The online marketing company vStream have set up The Digital Marketing School to be a free online video resource for anyone who has an interest in the world of digital marketing, from a beginners level, right up to seasoned professionals. It’s the first time in Ireland that SME’s, and in particular start-ups, will have an online consultancy resource, that’s absolutely free of charge.

The lessons are short and to the point. Today I have learned about the basics of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), Display Advertising and VSEO (Video Search Engine Optimisation) from Andrew Jenkinson and about Viral Video from Niall O’Driscoll and all of this in only 2 – 3 min lessons. It definitely beats standing in a classroom for an hour.

I love the idea of people sharing their knowledge and I strongly believe that people like Niall O’Driscoll and Andrew Jenkinson who are experts in their domain and passionate about their work are the best to teach about Digital Marketing.

I would like you to take a moment now and think back in time and remember your college experience when you really loved maths or biology or any other subject. Now try to remember the lecturer: his way of teaching and the way he spoke about the subject. How many of you remember the subjects and the lecturers because of their passion for what they were teaching?

In today’s schools we have lecturers teaching entrepreneurship without ever being an entrepreneur, marketing without ever working as a marketer, programming without ever working as a programmer and the list can go on.

I really believe that we should learn from people like Andrew and Niall and people like them should be invited to teach the students in today’s secondary schools and universities.

What are your thoughts on this? How could we get more career people to offer their time and teach about their passion?

Photo from IDEO

Is the way we educate keeping pace with the changing needs of the marketplace? Are we creating graduates with the right skills for the 21st century? There are some good signs in the work we’ve been doing with the industrial design programme and industry here at IT Sligo and in other initiatives around problem-based learning. In a recent article from Metropolis magazine, IDEO summarises ten tips based on their Design for Learning efforts for the 21st century classroom.

I particularly like the call to stop calling creativity, collaboration, communication, empathy, and adaptability ‘soft skills,’ as if they were a bonus as opposed to a necessity. I’ve argued before that creativity can be taught, and certainly when it comes to ideas, the ability to come up with ideas is nothing without the ability to communicate them, or work together to commercialise them.

How do we begin to measure and evaluate process as well as outcome?

Read IDEO’s Ten Tips For Creating a 21st–Century Classroom Experience

A group of students from MIT Media Lab in Long Beach California, transformed the Internet into a ‘Sixth Human Sense’. They developed a wearable computing system which can turn any surface into an interactive display screen. The system relies on a webcam as an input device and a small projector with a mirror as the output device.

Here are only some of the functionalities of their system:

• Creating a frame by using your fingers tells the camera to take a photo.
• You can project the photos that you took on any surface and use your fingers to browse through them, rearrange them or resize them.
• You can browse through menus.
• You can search locations on a map.
• You can draw on a wall just by using your fingers.
• You can even call your friends by dialing their number on the palm of your hand.
• On the way to the airport you could check if your flight is delayed or not.
• You could know the time just by drawing a watch on your wrist.
• You could project information about any person you meet.
• And even watch a video of the news that interest you in the newspaper.

If you want to find out more and see how the system works, here are two videos that show its functionality:

Students transform the Internet into ‘The Sixth Human Sense’ – Video1

Students transform the Internet into ‘The Sixth Human Sense’ – Video2

The most important part of the forum was the closed conference that brought together 60+ Ministers of Education representing countries from all around the world. This conference was about the next steps that countries need to take in order to include technology in their education systems. This was a disappointing session, as we witnessed ministers playing a game of ‘Show and Tell’ instead of trying to figure out answers to their problems. We have heard a lot of aims and ambitions and everybody was talking about ‘what we should do’, but no strategies or promises have been made.

The main issues on everyone’s agenda was changing the curriculum in order to fit the student’s needs and training teachers in order to understand technology better and adapt easier to the student’s needs. My question here was: have anyone asked the students what their needs are?

Another question that was raised was: ‘Who should be in the driver’s seat? The Industry or the Education System?’ The answer I’ve heard in this forum was: The Education System. Now let’s think about it for a moment, in today’s world technology evolved; the society evolved; but education didn’t.

