This blog is dormant. I’ve just finished a new book (Dudeney, G., Hockly, N. & Pegrum, M. (2013) Digital Literacies, Pearson Education) and am starting work on a new book on mLearning with Nicky Hockly. There’s only so much time available in each day…

Nice Flowers!

I’m just back from the fantastic IATEFL TD and LT SIG conference in Istanbul, locally organised by the very organised Burcu Akyol and team. A timely conference looking at teacher development with and without technology – though it so happens that when you look at the stories, they’re mostly about teacher development aided and abetted by technologies, which is not much of a surprise. As you might expect, there were major representatives both from the tech side of things, and also from the unplugged (not exactly dogme, as it goes) side.

I have to say I rather like the new take on dogme that the original founders are talking up. Scott Thornbury has switched from defending dogme against its detractors by recognising that much of the criticism is irrefutable (his words) and instead spent his time talking about what dogme is, rather than what it isn’t…

This turns out to be (to coin a phrase from the late, great Douglas Adams) ‘mostly harmless’, in the sense that Scott believes that nobody has ever been harmed in the pursuit of dogme. Which is probably the case – though that in itself is irrefutable at present. What Scott’s excellent talk DID highlight was that processes that allow teachers to reflect on what they do in class are good things and to be encouraged. Of course you don’t have to come over all dogme to reflect – but he has provided two amazing TD spaces over the years (the original Yahoo group for dogme, and his quality blog), and I’m a fan of both, though I don’t blindly drink it all up. Worth highlighting, of course, that they both depend on technology. And indeed technology has enabled teachers worldwide to develop more fully and more easily that ever before.

As I said in my talk, I’m still not at all convinced that microblogging sites such as Twitter and Facebook can provide meaningful opportunities for critical thinking and knowledge construction, but remain a solid fan of technologies that allow for the ‘long conversation’, the ones that don’t demand instant liking and instant gratification and mindless echoing of soundbite thoughts, but rather use the asynchronous to give people space to think, reflect, organise and share in something greater than the sum of the parts. That’s where spaces like Scott’s Yahoo group (quiet these days, but a torrent of conversation in its heyday) and his blog really come into their own. Twitter and Facebook are great for sharing links and endless rounds of ‘happy birthdays’, but it ends there for me. I find myself heading nearer Scott’s views on this (especially Twitter at conferences), which is rather odd!

Check out a great summary of Scott’s talk over on his blog…

Odd, too, to hear Luke Meddings showing off a wider variety of technologies in his talk than I did in mine. I couldn’t get to his talk but sent a proxy and heard great things afterwards. Another interesting moment for me, with Luke acknowledging that dogme isn’t right all the time, and then moving on to talk about ‘messy tech’ – I think those of us who have worked in tech for years are used to the concept of it being messy, but he wrapped it up so elegantly with music and typewriters and vintage photos that it’s nice to hear the story again.

It’s a mellow day of sunshine, and I like the mellow drift that the dogme founders have made towards a less dogmatic centre ground – a centre ground, incidentally, to which many of the tech people (myself included) have also drifted. The long hot summer starts here, I hope… I must be going soft in my old age.

Thanks to all who spoke, all who organised, all who catered, all who helped and everyone who made it a great event.

Yesterday, before shutting down for the day (both electronically & mentally) I took the time to catch up with Apple’s latest ‘event’, which was entirely dedicated to learning. At the event they announced a couple of new products which I think are real game changers:

• a new version of iBooks that displays more interactive books
• a new app for the Mac called iBooks Author

If you have a Mac you can now create interactive iBooks for the iPad and publish them in seconds. So far, so good – and it is very good. I fired it up this morning and saw what it can do: pages of text and photos, photo galleries, interactive photos, Keynote presentations, movies, quizzes and custom HTML widgets can all be combined into a finished eBook which you can preview immediately on your iPad (if you’re lucky enough to have one). The idea came (according to yesterday’s rumours) from seeing the app that was developed for Al Gore’s book ‘Our Choice’, and indeed the feature set is very similar… And it really does work, too. If you want to go a little further you can get them on the Apple Store and offer them free of charge to your learners, or as paid options (with the obligatory 30% going to Apple, of course).

If you’re in the States, the other big news connected to this announcement was that Apple have done deals with the likes of Pearson to offer a range of textbooks with a capped pricing of US$15. Much wailing and gnashing of teeth followed… how did publishers hope to make their money back (simple, really – instead of publishing a US$75 textbook and having it resold every year for five or so years in a second-hand market where you don’t see any profit, now you sell a textbook every year for five years for US$15, and the buyer can’t sell it on)… how were kids going to afford iPads (perhaps by saving up all the money they would have spent on outrageously expensive textbooks)… what were they going to do now they would be growing up without messing their backs up carrying suitcases of books around the streets, etc., etc.

Whichever way you look at it, this is a game changer and the ePub format looks decidedly dull – I can imagine buying a novel in the old format, because there you’re only interested in the written word – but for learning, for passion, for content, for art, for interaction, the Kindle doesn’t really get there. And yes I do see that Kindles are much cheaper and there are reasons people buy them. The OS community may need to step up to the plate here and look at developing an open source format with decent media features that will run on a wide variety of platforms and on cheaper tools such as Android tablets, traditional netbooks and laptops, etc. Whatever happens, I don’t think the electronic book will look like black text on a white screen for much longer.

A handy summary of the Apple event can be found here…

Speaking of Android, I’ve been playing (for the past week) with a new Android tablet (it’s an Asus Transformer Prime, since you ask) and it’s a lovely bit of kit – the first quad-core tablet with a decent nVidia chip, lots of horsepower, a lovely bright display and all packaged up with a dockable keyboard which allows expansion with SD cards, USB, etc. There’s also an 8MP rear-facing camera, though you do look decidedly stupid using it as a camera outside and under the public gaze. It’s fast… very! Ice Cream Sandwich is an improvement over the last iteration of Android that I played with, but it still looks like the ugly bumpkin cousin to the city chic of iOS – though I’m told some people prefer this…

I’ve not done an awful lot with it yet, due to a writing deadline at the end of the month, but I’m planning to take it on a couple of trips soon to see how it holds up against the iPad as an all-round travel device. In the meantime, if you have any Android app recommendations, I’d love to hear them.

I’m on a plane… I’m on a plane back from a conference… a very good conference, as it happens. But it was also one of those conferences that neatly summarises many of the problems and paradoxes in the conference goers life.

Firstly the plenary speakers – all white, middle-class, middle-aged+ Brits. One of the first plenary speakers on the first day apologised for being one of the first of a stream of white, middle-aged, middle class British men who would take the stage over the next few days. The rest who followed felt duty bound to say the same thing, I think (and they did). One of them – the only woman plenary speaker at leaast didn’t have to do the full apology. And of course we’ve had this debate before – firstly on my blog, and then on a series of blogs. We know why it happens, but very few like it.

We know why it’s mostly men (the profession being mostly women, it’s assumed that some ‘eye candy’ – such as it is in our profession – is a good thing). We know why it’s mostly Brits (they write global ELT course books and methodology titles, books which sell) As someone intimately involved with large conference organisation I understand and acknowledge the relationship between publishers and conference organisers, I understand why people get parachuted in to do the plenary sessions by publishers – I know how it works. But look – there must be good ‘local’ people working in the profession, people who know something about the country and the teaching there… Would it be too much to ask for some kind of balance – more gender balance, more local and superstar balance, and all that. It’s getting embarrassing for all of us.

Or is it? I have to confess to being on the other side of an obsession with travel. For the past three years I have travelled like a crazy person, accepting ridiculous amounts of invitations, and racking up a carbon footprint that would embarrass most people. I have had an amazing time, visited over forty countries, been to some incredible events and conferences, eaten wonderful food, spent social evenings with amazing people and slept in some lovely hotels. It’s been fantastic. At each event I’ve bumped into someone I know who was also doing a plenary or keynote – sometimes more than five or six times a year. It’s a huge industry and many of us enjoy being part of it.

And if you speak to an author and they tell you it’s all for the love of being in a session room sharing their knowledge with the audience, I would suggest you can take that with a pinch of salt…

Of course it is about that, but it’s also about being loved and appreciated, about being pampered: the cars from the airport, the lovely hotels, the social engagements, the love of an audience, the adulation, the photo opportunities, the video interviews and all the rest. It doesn’t sell more books, necessarily (and that’s actually irrelevant if you write methodology books as I do, royalty payments being what they are) but it validates careers, and it makes people feel wanted, loved and appreciated. Is that too high a price to pay for the carbon spend, or the closed doors to national speakers? I think, perhaps, it may be.

But I know for a fact that it does become an obsession – you travel and speak, therefore you are. I know at least one colleague who will not do anything other than plenary speeches – not for him/her the humble workshop or concurrent keynote – s/he is a plenary speaker! People fear disappearing if they tone down the travel, in much the same way they fear disappearing if they drop off the Twitter timeline, disappear from Facebook, etc. I’m not sure anymore if it’s sustainable or good, and that’s why from next year I won’t be saying yes to everything, and I’ll be choosing carefully – though I wonder if it will make a difference. I still want to visit new countries, meet and talk to new teachers, and share my work with them. I just don’t think I need to do it twenty-six times a year!

I can already envisage the content of comments which the paragraphs above might provoke (symbiosis, that’s what teachers want, it’s what makes a conference attractive and successful, it’s a shame publishers have such a strong grip, etc., etc.) – I’ll seal my predictions in an envelope and open it in a week or so

Anyway, back to that conference….

What of the poor teachers at a busy conference? I tried to put myself in their place over the weekend, tried to analyse the messages I was getting. I think first and foremost it seems I (the idealised local teacher me) am simply not doing much good in the way of service to my learners… I’m not using enough images or video, and not enough technology… I haven’t realised that translation is being rehabilitated and I’m missing the boat, I am slavishly following a syllabus and I’m not doing enough tasks or overt fluency activities. By the end of the weekend I’m sweating buckets… is everyone as bad as me, is everyone doing what I do?

And, if they are, how exactly are they ditching half the syllabus, and doing more fun, free, fluent task-based translation activities based around attractive visuals when they’re punished for deviating from the syllabus and have to get it all done each year. It’s one thing hearing from an expert that slavish addiction to the syllabus will mean it will mostly be ‘in one ear and out the other’ or lead to the great fallacy of ‘what I teach is not what they learn’, but quite another to be called into the academic director’s office and given a roasting for not doing the job you were hired to do. When I remarked on this paradox to one of my colleagues he made the point that the audience also contained ‘decision makers’ and that just seeding discussions around these areas might lead slowly towards a change. And I do take that point, but I still think teachers are given a hard time at conferences sometimes. There’s a lot of ‘we should be….’, but not too much ‘here’s how we do it… no, really, look – you can implement these changes by doing the following…’

As one of the delegates remarked to me, it betrayed an obvious shared history in private language school ELT on the part of the plenary speakers, and this may indeed lead to some misconceptions about what goes on in classrooms in state schools around the world. I think there’s a little bit of truth in that (the point was echoed by one of the plenary speakers himself), but I’m aware that some of those keynote speakers have worked globally with teachers in all sorts of scenarios, so I’m not sure how much weight that can be given. It may come down to a lack of local knowledge – and we’re back to the lack of local plenary speakers problem again.

In many respects I ended up feeling that for me as the imagined teacher, a lot of the conference was in one ear and out the other, and that I wasn’t really learning what they were teaching. But they were the distinguished foreign guests, so maybe it was my problem     Perhaps the biggest problem was that the conference theme talked of ‘difficulties’ and ‘challenges’, so maybe it was inevitable that the tone should be a little, um, challenging…

My own talk didn’t aim to tell anyone that they were missing something, I don’t think. As the first outing for a talk on the history of educational technologies I think it went quite well, though it needs some reorganisation and I think it’s a bit too heavy in the middle, like a Christmas cake. The talk tries to make sense of twenty years (for me) of EdTech, and tries to map defined technology trigger points with dates, but also with approaches that have come – and occasionally gone – in the world of ELT. I need to reorganise it a bit.

The conference was amazingly slick and there were plenty of quality speakers, both invited from abroad and local ones.

