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Social Entrepreneurs Ireland

2010-10-21T01:12:00.000-07:00

Social Entrepreneurs Ireland recently announced their latest round of awards. These aren't sheeny shiny pieces of glass or metal that sit on your shelf. SEI offer generous cash awards to amazing projects that are making a real difference to people's futures, and Ireland's future.

This year, they awarded over €500,000 to three projects, including singer Frances Black, who set up The RISE Foundation in 2006. It helps families of addicts to understand the nature of the disease of addiction and the profound effects it has on relationships. The Foundation runs therapeutic and education programmes and seeks to tackle the stigma of having a loved one in addiction.

Dara Hogan set up Fledglings Early Years Education & Care after he identified a significant shortage of early year’s education places in Tallaght West. Through a social franchise model Dara has set up 4 sites creating over 150 early years education places and 38 jobs and plans further expansion.

The third award, the Bridge to College (B2C) programme, was created and developed by John Lawlor as he believes that the current education system in Ireland is failing to prepare students for a career in the smart economy. The B2C programme seeks to deliver a dynamic learning experience for young people based on a new model of team-based workshops and technology mediated learning.

Since launching in 2005 Social Entrepreneurs Ireland has made awards to 142 social entrepreneurs, directly investing over €3.47M into supporting exceptional individuals. These in turn have directly helped over 170,000 people and indirectly helped another 300,000 people.

I'm proud to say that Social Entrepreneurs Ireland helped talkirish.com with a Level 1 award back in 2009, and introduced me to a network of inspirational people.

Is your e-learning as attention grabbing as this?

2010-10-03T04:28:00.000-07:00

So I don't know how some Cebu Pacific Flight Attendants got permission to demonstrate their in-flight safety demonstration by dancing to Lady Gaga, but it's certainly attention-grabbing. Even worthy of applause. Over 3.6 million people have watched this online in just TWO days. Check it out below.

Now the academic part of my brain is saying to itself, ah now, but really, how EFFECTIVE was that learning? Was retention strong? Were the learning outcomes clearly assessed and measured?

All I can say to that is my learning and retention of in traditional flight safety demonstrations is probably dangerously poor. And that's despite years of repetition. To add insult to injury, I've been bored senseless during these demonstrations.

After watching this video, although I can't tell you which passenger action is a criminal offence, I have a very clear and funny memory of how to DO stuff. That sticks.

NB I would NOT like this type of demonstration on a red-eye flight.

Hack. Create. Teach. Learn. In beautiful Barcelona.

2010-09-29T02:04:00.000-07:00

@grahamBM let me know he's off to http://www.drumbeat.org/festival in early November.

The site blurb explains that 'Mozilla's 2010 Drumbeat Festival will gather teachers, learners and technologists from around the world who are at the heart of this revolution. Join us in Barcelona for three days of making, teaching, hacking, inventing and shaping the future of education and the web.'

Sounds like a great event. Possibly made even better by the fact that http://openedconference.org/2010/ is happening right before Drumbeat, on 2-4 November.

The Open Education Conference has been described as “the annual reunion of the open education family.” Apparently, it serves as "the world’s premiere venue for research related to open education, while creating the most friendly and energetic atmosphere you’ll find at any academic conference."

Seems Barcelona's the place to be in early November 2010.

Just released - Buntús Cainte for iPod, iPhone and iPad!

2010-09-24T05:23:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, I secured the rights to produce a new version of Buntús Cainte, the most popular Irish language course in history. And after a few weeks of very hard work, we’ve launched Buntús Cainte for iPod, iPhone and iPad!

We’ve used some geek magic to insert the English and Irish text right inside the MP3 file. This means you can listen to the audio and read the text right on your iPod or iPhone!

Now there’s no need to carry an Irish language course book with you. Just download the MP3s to your device and you can learn or brush up on your Irish wherever you are, whenever you want. I’m taking Buntús Cainte away with me this weekend on a trip to Fermanagh – I love having the chance to learn and revise my Irish in short bursts no matter where I am. And this is the best way for any language student to make a language stick - a little learning, often.

Check out the course and let me know what you think of it. And feel free to spread the word to friends, colleagues and family too!

We'd originally hoped to sell this course through iTunes, but Apple doesn't allow small independent publishers to publish directly to iTunes. We were required to use a third party publisher. But none of the publishers we could find allowed us to publish MP3s with metadata, such as lyrics. We've used bandcamp.com to facilitate sales for now. If anyone knows of a way to distribute content through iTunes via a third party publisher who accepts files with metadata, let me know.

Superman would use Twittelp

2010-09-22T03:13:00.000-07:00

@Elena2020 alerted me to this really nice project - twittelp by @Giuliano84. As their website says, if Superman exists he'll be using Twittelp to get real-time updates about people who need help!*

Twittelp is a google maps and twitter mash-up that lets you ask your Twitter followers for help. You can also discover nearby people who need, help and help make a difference.

Twittelp wants to 'spread love and watch it multiply' and their tagline states that 'we can't help everyone, but we can help someone.' Go check them out, and if you can, participate.

http://www.twittelp.com/about.php or follow @TwittelpApp

*What phone would Superman use?

7 Improvisation principles

2010-08-02T10:38:00.000-07:00

@triciawang sent me a link to this fantastic blog post by Michelle James, a creativity consultant.

