Here are my top four books on digital learning  with greater or lesser relevance to English Language Teaching (ELT) which were published in 2011.  One is ELT specific but deserves a wider audience.

Learning in the Cloud: How (and Why) to Transform Schools with Digital Media
Mark Warschauer, Teachers College Press
Read: in paperback
Available in:  Paperback, Hardback

 Enter the competition here.

Enter the competition here.

As my ereading habits become ever more entrenched, the reasons for reading books in a digital format seem to multiply. Often I need to consult a book for work or research and won’t be reading the it from cover to cover. Or I remember my creaking bookshelves are running out of space. Or I just don’t want my wife to know I’ve bought another book.

Then there are the classics: historic works are are often available in cheap or even free editions so I can disguise the usual escapism as a drive to read improving literature. ebooks are usually cheaper than the paper version, though often not by much. Paying near £20 for an actual physical book can require a deep breath but at least I get something to hold for my money. That said, I like the fact that both Kindle and iBooks can be priced variably like music depending on how recently they were published.  Or that the first book in a trilogy can be reduced to near giveaway price in order to hook readers into the remaining titles.  My experience of Google Books is limited so far and I don’t use any of the Kobo, Sony or Nook readers which may do the same thing.

Ebooks’ immediate availability is a strong draw: a book can sometimes be whistled up in the middle of a discussion just as I increasingly expect to be able to summon Wikipedia or Google in support of whatever argument I am having in the pub.

You don’t necessarily need an ereader device  in order to read ebooks. This is the case with Amazon Kindle’s format and surely one of the reasons for that format’s vast popularity. As it can be read on almost any device that you already have, an actual Kindle Reader isn’t necessary. Lots of people aren’t aware of that so if you want to give ereading a free trial run, just create a free Amazon account, get the Kindle reader for whatever device takes your fancy, download one of the many free titles and off you go.

Having a book available on multiple devices also means I can read in different ways depending on the device: a book bought mainly for reference or just to keep up with what is going on, can be skimmed on my phone, read more closely on my iPad or subjected to extensive note taking on a PC or netbook such as the one which I’m writing this on. By the way, I’m not offering any recommendations for what type of reading should be done on each device. It just happens to be how I sometimes do things.

For the occasional insomniac or people like me who haven’t managed to find the bedside light which is good enough to read by but won’t disturb their sleeping partner, ereaders and the devices that ebooks can be read on often allow a read-in-the-dark mode. My wife is a more powerful influence on how I read than she knows.

Those who haven’t tried it yet may find themselves caught between the impersonality of reading on a larger laptop or PC screen and the seeming impracticality of reading on something the size of a Smartphone. Well, it ain’t necessarily so. After a few ereading try outs on early smart phones years ago, I decided small screen reading wasn’t practical. For anyone. It didn’t matter that plenty of friends were happily doing so or that I knew a majority of the bestselling books published in Japan every year are written to be read on Smartphones – that was just a cultural thing. As far as I was concerned, iPhone reading was a forced discipline grimly practised by Apple addicted subversives belonging to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Windows Users.

What I needed, of course, was a catalyst. I could read on a large screen – I just didn’t want to.  Then along came my iPad which had been a huge liberation for someone who needs to read a lot of PDFs. Just as an aside, if you need to keep up with any topic or field which circulates information in PDF format, this is a really compelling reason for getting some sort of tablet PC like an iPad.

However, I still found reading on an iPod sized screen less than comfortable. Then I bought a smartphone with a larger screen which I could cope with and gradually got used to the ‘in between’ size.  After all, it is fine for reading email and blogs – why not books? My conversion was complete when I found a novel I really wanted to read which was being heavily discounted on Kindle. Matterhorn is one of the great Vietnam war novels and was available for 59p against the £7.99 I was prepared to spend to treat myself.

That’s when I found that size didn’t matter nearly as much as I thought. Dear ereader, I was hooked.

Please sign up here if you would like a copy of the white paper when it is published in March 2012

Our session was 50 minutes with a smallish group so we were able to be flexible and mix slides with discussion. Over the last year we have talked around the topic a few times. At first it was lead by our research into hundreds of language learning apps so we tended to emphasise how far we had travelled, how much we had seen and, generally, how unimpressed we had been. Feedback recently has been that the overview and the trends are interesting but can there be more focus on apps for particular purposes. Also can we see things in action please?

Caroline brought her iPad 2 with connector so we ran the presentation off that. Good for people to see a tablet in action but iPads are designed to be as light and thin as possible and don’t take well even to officially approved plug ins such as projector connections. Heresy perhaps but can someone invent the iPad docking station?

