The event focussed on the impact of the Next Generation Learning campaign in the FE and Skills sector.  The day was opened with a keynote from Stephen Crowne, perhaps still reeling from having had £40 million cut from his budget by Ed Balls only a few days earlier.  Not surprisingly, there was a degree of celebrating Becta’s successes.  A key message was that ‘discriminating and effective’ use of technology brings benefits to our learners; he enthused about the potential for the future and reinforced the need to learn, purchase and collaborate across the sector.  In conversation with another delegate, the question was raised about the historic impact of competition across the sector and how that had mitigated against working together at many levels.

Next up was Major General Tim Inshaw – he’s the Director of Training and Education at the MoD.  He focussed on the impact of new technology in his sector.  He highlighted areas where interactive applications, almost 3D games based, are being used to train personnel in many areas – we’re all used to flight simulators – they’ve taken it a lot further.  Most of the training can be delivered anytime, anywhere and this is leading to savings at many levels. Because part of the training can be delivered on the job and away from the training bases, this has led to courses being of shorter duration. This produces economies both in terms of the cost of the training accommodation and the trainers (fewer are needed).  It also means that the trainees are away from their service bases for shorter periods, this reduces the costs of covering for them and in the longer term the suggestion is that fewer personnel would be needed and hence more savings.  This continued the theme of the last few events I’ve attended – deliver (more) for less – I’m beginning to think that best value is being replaced by cheapest as the cuts bite. Tim also talked about their need for security, protecting their training resources so that the ‘how tos’ didn’t fall into the wrong hands!

John Landeryou, Director of Further Education in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) came next.  John is a firm believer in the power of technology to support teaching and learning.  He talked about the Framework for Excellence  and Generator  as ways of helping the FE and skills sector to be more aware, to continue their development and to enable collaboration – especially through the Technology Exemplar Network .  Other points he made were around the virtual campus – a secure extranet in effect; the need for institutions to recognise and adapt for the shift from organisation provided ICT to that provided by their clients; that as a consequence connectivity within an institution would be paramount (accepting students with their own kit); and that this would need to be done securely without impacting on access to the infrastructure.  This harks back to the days when I worked in a local authority environment; I wanted the guys in charge of the ‘firewall’ to be Access Managers rather than Security Managers – and I wanted the change in mindset, if no one could reach the resources what was the point of having them?  Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t want things to be done insecurely, but I did want an enabling culture.  John also talked about informal learning – The School of Everything .

I then went to a session run by Andy Harris HMI at Ofsted. The theme was around VLEs and for part of the time Andy talked about the report released back in January 2009 based on inspections performed in 2008.  He talked about the fact than in 2005-2007 there were only 35 mentions of VLEs within 17,000 reports for schools and 28 out of 280 for colleges.  This was, he said, not necessarily negative.  More that it reflected the lack of visibility to the inspectors.  A ‘no comment’ response was made to the suggestion that perhaps some inspectors wouldn’t recognise a VLE! The best examples of VLEs enhanced and supported learning; they were not necessarily the flashiest or the wizziest.  The worst were simply online file depositories with little thought about structure, content or its delivery.  Dialogue with learners led to the conclusion that they were content with what was being offered rather than excited.  There are now over 30,000 learners of school age who are being taught in virtual schools.  In FE most access was on-site whilst in schools it’s off-site predominantly.    Nowhere have they seen comprehensive use of a VLE across an organisation. There was a lack of strategy and quality assurance in many implementations.  It was noted that colleges mainly used internal resources to build and support the VLE whilst schools used external resources.  When I asked whether the FE approach had lead to isolation, little shared development and re-invention of the wheel, the response was that that would have to be a discussion for another time…

Andy Palmer – Head of skills at BT talked about the challenges of training a large workforce where much of the training is regulatory based.  He talked about Dare2Share  an environment where the content is user generated and knowledge is shared across the workforce.  He had a series of questions for us:

• What skills does an organisation like BT need for today, tomorrow and the future?
• How do we ‘manage’ learning as simply as possible and transparently to the learners?
• How do we help organisations to be agile and flexible – responding to the needs of the organisation and its workforce?

No answers were given during the session but more food for thought!

I then went to a session given by staff from Ealing, Hammersmith and West London College – I was really impressed with the range and quality of the resources the college has developed.  I was particularly impressed with their blending of various technologies and the content they’d created around safeguarding really stood out.  The shame, and there was one, was that there are no plans to share the resources they’ve created.  This brings me to another train of thought – if public funding has been used to create the resources why shouldn’t sharing be the default stance?  Why would we want to use public funding to buy something that was developed using public funding?  Answers on an e- postcard please!

Samantha Peter (Head of Education Products at Google) was the final keynote speaker.

She started by saying that the four things we needed to consider when considering our client’s needs were: broadcast, community, speed and access.  Some time was spent during the day looking at exemplars from within creative and media environments – they all aligned to her four big things.  There was, as expected a bit of sales talk – 80% of a college’s ICT budget is spent ‘keeping the lights on’ and that there’s little left for innovation or doing something new.  She suggested that using Google Apps would release that locked-in funding to do something different.  There was a question from the floor about ‘where do you keep our data?’ Some of you will be aware that Microsoft use hosting in Eire to ensure that they comply with all European directives.  The Google approach, according to Sam, is that they are signed up to ‘Safe Harbor’ which gives us equivalent levels of security, so we can all sleep soundly, knowing our data is in safe hands.

Sam went on to elaborate on the role of Google apps and their integration potential.  She highlighted the real-time opportunities for collaboration and the opportunities for delivering innovation in small chunks through the use of cloud based technology and defined technology as ‘anything invented after you were born’.  The graphs above were used to illustrate this section of her presentation.

She used a quote from Einstein “The world we have created today, as a result of our thinking thus far, has problems which cannot be solved by thinking the way we thought when we created them.”  This, yet again, brought to mind the Think Different slogan used by Apple.  Her finale was that together we can “build a brighter future”.

I’d like to leave you with words from Alan Kay who said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”  So let’s get inventive!

Patrick Kirk