Michelle performs improvisation theatre - each night, she and her colleagues perform an entire theatre piece based on the audience's suggestions. Michelle noticed that some nights the performance was easy and flowed, and other nights it was hard. She became fascinated by what makes improvisation work.

Michelle asks "What creates peak level creativity in our group? What allows a complex, coherent, sense-making structure to emerge from nothing but a simple location? What is the "magic formula" that allows a fully formed, organized play - with believable characters and plot - to emerge before the audience’s (and our own) eyes? And what gets in the way?"

She describes herself as a serious student of improvisation theory. Her post can be found here, and is well worth reading - but for a quick intro I've quoted her 7 basic improvisation principles below, which I think can be applied not just to creative improvisation for theatre, but for many creative team tasks - or even ordinary social interaction.

1. Yes and. Fully accepting the reality that is presenting, and the adding a NEW piece of information - that is what allows it to be adaptive, move forward and stay generative. Each performer (agent) interacts with what is offered and offers a unique contribution.

2. Make everyone else look good. That means you do not have to be defending or justifying yourself or your position - others who will do that for you and you do that for others. Without the burden of defensiveness or competition, everyone is free to create. Complex characters can form that enable unpredictable complex actions and directions to emerge.

3. Be changed by what is said and what happens. At each moment, new information in an invitation for you to have a new reaction, or for your character to experience a new aspect of them. Change inspires new ideas, and that naturally unfolds what's next. You adapt as one structure dissipates and re-organizes into a new structure that expands, yet includes, what was before.

4. Co-create a shared "agenda." This principle involves the recognition that even the best-laid plans are abandoned in the moment, and to serve the reality of what is right there in front of you. You are co-creating the agenda in real-time. In order to keep the play going, you respond to the moment and an "agenda" co-emerges that is more inclusive than anything that could have been planned. It is not consensus, which reduces. It is co-creation, which expands.

5. Mistakes are invitations. In improv, mistakes are embraced – they are the stimulating anomalies that invite the performers into a new level of creativity. By using improv techniques such as justifying any mistake can be transformed into surprising plot point or dialogue that never would have happened in following a conventional pattern. In improv, justifying creates order out of chaos. Mistakes break patterns and allow new ones to emerge.

6. Keep the energy going. No matter what is given, or what happens, you accept it and keep the energy gong. Unlike in everyday life, where people stop to analyze, criticize or negate, in improv you keep moving. A mistake happens - let it go move on. The unexpected emerges - use it to move on. Someone forgot something important - justify it and move on. You’re lost or confused –make something up and trust the process. Just keep moving. The system is not static – it is alive and dynamic.

7. Serve the good of the whole. Always carry the question, "How can I best serve this situation?" and then you have a better sense of when to run in and when to stay back, when to take focus and when to give it, how to best support your fellow performers and how to best support the scene. By focusing away from how you will look into serving the larger good – the aliveness of the system - you have more creative impulses and resources available to you at any moment. And the choices you make are more in alignment with the higher levels of creative integration that form a coherent play.

Using FourSquare for Social Good

2010-07-26T03:35:00.000-07:00

FOURSQUARE
What is it?
Some folks say it’s a mobile social network
Some folks say it’s an urban exploration app
Some folks reckon it's a location based social network that incorporates gaming elements.

What Four Square wants:
To connect people with smartphones and money with venues in which they can spend that money.

How FourSquare works
Users share their location with firends by checking in via smartphone or SMS. Users are hooked using gaming elements that reward their check in behaviours - they can win badges, social kudos and real-life discounts. Users can connect their Facebook and Twitter accounts to their FourSquare account.

Foursquare has applications for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile

FourSquare’s revenue model
FourSquare may have or will be rolling out three tiers of paid services:
- for small (local) businesses
- for retail chains
- for big marketers.

It's possible Foursquare may offer up analytics packages and deals will be sold against against impressions such as web ads, clicks such as search ads, or cost per check-in.

USING GEOLOCATION AND LOCATION-BASED SERVICES - CURRENT SITUATION
Current location-based services connect a smartphone carrier with a location. So let’s say I’m in Starbucks on Main Street, Ordinarytown, USA. I can open foursquare app on my phone, check to see if that Starbucks location has been added, if it has, I can check in.

Organisations can exploit this in several ways:
- Attract people to their location
- Get people to promote their location

Users exploit this in several ways:
- Rewarded with real-world product discounts
- digital badges
- social kudos (depends on your social circle!)

WAYS IN WHICH A SOCIAL ENTERPRISE CAN SUCCESSFULLY USE LOCATION-BASED TECHNOLOGIES

ACTION
Geolocate your headquarters

WHY?
Workers and volunteers can check in as they arrive – perhaps raising the profile of the particular project they’re working on ‘Just checked into NiceNtreezy.com headquarters – picking up some leaflets for our Plant a Tree campaign’

WHY NOT?
Geolocating your offices may invite guests to drop in or pop by – does your office have the facilities and staff to deal with this? Will every staff member participate? Will this be a shortlived burst of activity?

ACTION
Geolocate an event

Use geolocation technology to tag an event that’s happening in your area – such as a tree planting.

WHY?
You can raise awareness of an event.
You can use the technology to invite users to attend as volunteers, audience or donors.

