PhD Conference at NTNU University, Norway

On the 30^th of March this year the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), held a conference titled: ‘The added value of a PhD – for all sectors of working life’. The audience were mainly: PhD candidates, supervisors and alumni, employees from all sectors including NTNU and other interested parties.

The stated goals of the conference were

• Raise awareness of the added value of a doctoral degree in all sectors of working life.
• Help to boost recruitment of PhDs in the job market through increased insight into the added value of a doctoral degree.
• Strengthen the reputation of our PhDs as highly relevant to society.
• Increase PhDs’ awareness of their own skills, what they can bring to the workplace and the challenges they can help solve.
• Help PhDs improve their ability to market their expertise and the advantage of a doctoral degree over a first degree.

The conference reflected the main focus of the university well. It is a university with a long technical tradition; hence, engineering and science took centre stage. For creatives, you had to look under the radar to connect to the relevance. For me, hearing people’s stories of how their research has influenced the directions their careers have taken; and mingling with others, were the main outcomes. Amongst the attendees there were also people who were doing education research. Mingling was accelerated by dividing the (pretty huge) number of attendees into groups towards the end of the conference for round table discussions. Different tables dealt with different questions. The outcome of the discussions was written down, collected and presented to the whole room towards the end. The tables I attended were composed both of very seasoned people in the higher part of the age-bracket, and younger people. This worked particularly well to widen the perspective of the groups.

What would I like to see in similar conferences in the future? I would love to see a better inclusion of arts and humanities. I do not mean to trouble neither artists nor engineers with the particulars of each other’s interest fields. But people who study learning have something to teach engineers who manage organisations, historians have things to teach anyone who digs deep into any matter, and so forth. And perhaps a final note for a conference in English would be to find a keynote speaker somewhat more fluent in English? ;-)

At any rate, a day well spent by the river in Trondheim while meeting old and new friends over food and round-table discussions.

The conference was held at Royal Garden Hotel Trondheim.
(Image Credit)

ICT in Education Conference

ICT and Education Conference at

Norwegian University of Technology and Science

 

 

Introduction

The National Conference on the Use of ICT in Education and Learning was held in the city of Trondheim, Norway, from the 11^th to the 13^th of May 2016. The conference took place at Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)’s science and technology campus, Gløshaugen. The conference is an event for working teachers, pedagogy students, ICT companies, governmental offices, publishers and researchers/ speakers delivering a packed program of presentations. I spent most of my time looking through the stands, but also had time to attend a few presentations. In this blogpost I’ll highlight some of the things that caught my eyes. It won’t be a complete overview over the whole conference, but in keeping with this blog: the blend of technology and creativity, and also technical education-facilities will be central.

This blogpost will be segmented into two:

1. The post you are reading will deal with publishing, networking, trajectories and reflections around ICT in education.

2. Thesecond post will deal with hardware and physical ICT-related facilities foreducation.

* Links to presentations can be found here.

* Link to conference’s Twitter page can be found here.

Presentation: learning-design in context.

Trends in Publishing

Large Media Companies

National broadcasters NRK (Norway’s version of the BBC) and TV2 have taken a great leap into the education sector by creating online platforms that lets pupils and students tap into the companies’ wells of recorded material. Comprehensive new material has also been created to address the need of Norwegian schools. I have not yet used their platforms, but judging from presentation, TV2 seems to hold the leading edge. The companies are operating as publishers (as opposed to traditional media-companies) when delivering services in the education sector.

Using platforms where extensive video-material covers (at least in the long run) the entire school curriculum has obvious advantages. Topics like modern history and social sciences are perhaps the areas where these platforms are most self-explanatory. However, content for topics like mathematics, science and language also seems to be well developed or under way. I do however, feel that a word of caution is in order. Norway is politically a country that for many decades have embraced left-of-centre politics. This has trickled into its media-coverage, and it’s a well-known fact amongst media-researchers that the media in general covers current events with a slight left-bias. Looking back at my own education it took me many years of travelling and higher studies to un-learn many accepted truths from my school-years that were clearly politically biased, especially in social sciences, but also in history. I’m all for presenting both sides of the story from a neutral middle-ground and if I have one concern with Norwegian media-companies now educating minors, it is an accentuation of an existing political bias. I am not trying to advocate removing certain views from schools, but rather complementing them in a more neutral and holistic sense. Let’s see what the future brings, but for teachers who use these platforms this is currently something one should look out for! To end on a positive note, the tools that have been developed by these media-giants seems packed with interesting content. The companies express a work-in-progress attitude, which tells me there will be more development of content (perhaps also on the delivery-platforms) in the very near future.

