A Higher Education e-learning initiative that is working, without UKeUniversities level funding. IVIMEDS has 34 international medical schools sharing content and production to produce a sophisticated set of e-learning learning resources. By all contributing a modest amount of money at the start, the schools get a big payback for relatively small investment. Professor Ron Harding, an expert in Medical Education, and Alan Langlands (ex-CEO of the NHS, now running University of Dundee) are behind the project. Five UK medical schools are busy producing content in five medical areas. This 'distributed production' model seems to be working. Recent evidence from Australia has shown that students using these resources score significantly higher than those who do not. Already international on scale, with academic credibility and a good production model, based on sharing, this could grow into something much bigger.

http://www.ivimeds.org/

FT attack on HR

HR baiting is a regular sport in the business press and Stefan Stern had another go in the FT on April 17 with 'HR is unloved but not unnecessary'. He sees the whole profession as being in crisis but was pleased to see that it attracted more comments than most of his other articles. The FT forum did indeed have some interesting responses. Many saw HR as tactical not strategic, building a wall around itself by recruiting those with restricted CIPD qualifications, not attracting high calibre, innovative managers with the ability to deal with strategic improvement. DISCUSS

Disconnected - fine book

Throwing aside all that Generation X, Y, Z and M stuff, Nick Barham gets out and talks to the youngsters who text, see school as irrelevant, spray graffiti, do pirate radio, have sex, take drugs, hate politics, spend lots of time online and generally see themselves as different. Far from being violent, over-sexed idiots, they turn out to be interesting and creative, albeit in a more fragmented, contradictory and disjointed world. The new tribes of emos, goths, skaters and chavs, the new language of texting, and most of the other aspects of their world, that we adults abhor, turn out to be far more fascinating than you imagine. If you've got kids or work with them - a great £7.99 paperback read.

Do we need any more proof of how much smarter our kids are, compared to their teachers and parents, at IT?

Brin, Page, Bezos and Wales?

What do the founders of Google (both of them), Amazon and Wikipedia have in common? Like Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Mahatma Gandhi, Sigmund Freud, Buckminster Fuller, Leo Tolstoy, Bertrand Russell, Jean Piaget and Hilary and Bill Clinton before them, they all had early Montessori schooling.

Sergei Brin and Larry Page both attended Montessori schools. Indeed, they both credit their Montessori education for much of their success. It was the Montessori experience, they claim, that made them self-directed, allowing them to think for themselves and pursue their real interests.

Jeff Bezos's mother tells of his single-mindedness at his Motessori school, being so absorbed in the tasks he chose that they had to drag him off to give him a change. This same self-directed, single-mindedness was a feature of his Amazon adventure.

Jimmy Wales was educated in a one-room schoolhouse. Although not home-schooling, it was close as he was taught in a class of four by his mother and grandmother, who ran the school. The school was significantly influenced by Montessori methods and he had the freedom to study what he liked on his own terms.

Note that all three have made significant contributions to increasing access to self-directed knowledge and learning.

Google buys Writely

Web 2.0 is getting closer as Google buys a web word processor. They seem to be gearing up to offer a rival web Office suite, with full data storage online. Could this really rock Microsoft who only seem to offer more features at greater cost.

All this Web 2.0 stuff will also affecting learning. With blogs, wikis and loads of other Web 2.0 productivity tools, knowledge is being created by users, edited by users and shared by users. This brings real bottom-up knowledge into workflow. The prognosis for training - get into this now or lose the battle to have a meaningful say in the management of knowledge in your organisation. This stuff is user-centric therefore learner-centric. It's also cheap and easy to use.

10% of teleworkers work nude!

Love this Wikinews story. A survey by SonicWALL, a Sunnyvale, CA, based company, reports that 10% of worldwide telecommuters are nude while working, finding 12% for men and 7% for women, respectively. A gender gap also exists for showering on work-at-home days, with 44% of women showering, while only 30% of men did. The survey also found that 39% of both sexes wear sweats while working from home. The survey also covered less racy topics, including opinions on productivity. 76% felt that working at home increased productivity. The number of telecommuters has increased sharply in recent years. For example, 43% of U.S. government employees telecommute, at least part of the time; up from only 19% one year ago. Posted while naked!

'Grey gamers' have less dementia

The growth of 'grey gamers', backed up with with recent neuroscience research, has led Nintendo to release 'brain training' games for the elderly. It's a package of workouts designed to reduce your brain age. This is big business with a heft £2 million advertising campaign in the likes of Saga magazine . The research comes from Ryuta Kawashima, a professor of neuroscience at Tohoku University. It'll be in the UK in June.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1725131,00.html