WHY NOT?
There is a chance that someone who doesn’t have your organisation’s best interests at heart can turn up. Make sure it’s appropriate to broadcast your event to the general public - or even those you think are on your ‘safe’ list.

ACTION
Attract a corporate donor who will ‘sponsor’ check-ins

WHY?
A corporate donor can agree to donate a fixed amount for every check-in to your event/headquarters – usually up to a set limit.

E.G. You organise a tree planting in your local park. Create an event and ask everyone who arrives to check-in - for every check-in, a local business offers you $1.

WHY NOT?
What’s not to like about free money?

ACTION
Create a treasure hunt

If you’re a large building, such as a museum or a big public space, you can create a series of locations that can be checked into by users in the form of a treasure hunt. Users who visit all locations are rewarded with what you choose.

WHY?
In early days you can be successful as Brooklyn Museum and garner a lot of press coverage for your event.
Raises the profile of your venue.
Engages users in a new way.

WHY NOT?
It’s a lot of work. You need significant footfall to make this happen. Nobody might be interested.

ALTERNATIVES TO FOURSQUARE AND GOWALLA
Hearing a lot about foursquare and Gowalla? Did you know there’s a Socially-focussed alternative?

http://causeworld.com/
CauseWorld is a mobile application that lets you help the world while you shop! By checking in, you earn karmas from our sponsors. Donate those karmas for specific actions to improve the world. Some of the many actions in the CauseMall include donating to classrooms in need, planting a tree, providing a meal for the hungry, or helping an injured animal

WHAT’S NOT TO LOVE ABOUT CAUSEWORLD?
Great idea, but needs a lot of users to really work. Should FourSquare or Gowalla become more socially minded, they’ll probably make it easier to use their services for the greater good. And because they’ve got a lot more usage, you’ll probably be able to target a lot more users.

LOADS OF USEFUL AND INSPIRATIONAL GEOLOCATION LINKS

How Non-Profits and Activists Can Leverage Location Based Services
http://mashable.com/2010/01/18/location-based-social-good/

Where are your advocates? Geolocation and your nonprofit
http://melindaklewis.com/2010/06/17/where-are-your-advocates-geolocation-and-your-nonprofit/

Nonprofits and Foursquare (or Gowalla): ideas and resources
http://pryoulistening.wordpress.com/2010/03/31/nonprofits-and-foursquare-or-gowalla-ideas-and-resources/

Brooklyn Museum 4square community
http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/community/foursquare/
http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/community/blogosphere/bloggers/2009/12/29/calling-the-mayor/

Finding value in Foursquare
http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2010/03/flying-the-nerd-bird-or-how-i-
found-value-in-foursquare.html

CauseWorld: Location-Based Cause Marketing
http://selfishgiving.com/cause-marketing-news/causeworld-location-based-
cause-marketing

Harvard Schools Cause Marketers on Foursquare
http://selfishgiving.com/cause-practices/harvard-schools-cause-marketers-on-foursquare

A Foursquare Experiment Gone Right
http://adventuresinphilanthropy.com/2010/06/08/a-foursquare-experiment-gone-right/

Foursquare for Charities: Why Location Matters
http://ht.ly/1ZsiZ

Foursquare ‘Checkin for Charity’ Hits 135k Checkins, Raises $15k
http://selfishgiving.com/cause-marketing-news/foursquare-at-sxsw

Guest Post: How Nonprofit Groups Can Benefit from Foursquare
http://philanthropy.com/blogPost/Guest-Post-How-Nonprofit/22264/

A Foursquare Strategy - CASE STUDY
http://www.devonvsmith.com/2010/01/a-foursquare-strategy/

Non-Profit Uses Foursquare to Raise Environmental Awareness
http://mashable.com/2010/05/27/earthjustice-foursquare-posters/

For Charity: Foursquare Looking For Leaderboard Sponsors
http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/12/for-charity-foursquare-looking-for-leaderboard-sponsors/

HOW TO: Add Your Nonprofit to Foursquare
http://nonprofitorgs.wordpress.com/2010/01/10/how-to-add-your-nonprofit-to-foursquare/

What is Cause Marketing?
http://selfishgiving.com/cause-marketing-101/what-is-cause-marketing-2

Maps, Mapping and What's possible
http://www.socialedge.org/discussions/business-models/maps-and-whats-possible?utm_source=Social+Edge+Newsletter&utm_campaign=48faad02ac-Newsletter_Visual_Thinking_6_22_2010&utm_medium=email

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

How Exciting!

2010-06-29T15:45:00.000-07:00

How exciting! After a full year of waiting and wanting, I have now paired my bluetooth keyboard with my iPhone. Finally I can use my iPhone as a proper input device. With the Dropbox app integrated with my docs2go app, I'm connected with all my important documents and can edit from anywhere with a data connection. I'm so happy it's silly!

What took you so long, Apple? Seriously.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us

2010-05-30T11:16:00.000-07:00

I picked this video up from Cathy Moore's twitter stream (@catmoore).

I love it for several different reasons. First, it's just really really interesting content - Dan Pink's lecture on Drive - the surprising truth about what motivates us is compelling in itself.

Second, the RSA animation is simply amazing. I was glued to the whole 10 minute animation - laughing, excited, really interested to see what would happen next. My husband came in halfway through and sat down and watched the rest with me. It's great.

