NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN: A GRUMPY OLD MAN'S GUIDE TO INNOVATION "There is nothing new under the sun but there are lots of old things we don't know"

Everybody has a web site but that's all Greek to me; I don't own a computer and I hate that letter "e."

It’s widely adopted and well-resourced. It’s used for a limited number of applications. It hasn’t yet transformed teaching and learning. For example:  Notes  PowerPoint  VLEs  Differences across student groups and programme levels.

The House of Commons Education and Skills Committee December …. The Government needs to take great care in making claims about the effectiveness of increased investment in education in increasing levels of achievement which the evidence cannot be proved to support. More generally, the value- added justification for higher expenditure on education is one that has wider implications: if large rises in expenditure are needed to produce improvements in education, this could be taken to imply that services that did not enjoy such increases would not see improvements.... Links between expenditure and outcome remain difficult to establish.

Conceptual Frameworks and Historical Development [of Educational Technology] M.R. Eraut, 1989 Definition of ET in 1967 by National Council for Education Technology (NCET) in the United Kingdom: “Educational technology is the development, application, and evaluation of systems, techniques, and aids to improve the process of human learning.”

I’m on the train

In enabling stronger links between formal education and informal learning, the PDA was described as a possible 'Trojan horse of a social shift in the significance of learning within communities'. Mobile learners have the opportunity to truly take control of their learning by directing it (literally and metaphorically) towards areas of interest. Work placements, field-trips, interviews that can be easily captured through the use of PDAs are enriched opportunities of current practice that could be more self-directed by each learner. A further area of investigation is to look at the ways that the potential of mobile and connected learning can further develop classroom practice and the wider curriculum and assessment frameworks.

Pedagogy? Andragogy? Heutagogy? And/or curriculum design? We need a new understanding of the pedagogies appropriate for a 21 st century education system. Traditional methods have not achieved enough. The wider availability of new technology means that we have both the opportunity - and the responsibility - to explore new approaches to teaching and learning. The familiar and effective teaching methods of listening, reading, writing and class discussion will of course remain important. But our teaching institutions ought to be advancing beyond the traditional formats that are still so prevalent.

We need a concerted effort by the digital content industry, innovative educators and education researchers together, to demonstrate what the next generation of e- learning could be. Personalisation changes how practitioners work. Staff must be sufficiently confident, they must have the right skills and they must have access to the right technology, if they are to use ICT to transform front-line services. Staff confidence is improving, but there is still significant variation in the level and quality of ICT use across the curriculum in schools and Further Education (FE), …. It is even true for Higher Education (HE), where the quality of ICT use often falls behind the quality of provision.

The government must give a clear signal that its current commitments to institute credit-based learning for adults will be integrated with similar commitments for 14–19 years olds into a simple, well- understood system of comprehensive lifelong learning. Learners need to be able to navigate their way with ease through the qualifications system. They must see qualifications as relevant, believe that achievement is properly recognised and that the returns from learning – both economically and in terms of meeting their own potential – are never less than useful and often high. It is vital that on and off the job learning can be united by a system of interchangeable, mutually recognisable credits. On the employers’ side, it is essential that the qualifications framework is seen as credible and offers an adequate guarantee of competence. In an increasingly globalised labour market, it is vital that qualifications and skills are internationally recognised and understood. As the UK takes the presidency of the EU later this year, we will pursue the development of a European Qualifications Framework and a European Credit Transfer system for vocational training to build on the existing NARIC and NRP systems. This framework will make clear for individuals, employers and providers how qualifications in England relate to those in other EU countries. We will also continue to support and promote the Europass, launched in January this year, which provides a standardised portfolio of documents for learners to use to record their qualifications and competences, including relevant work experience, in a way which can be easily understood throughout Europe.