an equity stake.

I'll certainly be hoping to enter Swequity again.

For more info see the NDRC's website - http://www.ndrc.ie/events/swequity-exchange/

The "equity for sweat" exchange model is a very interesting approach - could there be something here that might feed into the Design for Learning Competition itself?

I say this because I've been working with a large group of teachers within a Community of Practice for a few years now. The idea is that teachers come together and create and share digital curriculum content - so that by virtue of creating and sharing, each teacher ends up with loads of content.

This sounds simple but in practice is quite difficult to implement for many reasons. Perhaps it's time to look beyond the Creative Commons model - to a model where content creators get a little more in return than the kudos afforded by ones colleagues' appreciation of ones work.

For more on the NDRC's Design for Learning Competition see - http://www.ndrc.ie/events/designs-for-learning-2012-2/

John Curran - RIP

John Curran of St. Aidan’s Community School, Brookfield, Tallaght has died tragically.

John, who taught French and ICT was due to speak at our Connect Education Conference on Friday May 11th. He was a great believer in the use of ICT in Education and one of the strongest supporters of the Connect School Project.

The Conference has been postponed as a mark of respect to John, his family and the teachers and students of St Aidan's Community School.

Our thoughts are with John's family, and the students and teachers of St Aidan's Communtiy School.

Rest In Peace John.