Ricardo Semler was one of the guest speakers in this event and he managed to prove this point by asking a simple question: Why do children have 3 months of summer holiday? Because it’s too warm, because they need to rest or is it because ages ago, when this education system came in place, students had to help their parents during the summer holiday with the field work? We all know that this is not the case anymore and after two weeks of holiday children need to be entertained.

Ricardo also came up with a really innovative education system that is having really good results in three schools from Brazil. This system is based on a matrix of knowledge which the students are free to explore and they are the only ones that decide which subjects they want to dig into and which they want to learn on a basic level. This system is based on negotiating with the student on a base of two months projects that they could engage in. The whole idea of the system is to involve the student in his education planning. This approach will give the child more confidence and motivation and will allow him to be more innovative. The usual lecturers will become mentors and the classes will be taught by passionate professionals which will be employed only on the duration of the project.

All in all, the event was a really good experience which allowed me to better understand the way decisions are being taken at a really high level and the direction that the education system will be taking the next few years.

Scotland has appointed the country’s first education design champion. His job? Promote good design of schools. Paul Stallan quickly steered the discussion from lack of budgets to lack of vision and innovation. “A good environment for young people in formative years of their lives is fundamental. They should be encouraged to go to school. Design can address all this.”

He also highlighted the example of Fuji Kindergarten in Tachikawa, Tokyo, Japan as a shining example of school design. (There is little English on the site, except for their user-centred educational policy: “Kids first. Help me do it myself.”)

‘Place’ is a fundamental pillar of any great organisation and I am reminded of one of my favourite quotes on the subject.

Space matters. We mean by this that the physical environment in which an organization works is not simply a neutral backdrop. A workspace supports, enables, or constrains what takes place in it.

James P. Hackett, President & CEO, Steelcase Inc.
Scottish schools are ‘sick’ says education design tsar
Monocle: Fuji Kindergarten report

For the second year in a row, the Centre for Design Innovation has partnered businesses with the fourth year industrial design students at the Institute of Technology Sligo on real projects. There are multiple benefits for both industry and student.

The students begin the year by forming four-person teams. Instead of jumping into the work, they first take the time developing a brand for their group.

Students (and lecturers) in this picture are doing preliminary research with Connacht Gold, complemented with user research to better understand attitudes and usage of milk and butter. In six weeks, they will have gone from brief, research, concepts to final prototypes of potential new products.

Now that is problem-based learning.

The Institute of Designers Ireland has published Why Design to give second level students a greater degree of familiarity with design as a study path and as a career. Supported by the Office of the Minister of Education and Science, the guide offers a ‘snapshot’ of design courses currently on offer throughout the island of Ireland; a taste of the richness and diversity of design education at third level throughout the country

Tracy Fahey, President of the Institute of Designers in Ireland, speaking at the launch, commented on the value of sustaining design education in Ireland.

Currently, in Ireland, there is a real impetus towards the sustaining of a research and development culture in Ireland. Design plays a crucial role in terms of innovation and development. A good design education teaches students to problem-solve, to think creatively, to research options, to develop and test designs and to respond to client needs.

Read the press release

Download a PDF of the guide (2.8MB)
or
Download a text-only PDF (214KB)

Regardless of whether you are a designer or not, these two videos are worth 40 minutes of your time if you are a human being.

I haven’t spent a lot of time on the blog, Education Futures, but I stumbled upon the site through the following post (bordering on rant) around designing curriculum (and “design is mentioned 14 times) to be more relevant to students, as well as the use of games for teaching. You may recall another post on this blog about using games.

Games create challenge, purpose, skill implementation, and reading and acting with purpose. If it is a good game, they will play it. And the actions are the assessments. Games assess and evaluate by their very nature. If you do not have mastery, you do not move forward. But the game will also give you help if you need it—no one designs a game that is too hard. So, maybe we should be thinking about games and how we might begin to design and structure instruction and content. We are at risk of losing our kids to disinterest because we are becoming irrelevant in teaching to the minimum standard. We can do better for them.

The world of knowledge and information is at our fingertips and it will be creative skills that are needed to synthesise this information in meaningful ways. We need to create the next generation of design thinkers.