Finally, I love the fact the audio is a humorous lecture recorded with a live audience. The audience respond to Dan Pink's words, you can hear laughter - you feel like you're part of a community. This audio works in the way that canned laughter works. Canned laughter was invented by sound engineer Charley Douglass. And it's been used ever since because it works. There's a great history of canned laughter on wikipedia - think you should check it out.

Sadly, I'm pretty sure I'll not be commanding budgets either for recording lectures with a live audience, or for 'sweetening' my audio with laugh tracks. If you're lucky enough to give this a shot, let me know!

Nice e-learning shorts from Irish animation company

2010-05-23T13:32:00.000-07:00

I recently came across a nice showcase of e-learning shorts from award-winning Irish animation company Igloo Animations. Igloo aren't just about - e-learning - they've a wide range of animation experience, including advertising and television.

I like their 'Sustainability' short, which freely available on youtube.

You can also check out a short about Ireland's NAMA - the National Assets Management Agency.

Are Spellcheckers Rotting Your Brain?

2010-05-16T01:10:00.000-07:00

I was the sort of child who always wanted to get things 'right'. I found spelling quite easy, as words always looked like pictures to me, and I could usually tell instantly if the word was wrong by the way it looked. I was always useless at spelling words out loud. I found it a difficult to 'read' the word I could see clearly in my head. But I was proud of my written spelling, which always saw even the most unimaginative piece of writing getting a good mark from the teacher.

During my MPhil in Publishing Studies, I learned how to proof-read to a professional level. As it was still the 90s, I had to exercise my proof-reading skills on a lot of hard copy. I soon discovered that 'good' spellers aren't necessarily the best proof-readers. On paper, too often I assumed I knew how to spell a word, which resulted in errors. Whereas a fellow student who freely admitted he was a dreadful speller got almost 100% accuracy on our exercises. He pointed out that because he wasn't sure of his spelling, he checked almost everything. I was fast, but he was accurate. By the end of the course, he'd learned how to spell better, and I'd learned how to slow down and check.

Learning to proof-read changed the way I read. I became notoriously picky. I worked as a copy editor in several organisations. And I really enjoyed a stint as an electronic editor for an e-learning company where I explored my geeky nitpicking side by authoring a macro that automagically corrected the persistent repeat offences from our writing team before I began my human edit.

But spellcheckers have spoilt me. Spellcheckers have been around since the 1970s, and I can remember using them to check my documents since the 1980s. But since the introduction of spellcheckers for almost anywhere a human can enter text, my spelling has deteriorated.

Word spellchecks my documents. I have web browser spellcheckers for my blogs and webmails. Even the TextEdit on my macbook can check my spelling. Tweetdeck spellchecks my tweets. Now if I don't know how to spell a word, I don't even try. I type in an approximation, then right-click the mispelt word to get a list of possible corrections. My spelling has deteriorated noticeably. The few letters and notes I still write by hand are much more scrawly - in some cases deliberately so - to hide my possibly bad spelling.

This is a bad thing. But I don't believe the parts of my brain that used to store the correct spelling for hundreds of thousands of words have rotted away with misuse. Thanks to my brain's plasticity, I know those brain cells have been reused for something more urgent and useful. Just wish I knew what...

Spelling Bees - Not Enough Buzz

2010-05-03T12:43:00.000-07:00

Americans have been glorifying spelling for years now with competitive spelling bees. A few years ago, the BBC tried to make spelling sexy (or at least competitive) with the UK's first national spelling competition. Over 100,000 children took part in Hard Spell. The competition mustn't have been a ratings winner, as it was axed after the second year.

But the Hard Spell site is still present on the BBC's sprawling online archive. There's an interesting spelling game you can play to test your spelling. I'm not sure how the game is really set up. If it works off a database of thousands of hard to spell words, then this is a phenomenal game. If it's just a sheeny shiny interface with the words hard coded into the app, then this game took a lot of development time for minimal return. Anyway. Go test yourself!

A quick google search has shown me that there are loads of software packages that aim to teach kids how to spell, from just 3 letters to multi-syllabic behemoths of words. There's also what looks like a nice spelling app for the iPhone here - a spin-off from the successful The Times Spelling Bee website.

Seems to me that a decent piece of spelling software will be treated as a game by kids. Let them get in, test themselves, and give them rewards for improvement. I wouldn't expect the children of Ireland and Britain to become amazing spellers. Some kids will have aptitude, others won't. Some kids will have aptitude and just not care. Others will try.

Some skills can be quickly and easily taught to kids digitally at their own pace - spelling is one. This is the sort of learning schools could accommodate quite easily. Check out this post I did a while back on how I learned to type quickly and happily with a software programme. And how I was then bored silly for 5 years in school learning to batter an old manual typewriter in time to the teacher's stick bouncing across an old paper chart sellotaped to the blackboard. When are we going to change the record?

Spelling - Surender - Surrendder - Surrendar - Give up Now

2010-04-16T11:24:00.000-07:00

Ken Smith, a criminology lecturer exasperated by years of correcting the same spelling mistakes of his students, has argued common spelling mistakes should be accepted as variant spellings. These include:

• arguement for argument
• twelth for twelfth
• truely for truly

Ken's suggestion is that the UK accepts the 20 or so of the most commonly misspelt words should simply be accepted as alternative.

Interesting Idea. But I imagine that the possibilities for misspellings are limitless. If we accept the first 20 words, then surely another 20 will just pop up to take their place?