Views from around the conference-
area, and the stands.

Other Publishers

BS Undervisning (translates ‘BS Education’) provides a platform for coordinating sales and use of both printed and digital media. They have over 1500 digital learning resources in their catalogue and sports some of the biggest names in Norwegian educational publishing as collaborators. Amongst other things they provide a service that lets you search and link to the online resources that your institute subscribes to. BS Undervisning is part of a larger corporation that provides goods and services for libraries and places of learning.

One of my personal favourites was Norwegian publisher Gyldendal’s stand. Gyldendal had resources, tools for teaching and assessment in one place through their SMART programme. What caught the attention of the music producer in me the most, was that they are now offering guitar-course videos through one of their online platforms. They don’t have immediate thoughts on developing their music-teaching content, but were very open to the idea. As a ‘Sound and Music Production’ lecturer I used Lynda and AskVieo/ MacProVideo for students in vocationally angled higher education. These are great resources as a supplements, and sometimes even as radical improvement from traditional printed resources! It is therefore really good news for the future of music education in schools to see creative and artistic content becoming available alongside theoretical topics. Gyldendal seems to be a publishing house to watch for this sort of development.

Professional Network for teachers
and Online Safety for students

‘Senter for IKT i Utdanningen’ is an organisation that was set up under the Royal Norwegian Ministry of Education in 2010. It can be translated ‘Centre for ICT in Education.’ The centre is there to help lift the quality of ICT use in kindergartens, schools and for pedagogy students. In addition to working with the quality of ICT-education, the centre focuses on internet safety and the training of pupils to exert good judgement in ICT-based interactions. They are one of the initiative-takers behind the webpage and printed material for http://www.DUbestemmer.no/.  ‘Du bestemmer’ translates ‘You Decide’ and is a resource that deals with healthy conduct, law, plus positives and negatives a person encounters when interacting across the internet. The ‘Centre for ICT in Education’ also provides research and initiatives that it goes outside of this blogpost to cover. These include development of regional leadership in the school sector and help with finding the right digital resources for use in education.

‘Klassetrivsel’ is a term that describes how pupils feel (positive or negative) about their class and their social interactions. It is an online tool for teachers that can assess how students feel about their every-day life and social interactions in school. It provides feed-back to teachers that helps them assess and address the experience of being a pupil in their class. It started as a project at a school in 2007, and is now a tool available for all Norwegian schools who subscribe to the service. Their webpage is: http://www.klassetrivsel.no/

Creative Software

Creaza is a platform where you can make mind-maps, video and audio presentations, and cartoons. Let’s say, the teacher shares a mind-map with the students. The students pick up the mind map and follow up with their own research. In the end a multimedia presentation is produced by the students over a topic given by the teacher. The tool is very well geared towards creative responses to assessments and incorporates ICT-skills in a fluid way. The video and audio editors looks familiar for users of Mac-software. I don’t believe tools like Creaza can take the place of reading and writing in a traditional sense, but it is a very diverse ICT-supplement. It is diverse in the sense that it covers all the bases of muli(ple)-media in óne platform — this should make it easier for the teacher, who don’t have to relate to three or four different software-packs but who rather can relate to óne. Creaza has won several awards and I encourage you to:

1) Look at their web-site, as the different tools included in Creaza is described in a very accessible way by clicking on the banners under the ‘Product’ banner. There is also a Creaza-blog that keeps you up to date on news about the software.

2) Look at Creaza’s YouTube user, which is packed with tutorials and examples.