Interestingly, and for the first time in a long time, this was a large conference (900+ people registered) that had no talks about dogme. The closest it got was a talk about doing tech lessons when you don’t have much tech, and I got confused by mentions of ‘unpluggged’! As with technology, I think there are many loud people online making a lot of noise about dogme, but the reality on the ground is very different – we devotees, both plugged and unplugged, are the 0.1% (at most).

Teaching unplugged and technology have that in common, though I suspect access to technology is outstripping licenses to do dogme – it’s the syllabus problem again: if you’re not allowed to make these changes, if you’re not allowed to break the rules, then these fancy methods and approaches are simply no good to you at all – in my last blog post I was asked if I’d observed any ‘dogme moments’ whilst I was in Russia observing classes recently. I’d be more likely to find a giraffe in a Russian state school classroom, frankly. They may all have Macbooks in Moscow junior schools, but there’s still a syllabus to follow, and no time to deviate for fun fluency tasks or ‘dogme moments’… Maybe that will change?

I talked a little bit about change with a coursebook writer at the conference this weekend. He was asking who was more likely to affect change in teachers worldwide – was it me with my online training courses and methodology books, was it him with his course books worming their way into schools around the world? Frankly I don’t really know – if it were a pure numbers game then I’d have to give it to him, but after reflecting on how much can realistically be done within large systems, I suspect we’ve both got about as much chance as each other of affecting any real change in systems. All we can hope for is that we have an affect on some people – and I suppose that’s the teacher’s lot as well.

It was a social weekend and I spent quality time with some lovely people and had some great chats and some great food and some live music. A couple of people were shocked to find out I’m not on Twitter anymore. Someone asked me what my Twitter handle was and I had to confess that I no longer had one.

And inevitably, as it does when I go out and about these days, the talk turned to what it was like not to be on Twitter or Facebook, and how I felt…. It’s interesting, in a way, because now when I go to events I actually find out things – during my Twitter days I would go to dinners and sit next to someone and they’d say “Did you know XXX has changed jobs?” and, of course, I did…. “Do you know YYY is going out with ZZZ”. Well yes, of course I did. Everyone does.

But now I don’t. Sweet release, you see… I don’t know who is seeing who, where people are travelling to, where they’re staying, who they’re having coffee with. And it’s odd, but I don’t care. I know where my loved ones and close friends are and I communicate with them as regularly as I can – we talk. I have rediscovered the joy of catching up with people face-to-face, or in longer, quality conversations on Skype, by email, etc. I am gone, yet not forgotten. Searching for me on Twitter yesterday I see there were people at the conference who mentioned me in passing – I thank them for keeping my memory alive

The day to day passes me by now – the last time I looked at Twitter was about six months ago. I sign in to Facebook to accept friend requests, but I never linger. I get a summary of Twitter, Facebook and the rest inside a beautiful app for the iPad called Flipboard. To ensure I really am not missing out on too much, I signed in just as I was finishing this blog post. I share with you here a random sampling from the first four boards from my Facebook account in Flipboard:

Love is like luck. You have to go all the way to find it. Even then, it depends on your luck to get it or be empty handed

Teen tweeter won’t apolgize to Kan. governor

Don’t hide emotions from your students. Emotions show that you care. And if *you* don’t care, why should they?

To love someone is nothing, to be loved by someone is something, but to be loved by someone you love is everything.

Ohio investigators probe shootings possibly tied to Craigslist ad

When you become calm and serene on the inside the world becomes more calm and serene on the outside

Dead ends are for those who do not want to see the truth

Dear Maths, I do not want to solve your problems bevause I have my own

Dear Google, Please stop behaving like a wife,  kindly let me complete my sentence before you give suggestions

There was more, but you get the picture. After all that, I most surely do feel well developed   Heady stuff, I think you’ll agree…

Now then, I really must get back to work

I was back in Russia last week, as part of a long-term research project in conjunction with the British Council; a project looking at what the success factors are for the consistent and pedagogically sound integration of technologies in primary and secondary. So far we’ve talked to pre- and in-service teacher training institutes, spoken to some people higher up the food chain, and visited some schools to see some classes. The next stage involves an online survey for learners, and the development and application of an observation instrument which will be used in schools throughout Russia – and I’m looking forward to returning in early November to do some observations myself.

Last week, however, we were talking to school principals and I got the chance to visit two quite extraordinary schools in Moscow…

The first was a primary school run by a charismatic man – I couldn’t get a photo of him, but he did leave me with his deputy for a while:

He’d arranged to give us a guided tour of the school, and had agreed with teachers that we might pop in and look around… Now you probably need to know that there is an ICT policy in place at primary level: there are new standards, new literacies and there is equipment in all primary schools (or at least that is the idea). There has been a great shift in the curriculum to collaborative, constructivist learning, groupwork, producing, mixing, creating…. So what did we see when we walked round the school?

Well, the first thing I saw was small classes, full of polite little people. They all stood up when we entered any of the classrooms, and they all said hello when passing in the corridors. Now I’m not much of a discipline person, but I do like a bit of education and politeness, which is what that was.

So let’s go into one of the classrooms… here the kids are the only ones who don’t stand up, or even notice us as we talk to the teacher. They’re all engrossed in self-set experiments with the modern LEGO educational kits. One group has made a monster that will chomp your finger off if you put it in its mouth, another has made a car that responds to sounds. They build using the pieces, and they learn from small rugged computers which tell them how the components work… The teacher is no spring chicken, but she claims to love the LEGO kits, though she is keen to point out that they still do a lot of stuff with paper, bits of metal and other traditional materials, and she smiles as she pulls put the lovingly cared-for old style meccano. The kids still love that too. The kids, engrossed in their experiments – and chatting away animatedly – fail to notice when we slip out of the door.

In the next classroom we see the new intake, who have been there just three weeks. They’re doing a bit of Russian language, whilst learning keyboard skills. The teacher walks around gently but firmly putting their hands back in the right place on the Apple Mac keyboards…. I still can’t touch type, but these kids will before they finish the first grade.

All the classrooms are bright and there are plenty of examples of the kind of activities we heard about the day before – kids working with traditional folk stories from Russia, but retelling then with their own drawings and models lovingly animated with stop motion digital photography, kids working with electronic microscopes connected to computers, kids working with scientific computers that can measure sounds, temperatures, light, air pressure and a lot more.

This is a busy school, a happy school and a productive school – there’s a beautiful balance of the traditional and the modern, handicraft and technology, solo and group work and the kids seem happy to switch between technology and traditional, between silent reading and animated discussion during groupwork. It’s a great experience. Back in the principal’s office we have a coffee and the principal bemoans the fact that teachers who come to the school directly out of teacher training courses still know nothing about computers and are therefore unable to help the learners towards the future which will undoubtedly be theirs. Plus ça change…

After lunch we’re off to a secondary school (actually it’s a kindergarten, primary, middle and high school stretched over a variety of buildings, but let’s not worry too much about that). The principal grants us an interview before the tour:

There’s something odd about the directors of these Russian schools, but I can’t quite put my finger on it…

The building is a pretty nondescript square with a courtyard in the middle and I’m already feeling bored as we start the tour. Nobody has been warned, I think – teachers open their doors and, on being told why we’re there, shrink back into their classrooms muttering about how today is exam day, so it wouldn’t be any use to us. And, to be honest, i can understand why – it’s rubbish being surprised like that…

Eventually the head of IT turns up and gives us a complete tour – we visit a Chinese class (many of the kids in secondary learn Chinese or Japanese, apparently) which is decked out like a Chinese garden – lots of wood, a fountain with fish in it… And engaged kids chatting away in Mandarin… Of course they are quite able to explain exactly what they’re doing – in English… so that’s at least three languages they speak well (puts the UK schools to shame). I try my hand at thanking them in Mandarin, but whilst they are good teachers, I’m afraid I’m a very bad student!

Next door there’s a classroom lovingly decked out as a replica of Pushkin’s library… a grand place to study a bit of literature…. We cross from one wing to another. The roof of the corridor that links the two buildings has been strengthened and turned into a glasshouse corridor where they grow lemons, avocado, coffee, bananas and more – it’s a beautiful little respite as you change classes. Out of the corridor into the art department, where we find amazing talent hanging on the walls, and a temporary exhibition from an old student who is now an artist.

Beyond the art to handicrafts and then ‘domestic science’, where the boys are also learning how to iron and cook. Up on the to floor a disused corridor has been turned into ‘imaginarium’ classrooms – there’s another LEGO centre, a class with electronic microscopes and another with working science machines built by the students. These are quiet, reflective spaces (with computers!)

Downstairs an educational psychologist is waiting for a client.. chairs in a circle, bean bags and sofas abound. everywhere you see signs of pride in the school – posters, celebrations, bands and music groups, poems and newsletters… they even have a school museum full of related artefacts. Hard to conceive, then, that this is one of the leading schools in the use of ICT – it’s everywhere. They have masses of technology, three internet connections (for a bit of redundancy) and talented staff who are international award winners in collaborative training, projects…

Our guide has a Nespresso machine…. which is a fine way to end a near perfect day. The sheer numbers in the Moscow region (not to mention Russia as a country) are unimaginable for most countries, but here something positive is being done, and learners are being prepared for those putative jobs that don’t exist yet, whilst looking after their culture and history. These kids will leave school typing beautifully, writing beautifully, speaking at least three languages, knowing their way round a variety of technologies, with a portfolio of artwork, playing an instrument and valuing the beauty of collaboration and creation.

I would have taken a job in either place…. but nobody offered…..

The left hand doesn’t seem to know what the right hand is up to in the DOGME camp these days, or so it would seem…

The Interactive Whiteboard – oft referred to as the ‘Interactive White Elephant’ in many a hardcore DOGME article and talk  [ "In the end, whether or not you are drawn to IWBs boils down to whether you construe language teaching as, on the one hand, entertainment and delivery, or, on the other, community and communication.", http://tinyurl.com/qj8adg ] – is now rehabilitated in the DOGME shrine courtesy of a workshop at the recent Learning Technologies SIG on… um… DOGME and the IWB.

You couldn’t make it up! In a minute they’ll be saying coursebooks are alright and that all that stuff about how terrible they are was a mistake. But lo! What’s this? An invitation in my inbox to a session on ‘Unplugging the Coursebook’. That’s DOGME with a coursebook to you and me…

Cake and eat it? It seems like the fabled ‘silver bullet’ of the teaching profession is no longer the much-maligned technology, but the increasingly blurry-edged DOGME which is mutating into something to please everyone. And I thought ‘one size fits all’ was definitely out… Where are the hardcore dogmeists these days?

It may be time for a new mission statement from the dogmeists, as some of us are getting increasingly confused as to what this ‘state of mind’ really means – and stands for.

I’m putting together a new talk for a couple of conferences later this year, and I’m looking for some opinions. Here are the details of the talk:

TITLE: A History of Technology in Teaching
ABSTRACT: Having worked with technologies in teaching and teacher training since 1990 I have seen a wide range of advances and new technologies come and go over the years. In this talk I will look at the history of these technologies over the past twenty years and examine where we are today. What have we learnt from the past, which technologies survive today and where is technology going in the future?

So, here are the questions:

• What would you include in a history like this?
• What would be your high points?
• What would be your low points?
• What have you learnt about EdTech?
• What have we learnt about EdTech?
• What would be your recommendations?
• What would be your predictions?

I look forward to your views – and thanks in advance for any input!

Here we go again… Spring is in the air and it’s time for another round of ‘ed. tech specialist’ versus ‘tech sceptic’. And we have recently had a couple of large-scale debates to further push the envelope of informed discussion: the ELTJ debate at IATEFL, and the spate of blog postings this past Sunday.

Let’s first start with ‘the debate’ – the one my colleague Nicky was involved in at IATEFL this year. This was the ELTJ debate on technologies in language teaching. Firstly it’s worth bearing in mind what this event was, and what it was about – since there seems to have been a great deal of confusion in some people’s minds.

This was, first and foremost, a debate in the UK style – for those who are not familiar with it, it is almost always adversarial in nature, and the two speakers are encouraged to argue two very polarised views. It is not a ‘nasty’ event: the two people know why they’re there, and what’s expected of them. It is done in good humour and with social drinks afterwards, and a dinner the night before – it’s friendly, challenging, intense – but nobody gets hurt, in any sense of the word.