Following the story, CBBC asked kids 'Does Good Spelling Matter?' There's a mish-mash of replies, with views ranging from 'Oh yes' to 'No way'. I found two comments particularly interesting. First, Charlie, aged 12 stated that

"If a word is spelt wrong but you can read it, it's fine."

Obviously, communication is more important to Charlie than nit-picking over spelling. Ben, 13 observed:

"Well, I don't think that it matters a lot, because I was reading this thing from Manchester University and it said as long as the 1st and last letters are correct, and the rest is muddled up, it looks the same. Try it yourself... E.g: because or bcaeuse."

I wouldn't want to be the English teacher trying to argue with Ben's logic. A few of the comments mentioned that good spellers get more 'respect', which was seen as a reason for learning to spell better. But for a generation who are fluent in street speak and txt speak, communication is key.

p.s. each and every comment on the CBBC post was beautifully spelt...now either only spelling geniuses felt felt equipped to post a comment, or the CBBC team cleaned up any spelling nasties ;)

Language Learning iPhone Apps - BYKI French

2010-04-05T13:02:00.000-07:00

BYKI French was one of the first iPhone apps I bought. I'd known of the online software which has been around since about the early 90s. The BYKI website promises you'll be able to 'learn it fast, know it forever' using their system. If only!

The BYKI French app aims to teach you 1000 words and phrases with their 3 step process, which involves:

1 Look through flashcards with images and text.

2 Test yourself - look at the French and see if you can get the English

3 Test yourself - look at the English and see if you can get the French

4 QUIZ

Yes. It's actually a four-step process. Three steps must sound less intimidating.

In step one you see the text, an image and hear the French spoken. Steps 2 and 3 show you the French/English and you tap to reveal the answer, telling the app whether or not you got it correct. If you did, the app remembers this and progresses. If you didn't, the app throws the card straight back at you.

This is doesn't work for me. If I didn't remember the word first time, I know I'm going to remember it when the app throws it at me straight after I've admitted I was wrong. I'd prefer the app to bury the card and throw it up again later, to test me properly.

Finally, there's the quiz. I use this as a test quite often - I go straight to the quiz to see how I do. If I'm awful, I'll do the set from scratch. If I'm 100%, I'll mark the list off as learned. I also use this to quick revise lists I learned a while back.

Problem 1 - the lists
BYKI's language lists are frustrating. You only get to download a maximum of 91 lists - with about 10 words in each. That's sort of fine, I guess, except that there's no real reason for this limit. And the lists are not always grouped the way I would group words - e.g. You might be asked to learn the word 'Merci' in the 'at the bank' list. It's not that I might not want to say 'merci' at the bank - it's just that I'd rather learn that word in a list of 'polite stuff' and learn another money word or phrase in the bank list. You can't really tell what you'll get in a list.

Problem 2 - Learning what you already know
You can't delete words you know and keep words you don't. So if there's a list of 10 words and you already know 'bonjour' and 'au revoir', you'll still have to sit through repeated exposure to 'bonjour' and 'au revoir' when you'd rather be pushing your brain with new stuff. EVERY app I've used has this problem, so it's not a big BYKI failure - but still - being bored when learning is death to the retention process.

GUI
BYKI is not the prettiest app in the store. It does the whole sophisticated grey background thing which smacks the coder having too much influence over the GUI. It's not bad, it's just not attractive. The flashcards are, however, clear and generally legible. Just doesn't compare to the lovely uTalk French app, which I'll review later.

Other useful features on BYKI French
Twitter search
Real-time Twitter search of words and phrases from within Byki for iPhone. I loved this feature - it's so interesting to get random real-life usage of French phrases.

Download User Language Lists
I know you can donwload lists from over 5,000 user-created lessons, but this feature never seemed to work for me - kept crashing and I gave up. Perhaps it's more stable now, but you've still got the problem of figuring out which of the 5,000 lists are any good. Would be better if BYKI would either create new lists for us to download, or star extra-good or popular lists from the user-generated lists.

Extend your app with BYKI deluxe
If you buy BYKI deluxe (currently about £35) you can create your own language lists and download them to your phone. There's a free trial for this - and it's a similar feature to Mental Case, which I'll be reviewing later. Great feature, I guess, if you've the time to sit and make your own lists. I certainly don't.

Neat controls
BYKI offer great settings control - you can turn off the English voice that so irritates a lot of users, so you just hear the target language. You can change the scores, either to mark off word sets you know and don't need to learn, or to cheat and make yourrself feel better. You can change the quiz settings from French-English and vice versa (I prefer the harder English-French setting).

Stats
It's got a nice little stats option, which will tell you how many sessions you've had (I've had 78), number of learned cards (722), number of learned lists (57) and total time spent learning (7 hours and 47 precious minutes of my life).

VERDICT?
I highly recommend BYKI as one of the best language apps I've found. It could do better, but few apps compare. It's well worth the money.
Costs: £4.99 sterling

Want to try BYKI before you buy? I can't find a 'lite' BYKI French app, but I found 15 BYKI languages - a free app that introduces you to different languages using the BYKI system.

Belfast-based Aurion wins International e-Learning Award

2009-12-02T03:34:00.001-08:00

Congratulations to Irish eLearning Company Aurion Learning and their client, the Family Planning Association (FPA), for winning a prestigious eLearning Age Award!

