Handheld Learning

A conference like no other.

Cuts, cuts, cuts. Everywhere one looks in British politics at the moment the talk is of hacking great chunks out of public expenditure. The cheek of some of those involved is quite breathtaking, considering how wedded they have been to ever higher state spending.
But the truth is that the members of the British political class - with a few honourable exceptions - have spent so long advocating more spending that they have no frame of reference for talking sensibly about cuts. Getting value for money for taxpayers is a concept beyond their ken. And so what should be a hard-headed, well-informed discussion about restructuring the public finances is becoming, instead, quite ridiculous and hysterical.

So says Iain Martin in the Wall Street Journal. How ironic to read this in a newspaper, albeit in the European section, from the very streets from which this crisis began.

Yet at a time when the world is undergoing massive transformations; culturally, financially, environmentally and technologically, couldn't there be a better time to transform learning by pressing the reset switch on a Victorian past to look at things in ways more suited to learners in the 21st century?

If we believe that education is a solution to global problems then we face an uncertain future against a political backdrop that simultaneously understands the vital importance of universal access to learning whilst potentially making swathing cuts in public services driven by a media generated backlash against the very world that our young learners inhabit and are expected to grow.

This years conference will set out the argument for universal access that embraces the technologies embedded in the everyday lives of our learners and how, where that technology does not exist, it can be affordably provided in a sustainable manner.

Over the 3 day festival and conference, through talks, discussions and demonstrations both scheduled and ad-hoc, the case with the weight of its supporting evidence for the use of mobile, gaming and social media technologies to enrich, improve and even transform the learning experience will be presented.

After 5 years this may be the most important Handheld Learning Conference to date. A crossroad or tipping point has been reached where the pervasiveness of inexpensive devices, that can provide access to learning, have been rapidly adopted by large parts of society creating economies of scale that can benefit the rest.

Perhaps now is the time to save costs by allowing learners to use their own tools of choice whilst providing a social system of support for those learners who have no access to technology. Perhaps now is the time to consider the supply cartels and trade associations that have for years ensured that in many cases the technology in the classroom bears no relation to the outside world or more crucially to that of the learner and their expectations.

It’s no longer we could, we should, we might. We are.

So that brings me to this, the fifth Handheld Learning Festival and Conference with its embarrassment of riches and a programme of activities that is certain to provoke, engage, stimulate and inspire. Get the programme here (3Mb PDF).

Our first day, the Festival, is FREE to attend and is greatly expanded since its debut last year with a breathtaking array of activities that will just make it difficult to decide the sessions that you want to take part in.

Starting early from 11:00 we have an all day Best Practice session where 14 leading international practitioners from the UK, USA, Australia and Ireland present a range of practice from using gaming consoles in the classroom to social media in teaching maths to cell phone art to using Android based mobile phones for veterinary practice in Africa and a lot in between!

For those working in the Further and Higher Education sectors or with a leaning towards research we feel that we have arrived this year by finally having an independent fringe event called HHECKL and a MirandaMod, an unconference by the MirandaNet academic network.

For those wanting to get their hands on the latest developments in mobile then the exhibition and industry showcase is for you.

In the afternoon things let rip with the Learners Y Factor hosted by Jason Bradbury where 6 teams of young learners amaze and inspire an audience with presentations that demonstrate innovation in how they are using mobile, gaming and social media tech to enhance their learning. Get your seat early as it’ll be standing room only!

Do you have an idea that would revolutionise learning and teaching practice?

Can you get your message across in 6’40” with 20 slides each advancing automatically every 20 seconds?

Well, the Pecha Kucha for 21st Century Educators and Connected Learners is the session for you. Hosted by Dan Sutch from Futurelab anybody can take part and that includes you, just bring your presentation pre-timed with 20 slide’s auto-advancing every 20 seconds either on a USB stick or your own laptop and then let ‘ em have it. This is a great fun session, a terrific ice breaker for the conference and lot’s of amazing ideas come spilling out of it.

NESTA are joining us this year and during the Festival at 14:00 they will be throwing down the NESTA Challenge. Attend this session to be amongst the first to hear about a new exciting education project - idiscover - which aims to put the learning choices in the hands of young people and empower them to raise their innovation skills so that they can meet the challenges of the future.

