The Learning Pool Community Day – 14 September

I’ll be joining my good friends at Learning Pool on the 14th September in celebrating their Community Day – where the UK’s biggest public sector online learning community will be coming to life.

The packed agenda features plenty of reasons to sign up for a place, if you haven’t already.

Keynote presentations from Dr Andrew Learner of iESE and Dean Shoesmith, President of the PPMA are followed by interactive seminars on topics as diverse as engaging people with e-learning, measuring return on investment and making the best use of emerging technology (I’m helping out with that one).

The day will be rounded off with the Learning Pool Customer of the Year Awards, which are always good fun – and I’m sure the party will carry on afterwards too.

Five more reasons to attend:

  1. Cement relationships
  2. Get ideas for your own practical initiatives
  3. Hear about best practice and benchmark with your peers
  4. Receive free expert guidance and useful tips
  5. Take away strategies you can implement immediately

So, with just a handful of places left, sign up now!

“Kids today need a licence to tinker”

Nice article by John Naughton on the state of IT education in schools:

What is happening is that the national curriculum’s worthy aspirations to educate pupils about ICT are transmuted at the chalkface into teaching kids to use Microsoft software. Our children are mostly getting ICT training rather than ICT education.

And if you can’t see the difference, try this simple thought-experiment: replace “ICT” with “sex” and see which you’d prefer in that context: education or training?

How we got to this ridiculous state of affairs is a long story. It’s partly about how education departments, like generals, are always preparing for the last war. Thus, while we’re moving into a post-PC age, our ICT curriculum is firmly rooted in the desktop computer running Microsoft Windows. It’s also partly about the technophobia of teachers, local councillors and officials. But it’s mainly about the chronic mismatch between the glacial pace of curriculum change in a print-based culture, and the rate of change in the technology.

Consumer IT Resets the Baseline for Corporate IT

Good stuff from Michael Coté:

In moving to a BigCo job you quickly notice how different life behind the firewall is when it comes to IT. You’re often more limited than empowered. The advances in consumer IT (things like Facebook and GMail) often have created better IT than corporations provide their employees. For well over a decade, corporate IT has been chasing the old mandate of risk management through hyper-control. In the meantime, consumer IT has shot past the old bulwark of the IT department when it comes to ease of use, functionality innovations, and the resulting leaps in productivity. Consumer IT has set a new baseline for what knowledge workers need to be most effective and most corporate IT has fallen well below that line.

Who retweeted you?

I didn’t know you could do this. Maybe you don’t either, so I’ll share it.

How do you find out which of your tweets have been retweeted, and by who? Turns out, by looking on the Twitter website!

First, go to twitter.com and log in. Then click the little ‘Retweets’ tab just under the updates box. Should look a little like this:

Retweet tab

Click on ‘Your Tweets, retweeted’, as per the arrow.

You’ll see a list of all your tweets that others have retweeted. Cool!

If you then hover over one, and click, a detail pane should pop up, giving info on exactly who retweeted you. Click the image below to make it bigger, if you need to.

Retweet details

So now you know.

Local TV

I think it’s fair to say that DCMS’s plans for Local TV are mostly terrible.

Luckily, people who know a lot more about it that I do are writing it all up. I enjoyed these three posts on the LSE blog on the subject, all by Sally Broughton Micova.

They are well worth reading for anyone interested in local media.

Local TV Part 1: A Tale of Two Cities

The DCMS’s framework document states that “market experience suggests that small standalone local TV stations can struggle to develop s sustainable business model”. However, the Government’s plan is to issue individual local licenses and then leave it up to the market to determine if local stations give it a go alone or come together in a network. This means anyone interested in opening local television and broadcasting through DTT in Birmingham will have to individually negotiate with whoever might be interested in Hereford, Grimsby, or any of the other 60 plus locations. News Corporation, which owns a large number of local TV stations in the US and controls two of those in Birmingham Alabama, has other problems at the moment, so it seems unlikely it will be interested in applying for a multitude of individual local licenses in the UK. It is not clear how a backbone of sufficient size and capacity to adequately support local TV across the UK will spontaneously emerge from the negotiations of a few enthusiastic local parties.

Local TV Part 2: Great Expectations

One of the ways the Government’s plan intends to provide financial support to local TV is by having the BBC spend up to £5 million annually for 3 years to buy content from local stations. At the local TV summit Hunt also suggested that local TV will be selling content to other national stations. This is problematic for two reasons. Firstly, £5 million divided among several stations will amount to very little in relation to the budgets required to make high quality content. Secondly, local stations will have to produce content that national stations will want to buy. Consider the plea from Shameless’ Paul Abbott for British producers and commissioners to try making television drama at a cheaper cost of only £500,000 per episode. Or, that national stations in the UK are currently spending their budgets procuring high quality production from independent producers and hit series from the US.

Local TV Part 3: Don’t start linear

The proposal, to use the digital terrestrial television (DTT) platform and create linear television stations across the UK, is already old fashioned enough. It is admirable to invest in local media, but new technology allows more innovative and more sustainable ways of doing it. Putting local TV onto DTT multiplexes (MUXs), even in a first stage as the Government proposes, is an unnecessary investment, and one that sets local television off on the wrong foot in terms of both sustainability and purpose.

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