Aurion designed a groundbreaking sexual health and well-being e-learning programme for people with learning disabilities. Having spoken with Fiona Quigley throughout the development of this programme, I know that the challenges the whole team faced when producing such a great piece of learning. It's a masterpiece of tone, timing and delivery - and deserving winner of the 'Excellence in the production of learning content' category.

I'm really delighted for Fiona Quigley, who is Director of Learning and Innovation at Aurion. Fiona's one of my favourite girl geeks - one of few people I know who is keen to meet up of an evening and talk e-learning for a few hours. However, I'm sure the awards ceremony at the Park Lane Hotel in London's Mayfair was a bit more glamorous than our meet-ups in the Errigal Inn, on the Ormeau road in Belfast.

You can buy a copy of the programme from the FPA's website and you can see a demo of on Aurion's website.

Get more details on the Awards ceremony here.

So What's School For?

2009-11-11T00:24:00.000-08:00

Alanna Mitchell asks the big question in this article.

So is school

- for the transmission of culture and potted knowledge, akin to filling a CD-ROM?
- for fostering skills that will serve society down the road, or make dutiful employees?
- a strategy to make sure a nation's gross domestic product keeps rising?
- a sorting mechanism aimed at working out where in the class system a student ought to land?
- a way to encourage upward mobility?

She asks if school should it build character or endow morals? Is it a way for the new generation to question the values of the old? Or is it for making sure they don't?

As Mitchell rightfully points out, you could write a library full of books on this stuff. However, 2 issues stand out to me as big red flashing signals alerting us that a schools' reform is necessary:

1 Neuroscientific findings shows that the brain learns – or forms strong neural connections – when a child is in a calm, emotionally regulated state.

2 Neuroscience also shows that the brain is a platform on which intelligence can be built, rather than the determinant of a fixed intelligence.

I feel many schools fail on the first point, most particularly when children are taken from the much smaller, intimate primary school setting to an overcrowded secondary school.

As for the second point, it seems to me that education hasn't changed much from my days at primary school, where the emphasis was on figuring out who was 'brainy' and who was 'thick' and streaming us accordingly. While being streamed into the 'brainy' group worked for me and kept me from being bored at school, I'm not so sure it was so great for the children in the 'remedial' stream. Maybe the problem was that the kids in remedial seemed to believe that's where they'd be for life - not just for short-term special support in a specific area.

Mitchell quotes Guy Claxton, a psychologist at the University of Winchester in England, who argues that the brain as an organ is expandable, something to improve rather than prove, In theory, schooling should help that expansion happen. I don't think the system encourages this.

Read the article here.

Danish Students Surf Web During Exams

2009-11-04T05:55:00.000-08:00

So progressive Danish schools are doing what nobody else is doing - letting their kids take their exams using the Internet.

Check out the BBC's report for the full story - but here's a couple of things that grabbed my attention:

Will the students cheat? There's little stopping the students emailing each other for answers. But the teachers think the nature of the questions make it harder to cheat. Students aren't asked to regurgitate facts and figures - they're tested on their ability to sift through and analyse information.

According the the Danish Minister for Education, Bertel Haarder, Exams with Internet are an attempt to reflect daily life. He's proud that Denmark is leading the way, and hopes (bless him) other countries will adopt this system.

Have to say, I'm 100% behind Stephen Heppell, professor of new media environments at Bournemouth University who wants UK exams to be updated.

"Then they go into the exam room and all [their technology is] taken away and they're given a fountain pen and a sheet of lines paper and a three hour time limit. It's time to get real, isn't it?"

Paper exams felt out of date when I was sitting my GCSEs in 1993. What must it feel like now???

PS I found the cool legogeek image on David Muir's EdCompBlog.

Myngle - Language Learning Platform

2009-10-28T10:19:00.000-07:00

While in Amsterdam for the Maemo Summit 2009, I met up with Marina Tognetti, founder and CEO of Myngle.com

Myngle.com is a global language platform, where teachers and students from all over the world can teach and learn new languages. Myngle launched in December 2007. As of autumn 2009, it covers 51 languages with over 300 teachers and has 36000+ users from 162 countries.

Marina, an Italian who loves learning new languages, studied business and economics in Italy and then got strong corporate experience with stints at Proctor and Gamble, Philips and Sara-Lee. She left her role in eBay to create ‘an eBay for languages.’ She believes that everybody should have a chance to learn any language, no matter where they are located.

And Myngle does just this. Any student can learn any language online with live classes and real teachers. All teachers are carefully selected and trained by Myngle.

So how does Myngle work? Well, the student is king. You choose your teacher, your lesson time and price. You can try before you buy with a free trial. After that, you buy a learning package. You can opt for individual lessons or group.

Myngle was born while Marina was working for ebay – she’d been trying to learn Chinese. She’d been to school for 3 months for 2 hours a week, in a class of 25 learners. It just didn’t work. But private lessons didn’t work either – Marina had to select teachers by trial and error – unlike ebay, where you know what you’re getting, and the feedback is recorded.

Marina believes you really need a person to interact – to learn and correct. You don’t learn in a normal exchange. She believes your teacher will push you in one-to-one interaction. However, Myngle teachers adapt to your needs – if you like to learn by focussing on grammar rules, they’ll work with you on that.

