A d c o l o g

It’s been a while since my last blog post and since then we’ve had a revolution!

I’m talking, of course, about “The Learning Revolution” white paper from DIUS on Informal Learning.  Most of you will have read it and formed your own opinions on it, so this isn’t the place for me to pass comment on the paper itself.  However, this is the place for me to examine how this affects your future plans, with particular reference to technology.

The paper has been widely publicised in terms of joined up working  between the Thrid Sector and Local Authorities and the £20million “Learning Transformation Fund”.  A good example is John Denham MP’s piece in MJ about the paper.

What’s been less well circulated is the use of innovation and technology in the paper.  There’s a whole chapter on it and there are constant references to “finding new ways” of teaching and learning.  What’s more, there are grants of £100,000 available to drive this change, with even more of offer for exceptionally innovative projects.

There is a definite government agenda here, and technology is clearly in it.  But what for the traditional ACL projects – is there anything there for them?

A friend of mine remarked that this would be an excellent opportunity for local authorities to demonstrate their ability to work as a cohesive and inter-agency organisation – and the bid can fund them to do so.

I’m working closeley with DIUS at the moment to get the latest information and, for providers in the Yorkshire & Humber area, there is a webinar coming up, the results of which I’ll blog here.  But in the meantime, ensure you read the paper, the bid paper and, when thinking of innovative projects, think outside the box.   Sir Ken Robinson’s TED TALK on innovation and creativity in leanring may be an inspiration for it.

Happy bidding!

Voting systems have always been contentious in ACL – they cost a lot and one system shared among a whole directorate can undermine the efficiency of what we’re trying to do.  What would be really good would be if all the students carried their own voting systems with them , all the time.

Until recently, I’d have said that sounded a bit like an idealistic statement.  But today I discovered SMSPoll and various similar tools which allow you do exactly this – through  mobile phone text messaging.

OK, so it’s not perfect.  Not all learners have mobile phones and some might resent having to spend 10p on a vote.  However, this month mobile calls are set to exceed landline calls for the first time and most mobile packages now come with unlimited or high numbers of text messages.

The different SMS Poll sites available vary greatly.  Sadly, almost all the free ones are for US Telephone numbers, though this may well change soon.  There are at least two that work for UK numbers, and both are free initially, though there are limitations and a commercial package might be needed for full use.

Cardboard Fish allows you to add SMS tools to your website including polls, comments and blogs.  The problem is, you need a server to do so and, while you can use Google Pages or Geocities etc, they are limited in how they display it.  It is free of charge.

SMSPoll is great, visually. Sadly, it only allows polls at the moment and the free package is very limited.  The fantastic aspect oF this system, however, is that you can put poll results live into powerpoint (assuming you have an internet connection of course).

This doesn’t fully address the voting system problem – however it goes some way in helping organisations with lower budgets to make use of technology, while allowing votes that go on longer term.

UPDATE:  I tried SMS POLL during a talk at Barnsley yesterday and it worked really well.  It takes a while for the votes to update, so I gave people the questions, went through a few PowerPoint slides then returned to it, the feed coming live from the net into PowerPoint via the O2 dongle.  For an analysis of the results, see the upcoming post on Wesenwille.

E-Guides are very important for many ACL providers and at RSC-YH we’re hoping to support E-Guides byhelping them to share good practice and ideas. However, before we go about doing this, we thought we’d find out what E-Guides want and in what form.

To that end we’ve made a survey, which should only take a few minutes to complete. Could all Yorkshire & Humber E-Guides please go here, so we can start supporting you with your cascading.