Secondly, this debate was categorically NOT about Twitter, despite the fact that many people stopped reading when they finished the ‘pun’ part of the title and never quite made it to the abstract for the session, which quite clearly indicated that it was about technologies in language learning and teaching. I suppose it’s an indication of Twitter’s popularity that people got caught on the opening part of the title – sort of Twitter blindness…

Now most people who witnessed the debate – either in person or online – generally agreed that Nicky had won the day, and I’d go along with that (well, I would, wouldn’t I?). But to be honest, Alan’s heart was never really in the corner he was supposed to be arguing – he made that abundantly clear the day before (apparently) and also at the post-debate drinks. But he played along, did a stirling job, and took Nicky’s ‘gloves off’ approach amiably on the chin.

On a recent blog post it was suggested that the inclusion of a Twitter feed during Nicky’s part (I helped set that up on her request) was a bit ‘mean’, and that it gave her more fire power than she needed. Depends how you look at it, really – in my world it allowed the people watching the live stream to have their say, along with the f2f crowd, and that seemed fair enough to me. And, in a way, it exposed the weakness of Twitter in the face of a real debate: lots of strident views (get with the modern ways, daddy-o!) mixed up in a huge jumble, confusing people in the room and – in the case of one speaker from the floor – distracting her from Nicky’s well-researched and supported argument.

Twitter lost, then, as a tool for discussion, but it won as a tool for giving a voice to the remote participants, and as a sledgehammer to crack Alan’s resolve and in a way those were the two key reasons for doing it. And of course it’s not only Twitter that encourages trite one-liners and non-sequitors…. There was even a ‘get with the modern ways, daddy-o’ from the floor – which just goes to show that technology doesn’t have a monopoly on this kind of unhelpful reasoning!

But really the actual debate was not so much ‘won’ as it was ‘lost’. Lost because Alan’s heart wasn’t in it, lost because (as the majority of speakers from the floor showed) the majority of thinking people these days see a role for technology in teaching. The bulk of the audience was sympathetic to technologies, and why not?

Those technologies allow them to write and publish books, to research their work, to gain access to images and texts for their lessons, to communicate with other professionals, to attend conferences online and all the rest. And most of those will see that keeping their learners away from the same opportunities is ridiculous. Yet there are still some who think it’s all alright for them, for their learning and their careers, but not for the poor little mites who are in their charge…

And so we come to the second debate, the dull, unending debate which seems to polarise around dogme (or unplugged teaching) and ed. tech. The debate that keeps on giving. Personally I reckon we should just get together on the playing fields at some point and duke it out.

We tech people may be a little more out of shape than the ‘dogmatists’ (due to all those uncritical hours playing with our shiny knobs in dark rooms), but there’s strength in numbers, and a cursory glance at the IATEFL programme will show anyone that we have the numbers, still.

These days they call themselves ‘tech sceptics’ – and I admire their self re-branding because it puts them on the moral high ground, and is based on the single most important weapon in their armoury against those of us who work with ed. tech – the ‘you’re all a bit too thick, uncritical and seduced by shiny knobs’ attack, which is always at the forefront of their approach.

This week saw a resurgence of the tired, dogged ‘dogme versus ed. tech’ debate with a plethora of posts on ed. tech on Sunday. And I was struck once again at the assumption (sometimes stated, always implied) that those of us who work in ed. tech have somehow lost our critical faculties, or (please tell me this isn’t what they all think!?) that we never had any. The discussion is centred around Scott Thornbury’s ‘T is for Technology’ post, and I think he’d be disappointed (not really, obviously) if I didn’t respond, albeit on my own blog ☺

Perhaps we ARE the digital natives – savage, uneducated, unable to evaluate…. Perhaps the dogme acolytes come in shiny coracles to teach us the word of the Lord and to free us from our ignorance? I’m not sure, but I’d love one of those reflecting silver things, some beads and a fire stick if any of you are in the neighbourhood…

It wasn’t just me who picked up on this line of attack. Soon after the barrage of posts started, Emma Herod posted this tweet:

Does the “pedagogy must come before tech use” argument, not assume us teachers are a tad thick? Isn’t this obvious? Sorry…

And I realised that her succinct message was what had been bothering me all day. Reading a blog post that says something along the lines of “when I last taught in a school people used to show videos when they wanted a fag break. Don’t talk to me about ed. tech – there’s no critical thought, no evaluation, no pedagogy…” it implies that tech use is indeed uncritical, that teachers using technology don’t give a fig for pedagogy and – as Emma so correctly identified – it suggests that we are all just a little bit ‘thick’. And I’m not sure that is polite, fair or warranted. Not in my experience working with teachers, at any rate.

The inference, you see, is that unlike any other professionals in the world, teachers of English who engage with technologies in their teaching are permanently stuck in the ‘peak of inflated expectations’ section of Gartner’s hype cycle, and so blinded by the shiny that we never, ever get to the ‘plateau of productivity’. Too thick, you see? Can’t be done guv!

I’ll be the first to admit that I am an early adopter, but it gives me time to let a new tech bed down and think about it a little. As Tennyson said, it’s better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all. If you’re writing about things you’ve only heard / read about, then techn(olog)ically speaking, you’ve never really loved at all.

Of course ‘unplugged’ teaching can be done by anyone, from the teacher with classes of 200 in China, to the teacher who qualified this morning, business teachers (who, apparently, have no real need to know any ‘business’ vocabulary), teachers of young learners and all the rest. Truly it is the magic bullet of ‘approaches’ or ‘methodologies’ or ‘states of mind’ (what it is depends on the day, and the video you’ve chosen to watch). Nobody’s too thick for that, or so it would seem…

And, presumably it follows that unplugged teachers are all lovely, reflective people who spend all day thinking about their teaching and their learning, their learners and their needs and all the rest. Not for them the ‘thick’ world of the ed. tech enthusiast…

In the cold light of this Bank Holiday Monday as I sit in Gatwick Airport waiting to fly back to Barcelona, however, I’m beginning to like this ever-present inference a lot more. If that’s the best they’ve got, then I don’t see much of a bright future for the rest of the arguments.

But of course they mustn’t be ignored, so let’s take a closer look…

There’s Postman, of course – the current poster boy of the terminally unplugged. I won’t waste my time on him here, but if you’re interested in finding out why he’s irrelevant in the web 2.0 era, please see an earlier entry here. You’ll be amazed to hear that Postman has the same kind of disdain for our friends electric, from a similarly comfortable, woolly middle-class viewpoint. Witness his incredible lack of empathy for anyone other than himself, and his complete failure to grasp the significance of any technology other than ones he needs and uses. Sound familiar? It should…

Ponder his clever question: what is the problem which this technology was invented to solve? Help him formulate a reasonable question: how might this technology improve any aspect of my life (or indeed anyone else’s?) How might it contribute to teaching and learning? I do believe if he had lived longer and in a less rarefied field, he may have been able to identify with people of different social status, economic outlook, job requirement. Alas, alack, Saint Postman fails to ask the questions that the ‘tech sceptics’ would have we ed. tech people ask. He must be a bit thick, I reckon…

There was talk this weekend of ‘educational software’, and there I have some sympathy with the tech sceptics, for much of the software produced over the years has been a tad disappointing. The CDs, the DVDs, the IWB software and now the apps…. Lots of unimaginative exercises and gap fills, etc. However, there’s another underlying assumption there, and that is that ed. tech enthusiasts are actually using these products. It’s another Postman-era red herring, however.

In all my years of working with ed. tech and teachers, in all the courses I’ve run, on all the mailing lists I subscribe to, I’ve rarely come across a teacher who uses these products. Rather, the ed. tech people I know use web 2.0 tools and similar. You wouldn’t find a self-respecting ed. tech teacher working with CDs and the like. I think you may be confusing us with the degenerate form of the tech sceptic there…

As I argued in my talk on mobile learning at IATEFL this year, it’s transformative tech that we like. It’s the tech that encourages creation and production, creativity and communication. It’s the tech of the app, not the tech of the ELT app or the CD. No, we’ll leave the ‘software’ (quaint word…) to those who don’t know what they’re doing and are having a bit of a dabble before writing a damning blog post.

So no, I don’t think there’s a problem with the delivery model – some people are just stuck back in the nineties looking at the wrong one. And that will, of course, create a perception and an inference of a problem – which is not the same as an actual problem. We can see what you’re trying to do here, we’re not thick, you know! Oh no, wait a minute…

There’s also, apparently, a ‘theory vacuum problem’ that seems to have an issue with lists of uses for web tools such as Wordle, etc. The ‘theory vacuum’ states that the techno-tail is wagging the pedago-dog. But is that actually the case? And isn’t that again predicated on the notion of ed. tech people as uncritical simpletons?

When someone posts a blog post entitled (as an example) ’5 ways of using Wordle in class’, do the tech sceptics assume that those five ways are all based around the notion of making pretty pictures with words and stuff to make the students go ‘coo!’

Or could it possibly be that the writer has thought a little about the potential use of Wordle pictures for practising certain structures, revising vocabulary, pre-teaching key vocabulary for a reading or listening activity etc., etc.? Perhaps it’s a little deeper than it appears… And maybe the tech sceptics are imagining what’s on those lists, rather than actually reading the blogs? And maybe they just hate practical ideas from people who have tried them out.

The easy way to belittle these is, of course, to attach big critical labels to them and hope some of it rubs off and discredits everything. Indeed, someone tweeted about the ‘no smoke without fire’ approach. The Sun newspaper in the UK has been using this approach very successfully for years: ‘Prince denies having third nipple’ works a treat… That way everyone knows (or at least suspects) that he does have a third nipple. Otherwise, why would you ask?

When tech sceptics can prove that not using a coursebook / using a coursebook / favouring TBL over CLT / never using translation / adopting a GT approach or any other ‘method’ is effective / more effective than any other in all scenarios – when there is real evidence then perhaps the ed. tech people will join in and give you some. In the meantime I’d like to remind all the tech sceptics that it was my colleague Nicky who provided research evidence to back up her motion in the ELTJ debate, not Alan.

And what of the ‘attention deficit problem’? I was really, really interested in this, but then a bee flew in the window and before I knew it I was in Oslo with a pocket full of wooden birds and a Thompson Twins’ single. That’s the modern world for us. At the IATEFL conference Jim Scrivener talked of ‘hyperlink heroin’, and it’s a terrible thing, apparently. Not content with being devoid of any critical powers, we’re also addicted to the drug of information, or so they say.

Yet I can do a good solid morning’s research without nipping over to YouTube for a quick rickroll, and so can many of my peers. So exactly where IS this new attention deficit really taking hold? Is it in the new ‘digital natives’ (please – we ed. tech people have moved on from that term to the more reasonable ‘digital resident’ – come over to the dark side and join us)? Well, the tech sceptics would have you believe that they don’t exist, that they’re simply a marketing term to frighten we older folks and enforce the use of technology in education. So if they don’t exist, and we oldies can still pursue a relatively complicated argument or line of research, who exactly is this ‘attention deficit’ really effecting?

Saint Carr – the man who managed to eke out a one page particle of conjecture into a whole book called The Shallows is the new hero in this regard. And indeed there is some evidence to suggest that technology is affecting the way we think, but it’s scant at best. And there are many alternative viewpoints, as I tweeted recently with regard to a Guardian think piece about the book. Or maybe try the Telegraph article, ‘is the Internet making Nicholas Carr stupid?‘. Different points of view are important, I think.

We will, of course, need to wait a good generation and a half before we can really tell what this new connected world is doing to us, but the new science of brain plasticity clearly demonstrates that adaptation and re-configuration of the brain has been a constant in our development. And there’s no evidence as yet that our new world is going to generate a whole new species of human who get distracted by squirrels and can’t read more than a sentence without taking a break. So please don’t let them tell you otherwise.

And finally there is the ‘added value problem’, or so they tell me. Some people just don’t see the need to use technologies, apparently. But then we’re told to think of the learner, that it’s all about the ‘people in the room’. So how does this ‘teacher doesn’t see the need to use technologies’ fit into this comfy model of learner-centredness? See, if I was the person in your room, you’d be doing some solid grammar translation work with me, because that’s what I like, and it served me well when I was learning Spanish or French. And I’d be the client.