We centred the presentation around the Learning productivity apps slide – see illustration above – with demos and questions.  As with other presentations there was a large variation of mobile experience among the audience: some were looking for a basic overview and had limited hands on experience; others were in the midst of a big mlearning push and wanted to a sense check. What they all had in common though was the sense of lagging behind and of needing to respond to student demand.

My parting shot – more to the novices than the experts – was not to be put off by the technology and jargon but absolutely  ’Do try this at home. It’s the only way you will learn.’

PDF of our presentation is here.

The relevance to e-learning comes from the fact that, according to a Spanish colleague who visited the still preserved lectured theatre, the room layout / function / implied methodology of lecturer delivering to lots of note-taking students is also still preserved in thousands of universities world wide – nearly four hundred and fifty years later. As we are still saying ..

As I haven’t been saying: I am just a little embarrassed at how long I managed to not post anything here. So many projects, so many ideas, not enough time to turn them into posts.  Yes, there are other ways of getting information out there since I started this blog: blogging now has to take its place as just one of the favoured forms of personal publishing and community discussion. First there was Twitter. More recently the curated content platforms such as paper.li and scoop.it.  All of those things, yes, but the need for good, original content remains. Also, where better to sound off, if not a blog?

BESIG App presentation 2011. Other symposium presentations on slideshare here.

Summer wasn’t much in evidence in Preston, at least to a relative Southerner, but the atmosphere was warm and welcoming. It was the perfect size for a small conference: enough people to have variety but not so many that you couldn’t have chatted to quite a few by the time it was over.

I was nabbed by roving guerrilla operative Andi White for a quick interview at the end. See below. Thanks to everyone for a fun and extremely well organised event.

Developing Mobile Language Learning, Brighton, 2011

Publishers, course providers and pedagogues were brought together recently in Brighton to discuss their work and share insights in the area of ‘app’ or mlearning content development in front of an invited audience. The event was jointly organised by consultancy firms Eduworlds Knowledge and Constellata Limited and hosted by the University of Brighton in association with the IATEFL (International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language) Learning Technology SIG. The first three sets of speakers showed how they were innovating in this uncertain world while Paul Sweeney and Caroline Moore presented insights and analysis from their upcoming White Paper on mLearning in language education.

Martin Peacock and Neil Ballantyne, The British Council – multi-platform, global language app development strategy

The British Council

Martin Peacock and Neil Ballantyne speaking at Developing Mobile Learning, Brighton 2011

• began a ‘flirtation’ with mobile two years ago which has led to a multi-platform, global language app development strategy culminating in 750,000 downloads last year.  They point out that their reach was over 2 million when including subscriptions to SMS services and downloads of audio via service providers’ content portals.
• initially ran three parallel approaches to app development: low-tech, medium tech, smart phone. That has morphed into two main technical categorisations: SMS word-of-the-day type content for low end phones; apps  (games, podcasts, more sophisticated learning tools) for smartphones and any more standard ‘feature’ phones which can also play apps.
• is aiming to reach big numbers,  they develop on three broad platforms: Apple, Android and Java (Blackberry and Nokia)
• place a great emphasis on consistent brand and quality while using an innovation driven approach which means willingness to experiment and scrap things which don’t work.
• have major projects in the pipeline including with Cambridge University Pess.

Tom Ottway, CloudBank / University of Sussex  - “Lend us a Lady Godiva?”

Tom Ottway, Cloudbank and University of Sussex, speaking at Developing Mobile language learning, Brighton, 2011

• Sussex University International Study Centre is running a Smartphone project with JISC funding where visiting students get to ask and answer their language and culture related questions using their smartphones.
• The aim is to increase learner engagement with culture and the overall environment; boost critical thinking skills; encourage proactive and collaborative learning
• Users make use smart phone functionality by taking a picture and possibly recording an audio explanation of a cultural ‘concept’ or language term.
  