In my own teaching experience, I’ve worked with higher-/ vocational education. We used softwares like Cubase and ProTools which are professional tools from the creative industries. Creaza, as far as I can see, belongs in primary and secondary education. The ICT-skills acquired from Creaza should be easy to transfer to professional platforms when pupils/ students reach a higher level of studies. I believe I would find it easier to train higher-education students who are familiar with platforms like Creaza on professional platforms. Apart from the obvious use in a modern classroom, I can see two other uses for Creaza:

1) Students who struggle to follow regular teaching for various reasons. Creaza is engaging and forces you to create, and not just respond like to a computer-game. It also looks particularly good at creating ‘narratives.’ Work with narratives is no foreign thought in pedagogy or social sciences. In 2012 I wrote about the research of Electro Acoustic composer Louise Rossiter, who explored the use of Electro Acoustic composition as a therapeutic tool for pupils from troubled backgrounds. The results were positive. Creaza is not an Electro Acoustic composition platform, but if used in similar ways I’d expect results pointing in the same direction.

2) Use for adult learners with limited skills, either in: 1) ICT, or 2) the topic of the class (including language). A good example would be for teaching immigrants with limited language and ICT skills, and limited skills on local society. Creaza would combine an intuitive ICT platform, and basic use of language in presentations; while allowing the learner to feel success in making a good product while still not in full command of the language. (As opposed to a presentation where everything is resting on language.) Examples of interaction and aspects of society can be animated in the simple-to-use Cartoonist application.

As this software caught my imagination I’ll add a quick YouTube video just to give you a visual idea of what it looks like:

Trajectories in ICT

New Media Consortium’s (NMC) Horizon Project has published a rapport about the trajectories the use of technology in Norwegian education. The rapport was published in 2013 and covers 2013-2018. It analyses the matter on three time horizons: one year or less, two to three years, and four to five years. The Norwegian rapport is a collaboration with The Norwegian Centre for ICT In Education. NMC have done rapports on several countries. Here is the link to the Norwegian rapport. NMC runs a conference and the website has a blog with their current news.

Is ICT The Way?

ICT is certainly a buzzword in education right now, but can we trust that ICT-tools really can take over for traditional learning tools? I think the answer is both yes and no. A future with more ICT and automatization clearly needs a workforce who is able to address the new tasks. But I’m also worried that we sometimes are over-emphasising the constantly changing technical aspects of the future at the expense of the not-so-changing human aspects of the future.

I guided in the Norwegian mountains for many years and I remember a study from the early 2000’s stating that children who attended ‘outback kindergartens’ (close proximity to outback, and much use of outdoor activities. Norwegian expression is: ‘friluftsbarnehage’) were better at a range of things, including problem-solving than children from inner-city kindergartens. Studies like these remind us that modern society is built on harnessing the potential that exists at the core of creation and of the human mind. Basic inter-human skills will not be addressed sufficiently through online platforms for collaboration, and the future will not be secure for job-seekers in decades to come just because they are proficient at today’s technology. With a growing number of companies not just addressing, but also helping to create demand for new technology in education we have to constantly evaluate whether we are developing the human potential in pupils and students as much as we develop our ICT-skills. I’ll underline this with an example from one of my own areas of study, Music Technology. I go to trade-shows and know several distributors and manufacturers of music production gear. Every year there are new equipment-releases and you’ll be constantly reminded you need the new products to really stay at a current professional level. However, most of the classic albums we teach in music-history classes are more than a decade old, and hence the technology is practically from the stone-age in the world of the technology-manufacturers. But tomorrow’s musicians, music educators and producers won’t be much effective if they can’t play low-tech wooden guitars, collaborate in bands and appreciate the potential in the tools at their disposal. To put it to its edge, I believe in a future where the most adaptable persons can chop down trees for fire-wood, counsel someone in trouble and write with a pencil; while operating technology, making global interactive collaborations and assessing the deployment of the tools they have available.

*

Thanks to NTNU for creating a meeting-ground for an impressive array of educators, researchers and ICT industry! This was more of a meeting-ground and an ideas-exchange, than an academic conference in a traditional sense. I’ll be going back!

Read the follow-up to this post, on ICT-equipment!

ICT in Education Conference — Equipment

This is the second blogpost from the National Conference on the Use of ICT in Education and Learning in Norway, 2016. The first post deals with publishing, networking, trajectories and reflections around ICT in education. This post will deal with hardware and physical ICT-related facilities for education.

* Links to presentations can be found here.

* Link to conference’s Twitter page can be found here.