But then imagine if I pulled out my mobile phone and wanted to record myself for you to correct? Or asked if we could, maybe, do some email work with a native speaker in, say, Russia? Or if we could work on a wiki to improve writing strategies? Or…? Would it be alright for the teacher to ‘not see the need’? What happens then to the people in the room?

To play this against the issue of discarded technology and the environment, well, I haven’t got the time – but if anyone wants to play that game, then they should sell their microwaves, washing machines, fridges and all the other white goods. And stop using computers.

I’m not sure where I’m left here. I spend a large part of my time promoting balance and a critical approach to technologies. I am as happy in a classroom where people are not using tech as I am in one where they are. I just want to know what went into that decision – and in fact that’s the focus of a long-term research project I’m currently involved in in Russia. It’s less writing and talking about it, and more actual fieldwork to find out why.

If we are to be accused of being less than critical in our approach to ed. tech, then I think we can rightly accuse the tech sceptics of being less than open in their attitudes to tech. A lot of this is, of course, born from lack of experience. We can learn a lot from each other, but not if it’s as polarized as the ELTJ debate is. The trouble is, I do believe that the ed. tech people can teach effectively without technology, I just wonder if the tech sceptics could do the same with?

I note that, since the recent IATEFL conference in Brighton, there’s a renewed interest in Postman and his views on technology. Someone even seems to have created a Twitter account specifically to regale us with his views on the transistor radio, the hit parade, cyberspace and more. But the point about Postman (aside from the creepy smile) is that he ceased to be relevant a while ago. Postman lived before Web 2.0, before the technology became more useful more creative, more productive and more social.

He may have had some relevance in the 1990s, but I can’t see what he has to do with the realities of 2011. When I see someone posting a link to a video of Postman warning of the perils of ‘cyberspace’, I simply have an image of my dad telling me how destructive those mop-haired so-called pop stars in the ‘hit parade’ were going to be on my life and my education. And yet somehow I survived…

So let’s examine the video that everyone thinks is so very clever…

[ you'll find it as part of this lecture: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uglSCuG31P4 ]

[ Mr Postman wants you to buy his outdated ideas... ]

In his video he relates how he went to buy a car and was informed that he would have to buy a car with cruise control and electric windows. He then labours his famous question, “What is the problem that this technology solves?’ And we all laugh and nod our heads sagely and begin to question the value of these things. But then we’re middle-class people….

Let’s take cruise control. If you’re a middle-class academic you probably drive a pleasant half hour every day to the office where you think clever thoughts about technology. Perhaps you drive the kids to school on the way. Your poor clutch foot doesn’t have time to get tired, even if you’re driving in heavy traffic and changing gear often.

But let’s imagine you’re a long-distance trucker in Australia…

You’re probably paid a lot less than Mr. Postman, you have deadlines to meet, and you can’t afford to take a ‘clutch break’ every half hour over an agreeable latte with your clever academic chums. No, to earn your minimum wage you have to keep driving to the extent the law allows. So what’s the point of keeping your foot on the clutch for all that time? It’s tiring, causes muscular strain right through the leg, and when you’re old you’ll be in constant pain while Postman reminds you how useless it would have been to have cruise control.

And let’s examine the electric windows argument more closely. Again, Postman doesn’t see the point of electric windows, because he’s never had a problem with winding them up. You would have thought an academic could easily have envisaged the following scenario…

It’s a cold, slightly rainy day and you give a colleague a lift. The colleague winds the passenger window down a bit, because he wants to smoke. When he gets out at work, he leaves the window open. And you’re driving off, but the rain gets heavier and it starts to come in through the window. And oh, but it’s cold. You lean over to try to wind the window up, but it’s a bit far to reach easily. But, damn – it’s cold and wet. The road ahead is clear so you take a chance, lean over a little more to wind the window up, taking your eyes off the road for three seconds.

Just enough to knock down the child who is chasing his ball into the road. Now, you see, that wouldn’t happen if you had electric windows. So there’s another problem solved.

This probably sounds glib, but it’s not. The fact that Postman couldn’t put himself in the head of someone having to drive hundreds of miles to earn a living, the fact that he couldn’t envisage a situation in which electric windows might save a life – well, to me it shows a man out of touch with reality, safe in his tidy little academic world, and playing for laughs because it allows the ‘principled tech use evaluators’ a crutch with which to purvey their ill-informed tosh.

It reminds me of a comment over on the dogme group a while back, about the benefits of washing machines when they use so much water and detergent. I’d rather ask generations of people forced to wash by hand than listen to Mr. Postman. They would seem more reliable as evaluators of the utility of such things.

[ firstly with my IATEFL hat on... ]

Just back from the IATEFL conference which, once again, was superbly organised and run by Glenda and her team at Head Office. To pull off a conference with 2,300 delegates is no mean feat, but they manage to do it every year and I do hope the conference feedback reflects that.

[ the Brighton Online team, sans me ]

The one thing that did let us down – as many noted – was the wifi, for which a fair bit of money had been shelled out. I have to admit I found it slightly inconveniencing at times, but even I managed to survive for a few days with sporadic access, and – on occasion – even enjoyed the fact that I couldn’t be connected twenty-four hours a day.

We’ve managed to provide decent wifi for the past two years or so, and are painfully aware that many people need it. On behalf of IATEFL, then, I’d like to apologise if it seriously inconvenienced you and we hope to resume normal service next year in Glasgow – hopefully with a more helpful and service-oriented team at the venue.

Julian and team from the British Council also excelled with Brighton Online, and the numbers when we left the venue also reflected the quality and range of interviews and sessions that have been uploaded so far. If you haven’t yet taken a look at the site, please go along and visit and watch the amazing set of interviews and sessions, and get involved in the forums. I’d like to thank everyone involved in that endeavour, but particularly the indefatigable interviewing teams, and the team from Tantrwm, who provide the AV facilities. It would be tricky to name everyone who plays a part in the online conference – but you’ll surely agree that they are ‘awesome’

[ and now personally... ]

I was amused on a couple of occasions to be blamed for the serious reduction in tweeting going on this year – would that I had such a hold on the online community with just one blog post on my ‘twittercide’! It just seemed to me that most people had got over the inflated ‘awesome’ of last year and some kind of balance had been restored both to the development side of things, and to the meetings and social occasions. People seemed to be spending more time actually talking, and less time air kissing and declaiming how awesome it was to finally meet @madaxemurderer in the flesh. It seemed more balanced, and more about relationships rather than trying to meet as many one centimetre avatars as possible.

As usual, I didn’t get to go to as many sessions as I would have liked – those I did see were mostly good to excellent, and I thought (and heard) that the quality generally was very, very high. I did enjoy the plenaries, particularly those given by Catherine Walter and Peter Grundy, and the final performance by Brian Patten at which I was nominated to help him deliver a poem (my contribution was to declaim the word ‘cat’ each time he touched me on the shoulder). During Brian’s reading I spent a bit of time ‘translating’ the scouse for a couple of foreign delegates sitting nearby. Makes you remember how varied the English language can be…

There was a definite buzz in the air, though – particularly from publishers, and Nicky and I enjoyed some interesting meetings to talk about possible projects in the future. I smell a sea change in the air (not just because we were in Brighton) and I think publishing is just about to get interesting again. Watch this space for more as these projects move out of ‘prototype thinking’ and into reality. I have to say I’m truly excited about the way people are adapting to some of the changes at the moment.

I also enjoyed the conference pub (The Globe), some of the publisher events (special mention to Macmillan’s Elvis impersonator), the Pecha Kucha run by Jeremy Harmer, the quiz night courtesy of Adrian Tennant (though disappointed our team came third…) and the karaoke wrangled by Petra Pointer. Talking of Petra, at the airport Nicky and I persuaded her to go off and buy a Kindle from Dixon’s Travel…. Hope she’s enjoying it…

Ah! And many thanks to Carla Arena for the mini bottle of high quality cachaça – it was great to meet you and introduce you to the sophisticated British pub culture – hope you remembered to take your glasses back to the bar for the rest of the trip

And so back in Barcelona to the inevitable email crisis, and deadlines looming – and the never-ending cold. Thanks to everyone who took the trouble to choose my session to attend, thanks to everyone who sat around and had a coffee with me and chewed over the future of everything, the kind people who chatted in the pubs and coffee shops, those who sat down next to me and introduced themselves and passed a few minutes in genial conversation. Let’s do it all again next year!

Glad the awesome is dampened – it’s much better having real conversations with real people, I find – and that goes for online, as well as face-to-face…

I must confess I didn’t start it – I followed suit like a lemming. Others braver than me had forged the path. But this morning I killed my Twitter account after over four years of activity and building up a large collection of followers and friends. So why are people doing this? I can’t speak for anyone else, but here are my reasons…

I joined Twitter primarily because it seemed such a good research tool. Each and every day as I expanded my community I got useful links to websites, tools, research and opinion articles and a lot more. And mostly, when it started, I was able to keep up and store the good ones. But I just don’t have time to follow all those links anymore. I bookmark them and I never return to them. So there’s strike number one…

I also liked Twitter because it let me know where my friends were, and what they were doing – and that was fun. It also meant I knew when we were going to coincide at events, what they’d written, etc. I’ll miss that part of things, but then I’ll still meet up with people and still talk to them, so maybe the utility of knowing where they are was over-egged.

Then there was the unfortunate incident blogged about elsewhere on these pages – I think that was the beginning of the end for me. It has (unfortunately) made me more suspicious of the people I ‘meet’ online, and I’ve noticed that this suspicion has unconsciously carried over into my real life and to events that I attend. I now find myself wondering what kind of people they are. In the olden days, when one simply met at conferences, I used to consider myself a pretty good judge of character, but those days are gone.

And events themselves have become unmanageable to me. I used to know a bunch of people and, generally, at some point during a conference I would spend some quality time with them and have proper conversations. But, increasingly, I find myself ‘knowing’ more and more people, and having shorter and shorter conversations with many of them. I think I want to go back to the quality time. Odd that the ‘PLN” should have resulted in that for me, and of course your mileage may vary, but my conclusion is that I have more fleeting and shallow conversations with far more people. I’m a-yearning for the olden days.

So when I really sat down to think about it recently, I realised it wasn’t working for me. I couldn’t keep up with all the links, I couldn’t be a good friend to all my new friends online, I was suspicious of the motives of people (unfairly, obviously – but, once bitten…) and there just seemed little point.

This is a quick reaction to the decision. I think I have more to say…

Oh dear…. Over on this blog there’s a post called “10 Reasons NOT to buy an iPad 2“. Let’s deconstruct them:

1) It’s not a phone
That’s very true. It’s also not a lawnmower, or a coffee machine, a bath or a bicycle. There is logic lacking here, and that sentence doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

2) You already have a camera
How do you know that? And even if I do, why would the fact that there are now cameras in the iPad 2 make any difference as to why anyone should or shouldn’t buy one? I mean I already have a radio, an RSS reader, a Kindle, an email program and all the rest. The advantage to the iPad is it does it all in a very useful convergent device…

3) The keyboard is crap
Well, that’s rather subjective – if you don’t touch type (and I don’t) then the keyboard is as useful as a physical one. The advantage it has over a physical one is that I don’t have to carry it around separate to the actual machine. If you want crap keyboards, take a look at the average mobile phone. When mLearning takes off, it isn’t going to be on mobile phones, it’s going to be on tablets. The iPad has 7% of the PC market – if it’s so crap, why oh why (and please don’t suggest that it’s because 7% of the PC market (and rising) are simply lured by well-engineered, incredibly useful gadgets with amazing battery lives…

4) The screen gets yucky mucky
Yes… that is SO awful. That’s why I never take my bicycle out any more, in case it gets dirty. Oh no, wait a minute… you can clean these things. No way!

5) It’s too small to share and too big to be discrete
Hmm…. I’m getting it now.. this is sort of loaded in many ways. Too small to share what, exactly? I regularly share photos, movies, music on the iPad when I’m travelling with people. And then I get confused by ‘discrete’ – do you mean you can’t work on top secret documents without other people looking at them? Or do you mean that it’s big – like a netbook – so people know when you’re using it???