After all this we give you a short break to catch your breath and get a bite to eat before the fabulously fantastic Handheld Learning Awards for Innovation and Best Practice 2009.

Also FREE to attend these are the most prestigious awards in the field of learning, teaching and mobile computing. Nominated by the general public, finalists selected by a panel of independent judges and then the winners selected by the public by non-premium rate SMS. Not only prestigious but also fair - almost unheard of in the world of backslapping!

Furthermore this is no ordinary awards event it’s a Party with a capital “P” to celebrate our fellow innovators and innovations with entertainment by one of London’s hottest jazz and blues bands, massive screen video tournaments, a quick-fire, razor-sharp awards presentation by Jason Bradbury and a cash bar with snacks. Just being there will make you feel like a winner!

So come on down.

Tuesday morning and we’re into the main conference, doors open at 8:30 for a caffeine fix and some more networking. Everything starts off in the main Porter Tun room at 09:30, get your seat early because it’s going to be busy. Our opening morning is themed “Reflections on Learning” beginning with an opening address by Ofsted Chair, Zenna Atkins. Zenna’s no nonsense form of address will be the perfect antidote to any of those who over-indulged at the awards evening and will focus the mind on some of the key and pressing matters that face the education sector.

Fortuitously running at the same time as the Conservative Party conference in Manchester and following the Labour Party conference in Brighton we’re hoping for some interesting opening salvo’s against this backdrop.

Zenna is followed by the artist and pop cultural icon, Malcolm McLaren. Malcolm has consistently innovated and re-invented himself throughout his career since opening his legendary shop with Vivienne Westwood in the early ‘70‘s to managing and art directing iconic rock bands including the Sex Pistols, running for London Mayor, co-producing a major feature film and recently being exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts.

What were the features of McLaren’s learning that enabled such a career? How will we find similar creative innovators within our education systems? If McLaren were Education Minister what would he propose now?

Expect a polarisation of opinion during the break before we resume to hear from senior associate partner of the Young Foundation, Yvonne Roberts. Yvonne is an award winning journalist and broadcaster, she is the author of the book Grit that makes the case for a radical change in education in the UK, advocating and end to the “one size fits all” approach - and encouraging more diversity, a greater value placed on practical and vocational learning and the importance of emotional and social literacy, resilience, self-discipline - or Grit.

Our conference wide collective experience culminates with a keynote from James Paul Gee, the Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State. James’ book “Sociolinguistics and Literacies” was one of the founding documents of the “New Literacy Studies”. His later work defining a methodology for studying communication in its cultural settings has been widely influential during the past two decades. More recently Prof. Gee’s published work has dealt with video games, language and learning.

Thus a possibly unlikely combination of opening keynotes brings us distinctly different or perhaps ultimately the same reflections on what learning is and what it can or should be. One thing is certain this will be a riveting start to the proceedings!

In the afternoon the main conference theme is “Creativity & Innovation” where we have invited renowned thought leaders from teaching, visual design, publishing, game design and industrial design to discuss and explore the issues around creativity and the innovation that drives it.

How can the new technologies be embraced in a way that is exciting, stimulating and engaging with learners expectations?

What is the magic within video games that make them so attractive compared to software designed to teach?

What impact does the industrial design of products have on their use within a learning environment?

How is gaming technology being used for training in the military?

Featured speakers include, John Davitt, Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, David Braben, Tim Rylands, Linda Hahner, Phyllis Hillwig, Tony Vincent and Dr Naomi Norman.

If the main afternoon session isn’t for you then try either the Games for Learning of Social Media for Learning breakouts. In these sessions you’ll hear and see inspiring presentations from the leading practitioners and service providers working with gaming and social media technologies and applying them to learning with some astonishing results!

At 18:00 it’s over the road for a quick networking reception before heading to all that a night in London has to offer but remember we’ll need you back bright and early in the morning.