Myngle is very selective when choosing teachers. Anyone can apply, however, teachers are personally screened – and Myngle guarantees that every one of their 300 teachers is good. All Myngle teachers have great experience in offline and online teaching.

Marina explained to me that Myngle students tend to be older and more serious than your average social learning network student. They’re often learning for business purposes. They’re spending money and want results – language learning is a serious investment for them.

Myngle’s try before you buy approach is really working for the website – according to Marina, a huge majority of those who try, buy. They love the service. But then Marina’s philosophy on customer service is to ‘always overdeliver’.

Myngle was started up with Marina’s personal finance. It has since secured two rounds of funding, and is in the process of securing a third. Marina and her team spent 2008 getting the site features just right and ensuring quality would be high. They spent 2009 focussing on marketing and customer service. 2010 will be all about the customer – reaching out to as many more language learners as Myngle can.

Interestingly, Marina observed that ‘Education is the only non-consumer centred industry in the world’. She believes this is wrong – and indeed can explain many of the educational failures we experience. She believes that the education sector is changing. The customer is taking control. They can now choose the teacher, method of learner, the time and place.

This approach leads the learner to eventually only needing an independent assessment as a means of certifying the learners knowledge – Donald Clarke has an interesting post on that here.

I’ll be testing Myngle out while I’m in Paris – I’ll review how I found their system.

You can follow Myngle on twitter @myngler

Hungry to learn across the world

2009-10-27T13:11:00.000-07:00

That's the title of a BBC article telling the story of 16 year old Babar Ali - the world's youngest headteacher. Every day, he teaches hundreds of students in the village of Murshidabad in West Bengal.

Babar is a student himself. Every morning, before school, he has to help with household chores. Then he catches an auto-rickshaw to travel part of the way to school. He walks the last mile or so.

Babar's school is free, but his family have to pay for a uniform, books and transport - which all adds up to £25 a year. This is £25 too much for a lot of families.

After Babar finishes his school day, he comes back to his small village, and teaches what he has learned to 800 children who are too poor to afford the school fees. Babar is not alone. Ten teachers have joined him - students like himself - to teach what they know to other children.

This is an awesome story. Children who are hungry for knowledge feeding what they know to those who are even more deprived than they are.

But the title of the article is misleading. Children across the world are not hungry to learn. Time and again I've heard teachers comment that their biggest problem is in motivating students to want to learn.

Seeing as motivation is one of the key factors in effective learning, this is a worrying problem. So what is it about the kids in our schools? Why aren't they hungry for knowledge? Is it because they live 24/7/365 in the middle of an information feast, and they're gorged to the point of indifference?

No iPhone = Boredom and Anxiety When Travelling

2009-10-23T09:31:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I had to go from Belfast to the East Midlands of England for a business meeting. The travel arrangements had been hastily done, and were not ideal. At 7am, the airport security man looked at me strangely and said 'No mobile?' as I flung my netbook, keys and 'liquids' out for scanning.

No mobile. Indeed I hadn't. And no time to go back and get it. I knew I'd most information that I needed on my netbook, so I didn't panic. In fact, I was a bit curious to see how I'd get along. A case of planes, trains and no-mobiles.

As it turned out, I didn't get along terribly badly, but not terribly well either. I'd 2 main problems. (a) boredom and (b) anxiety

Let's look at (a) boredom first.

I use my iPhone for listening to language learning MP3s (loving Michel Thomas at the moment), gaming, reading books, twittering, email and browsing the web. And these are all things that fill those endless endless snatches of downtime when you're travelling.

Standing in the slow coffee queue waiting to put your breakfast order in? Check tweetie. Sitting eating your breakfast in the cafe? Check emails, browse tweets. Waiting to board the plane? Catch up on news. On the plane? Plug into Michel Thomas French while playing Bejewelled and you land in England a wiser woman than you were in Ireland. And so it continues.

I was deprived of all this. So I bought a magazine. Scientific American Mind, to be precise, at the ridiculous cost of £4.70. An hour later, I'd read everything in the magazine, even the pointless letters to Editor that all talked about articles I hadn't and couldn't read.

Reading this magazine really brought home the fact that print is dead for me. I bought a magazine that looked relatively interesting. But in fact only maybe 30% of it was something I enjoyed reading. The rest of it I would've skipped over online. And the bits I enjoyed were stymied by the fact I couldn't learn anything more - I couldn't click deeper.

After finishing the magazine I was still left with about 12 hours of travel. If I wanted to read something educational on my iPhone, I could have read for HOURS and not paid a penny. If I wanted to spend £5, I really would've got a whole lot more value for money on the apps store.

Now, let's look at (b) anxiety.

I get anxious when I don't have enough information. This is particularly true of travel. Without a mobile internet connection to check my travel details, I had to go from coach to train station to train station to taxi just *hoping* that things would be OK. They weren't as it turned out - I missed most connections by five minutes, and spent hours sitting around waiting for the next one.

Then when I got onto a train I'd no real clue where I was, how long it would take me to get to the next point, or what was going on. I spent a lot of time being anxious. And what with having nothing to distract myself, I had a lot more time to be anxious!

The *sort-of* upside

The *sort-of* upside to all this was what happened when I had to ask people for help or information. I was shocked at how lovely everyone was. Everyone was hugely helpful, funny and kind. One gentleman told me I had the loveliest accent. Another wished me Bon voyage. I entered into little mini-conversations with strangers.