6) If you cart it around in your briefcase, you may as well have a laptop – it solves reasons 3, 4 and 5
Not really…. A laptop isn’t going to give you 12+ hours of battery life. A laptop may give you back ache… along with the power cable and all the rest, but no – it definitely won’t last all day and a bit more. And of course a laptop won’t be ‘always on’ when you need it (average boot time of Windows is a few minutes longer than that of the iPad – even the solid state Macbook Air takes a good ten seconds to boot). It only really ‘solves’ reasons 3, 4 and 5 if you think reasons 3, 4 and 5 are actually valid…. Which quite patently they aren’t

7) If you carry it around obviously in your hand, you look like a dork
So true – whereas carrying a large Dell Inspiron laptop plus brick of a power adaptor and constantly having to ask for a power socket makes you look uber cool… Actually, how many people carry things ‘obviously’? Do those words even collocate in normal English?

8 ) It’s only as useful/fun/interesting as the apps you download
Again, that’s very true. My Dell Inspiron with no OS and no software is utterly fascinating as I sit and look at it. Whereas the stupid iPad needs both an operating system and software to make it useful, fun and interesting. Those PC designers are smart cookies…

9) It makes you smirk
I’d say that really isn’t much of a reason. I just tried it out, to be honest. I read today’s Guardian on the iPad and I swear I didn’t smirk once. Not sure of the relevance of this one, either.

10) It’s already obsolete
So is the Macbook Air you lust after. So is any technology currently on the market. If you want, you can wait until all technology companies stop innovating and producing new things and simply buy the last thing they made. Again, there’s no logic.

Strikes me, often, that the ‘reasons not to buy an iPad’ posts many people write are written on the basis of “I don’t have the disposable income to allow myself the luxury of an iPad, so I’ll diss it for a while and it’ll make me feel better…”

The fact is that Apple have revived the dead tablet computing market and that is having – and will continue to have – a profound effect on many things, not least of which is mobile learning. Worth remembering in a couple of years’ time… Let’s not forget, the reason people now get to buy cheap plastic Android tablets is due to the revival the iPad kicked off…

Well, I’ve been thinking about this post for some time now, and I can already hear the clatter of keyboards as they dash to respond… The thing is – and this is the nub of the post (and a comment I threw in to Twitter this morning) – I think all this ‘PLN’ business is seriously over-hyped and overrated and most people are kidding themselves about just how much they get out of theirs, just how many of their PLN would be friends and mentors ‘in real life’, and just, well, just how real it all is…

So hey ho, here we go – feel free to tell me just how valuable it is to you, of all the new ‘friends’ you’ve made and all the rest. And I do know, of course, that real friendships and professional relationships and things like that are made every day online – I know there are real ‘success’ stories, but I also think there’s a slightly creepy, slightly seedy, slightly self-congratulatory, slightly odd, slightly desperate and slightly unreal side to the whole thing…

Here’s what I know (and I must stress this is a personal post – your mileage may vary)… My best friends are all, with one or two exceptions, people I have first met face-to-face and then continued to contact online due to distance or whatever. I also know that, like most people, I have an optimum number of friends, and that number is very small. I see these people when I can, and I get more out of two hours in their company than I could ever in a few weeks with them online in Twitter.

In fact I got a lot more out of TESOL Spain last weekend than I ever could in a few weeks of Twitter. And yes, I do know that not everyone gets to go to conferences. But really, all that makes Twitter or any other online community (at least for me) is ‘better than nothing’.

Twitter is, of course, fantastic for many things – new links to interesting websites and research, to reviews and all the rest. On a daily basis I probably bookmark half a dozen or so of these (though I never, of course, have time to go and look at them again). It’s great for quick questions to someone, and excellent at JIT training and solutions when you need to know how to do something. But I can’t help feeling that it’s all being stretched a bit far when it gets called a ‘community’ or ‘network’…. Well, maybe it’s a network in the strictest sense.

It’s a bit like Facebook in some ways. It’s ridiculous for me to sign in to Facebook and see my 500+ ‘friends’. The thing is, you see, they’re not really friends, most of them. At best most of them are acquaintances, generally they’re friends of someone I once met at a conference and with whom I had a most pleasant and edifying chat. But that doesn’t mean we should swap holiday photos or call each other ‘friends’. We’re colleagues, perhaps, in the same way that everyone who works at a university is a colleague of everyone else…. Except they rarely meet each other, have nothing in common and probably never will.

The truth of the matter is that we can’t all be sane, nice, amazing people – there must be some loonies out there… Yet everyday people arrange to meet someone they’ve only met online, to stay in their houses and go out for dinner with them, and more… As if it were the most natural thing in the world. And we educators are generally ok, but there must be some mad axe murderers amongst us. Have any of your friends disappeared from a ‘tweet-up’ recently (God how I hate that word)? Perhaps you should check…

I’m a social animal. I love meeting people, talking to them, discussing their work and mine – but I’m sure there are many hundreds of people I’m connected to on Twitter who would find me dull beyond belief, and I’m sure the same would happen to me. There’s been much written on the ‘love fest’ of online communities, and I really do think it’s over-played. It ain’t all rosy, we’re not all due to be the best of friends, and the sooner we get over that, the better.

Twitter has, of course, improved the first-time conference experience for many – and that is an amazing thing. But when people get home after their ‘tweet-up’, do they ever sit down and wonder if any of the people they met would really ever be close friends of theirs in real life? Do we really all find each other so utterly fascinating, lovely and professionally inspiring that we long to retire to a commune the size of Belgium and start a new Utopia? I think not. Twitter has its strengths, but it is also unpredictable and it draws us in to an ever-increasing love-fest where everyone is frilly and pretty (intellectually and personally speaking, of course). And life isn’t like that. I don’t share my family snaps with strangers online, and increasingly I feel uneasy abut doing the same with my ‘PLN’.

And what of other communities? I’ve already mentioned Facebook – to me it’s simply an address book. I sign in, accept invitations from people who are friends of people who are friends of a guy who once talked to me in Buenos Aires, and then I sign out again. Because if I hang around for too long, the second cousin of the woman who gave me a lift to the bloke who was going to arrange my transfer to the airport is going to open a chat window and ask me about ‘some’ and ‘any’. Or maybe for a quick edit on their PhD thesis on mole wrenches… since we have so much in common and all that.

This week I have been invited to join four more communities and two Nings. And the thing is, I’m already over-stretched with work and Twitter and all the rest. And it’s not that I don’t want to socialise with people, it’s that I don’t know what I can bring to yet another community. If everyone is like me, and if everyone is increasingly spread thinner over life’s slice of bread, what good are we to any of the communities we join? The old thing of 90-9-1 really does make sense…

So I’m currently caught between stools, as it were. I love my work and I love technologies and what they can bring to teaching and training. I love technologies for my work, and also for a lot of my play. I love the fact that I can talk to people all over the world at any point in the night and day. But increasingly I find it’s the richness of one-to-one discussions (online or face-to-face) that make more sense to me. Or small group discussions, again, either online or in meat space. What I don’t get, mostly, is how one has a decent discussion on Twitter or Facebook where the interface is simply not rich enough to allow for that.

Most of the discussions or arguments I see on Twitter, as one example, consist mainly of soundbites which are then re-tweeted as gospel truths. You don’t see much critical thinking in 140 characters, nor should you… It’s all so very tiring when you’re an old man

I’ve more to say on this, I reckon – but there are dozens of seething keyboards warming up to get to grips with this bit, so I’ll leave it here and let you all get on with it. I think I’ll come back when I’ve had a bit more time to think about it, and when I can see what everyone else thinks about it, too. All I can say is that in the past few weeks when I’ve put Twitter on the back burner I’ve done more work, more reading and more in-depth chatting to people than I have all year.

And it’s been wonderful.

Now, I really must go… got to fly to Manitoba to stay with this bloke I met through a friend on Twitter who put me on to his Facebook page and invited in his friends from when he was at college in the 80s. We’re already the best of friends and I’m sure we’re going to have lots in common. I’ll be staying at his place – you can contact me c/o Mad Billy Stokes, Mantitoba

So I finally cracked and got an Android phone to go along with the plethora of i-Devices I’ve come to know and love so well. This was partially to plug a little gap in my personal experience in terms of talking about mLearning and running the course I’m currently tutoring, but also to see what all the fuss was about. Can’t say I wasn’t tempted by a little more Shiny Precious, either. And it’s R&D, and the company paid, so that’s alright then.

It’s a Samsung Galaxy i9000 S and it is certainly a very handsome little thing. It sits sleekly in the little pouch I got for it, it weighs nothing, yet feels relatively solid. And I do like the fact that it has a built-in FM radio – the one thing lacking on my iPhone. But so far, that’s as far as it goes. The rest has left me a little cold. Now some of that has to do with Samsung, and some to do with Android – but the overall experience is clunky and ugly compared to iOS. Let’s start at the beginning…

So Samsung ask you to download a horrorshow piece of software called KIES – you need this to do any syncing, you need it to update the installation of Android, etc. I need it like I need a hole in the head, frankly. Firstly there’s no version for the Mac – so there goes another US$40 to get SyncMate so I can sync photos, mail, calendars, contacts and music. But that doesn’t get me round updating Android itself. I found a lot of scary methods online, but after just one day with the phone was too scared of bricking it to try anything. I do know my way around the iPhone, but that’s taken some time.

So I downloaded KIES and installed it on my desktop and updated Android. Ooh look – there go all the apps I installed, my calendars, my contacts, the music and photos. And, very handily, KIES has somehow managed to disable the sync I set up with SyncMate. I had to go to bed at that point…

The next day my desktop doesn’t start up properly. I have to roll back to the last restore point, before I installed KIES… It eventually starts up, but this morning it took three attempts and it’s sluggish and ill-tempered. It sort of reminds me of Android on the Samsung Galaxy i9000 S, in an oddly familiar sort of way. Do I really have to reinstall my desktop because of this? But let’s move on to the phone…

As I said, the radio is nice… But the screen isn’t a patch on the iPhone retina display… the ’5MP’ camera isn’t going to win any awards, either. Sometimes the phone is lightening fast when swiping between screens, sometimes it’s like walking through waist-deep sand – and there’s no rhyme or reason to this. I have to download an app to stop the phone using cellular data (found that out after a day when it appears to have simply decided to download stuff for me without asking) – I only want it using wifi, you see?

Oh, and Android’s ugly – no, really, it is seriously ugly. And the ‘Market’ is ugly, too… I’m nostalgic for the iTunes Store and my lovely iPhone camera, but I persist. I download some apps again, but most of them are sinfully ugly (apart from official ones like the Kindle, Spotify, etc.) and they don’t last long… I don’t know – maybe I’m missing something. Did I mention how good the FM radio is? Oh, and you can set up a wifi access point… but not if you’re just using wifi, of course – so that’s a great feature, but I won’t be using it. Even the photos I synced look pale and truculent compared to their counterparts on the iPhone.

Maybe I’ve just had it too good for the past two years… But there’s one thing that really does it for me. When I download the official iPhone app from my bank to do some cool online banking, I’m pretty sure it went through some checking before it hit the iTunes Store. Does the same thing happen on the ‘Market’? I hope so. But what about the unofficial markets – can I trust apps from them with my name, email address, location and other data? Will they scan my phone for credit card numbers and send them to an odd bearded child somewhere who will then sell them on to unscrupulous types in virtual markets? I think I should be told. How safe is this Android of which you speak?

I promise to stick with it for a while, but through grated teeth and with furrowed brow. However, I have been known to be wrong on quite some several occasions, so watch this space for a full retraction and an ‘I love Android and my ridiculously long-named phone’ post soon.

Teaching Online – Hockly & Clandfield

Along with my colleague Nicky Hockly, I am currently halfway through (three weeks out of a total of six) an iteration of one of our online courses called ‘mLearning in Practice‘. We’ve just finished the first three weeks, concerned with big picture stuff, contexts and concerns – and now we’re moving on to the second half, which is more practical and leads to a final action plan for each participant. We have fourteen people from nine countries as far apart as Brazil, New Zealand and Russia.

The course is going extremely well, I think: the discussions are engaging, the content seems to be relevant and interesting to people, and discussions are wide-ranging and stimulating. In the first three weeks we have had 580 forum postings from sixteen people (that includes Nicky and me) in seven forums. This strikes me as an extraordinary quantity of posts, particularly as a very small percentage of them has been ‘me too’ style postings – indeed, most of them have been content-driven and have pushed discussions forward. It’s a hard life being an online tutor – and just as hard being an online participant in a course that works.