The event took place at NTNU's
Science and Technology Campus.

Hardware Electronics

‘Senter for IKT i Utdanningen’ had set up two rooms with new technologies that could be used in technology education. As a former FE College Electronics student I took special interest in the Arduino electronics kits. Arduino has made a lot of interesting electronics and a neat manual of circuits. The circuits could be wired to some unusual sensors, such as apples and bananas. The idea being that the fruit contains water, and by touching them you can make small currents flow from point to point by touching the fruit. My emotions about this are mixed. It is no doubt fun, but by the time students become advanced enough to understand electronic circuitry, they might be better off understanding how real sensors work — I have still to see apples and bananas wired up to hub-tops and security systems. However, the electronics was flexible and a good manual with circuits makes it easy to conduct exercises. Even if teachers were to have limited training in engineering.

 

Arduino's manual of electric circuits.

Two of Arduino's trainer-boards can be seen. The left handling
networking and peripherals.

Second Hand Computers and Gear-storage

Arrow Value Recovery had an interesting stand that caught my attention for two reasons:

1) as the name suggests, the company ‘recovers value.’ That is, they specialise in sourcing, refurbishing and re-selling used computer equipment. This means that you can buy well-specked second hand computers at a sensible price, and at a reduced environmental impact.

2) Arrow sells storage systems for tablets and computers. The GoCabby case for smartboards was on exhibition and provided a compact, safe and transport-friendly way of storing and hauling tablets around. This was one of my favourite items from the conference as it isn’t just focusing on learning and technology, but also on providing Teachers and Facilities Officers with good storage solutions.

GoCabby System.

AV-installations

Scandec Systems is a Norwegian company that specialises in sound and multimedia solutions. Their company name brings back memories for old sound-engineers like me as they were the distributor for large format mixers like the DDA Q2 back in the 1990’s. Scandec of 2016 offer AV-installations for everything from large venues to conference-halls and schools. Recently, they’ve added Panasonic’s professional screens to their distribution-portfolio. Other products include the Promethean ActiveBoard and the FrontRow Juno speaker system. They latter they are happy to lend to schools for a two-week period.

Africa

Microsoft won’t need any further introduction, but I was excited to learn about the ‘Microsoft 4 Africa’ initiative as I have a particular interest in creative technologies education in Africa.

Mathematics

Casio had a stand with a variety of mathematics resources and calculators. This is not my specialty area, but as one of my close friend’s work for them I’ll give them a shout. You can learn more from Casio’s education web-site.

*

Missed my main post on this conference? Read it here!

World Intellectual Property Rights Day 2014 in Norway

This Spring I attended a seminar at the Norwegian Industrial Property Office. The seminar was aimed towards film and TV-production. It hosted a range of speakers within the fields of production, distribution and law. The World Intellectual Property Rights Day is a worldwide event and this year’s theme was “Movies – A Global Passion.” Some of the presentations can be seen on Youtube. Here’s a breakdown of the speakers and their presentations:

Per A. Foss, Director General, Norwegian Industrial Property Office (NIPO)

He has a solid academic research career and has worked with business development and licensing before taking up his role at NIPO in 2012. Foss talked about NIPO’s work in general and highlighted their increasing interest in assisting the creative industries, as this is a sector in growth. As a creative practitioner in the Kingdom of Norway having this solid backing and desire to connect from an organisation like NIPO is reassuring. From the mingling after the event it was also clear that NIPO is interested in opportunities to connect with institutions in Higher Education, to help educate prospective creative practitioners. This could include taking part in events, helping with developing curricula and more.

Håkon Briseid, CEO and Producer, MonsterScripted (Vimeo link)
Talked about:

·      Taking an idea through to a product for visual media.

·      What can be patented and what cannot? (with examples of current shows that have fed of each other’s ideas).

·      How to work well with writers and book authors in turning their products into films.

·      How the film and TV-industries have changed over the last decade and how this should affect your approach to production.

·      Where money currently is moving and not moving within the industries.

·      Effective pitching.

 

Hedvig Bengtson, Senior Adviser, Norwegian Industrial Property Office (NIPO)

Hedvig is a Senior Legal Advisor at the Norwegian IndustrialProperty Office. Hedvig provided an overview over various actions that are being taken to fight piracy internationally. Many of the same organisations that work with protecting physical copyright infringements also work with digital infringements. Infringements of copyright to a physical product and a digital product have a lot in common even though they are fundamentally different in nature. Copied digital products are hard to track.