  Cloudbank Screenshot of 'to nutmeg'

  Amongst the amusing examples he provided from the database were ‘to nutmeg’. ‘ Virgin Mary’ (Student: “I know ‘virgin’ and ‘Mary’ but ‘virgin Mary’?”) and a grandfather explaining the cockney rhyming slang ‘Lady Godiva’ (‘fiver’ – five pound note)

• The project has been highly successful and will be extended
• Cloudbank University of Sussex – Developing Mobile Language Learning presentation

Dr Sandra Hestermann, Cornelsen Verlag – more than 40 apps and growing

Dr Sandra Hestermann, Cornelsen Verlag speaking at Developing Mobile Language Learning, Brighton, 2011

• The biggest German ELT publisher Cornelsen has been experimenting with apps for two years and now has over 40 apps which run on the Apple platform
• German classrooms are low resource (only 8% have IWBs) but German students and teachers love their smartphones
• The coursebook is at the heart of teacher and learning in German schools. The app approach is a route to introducing a modular approach which will bring in reich materials from outside the classroom
• Cornelsen’s key areas of interest are
  • the future of the app market: business models, innovative content, devices
  • the growth and development of the Mac Appstore (interesting especially for teachers as a target group)
  • Finding ways to improve internal marketing tools for apps, as well as the reduction of production costs
  • the evolution of iPad usage at schools in Germany

Cornelsen Developing mobile language learning presentation

Paul Sweeney, Eduworlds Knowledge Ltd and Caroline Moore, Constellata Limited – advance notice of some conclusions from their upcoming White Paper on mLearning in language education.

• Based on a study of more than 100 language learning apps (selected from the nearly 1000 currently available across different platforms),  educational content providers need to decide what they are trying to do with apps on Smartphones: too many are treating the app as content for a dumb terminal instead of as an enabling function for a smart phone.

Caroline Moore, Constellata Ltd presenting at Developing Mobile Language Learning, Brighton, 2011

• The language learning ‘appsmophere’ is heavy with unimaginative vocabulary apps and short on tools and appropriately formated content for this medium.
• The opportunity for mainstream publishers is mainly to develop apps / mobile content as an adjunct to classroom learning. For example, supplementary practice of vocabulary, grammar, skills and pronunciation.
• As an indicator of how this area is still emerging, even the most highly evolved category of apps – dictionaries – still overemphasise content at the cost of user functionality
• Looking at market data for educational apps provided by xyologic.com, it is possible to get a current snapshot of the most propitious markets.
• Korea, China, Russia, France and Germany are among the top EFL countries across all platforms in early 2011. It pays to reversion / bilingualise for these  countries and others.
• It is imperative to understand that the Apple iTunes app store is in fact multiple national / regional stores and that certain categories such as games dwarf the relatively minor education sector.
• Analysis of individual markets is therefore important as there are many surprises.

Constellata – Developing Mobile Language learning presentation

Eduworlds Knowledge- Developing mobile language learning presentation

Online participation

The British Council created another great online conference, repeating the formula from Harrogate last year with a few tweaks. As well as the sessions recorded, they were also live streaming interviews from a makeshift studio. Like everything else recorded, these are available to watch after the event here.  The chatter in the background and fuzzy edges doesn’t take anything away from the overall effort, instead acting as a reminder what it is to put something this ambitious on in the circumstances.  Any time I felt things dragging towards daytime TV interview  format, everyone was suddently drowned out by an event announcement or something equally unexpected happened. The informality and professionalism is captured in the team’s own session below which has an amusing end-of-the-party vibe as well as an olympic show of self deprecation by all.

Star gazing

There were at least four presentations including my own attempting an overview of where things are going for eELT. Sign of the times. I’ll put my slides up soon and the white paper on ePublishing in ELT  will be out by mid May. Sign up box coming soon.

M-learning

The good news is that this year’s in-thing isn’t a complete chimera like Twitter last year and is a stayer. Plenty of solid practice based sessions  on the topic in addition to the mini symposium I organised with Caroline Moore on the Friday. That white paper coming soon too!. Gavin Dudeney’s session got good reviews as did Neil Ballantyne’s.  Both have got slides and interesting links to follow up.

Wish list for next year

The role of digital in ELT has progressed so far beyond the old Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) remit that it doesn’t have to justify itself any more.  No argument there as Facebook motors past the half a billion user mark and the kidz are IM’ing each other on their smartphones. But the digital debate generally in ELT has always focussed too much on tools and ‘interactive’ content for my liking.  There are other aspects of digital which are worth talking about.  Superficiality isn’t helped by international media headlining Apple product announcements, promoting Steve Jobs to a saint and equating every announcement from Google as being good for society and democracy.

Meanwhile there are important agendas being overlooked which more general ICT in education conferences are beginning to address. What about fostering digital life skills, how to handle inclusion (and avoid discrimination), the role of communications (e.g  with parents and guardians), privacy (both in terms of safe guarding young learners and wandering into the private mobile sphere of older teens and young adults).  Is there room for a couple of more reflective and less practice-based sessions next year which address this or would it be better to have some type of debate / event? Just please don’t say another tired For vs. Against ICT debate.