And that, of course, led me to thinking about why it works… [ more after the fold ]

People
These have to be the most important element of an online course. The people who do courses with us are highly motivated professionals looking for specialised teacher development opportunities. They’re usually working, paying for themselves, and determined to get the most out of the course. In this instance we have a wide variety of people from very disparate contexts and from very different countries. As such they have a lot to share with each other, and a lot to learn from each other. They’ve also come to the course with some kind of experience (even if it’s purely personal) of using mobile and handheld devices, and strong opinions on the goods, bads and uglies… In a couple of cases they are very experienced in this growing field.

Materials
Of course you do need some decent materials and content – but in this type of course it’s more a case of winding people up (in the nicest possible way, of course) and setting them off on a journey together. We provide a structured developmental shell, but it doesn’t work unless people are prepared to go with the flow and push beyond the initial offering to seek out shared learning moments. This group is truly amazing in that respect. Our tasks are structured and developmental (we hope) but they don’t ‘teach’ (not in that way, at least) – the learning comes from engaging with the tasks and interacting with the others. Without the group dynamic, it wouldn’t work.

Atmosphere
We all like a party with an atmosphere (!) As both Nicky and I have said on many occasions, if you don’t work on the group dynamic for a little while at the beginnng of the course, then you might as well forget it – not only in terms of pair and groupwork, but also in terms of discussion, humour and going beyond the actual materials. There were a few connections on this course between participants, and new friendships have been made, but those first few days make all the difference to the success of a course. At the beginning of each weekly block we try to include a simple task that reminds everyone that they’re working with new friends… that we’re all in this together. It’s worth it – believe me. In fact, after the people themselves, I’d say this is the most important part.

The more I think about it, the more the poor materials seem to be relegated in this list…

There are other factors, of course – but I feel a new conference talk coming on, so I’d better keep something back for that. In the meantime, here’s my suggestion for running a good online training course:

• Get yourself a lovely group of exciting and excited professionals from around the world
• Make sure they all get introduced to each other
• Give them a few things to think about
• Sit back and watch what happens
• Interject where needed

It’s not rocket sicence, but when it works it certainly can seem like it!

This is a difficult post to write – the most difficult one I’ve ever written, in fact. And my mouse is poised over the ‘Post’ button as I sit here thinking… You shouldn’t really have to share this kind of thing with the world, because ideally it shouldn’t happen. But, after much reflection, I can see it’s the only way of ensuring that I can get on with my life properly and put a particularly distressing episode behind me – an episode not of my own making, but one that is giving me sleepless nights, keeping me from Twitter and email, and – well – simply making my life miserable. The fact that this post has taken an entire day to write, and now totals over 5,000 words (I know – but please give it fifteen minutes, if you can), should give you a good idea of how much it has affected me.

It’s also a kind of liberation, a setting straight of the records and a chance for others to see that life doesn’t have to be the way it is, that bullies don’t win – and that you should treat people with respect whilst ensuring that they do the same to you. You shouldn’t have to put up with vile rumours being spread about you online or off – it’s not right. You know that, and so do I.

[ a note before I start ] If you are being bullied online, check out this page for legal information and advice: http://cyberbullying.us/blog/advice-for-adult-victims-of-cyberbullying.html . Also check the local laws in your country and the country of the person harassing you – you’ll surely have contacts or can ask someone for a suitable recommendation. Note also that it is illegal to harass, victimise, threaten, bully or blackmail people on Twitter, by email or any other electronic means. Tweets, emails, etc. which display this behaviour are just cause for launching a criminal investigation and can lead to criminal prosecution. If this is happening (or has happened) to you, you should seek legal advice. December 17th this year is Anti-Bullying Day – maybe you can help someone? And, having said that, here’s my story…

What would you do if you received a flurry of emails from someone, one of which said they hoped you had a massive stroke and then died slowly and painfully from terminal cancer whilst recovering in hospital? What if the same person tried to blackmail you into talking on the phone? What if the same person threatened to make your life a misery everywhere you go? What if that person defamed members of your family that they had never even met? And what if they were spreading malicious gossip about you to people they meet at conferences and events? What would you do? How would you feel? If you’re ready, here’s the punchline right at the beginning – and, before you go elswehere, can I just make entirely sure that you understand that this is real, not some kind of pastiche – this is happening to me, and it could equally happen to you one day.

My name’s Gavin and I’m being bullied online.

There, I said it – and at first glance it may seem a little humorous that a man in his mid-forties would claim such a thing, but that’s the plain truth of the matter. It might even seem a bit shameful to you, and you may be tempted to turn away now and go somewhere else for your news, but I urge you to read this because it may be useful to you at some point in your online life. And, if you read the article linked above, you’ll see I’m not alone. My apologies also to those of you who have been tempted over here because you’re expecting the usual diet of iPad, iPhone, SL and technology-related fare.

But, you see, this is serious. So serious that today I am on the verge of going to the police to have them investigate the following charges: stalking, cyberbullying, defamation of character and blackmail. I suspect I may have your attention now…

In fact, I’ll go a little further than simply saying I’m being bullied – I’m being bullied, stalked and blackmailed online, and I have the documentation to prove it. So vitriolic have been the attacks that I’ve been forced to print out nearly a year’s worth of email and Twitter messages and lodge them with my lawyer, just in case something happens. When you receive emails hoping that you will soon have a heart attack and then get diagnosed with terminal cancer whilst recovering in hospital, you have to wonder if that person really means you any physical harm as well…

And the person in question hasn’t just chosen me over the past year (though I understand I’ve been the recipient of the nastiest materials) – several people have (unbidden) asked me what they’ve done to attract the sort of attack that they’ve suffered, and I can’t really understand it. Two people have been forced off Twitter by this person and so it goes on. And silence reigns because nobody wants to break it and, perhaps, attract more attention. That’s how bullies thrive – we know this from the playground. The difference, of course, is that it’s easier online because it’s harder to know what’s going on, and it’s more difficult to break the silence. And, of course, unless you have a lot of good friends, it’s hard to know what’s being said about you. Fortunately, I do have such friends (and I do know what’s being said), and I also have a large folder of evidence that refutes each and every shred of the vile story.

But I’m not prepared to suffer in silence anymore, so I thought it might help some of you if I told my story – it might also act as a salutary warning to some of you, too.

When I first met this person online I thought they were fun to talk to – similar interests, similar annoyances (mostly) and we spent quite a bit of time chatting, mostly on Twitter. You know how it is when you enjoy someone’s conversation? And of course as you spend more time chatting to someone, the more you reveal about yourself and your life. You do this quite naturally, it’s normal to share thoughts and experiences with people you trust. And I’m one of those people who does trust others online, as I try to be as lacking in suspicion as I can, both online and off. And mostly that works for me – I’ve met plenty of good people online and some of them are now very good friends in real life. In fact of the hundreds of people I’ve met online in the past fifteen years, only two have turned out to be, shall we say, difficult.

And so I joked and laughed and shared my life with another of my online friends.

But at some point this person decided that they’d fallen for me, and that was when things went very, very wrong. Despite the fact that I informed them immediately that I was sorry, but I didn’t share those feelings, the emails and DMs kept coming. Could we meet? The answer to that was ‘no’, because I was aware that a meeting would only inspire some kind of hope that this would bloom into something it was never going to be. Didn’t I realise that I was simply in denial? Again, the answer from my side was ‘no’. And even the classic ‘your words say ‘no’ but everything else says ‘yes” – and there’s an excuse that men have been using for years. To find myself on the receiving end of that was extremely alarming, to say the least. And still I said ‘no’.

Then the nastiness started.

I was told I was wrong to have led this person on. I never did, of course – sure, we laughed and joked and shared conversation online, but there’s a huge difference between that and actively expressing a sentimental interest in someone – and there was none, there never was. I can say this quite assuredly, because the same person, in a moment of clarity, admitted by email that they had misinterpreted the signs, and admitted that it had all been in their own head. I even got an apology for what that is worth. It’s all in the paperwork sitting in my lawyer’s office.

I was told I was a serial online predator, leading innocent victims on and then dropping them at the last moment – and so on, and so forth. And this was where I made my first mistake – by continuing to engage with this person. And so, for the past few months, I have been subjected to a barrage of ‘hot and cold’ emails: some of them tell me how lovely I am and how I’m just not seeing what’s in front of my eyes. They tell me that we were meant to be, that I feel the same things, that if only I would just admit it to myself, then the world would be alright.

There was a time when I tried to ignore things, but somehow – and this is how it all happens – you always think that you will be able to reason with someone. Tell them you’re sorry – but they were mistaken. Ask them to simply try to get over what they feel and get on with their life, to give you back yours. But of course, you simply make it worse. Because they thrive on the attention and the answers. And, I suspect, if you’re responding, there’s always a glimmer of hope, no matter how faint it may burn.

And each time I make it clear that there is nothing to talk about, and then the other kinds of emails arrive…. they call me a ‘ f*****g toad’, a ‘liar’, ‘a bully’ and much, much worse… It’s worth noting that this name-calling has become progressively worse, more violent, couched in increasingly aggressive terms and tones. A family member, who is currently not well, has been attacked in an email to me (presumably guilty ‘by association’?) they accuse me of leading people on and – more recently – they wish me to die in agony in a hospital bed. There have been professional insults, too – and plenty of snide remarks online, and people have been told the sad tale of woe, of how the ‘f*****g toad’ supposedly acted.

I’m just lucky, I know, that none of my real friends or professional contacts would believe a word of it – they know me properly, and well. One or two of them have heard the stories, of course, and passed that information back to me. And I thank you for your concern, and I appreciate that you give it no credence, because we have history, shared lives and shared work and we know the value of real friendships too well to pass them over on the back of malicious gossip. That, to me, embodies all that is good about my dispersed network of friends. When we hear stories about friends, I suspect we all naturally judge the storyteller and work out the potential veracity of their story against what we know of the person being talked about. In many ways it’s a classic tussle, and my good friends have proven this point amply in the past few weeks. Again, my sincere thanks. And my thanks to those who have provided legal advice, too, on how to deal with this.

It’s worth reiterating, at this point, that I have ample material in plain black and white, all safely tucked away for a particularly rainy day – ample enough to show that the real story is considerably different. That I am sincerely being stalked, bullied, blackmailed, maligned, defamed and a whole lot more. As is my wont, I’ve helped this person with a job application, I’ve edited an article for them prior to submission and I’ve provided technical support on occasions. You’ll think me stupid, that all I’ve done is encourage them – but those of you who know me will know that I rarely say ‘no’ to a request for help. Though I’m now revising that modus operandi. And, as a result of all this, I now look suspiciously at every friend request on Facebook and every follow on Twitter. Nobody should have to live like this.

So, here’s the question. How much would you take in similar circumstances?

This last week has been hell, and the final straw, and that’s why everything is with my lawyer – including the admission of blackmail which arrived last Friday. I was being ordered to have a phone conversation with this person, to ‘apologise’ for my behaviour – something I was not willing to do, because I wasn’t responsible for any of the pain and suffering this person claimed to be enduring.

My blackmailer made it very clear that this is what would happen if I failed to pander to their demands: photos of some of my DMs would be published online, perhaps even emails, who knows? Despite the obvious problems with the legality of such a course of action (and possible criminal action on my part) you do find yourself checking those DMs and emails to see what you might have said to your ‘friend’ over a year. But then you realise that actually, it’s not important. Anyone who you consider a friend knows you well enough to know that you’re an affable sort of person, friendly, helpful, hard-working and the rest. You volunteer and help out, you always answer queries from people and help where you can, you do your work to the highest standards you can… Certainly you’ve made some mistakes in your life, but who hasn’t? Anyone worth calling themselves a friend of yours wouldn’t pay attention to this kind of despicable behaviour, and so you begin to relax and think about the situation a little more clearly.  So, why did I let it go on so long (and why do you)?

The answer. my friends, is simple. We live in fear of people sharing the information we shared with them, with other people. It’s like your own potential personal Wikileaks Armageddon. But life doesn’t have to be like this. I’ve seen friendships survive the odd argument, disagreement and throwaway line. I’ve seen them survive more than that. As I have been forgiven for making the odd rude or hurtful comment, so I have forgiven. This is part of being an adult – of respecting boundaries and learning how to act when we cross those boundaries.