E-learning raises GCSE grades

And here's another.....The Fischer Family Trust has produced a report on the exam results of 105,163 Year 11, a total of one in six students who took their GCSEs. Over 105,600 year 11 students from 1006 secondary schools were analysed in an independent report which proves that using e-learning to prepare for GCSE exams really does improve grades. The report takes into account the results of one in six students who took their GCSEs and found that pupils who used e-learning for as little as 10 hours achieved 4.7 per cent more 5+ A* to C GCSE grades than expected, based on prior attainment. The value added gain was 2.1 capped points per pupil, which is the equivalent of one-quarter of a GCSE grade per subject. Improvement, in terms of overall GCSE points score, is greatest for students in middle and lower prior-attainment groups. In terms of attainment of 5+ A* to C GCSE passes, improvement is greatest for middle prior-attainment groups, particularly where levels of use are above 10 hours. For pupils in the lowest prior attainment band, using e-learning for 10 hours or more achieved gains of nearly half a grade. This is the equivalent of 50 per cent of students achieving one grade higher than expected.
http://www.fischertrust.org/ict_main.htm

E-learning raises A-level grades

People are always crying out for proof of the learning efficacy of e-learning. Here's one from secondary education. A series of Independent Reports from different countries all reach the same conclusions. The graph shows the link between SCHOLAR and attainment. Those with no or low use of SCHOLAR achieved the same or a lower grade at A2 compared to AS level. High users of SCHOLAR achieved the same or a higher grade.
There have now been three SCHOLAR pilot programmes in the UK, one in Scotland, one in England, and one in Northern Ireland. All three have been evaluated independently using different approaches, yet all three have identified the benefits of this approach. The improvement in exam results between AS and A2 level is particularly significant. Analysis revealed that there was a positive correlation between the number of SCHOLAR pages accessed by a student and the difference between their AS and A2 grade. The more pages of SCHOLAR accessed by a student, the more likely they were to improve a grade between AS and A2.
http://www.interactiveuniversity.net/programmes/scholarengland/evaluation.aspx

BBC Jam - a messy business

Now had time to go through the ‘Business studies’ stuff for 11-12 year olds – it gets weirder. Take one of its ‘star’ businesses, wait for it…. Eidos! Sorry about picking on Eidos. I’d love to tell you about the other businesses, but hardly anything loaded and worked.

What the BBC case study doesn’t tell you is that Eidos was days away from bankruptcy last year as their bank wanted to pull the plug after massive losses, missed deadlines and bug–ridden releases. In the end, after a collapse in the share price, it was picked up by SCi, a much smaller player. The company profile makes no mention of this. In fact Eidos, as a company, doesn’t really exist, it is really only a brand and consumer marketing vehicle. SCi is the listed company. Click on the TV in the BBC simulation and you’re taken to the SCi website – that should confuse the learners! As an assignment you are asked to do a SWOT analysis of Eidos – that WOULD be interesting, if you had the real and current data to view! The only interesting bit was the ability to explore the Eidos offices, but again, it was a lot of effort for very little reward. You wonder why all of the Eidos senior staff were posing about for BBC film and photo-shoots at the very time the company was sinking - they should have been trying to get their lamentably late games out.

In general, the whole thing is a scrapyard mess. The repeated animations are just annoying – the same images over and over again – it makes you scream with rage. E-learning is about the user being in control. This is what you get when TV people create interactive content – thinly disguised broadcast material. Interactivity is the name of the game. Here you spend more time hanging about waiting, often on just simple pieces of repeated animation, than learning. Most of the time it’s like an animated PowerPoint in extreme and painful slow-motion. Try the Library – you may lose the will to live waiting on results.

Bienvenue à Habbo Hotel!

Just back from Paris with my kids where they learnt more French in five days than they did in the first half of their year at school. Why do hundreds of thousands of children go through years of French at school yet can barely order a drink when they go to France? It's clear that the classroom is NOT the way to teach a language. Immersion is clearly the answer (with formal backup). That's why my home town Brighton is packed with foreign students year on year.

Online worlds now give us this immersion. Thousands of kids already hang out in this synthetic world. Go to Habbo Hotel (French version) and you can sign up and chat to real French users, party, meet people in cafes, go swimming, furnish your room, go shopping, get a pet....what better way to immerse yourself in the language than being forced to converse with others. It's a sort of messenger on steroids. This may be the educational answer we've been looking for - it's free and it's packed with real people speaking the real language. We're going to try it over the next few months.

http://www.habbohotel.fr/habbo/fr/

Castronova's 'Synthetic Worlds' and informal learning

Loved Castronova's book 'Synthetic Worlds - The Business and Culture of Online Games'. It's a serious academic text (but readable) on parallel worlds online - what it's like to enter, inhabit and meet others, as well as a detailed examination of their economies. Online Synthetic worlds promise to be huge in the delivery of learning. As they parallel everything in the real world they will also provide undreamt of possibilities in learning. Lots of real examples already exist in medicine, public health, finance and the military. You enter the world (like Second Life), create an avatar and visit the learning location. Second Life now has a special 'Campus: Second Life' service.

As Castronova says, 'There are enough applications of this technology in the area of education and research to occupy several generations of teachers and researchers' - damn right. Millions play and hang out in these environments and it's one more Web 2.0 tool, such as open source, podcasts, videocasts, blogs, wikis, file sharing and others, that will play a role in informal learning. Being in these worlds may turn out to be as normal as watching TV and learning in them as normal as going to school.