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<h1class="post-title p-name">#altc2011 Day 1</h1>
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<aclass="u-url"href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/altc2011-day-1/">Tuesday 6 September 2011</a>
After a short introduction from the Lord Mayor of Leeds, conference chair John Cook handed over to Miguel Brechner from Uruguay to talk about the inspiring Plan Ceibal.</p>
<p>This project started in 2006 and tapped into the One Laptop Per Child programme to provide every schoolchild in Uruguay with a laptop and Internet access. I can’t really do it justice here, but I encourage you to watch the <ahref="http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=ClipsFromALT">recording of his talk and the questions afterwards</a>.</p>
<p>By focusing on users and usability, rather than on the technology, and not just letting vendors taking the lead, Plan Ceibal has made a reall cultural and social difference in Uruguay. Kids are now eager to get to school, parents are getting online with the help of their children.</p>
<p>It raises serious questions about how we do technology in our schools. I don’t have the statistics to hand, but it sounds rather like a developing country has more schoolchildren with Internet access than we do, which is worrying. If they can teach programming and robotics in primary school, why are we still having computer classes (and qualifications, such as ECDL) that focus on word processing and spreadsheets?</p>
<h2id="cloud-learning-with-google-apps">Cloud Learning with Google Apps</h2>
<p>My first parallel session was about Google Apps in education. I had high hopes of this, but to be honest, I didn’t feel I learnt very much from it.</p>
<p>The guy from Google did wave a Chromebook around, which looks like a very useful device, but possibly a bit hamstrung without a network connection until HTML5 offline web apps become a bit more commonplace. There were also rumours of being able to run virtualised desktop apps in the browser thanks to a partnership with Citrix, but no demonstration of how at might work.</p>
<p>The one thing that did show some promise was the brief mention of Manish Malik’s work to use Google App Engine to start building a <ahref="http://edublend.blogspot.com/">VLE integrated with Google Apps</a>, which he calls a Cloud Learning Environment. I’ll be looking into that in a bit more detail when I get a chance.</p>
<p>After lunch it was three short papers on the general theme of collaboration with technology. Jill Fresen of the University of Oxford gave a nice overview of the mobile interface, <ahref="http://m.ox.ac.uk">Mobile Oxford</a>, to their Sakai-based VLE, WebLearn. They’ve done some really interesting work with it, especially integrating with the Sakai Polls tool to make a cheap, mobile audience response system.</p>
<p>Jak Radice and Maureen Readle had some interesting stories to tell about<br>
digital story telling. They’ve done some really interesting work (with their<br>
colleague at the University of Bradford, Caroline Plews) bringing the stories<br>
of real health service users into the classroom. If you’re interested in<br>
learning more about that, take a look at their fictional town of<br>