Of course, I have spontaneous social contact with strangers all the time online, but that's not such a novelty.

iPhone fail

Incidentally, I forgot my iPhone because it hadn't charged properly *again*. I woke up at 4am to find a very hot iPhone with a quarter charge. I had to disconnect it, let it cool down, and try again that morning as I got ready to go. This has happened twice now. And both times have been directly before I had to fly to England for an all-day meeting. What's going on?

Google Wave Explained

2009-10-17T01:59:00.000-07:00

by someone who hasn't got an invitation...

UK Police to get SmartPhones

2009-10-16T11:02:00.000-07:00

BBC news reports that the most UK police forces are to be equipped with smartphones by March 2010.

Gary Cairns of the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) explains that officers with smartphones spend about 30 minutes less per shift in the police station than officers without smartphones - leaving them free for frontline duties.

The cost of the scheme is £80million - and it costs about £270 per officer, per year. 85% of officers offered smartphones take up the offer - although the BBC reporter seems to think this is a bit weak, I think it's pretty impressive. I wonder what the figures would be like if every UK teacher was offered a smartphone? Or every student?

So what's smart about these phones? Well, the article doesn't mention what type of phone the officers will get. But they will enable officers to access key databases, like the Police National Computer and other information like criminal records, vehicle details, briefings and photographs of wanted or missing people. And they'll let officers transmit information back to base.

Officers are interested in how GPS technologies can help them do their job - for instance, tagging streets with 'useful' information about who lives there, and what they're known to the police for.

A bit big brother? Yes. While I can imagine how useful a googlemaps-police criminal database mash up app would be in the fight against crime, I know that people make mistakes. And how am I to check what information a police app might have on me? How can I correct inaccurate information? And how is information police might gather by mobile validated?

Each phone is password protected, and can be remotely wiped, making them fairly secure - but not impregnable. It would be scary to think of what would happen with a smartphone in the wrong hands. But the pros probably outweigh the cons here.

Finally, I wonder do these phones have facebook and twitter disabled? Officers might be spending 30 minutes or more in the frontline, but how useful is that if they're sitting in a parked car, eyes glued to a little glowing screen?

www.talkirish.com Wins an Irish Web Award

2009-10-11T01:41:00.000-07:00

I'm delighted that my social learning network, www.talkirish.com, won the Best Education/Third Level website at the Irish Web Awards last night.

A huge thanks to the judges and organisers and of course the Talk Irish team and community. It's so cool to have won something like this - hope it helps us get decent funding so we can grow the site faster with even better content.

Irish Web Award Shortlists

2009-10-04T13:24:00.000-07:00

I'm really excited because both this blog and my social learning network www.talkirish.com have been shortlisted for 6 Irish web awards between them!

www.talkirish.com has been shortlisted as:

- Best New Web Application/Service
- Best Discussion forum
- Best Education and Third Level Website
- An Suíomh Gaeilge is Fear (Best Irish Language Website)

And www.searchfindlearn.com has been nominated both as Best Technology Website and Best Education Website.

Unfortunately, I can't make the awards ceremony this weekend, as I'll be at the Maemo summit in Amsterdam (annual get-together of the Maemo Community. Technology enthusiasts, apps developers, and platform developers meet to network, share their latest innovation, learn about future trends and just have fun).

And tonight I'm in London, getting ready for 3 days at the Handheld Learning conference - I've got my shiny new iPod touch ready to play with. I'm so excited about getting my hands on other handheld learning devices and getting to chat to as many other learning geeks as possible. Anyone fancies meeting up just tweet @michellegallen

Fart Apps are Fun, but News, Games and Book apps are Sticky

2009-09-26T09:35:00.000-07:00

I saw this short article on NYtimes - a report on user retention rates on various category of apps.

Flurry Inc (an app-tracking San Fran start-up) tracked more than 1,800 apps and 75 million consumers on iPhone, BlackBerry, Android and JavaME. They wanted to see if users returned to use an app within 30,60 and 90 days.

I think the results were fairly predictable:

* News & reference apps are used the most — more than once a day at a rate of 11 times per week.
* Social networking apps are used six times a week.
* Health and fitness apps are used 7 times a week.
* Games are used 7.4 times a week.
* Book-related apps are used 10 times a week.

I was a bit surprised to see that social networking apps are used only 6 times a week, while book-related apps are used 10 times a week. I thought I was the only mobile bookworm - people seem surprised if I tell them I'm re-reading Ulysses on iPhone at the moment, having started with Les Miserables and worked my way through several shorter texts.

The NYtimes comments that 'it’s only a matter of time before Apple tries to turn the iPod touch/iPhone into e-book readers'. Bit of a strange statement when you consider that the iPhone is already an e-book reader. Perhaps what they mean is Apple might exploit the iPhone/iPod touch by providing a pay-per-download service for printed matter.

I for one would be an avid customer. I've already been extremely frustrated with Amazon's Kindle app - not available to UK customers, which has left me ordering printed books that take ages to deliver, when I want to read them NOW. These are the type of book I know I'll read quickly, just the once, and will give away. The type of book I want on mobile.

If Apple are quick enough and their library big enough, Apple iBooks could become yet another way for me to spend mobile money.