Award Winners

We won the LoS Award last night but the highlight has to have been a hug from the legendary Floella Benjamin and then she announced to the audience that I was "a great hugger". I prefer "hugger" to "bugger" which I have to admit I have been called in the past!

The Best TV Series Ever

An education video produced by my company DLA has been nominated for a Learning On Screen Award. The ceremony is tomorrow so I am busy dusting off the old tuxedo and looking forward to a great evening at the BFI in London.

I am delighted because the video is based on footage from the greatest TV series ever to be made in the UK - Michael Apted’s Up Series, produced from 1964 and still going now. Very little in the world of film and TV has as much to say about the human condition and even fewer works say it so well. It is unique.

I was lucky enough to have some inspired and inspiring teachers at my secondary school who showed us the first three instalments of Up (7, 14, 21) as a part of what was then known as Community Education. It is one of the stand-out moments of my entire school career. The films (I seem to remember they were shown to us from a 16mm projector) and class discussions afterwards are some of the fondest memories I share with my old Clevedon Comprehensive School mates whenever we meet. I think we all try to catch up - every 7 years - with the lives of the Up generation. The Up participants feel like friends, they are part of our circle. I feel like saying the “Us Series”.

  

Lemmy RIP - Motorhead Tribute

One of my favourite videos ever - my nieces in their Motorhead tribute. RIP Lemmy.

How to find video for learning

Just taken part in an online presentation for the ALT Winter Conference, talking about our new Edugraph service. It's a next generation tool for mapping all sorts of rich content for edu purposes at scale. I like it because it combines the best of human intuition and creativity with the latest in machine learning. Launching next year.

The Blackboard Collaborate platform worked seamlessly.

Learn from Hillary

Whatever you think of Hillary Clinton's politics or track record, her campaign kick-off video launched this week is an object lesson in great communications.

Watching some of the lamentable efforts in our UK election campaign makes this even more powerful. First and most importantly it develops and sticks to a simple theme "getting started". That's how all great ads work - one simple message that builds and then delivers. By the time Hillary comes on screen you really get it. By the way it's the oldest rule in the book but surprising how even comms professionals can ignore or forget it.

Second it is completely up front about being inclusive. Commercial advertisers, marketeers and sit-com writers get it that today's America/UK/Europe is diverse - they have to because revenue depends on connecting with as big a part of the nation as possible. UK politicians should stop cowering in their fear of UKIP or the Daily Mail and realise that too.

There you go - no rocket science.

   

The Extraordinary becomes the Everyday

Have a quick look at the video I made for the 20th Online Educa Berlin. It was huge fun going through the archives at ITN Source to find the old newsreels and sci-fi. Also revealing to see how well people were thinking about eLearning - or "Teaching Machines" as they said then - in many of the same ways as we do now in the world of edTech. Back to the Future as they say.

Big Numbers about Africa and Technology

eLearning Africa 2014 in Kampala is coming up. Here's a short piece I wrote about the numbers that make the conference themes and topics so important. Original here.

The big five – your survival guide to the numbers behind the stories

on May 12, 2014

Do you feel bombarded by big data? Or floored by forecasts? Here are eLearning Africa 2014’s Top 5 vital statistics and trend predications. They are the essential background to some of hottest topics we will be discussing in Kampala.

Have we got it right? Let us know what we might have missed – or have you got a killer stat you’d like to share? Comment below!

by Adam Salkeld

1.    Growth in Consumer Internet Traffic in Africa

So much of what we do and hope to do in eLearning is driven by the Internet. Africa will continue to see very strong growth in traffic. If you like big numbers here are some:

2012:  410 Petabytes/Month – That’s 410,000,000,000,000,000 bytes
2017:  2.4 Exabytes/Month – That’s 2,400,000,000,000,000,000 bytes

In case you got lost counting zeros that’s a sixfold increase.

2. Going Mobile

How we access the Internet is changing and increasingly it is via a mobile connection. If you need convincing that mobile learning has potential, look at these latest projections for the spectacular growth of mobile data in Africa. For educators it may well be a case of “follow the user”.

3. Smartphones

Until now smartphone use in Africa has been lower than in other parts of the world. That is changing.  Nearly half a billion African smartphone subscriptions are forecast by 2018. This rise will be driven by better data networks, economic growth and new hardware, such as Microsoft’s 4Afrika handset.

 4. Video

As you will see at eLA 2014, video is one of the most exciting new languages of learning.

The YouTube Generation is alive and kicking in Africa and it is getting stronger all the time. If we look at the projected growth of video traffic on Africa’s Internet, it is huge. Get ready for some more seriously big numbers.

If you prefer, that’s a growth from 230 Petabytes per month to 1.8 Exabytes per month.

5. Youth

Finally, as you arrive in Uganda for eLA 2014 you will be coming to a country with the second youngest population in the world. Only Niger has a more youthful population profile. The average age in Uganda is 15.5 and a staggering 78%of the population is under 30.

Welcome to the Future.

Sources:

Informa Telecoms and Media
Cisco VNI
CIA World Factbook

Note: Forecasts 1 and 4 represent MEA region