So, looking through the DMs and emails, I can see we’ve had the odd laugh over someone’s behaviour online, over other aspects of people’s lives – as you do – but there’s nothing I wouldn’t say to those people face-to-face, given the right moment, and nothing I haven’t already written in my blog at some point. I don’t muchly care either if anyone ‘discovers’ I’ve indulged in ‘cyber sex’ in Second Life at some point in the past six years – I’m open to discussing that with anyone and everyone – I mention it here, because I happened to mention it in passing once to my bully, and I’d hate to think they might feel that was a useful weapon against me, because it’s not. You’d be hard-pushed to find someone who hadn’t indulged in a bit of ‘cyber sex’ in Second Life at some point in the past six years. At one point it was the only thing to do (apart from gambling), and almost part of the Terms of Service – and even if you haven’t, I’m betting you’ve had a ‘saucy’ conversation with a partner at some point when you’ve been away – perhaps on Messenger or elsewhere? I never had one of those with my bully – I include it here to remind you all that these things can be quite normal and are no reason to succumb to blackmail. The rest is simply chat – the kind you have with someone you consider (however erroneously) a friend.

When my blackmailer ordered me to get on the phone and apologise, I decided to take matters into my own hands and that’s when I went to a lawyer and committed everything to his safekeeping. The tone of the blackmail email was extremely disturbing, threatening. An email full of ‘you will’…  threats and orders. Not an email from someone who believes (as they have stated in so much of the correspondence) that they made a mistake in their understanding of our friendship. No, this was an email of violence and extortion – and frankly, it scared the living daylights out of me. I’ve re-read every single communication I’ve had this with person and I’m fine with it all. I never led them on, I never promised anything and I never went back on that promise. The rest, as they have so clearly admitted time and time again in the barrage of emails, was imagined or ‘interpreted’. I’m sorry they thought that was reality, but it wasn’t – and I never said it was. Not once.

And so here is where I’m at with all this. I’m shocked, I’m disturbed… to be honest I’m a little bit afraid. How far do people who do this kind of thing go? What will they do to get what they believe is theirs, or what they believe they deserve? And, perhaps more than anything, I’m completely abhorred that someone would treat another human being the way I have been treated recently. I’m saddened that people feel they can trample over other people, saddened that they would violate the normal rules of human communication and respect. I’m finding it hard to put into words exactly how I feel, but perhaps you’re getting the idea by now?

My blackmailer is free to do whatever they like, of course, within the bounds of the legal system and their own moral code. Before they do that, however, I would urge them to re-read the emails they’ve sent me over the past months – the threats, the apologies, the recognition of their misinterpretation of the nature of our friendship, the blackmail threats and the rest. To stick them all in order and read them as they will look to an outsider – then decide how the police, their employer and anyone else will interpret them. How will the six emails in a day look – half of them sweetness and light, half of them threatening and full of menace? What will that say to people?

If they do decide to break the sanctity of private conversation then they may get a short-lived buzz, but the long-term result will almost certainly be that nobody will have anything to do with them anymore, and nobody will certainly ever trust them again. Conversations may well be reduced to work or factual statements, if there are any at all. Perhaps there will be no more acquaintances and no more friends, either online or off. At conferences and events people almost certainly won’t want to be in their company, and they certainly won’t want to be talking when they’re near, just in case. They’ll potentialyl be reducing themself to a social pariah, shunned at every opportunity. I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy, but sometimes you simply can’t reason with people..

That may not be important to them – this is what they’ve told me, and I have to believe them. I also have to believe, then, that they will do anything to legitimise their illegal and threatening behaviour over the past few months, so I’m forewarned, and so is my lawyer. The evidence I have gathered will find its way to everyone I know and everyone they know. The blackmail confirmation email and all the threats and the vile rumours will find their way to the police, and the entire dossier with its disgusting contents will find its way to their employer. The same will happen should I succumb to the much desired heart attack and fatal cancer that is wished upon me from a distance. I won’t be bullied not even when I’m dead…

My friendships and reputation will survive anything that can be thrown at them (real or invented) – the big question is, will theirs? Will their job survive when it’s discovered that they’re being investigated for potential stalking, admitted blackmail and unsavoury emails about my dying in agony, and defamation of a family member? Will they be able to live with themself after that? I know I will, and so will my circle of friends. How much do they want the ‘revenge’ they seek against someone who has consistently simply told them that they did not want further involvement aside from professional courtesy?

And of course, if this person does go ahead and posts some of this ‘private communication’ and by any chance you feature in any of it, needless to say I’d take it with a pinch of salt if I were you – because I suspect a large part of it definitely won’t be worth the paper it was never written on (eletronic or otherwise). It may be pointless to reiterate, but someone who wishes you a long and painful death from cancer, someone who blackmails you and insults your family and someone who defames your professional reputation is probably not the best person to trust. Those of you who know me, have met me or have worked with me will know that. Anybody else, well, I’m afraid I can’t really help you decide what is right and what is wrong – you’ll just have to use your common sense and your best guess at who you’d rather trust. That’s the best I can do, I’m afraid. This is an adult world, and we must all accept our responsiblities and work out the rules of polite social behaviour.

Either way, I ask of them simply one thing: to stop contacting me, stop digging away at me in public spaces online, stop digging away at my friends, and stop spreading their vile distortion of reality to people they meet. I urge them to find a new hobby and simply enjoy life, their job and the friends they have. Is it worth wasting so much time and effort over someone they have said, in writing, they would rather see dead or dying in agony? Life is too short – I hope they move on, enjoy the positive and simply throw the negative away, because inevitably the negative will become like the cancer they wish upon me, and ultimately, it will destroy them.

And, if you, dear reader, are still reading this far down… Life has changed… we interact with many hundreds of people online who we don’t really know. Sometimes we take that conversation private – perhaps in DMs and perhaps into Skype chat or more. The big question is, do we know who we’re talking to? Do we feel confident that what we share with that person is going to go no further? In short, is that person really a friend, or merely an online acquaintance? Would we tell the same things to the person on the supermarket checkout, and – if we did – would we then regret it? Gossip has always existed, of course, but now we share our lives and our thoughts so much more easily than ten years ago.

Perhaps you’re in a similar situation to me? Perhaps someone is bullying you? Perhaps you’re wondering if you should accept the next friend request… Do we all really need to live this way? Somehow, I suspect we don’t – I’ve taken the first step here, perhaps you’d care to join me in condemning every single bully, online or off? Perhaps you’d like to see a better world, where people don’t do this kind of thing because they think they can get away with it. I know I would. I’ve had fifteen years online with a whole host of amazing people, and I’d hate to think that one person could make that trust crumble, could tear down the fabric of pretty much all the good I see in technology for people and for professional development. Perhaps some rest will bring some clarity – I’d just hate to think the world is like this, generally.

You’ll notice I’ve been very careful in this post not to name names, or even to give a hint of who that person may be. I’ve shared a few necessary bits of information to set the scene and give you enough background to understand what’s happening to me, but I’ve been careful not to break the vow I make to anyone I interact with online: and that vow is simple – if we communicate privately, by email or by DM, then those conversations are private and will remain so to my grave.

If only everyone else appreciated the human dignity of that (not to mention the legality of breaking it) then life would be a much simpler place. I’m going to finish here, but just to recap, I’d like to reiterate that nobody (regardless of age, status, etc.) deserves to be bullied or blackmailed online. You don’t have to take it lying down, and you don’t have to suffer it in silence. I’m outing myself here as a victim of that (still, mercifully, heart attack and cancer free) situation. I will not take this lying down any longer.

And as for my current legal situation, I repeat:

I am simply calling for my bully to stop contacting me by any and all means (email, Twitter, phone, etc.), stop digging away at me in public fora, stop mentioning me on Twitter, etc. and move on with their life without any involvement (direct or indirect) with me. If this does not happen within the next calendar week, if either my private or professional life continue to be dragged through the mud online or in face-to-face situations, if any of my private communications are shared online then I will instruct my lawyer to put into action the steps needed to launch a criminal investigation into online harassment, blackmail, coercion and threats to my wellbeing, as well as the insults to another member of my family. I will push for a full investigation and for bans on any and all social networks, perhaps even limits on Internet access to ensure the future safety of others (my lawyer assures me that this is well within the bounds of legitimate requests from a victim who fears violence – either physical, or mental – online or off), and I will ask for every stone to be turned over, for everyone who has been a victim to come forward and speak up, for once and for all.

The real positive here is that I am guilty of nothing more than conversing with someone I called a friend – whereas the ‘friend’ has crossed the line into criminal behaviour. And that’s how you sort out bullies – not by ignoring them, but by letting them hang themselves and then taking the evidence to the people who can do something about it.

I don’t expect anyone to actually comment on this story because it’s a difficult one to comment on, particularly when it’s a man writing (because this sort of thing doesn’t happen to men, right?) – but you may, if you have something to say, because frankly I’d love to know I’m not alone in this. I mean, I know I’m not because people talk to me online, lots of people. I know other victims, I just don’t know anyone who’s written about this in such open and frank terms.

I will not get into any discussion whatsoever with anyone as to the identity of my blackmailer, and won’t tolerate any speculation on this page (or in any other form of communication) as to who it might be. Despite all that has happened, I believe that they deserve the right to remain anonymous within my online community and my online life and within the community that we share. This anonymity disappears, however, the moment I decide enough is enough (i.e. one week from today if I spot any more of the same behaviour online, or any other ocurrences are referred back to me by my friends and colleagues) and hand everything over to the police. The same applies if I hear that somebody else I know is suffering anything like the same treatment from the individual in question. In perpetuity. That’s my final offer.

If you DO have a story to share, please do so in a civilised and thoughtful manner, with no names and no ‘clues’ and nothing that could identify any of the people involved (apart from yourself, obviously). Tell your story so that we can all learn from it, but please keep it legal, moral and ethical if you do. I will, for this post only, be moderating comments on this blog – I apologise for that, but I believe it’s necessary. Hopefully normal service will be resumed soon and I’ll be back to my usual annoying posts about luddites and all the rest. I do so look forward to that day after the past few months – and especially after the past week or so.

And to everyone else on Twitter, this blog and in my circle of friends – thanks for all the good times, which far outweigh this one bad period in my life.

Gavin

“Hello World” is traditonally the output of the first computer program a novice writes in any new language. This weekend I decided to do my own ‘Hello World‘ for the iPhone and see if I could come up with a working app for The Consultants-E which would aggregate our social media presence into one place. The app is a very simple idea. Taking (mostly) XML-compliant RSS feeds, it feeds them into pre-designed templates which format the information for the iPhone screen. And this is what it looks like…

1) The ‘About’ Screen

( click to embiggen )

This is the opening screen – a little bit of information about the company and the app.

Notice the tabs along the bottom (if you’re familiar with the iPod interface on the iPhone, this will be nothing new to you). The first three tabs here are purely informational. The ‘Courses‘ and ‘News‘ tabs read XML files form our website on a regular basis – this means that we can update the files on the server, and the information in the app updates automatically, without the need to re-submit the app to the iTunes Store every time. So, the app reads the XML file, applies an in-app template and formats the data for the iPhone display. As with any other ‘RSS reader‘ app for the iPhone, articles can be opened, mailed, tweeted and opened in Safari. The little red badge on each icon shows you how many unread items there are in each. Here’s what the ‘Courses‘ tab looks like (with sample holding text and images):

( click to embiggen )

2) But there’s ‘More…’

( click to embiggen )

Clicking on the ‘More‘ tab gives access to the social media side of things, but it also allows you to edit the tabs and choose which ones you want on the opening screen, and which ones you want to appear in the ‘More‘ menu:

( click to embiggen )

As I said, if you’ve used the iPod app on an iPhone, this will all look strangely familiar. In terms of the elements on the second screen, here’s some info…

• Blogs
  Will take multiple feeds so we can show the latest posts of all the people who work in the organisation. Each post can be clicked to read, email, tweet or open in Safari
  

  ( click to embiggen )

• Facebook
  A tricky one – I had to set up a Yahoo pipe for this as Facebook isn’t too open with RSS feeds
• Twitter
  As with the ‘Blogs‘ item, this can take multiple accounts and display them inline
• Video
  Again, multiple RSS feeds from YouTube or an XML compliant source
• Photos
  Photo galleries from an XML compliant source (in this case, Flickr)
• Contact
  The form allows the user to send us email and (if they want) attach a photo to it

That’s essentially all the app does…

The big secret to the while thing is having all the content externally hosted – most of it comes from Web 2.0 tools which do supply XML feeds. The rest (‘Courses‘ and ‘News‘) is a kludge of individual XML files hosted on our server. The really big secret is that the main configuration file for the app is also self-hosted. When the app starts it checks the date of its own internal configuration file against that of the one on our server: whichever is newer is the one that gets loaded. This means we can make changes to the layout AND content on the fly.