The Wednesday morning session in the main conference deals with Inclusion. We have six speakers; Niel McLean, Becta, David Cavallo, Chief Learning Architect MIT, OLPC, Tim Brighouse, former Commissioner of London Schools, Sal Cooke, Director of TechDis, Prof. Elizabeth Hayes, ASU and Helen Milner, Managing Director, UK Online Centres.

Chaired by the rambunctious, Donald Clark each speaker will be invited to discuss inclusion from different perspectives - from the perspective of wealth, ability, gender, access and culture leading to a discussion that will ask about the challenges involved for inclusion, the cost of inclusion vs the cost of exclusion and whether inclusion is, in fact, important.

For those with an interest in some of the leading academic and practitioner research being conducted into the use of mobile, gaming and social media technologies for learning the all day international Research Strand is for you. With contributions from 24 participants representing 10 countries and curated by Mark van’t Hooft of Kent State University this is perhaps one of the most insightful day’s of research that you will find in this field.

With significant investments being made in UK projects ranging from the £40 Billion Building Schools for the Future (BSF) initiative to the 3 year MoLeNET programme that has placed investment into developing mobile learning for Further Education the all day UK Policy Strand is the place to discover more.

Supported by Partnership for Schools, The Training and Development Agency for Schools,  LSN / MoLeNET and The Specialist Schools and Academies Trust this strand presents a series of talks and demonstrations about how mobile, gaming and social media tech is being embraced within UK policy, successful BSF outcomes, teacher training, leading projects in FE for more than 20,000 learners and exciting projects in secondary.

Certain to be popular on Wednesday morning will be the Spotlight Scotland session where the team from Learning & Teaching Scotland plus colleagues will give a series of 30 minute presentations illuminate the many creative and innovative approaches that have been taken towards learning and teaching practice that has made Scotland a leader in many emerging fields such as Game Based Learning. Presenters in this session include Handheld Learning Special Achievement Award 2008 Winner - Derek Robertson, Ollie Bray, Katie Barrowman, Brian McLaren, Lisa Sorbie and Anna Rossvoll.

Wednesday afternoon brings a breakout session on Emerging Technologies and New Practices. Whilst in the main conference it’s time to look at Transformation with 3 distinctively different perspectives on how the adoption and deployment of mobile and social media technologies have transformed organisations and learning.

Clare Woodward from the Open University will present work and findings from a major DfID project, English in Action, that aims to help 25 million people in Bangladesh improve their ability to use English language for social and economic purposes.

Nabeel Ahmad, IBM Learning, will discuss how IBM are scaling their workforce to more than 100,000 smart phone users by 2012 and how research has indicated that it is performance support solutions that are indicated as a requirement rather than courseware and why that makes sense in this business setting.

Thomas Black, Stanford University, will discuss how Stanford is experimenting with mobile devices to demonstrate that, beyond serving as small web browsers, they can change the way students, faculty and staff function, adding to their convenience as well as increasing their efficiency and productivity. Thomas will ask whether “mobile” can become the replacement of older arcane technologies so well accepted that their costs are not questioned anymore?

And then we come to the finale at 16:00 on Wednesday 7th Oct we hook up live to Boston, USA via live HD video-link for the closing keynote from renowned inventor Ray Kurzweil.

Described as a “restless genius” by our friends at the Wall Street Journal as well as “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes, Kurzweil is one of the leading inventors of our time. The principal developer of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character reader, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. Kurzweil has received 19 honourary doctorates. In 1999 he received the National Medal of Technology, the highest honour in technology in the USA, from President Clinton. In 2002, he was inducted into the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame.

You see, Ray Kurzweil is a pretty smart guy.

His prescience has been remarkable and incredibly accurate in technological crystal ball gazing from predicting machine intelligence in beating human chess grandmasters to the evolution of the Internet.

Kurzweil predicts that three-dimensional molecular computing will provide the hardware for human-level artificial intelligence well before 2030. He predicts that we will move towards a decentralized educational system where every person will have access to the highest quality knowledge and instruction.

If he’s right then what does this mean for our education systems and how do we prepare the children entering formal education now for a future where computers appear sentient?

Well, you didn’t expect just another dull education conference did you?

If you haven’t registered yet then there’s still time but hurry the ticket price goes up from Sept 26th from £375 to £425. Register here.

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