Dyslexia and learning design (Podcast episode 7)
We sat down with Martin Bloomfield, author of Dyslexia Bytes, to talk about dyslexia and to explore what we need to know about it in Learning Design.
education
How to be a successful education app developer
When this blog was brand new (nearly two years ago), I stumbled across a post by a French indie app developer called Pierre Abel who was having great success by focussing on educational iPad apps for young learners. As someone who had spent quite a lot of time and effort trying to develop successful ELT apps while working in-house at an ELT publisher, I was interested in how an independent developer had approached it, and whether I could find any useful lessons that ELT app publishers could apply. I thought it would be interesting to see how he’s done since then and whether the same lessons still apply.
Will your app win the next YUDU award?
There’s a steady stream of great new apps every week, so how do you decide whether an app is worth the space it takes up on a device? More importantly, how do students and teachers decide which apps should stay and which apps should go? Is there any absolute standard we can employ? Laura Summers reflects on the winners of the YUDU Design & Technology Awards
Social Enterprise in ELT – The E3 Project
The primary aim of the E3 Project is to engage those with the lowest levels of spoken English, particularly women over the age of 30, who are isolated within diaspora communities but committed to living in the UK. This is based around three main areas; digital inclusion, positive integration and active citizenship.
Language Testing and Second Language Acquisition Research: Worlds Apart
I started asking around and realized I was not the only language-learning advocate surrounded by test developers and assessment gurus who seemed to be “speaking another language.”
Learning on Rails
It’s possible that we’ll discover that providing the student with highly relevant, engaging content will be more effective than crafting learning experiences on rails (à la our current, item-response-theory-influenced “adaptive learning”).
Equal rights for nNESTs?
In this guest post Marek Kiczkowiak from the blog TEFL Reflections and the TEFL Equity Advocates campaign explores the issue of prejudice against non-native English speaker teachers and issues a plea for a more egalitarian approach to hiring teachers, placing more emphasis on skills and qualifications than on mother tongue.
Why it’s OK for Facebook to manipulate us (but not for EdTech companies?)
Is adaptive learning ethical? Is it OK to experiment on one set of learners to improve results for another? Do EdTech companies have a higher duty of care to their users than regular businesses?
What publishers and writers can do about piracy right now … and in the future
If you haven’t already read Nick Robinson’s excellent post on ELTjam about book piracy and the lively conversation it’s started, go check it out. To sum it up, just about every ELT textbook that’s ever been published (including mine) have been ripped off by pirates and put on innumerable free PDF download sites all over the Internet. The conversation has branched off in many directions: Is piracy really that bad? Is copyright law generally a moral thing? Are authors totally screwed? And so on. One thing I think hasn’t been addressed fully is what we can do to limit piracy or make it work for us. Expanding on suggestions I’ve made in comments on the original post, why can’t some of these things be done?
5 things we need to know about BIG data
When it comes to buzzwords you don’t get much bigger than ‘big data’. Here are a few notes that might help us navigate the topic …
Interview with a publisher Pt. 3/3
And so my interview with John Tuttle draws to a close with this final instalment. So far we’ve covered the evolution of the ELT industry and the how the role of publisher will continue to develop, and what the future may hold for ‘guru’ authors and the new generation of content writers. Now our conversation turns to adaptive learning and what lies ahead in the world of EdTech …
Interview with a publisher Pt. 2/3
In the previous instalment of our interview with former Deputy MD of Cambridge University Press, John Tuttle we talked about how the ELT publishing industry has evolved and some of the factors that have contributed to that evolution. In this post, our conversation turns to the role of the author in ELT publishing and how that might change over time.
Interview with a publisher Pt. 1/3
In all of the recent debate on this site about the future of ELT, the voice of the ELT publisher has often been noticeably absent . With this in mind, we thought it would be interesting to get the views of a board-level ELT publisher to get their reaction to the conversations taking place about and around them. In this first instalment John Tuttle, until recently the Deputy Managing Director of ELT at Cambridge University Press, tells us about the evolution of the ELT publishing industry and some of the common misconceptions surrounding its key players.
Infographic: Startup Weekends
In advance of the Cambridge EdTech Startup Weekend that ELTjam is co-organising with Cambridge Judge Business School, we’ve put together a catchy infographic to explain what happens at these events.
The evolved uni classroom
Following on from his post ‘Me and my iPad‘, Phil Wade shares his experiences of working in a university classroom laden with tech.
Six Cool Tropes in ELT EdTech
Note: it has been more than three years that I stopped blogging at my site Six Things. But I was sitting in a conference the other day and I promised to myself: if I hear that trope or see that image one more time I’m gonna have to blog about it. Well, guess what? It … Read more
Cambridge EdTech Startup Weekend
ELTjam is collaborating with Accelerate Cambridge in organising the first ever Cambridge EdTech Startup Weekend
The Future of ELT
It was interesting to be at IATEFL this year, the annual land grab for attention larger than ever, and a conference dominated by discussions, presentations and a plenary about the future of ELT, which – it is suggested – will be completely mediated by technologies (more of this fallacy later). With Sugata Mitra selling his … Read more
EdTech Accelerator Series: McGraw-Hill
Following on from our previous posts on Pearson’s Catalyst incubator and Kaplan’s joint initiative with TechStars, this week we’re taking a look at another publisher-turned-accelerator sponsor.
Self-publishing in ELT (Part 1)
My recent post on whether ELT brands had become more important than ELT authors generated lots of interesting discussion in the comments, and a few things in particular jumped out: Jason R Levine: … in the age of education 2.0-3.0, have the ELT teachers, content creators, and curators become more important? Eric Roth: Given the … Read more