So, that’s it. I started on Saturday morning when the XCode developer edition had finished downloading from Apple (a whopping 3.4GB) and had a mostly-working version by 2 a.m. Sunday morning. At 9 a.m. Sunday morning in an over-zealous phase of ‘tidying up the file structure and assets‘ I managed to break it. It took me two hours to get it working again and the rest of the day to finish it off. I’m not much of a programmer or scripter, to be honest – I’m slow and unmethodical – but if I managed to get this done in a weekend, I imagine someone with a bit of nous could build something pretty amazing in a couple of weeks or so. I did pay for the icons ($25 for 160 iPhone themed icons – good deal), but the rest came free.

So now it’s a little wait to get my developer license from Apple (EUR79 for a year), then I’ll be submitting the app and waiting to see what happens. Next up, a location-based interactive game… when I have a month or so free…

Err.. probably…

You can see the end result of this flurry of activity in the simulator video on YouTube:

CC photo by radarxlove - http://tinyurl.com/2w9uvlg

Let’s face it, some people are never going to do the work, are they? They’re too busy, or they can’t write… or they simply can’t be bothered, or they’d rather spend the time or money on something else, or…

That’s why you’ll find copies of the books colleagues have written on file sharing sites, you’ll find blog posts posted elsewhere under a different name, you’ll find slides from presentations inserted into the presentations of others (the blatant one at English Australia this year was all the more delicious because I was sat in the audience), articles re-written and re-published under another name, etc., etc.

The big question, of course, is does it matter? Well, I suspect that there’s some kind of middle ground here.

As a very minor author, I never bothered putting down the initial payment on a yacht or a house in the Bahamas – the income from my books was never going to stretch that far (it’s not bad for a few decent dinners every year). I don’t expect an income from my blog, I write it to help me shape my thoughts, and to get feedback from others on the same subject – that’s why there are no Google Ads, sponsored links or anything of the sort on any of the posts. No chance of that miracle slimming cure here… move along, please – nothing to see…

Presentations? Well, I get my fair share of invitations to conferences, generally – and I do strongly believe that it’s people that people want at conferences, not their materials and ideas (or not solely their materials and ideas, at any rate) – that’s why being filmed or recorded has limited (or no) impact on your attractiveness as a speaker.

Articles? I think I can count on the fingers of one hand the articles I’ve been paid for over the years, compared to the ones I’ve written ‘pro bono’ – the rest were because I wanted to write them, as a favour to someone or by request of someone (and those requests rarely come with offers of remuneration).

Were I Dan Brown, I suspect I could probably survive quite comfortably even with all the illegal copies floating around… but of course I’m not. I’m not saying Dan shouldn’t hunt the purveyors down and eat them of course – whatever works for him, his agent and his publisher. But I reckon he’ll be able to afford a normal lunch tomorrow, either way.

The problem comes, of course, when you’re trying to make a living solely from your blog, or your books (however misguided the faith in your books and their potential sales may be [ not you Dan, obviously]) or your conference appearances, etc. I’m (un)lucky enough to have to work for a living – so I have an income which is derived from a day’n'night job – the rest: the blogs, the books… well, those are small bonuses throughout the year, sometimes financial, sometimes in terms of content, engagement and discussion.

So, do I care – personally? No, I don’t think I do – I don’t care if someone rips off a blog post of mine, or publishes an article of mine because frankly it’s just words, a collection of words which have no meaning outside my chosen context – and outside the circle of people who will share those words and get involved in the discussion. On my blog I get conversation, articles inspire feedback, books get read and used and sometimes you get a friendly email saying how useful (or not) it was. Anything outside that circle of feedback doesn’t much matter to me. The chances of anyone hiring the plagiarist are slim, I reckon.

But am I more sinner than sinned against?

Casting around my hard drive I note that my music, films and software are all entirely legal. Looking at my company website I note that we paid for the rights to use all the photos we use… but then again have I always been so stringent in the images I’ve used in presentations? No, the fact is that I’ve broken the law at some point – so how can I get too worked up about people stealing my ‘intellectual’ property (such as it is)? I think the answer is that I can’t really – or not with a straight face, at least…

As a side note, it’s much easier to find CC materials now than it was when I first started on the Net all those years ago (and no, that’s not intended as an excuse for my younger criminal days). For images there’s a great CC search option in the advanced Google Images search, the same on Flickr, and – specifically for ELT – the wonderful and growing resource ELTpics, which you can find through the hashtag #eltpics on Twitter, or by searching for the same on Flickr.

So, since I don’t live in the middle ground where writing is my living, and since I’m not Dan, I reckon I can quite comfortably say the following – speaking for myself only, obviously:

1. Anybody is welcome to ‘borrow’ my blog posts
2. Anybody is welcome to ‘re-purpose’ my articles
3. Anybody is welcome to ‘re-invent’ my presentations

They can claim them as their own, if they like – it’s all the same to me. I think in all honesty I’d be happier if I was credited – or would I? What if their blog has loads of dodgy content and my post gets added, perhaps I’d rather people didn’t know it was me… What if they do an atrocious presentation, and credit me? What if they completely misinterpret my slides and portray me as someone I’m not? No, listen, actually – thinking this through, maybe I don’t want to be credited. Damn, but it’s complicated!

I can’t say they’re welcome to my books, because that really is illegal, and (rightly so, possibly) the publishers would be down on them like a ton of bricks. What’s really worth bearing in mind, though, is that all they’re getting is words and ideas, not the person who had them. And really, they ain’t worth the paper they’re not printed on, not on their own – there’s a package involved with all of us engaged in thinking, writing, creating and presenting, and there always will be.

Ooh, me precious words – keep them safe from the great unwashed. My oeuvre…. what shall become of it?

As the Bee Gees never sang, “It’s only words, and words are not all we have”

I’ve spent a large part of the past year and a bit thinking about mobile technologies and mLearning – my colleague Nicky and I started researching in mid 2009 as part of her preparation for a talk at IATEFL last year (the one I missed because the room was full to bursting point and they wouldn’t let any more people in) and then continued as we worked through a book proposal and the design of our new mLearning in Action course. In the meantime, Nicky’s blog has been very busy with a plethora of mLearning posts.

And now I’m sitting here preparing a talk on mLearning which is already booked up for a few outings in 2011…

There’s been a lot of reading of websites, reports, books and blogs… a lot of discussion on various fora, some fun wine-fuelled brainstorming evenings in Spain and Australia and a couple of conferences. And one thing that has hit home is that there are quite a few misconceptions out there – and I’m just beginning to think about them now as I work towards a plan for the talk.

1) Learning on a mobile phone I?

Well yes – but then again no. The biggest misconception in this whole area is that mLearning refers only to mobile phones.

Over the past ten years I guess I’ve been through my fair share of handheld gadgets – looking through the Box of Broken or Obsolete Toys I see an Apple Newton, two Palm Pilots, an iPaq, an old Archos multimedia machine, a couple of walkie talkies, original iPods, small iPods, an MP3 recorder, a plethora of phones, including older Windows-based smartphones, an old iPhone… The Box of Soon-To-Be obsolete toys currently features a Kindle, an iPad, an iPhone 4, a Netbook, a Flip video camera, an MP3 recorder… Still waiting for the true convergence device, but at least when I retire I’ll make a mint from my Museum of Ancient Tech… It’s all R&D, at any rate!

mLearning seems to be moving a little away from the simple mobile phone – most of the research I’ve come across in the past year has revolved around iPod Touches, iPads and the like – devices that don’t rely on mobile phone charges, but instead use wireless networks – and that makes a lot of sense, if only economically.

Tablet computing (although now in its second or third incarnation) is now here to stay – watch the market explode around Christmas this year with all the big companies releasing theirs – you’ll see Android tablets, Blackberry tablets, cheap OLPC tablets, hybrid mobile phone tablets and all the rest. Long battery life, very readable screens, useable keyboards and all the rest. These seem to me to be the obvious platform, although I think smartphones will also do well in some markets and in some countries – particularly those that don’t yet have ubiquitous Net access , but do have the much cheaper mobile phone infrastructure in place.

There’s more to say on this and the points that follow, but too much detail ruins my talk, I reckon…

2) Learning on a mobile phone II?

Well, yes, actually. Earlier this evening I posted links to a variety of projects and case studies where mobile phones are playing a part in the learning people are doing – there were literacy and numeracy projects in Africa and China, English language projects in Bangladesh and a few more. But clñearly we’re not starting from scratch here – what most of these projects do is allow people to continue their learning outside the classroom – and this is particularly valuable in places where classroom time is limited. What a lot of these projects do is build on knowledge from the classroom in a mobile, just-in-time and often social way, and their benefits (if you read the research) are clear. In developing countries some of these projects have had amazing results, and brought basic education to people who might not otherwise have experienced it. And, curiously, mobile phone companies are in on the act – giving free access and data transfer to the participants.

Now the cynic in me might think that of course they’re simply trying to ensare the unsuspecting into lifelong addiciction to SMS and long-distance, huge cost calls. But at some point you have to believe in some of these projects, believe that large companies can also run philanthropic education charity wings and all the rest. I may well be proved wrong, but I still think that there’s a lot of good in the world, too!

3) Learn a language on a phone?

Well, no – clearly not. Elsewhere I’ve written at great length about how I feel online language learning is great for language practice, but I’m not about to sit down and learn Russian on my mobile. That would be an asinine decision on my part. However, if I already had some grounding inRussian I certainly might take advantage of some of the apps on my device – dictionaries, phrase books, flashcards, newspapers, radio stations, tv stations… even the chance to talk to Russian people on Facebook, or Skype, or whatever.

I don’t think we’re going to find anyone who learnt a language exclusively on a mobile phone (though I have to say I once met a man in Turkey who’d learnt all his English from Noel Coward recordings, and he was remarkably fluent, and spoke with a beautiful accent!), but I do think that it would be relatively easy to find people who have taken advantage of a smartphone to improve their language skills, using the kind of apps I’ve just mentioned.

4) Word of the Day?

I remember a talk at an IATEFL in around 2002, by Hamish Norbrook of the BBC. He was talking about mobile phones. It was around the time of the great language crisis, when texting was killing English (see Crystal for more on this) and that mythical schoolgirl had written her summer holiday report up as a texting essay (the horrors!). Hamish was pretty positive about the possibility of mobiles. But in those days the only activity anyone could think of was shipping vocabulary out to learners by SMS – a sort of mobile Word of the Day. Nobody (not even Hamish) could have envisaged the day when podcasts would be cheap and easy to produce and easy to distribute.

He couldn’t have imagined a device such as an iPad.. the screen, the keyboard – the access to information, the apps, the location-based services, image sharing and everything else currently available. At some point we’re going to have to throw away the ‘word of the day’ restraint locked in our heads and come to terms with the power and versatility of mobile and handheld devices.

Going out on to my balcony, I can point my iPhone at the sky… my iPhone knows where I am… my height and everything. Thanks to the in-built compass, it knows where I’m looking. As if by magic the stars appear on my screen, all labelled. I can click one for more information… We’ve come a long way since ‘word of the day’.

There are so many more misconceptions, but this post is way long enough now… Maybe I’ll come back in a week or two and add some more. In the meantime, I’m going to stop.

I’ve still to get my research organised, still to have a few more thoughts and still to make sense of where I think it all fits into the classroom (where devices and infrastructure permit), where it all fits into learning outside of classrooms and on the move, and where it’s all going. These are exciting times, though.

And as I’m sitting here with an old-style piece of paper mapping out this talk (which will feed into the book and the course), maybe you have some thoughts on the whole area? I look forward to hearing them