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Friday 21 January 2011

Emerged technologies

Last Friday Marta and I went to the Association of Learning Development in Higher Education's CPD event in Leeds and ran a workshop on 'Using emerging technologies to engage students'. It was essentially a repeat of the Engaging without invading workshop that I did in March last year but a little bit updated.

The thing that was most interesting for me was the change in attitude of the audience from 10 months ago. It was a different audience but one drawn from the same professional group., the majority attitude last time had been 'I'm really not sure about this - convince me'; this time it was 'We really should be using this - how?' Also of note was an interest in using social media for learning as well as simply publicising (I need to get involved in Alan's Friendfeed project again).

I made the comment in the workshop that I wasn't sure how long we can continue to call these 'emerging technologies'. The feedback on the session was very positive but the one comment that jumped out was the one that said 'This wasn't a workshop on using emerging technologies it was a workshop on using Facebook and Twitter'. A lot changes in 10 months!

5 comments:

  1. Really good presentation. I especially find the statistics helpful and the quoted comments as well.

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  2. [...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Stuart Johnson, Terese Bird. Terese Bird said: RT @stujohnson Emerged technologies http://dlvr.it/Dn0vN - good example of smart use of Facebook to reach students #edtech #SoMe [...]

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  3. This had slipped from my mind completely, but when I first moved from a PhD, partly covering Computer Science, to librarianship, I was completely thrown by the change in what the term 'emerging technologies' covered. In Computer Science you're often referring to cutting edge technologies, still under development and often not on the market. Under that definition, technologies like Facebook and Twitter emerged ages ago!

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  4. Good point. It's a lot about context - if you look it up on Wikipedia this is what you get http://goo.gl/YLVh5

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  5. [...] as an experience, is completely the opposite of Stu Johnson’s experience with his workshop delivery in Leeds where he noticed a positive change in the interest towards using [...]

    ReplyDelete