Some organisations working for protection of digital property rights:

·      World Intellectual Property Organization, WIPO (UN). The webpage is a good resource on legal and political matters, and co-operations being done in the area of intellectual property rights

·      The European Observatory on Infringements of Intellectual Property Rights (EU)

·      Global Congress on Combating Counterfeiting & Piracy

·      Norway’s premier University, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) has recently established Norwegian Academy for Intellectual Property

·      4 official organizations working together in Norway:

o   Norwegian Industrial Property Office

o   Royal Norwegian Ministry of Culture

o   The Royal Norwegian Ministry of Justice and Public Security

o   The Norwegian Customs Service

o   There is a lot of information spread around the web. A new web-page will be launched towards the end of 2014. The webpage will provide one location for important information

General:

·      Trend: “Piracy kills music” –this type of campaign has not been efficient [little wonder! An entire culture industry in effect criminalizing a whole generation it wishes to benefit financially from! =my comment=]. Increasingly one is trying to provide a positive angle!

·      UK is good at providing good information about where to legally download (The Content Map)

·      Music Inc. is a music management app where you can see how much revenue is lost from an artist to piracy

·      The Norwegian Industrial Property Office has developed an app where you can search for trademarks, company names and internet domains

·      EU completed a study of how much regular people knew about intellectual property rights

o   10% of the population commits 74% of the offences against intellectual property rights (IPR). These are typically aged 15 to 25 years old

o   IPR-intensive industries provides ¼ of the employment and ⅓ of the economic production inside the EU

Simon Strumse, Filmgrail

Filmgrail is a newly launched app and web-page to help you search for new films to watch in a legal way. Filmgrail is aiming to make people watch more films and not just the same blockbusters over and over. With their simple user-interface they make information about films available to you to help with making quick and informed decisions. The first stage has been an app developed with emphasis on the Norwegian marked, but within a short while they will cover the whole world. The system can be implemented in decoders and TVs. I have mentioned Filmgrail and Simon in a previous blog post.

From the presentation:

·      The old model: First viewing (TV)/ Cinema (Film) -> DVD is still the most profitable. But within a few years streaming will take over

·      95% of film revenue comes from about 5% of all films that have been made

·      Consumer decisions are based on psychology. User-friendliness is more important to the consumer than law

·      Popcorn Time is an illegal Argentinian web-service that has collected a huge catalogue of TV and Film in one place (torrents played through a very good interface). It is very user friendly and supposedly better than Netflix. It has no zone restrictions. This should be a wake-up call to the film industry, why are they not doing the same?

David Smith, Norway Communicates & Lillehammer Foundation for the Arts (LFA)

·      A lot of culture production is happening in Norway, but not much is known abroad

·      Lillehammer International TV Drama Week

·      Recent developments at Lillehammer University College

·      The Royal Norwegian Ministry of Trade, Industry and Fisheries has an emphasis on internationalization:

-> Smith asks the question, what can we do to get Norway to open up to international culture?

[My view is that this question should be asked in reverse, how can we get Norwegian culture into the world? I also believe this is much more in line with the other work Smith is doing, and that there is a lot of unexplored commercial gains in exporting a previously globally unknown culture. As a resident of Singapore and the UK for a many years I know the cultural curiosity we are met with as ex-pats. I also believe that a 1000-year-old Kingdom should allow itself to explore more of its millennial-long history than just the last few decades—which is a topic for another time.]

·      Also mentioning: Vision Norway 2030 [for more click link], Norway Exports, The Rise of the Creative Class [review], talking about Norwegian culture as an ‘experience economy,’ and the concept behind Cultural Crossroads.

·      “When you find the essence of culture, everyone can relate to it.”

=Steven Van Zandt=

Shout

Shout out also to Bernd Otto Ewald for an interesting conversation about Norwegian tourism after lunch! Ewald is a Senior Adviser at the Royal Norwegian Ministry of Trade, Industry and Fisheries.

Norway—culture to capitalize from?
Photo: Harald Haltvik