Blog
Learning without Frontiers & BETT
Posted by irislapinski on January 31st, 2011
2011 has been off to a furious start here for us at CDI Europe: in the first week we were lucky enough to be involved both at Learning without Frontiers as well as BETT.
At LWF we had the honour of speaking right after Karen Cator, Director, Office of Educational Technology, US Department of Education. Pretty nervous, but well-prepared, I climbed the stage which I shared with two of our students, Amarah (13) and Ahmed (23). They did amazingly well in front of an audience of nearly 1,000 people to share our current thinking on what we are about and what we are trying to achieve. I won’t write it all up here, but if you want to know what we are all about just watch the video:
Once I had given my speech I could relax and really listen to the great speakers Graham had lined up. Speakers as well as delegates at LWF seemed to fall into two groups:
- People who are using technology to improve, but equally sustain traditional learning models
- People who are using technology to re-invent learning and challenge traditional learning roles.
While there are justifications for both approaches, I obviously got more excited about the latter. But then, at Apps for Good, we are currently not restricted by the ICT curriculum.
There were many things that resonated with me: Keri Facer speaking about the importance of embedding technology practice in communities and Lord David Puttnam speaking about the need to increase productivity in learning rather than class hours. This is currently one of the things we are investigating as part of our work to continually refine and improve the Apps for Good course. Towards the end, Jimmy Wales spoke about scale as a key challenge for learning initiatives and again this felt very familiar as we are now gearing up to scale significantly over the next few months.
It was inspiring to see how many teachers are passionate about technology and education. I was only annoyed that I had not mentioned our plans to opensource our full content via an online platform during the course of this year to allow anyone anywhere to run their own Do-it-yourself Apps for Good course. If I had, I wouldn’t have had to explain this 20 times afterwards….
But now I know that people from Australia, to the US and UK would find it useful – and that’s a huge motivation for me.
Nominet Trust grants funding to launch Apps for Good open source platform in 2011
Posted by katiefyfe on December 22nd, 2010
Good news! We are thrilled to announce that after the success of our first year, and lots of hard work, CDI Europe has been awarded £150,000 from the Nominet Trust to build an online open-source education platform that will allow organisations anywhere in the world to run their own Do-it-Yourself Apps for Good courses. Our vision is to create a platform that is used by hundreds of partners and thousands of young people over the next few years, and we are very grateful to the Nominet Trust for their support.
So what is the Nominet Trust? The Nominet Trust is a UK charity that provides support to organisations who are contributing to an accessible, safe and diverse Internet used to improve lives and communities. It is passionate about supporting imaginative uses of web technology that help to solve social problems.
Dell remains our key strategic partner for Apps for Good, and have granted us a Dell YouthConnect award of £300,000 to continue our Apps for Good programme in 2011. Dell has been a strong supporter of CDI and Apps for Good from the start (Michael Dell even tweeted about us recently!) so we are very happy to be continuing our partnership with them.
Droidcon & Royal Society Study “Computing in Schools”
Posted by irislapinski on November 9th, 2010
The past few weeks have been really busy – you should have a look at the Apps for Good blog to see a summary of all the different ideas pitches and dragons’ den events.
Kevin from Novoda also invited the Apps for Good students to attend Droidcon and to speak about Apps for Good. You can find my presentation here below, and while the first few slides are pretty much a standard introduction to CDI, the final slides are not: we have been learning so much about specific problem solving and specific solution design that I don’t even know where to start.
We will be writing about this more, but basically if you cannot find 3-5 people with names, faces and real lives who have a specific shared problem, you have no market. We have been taking some inspiration from the guys at Strategyn and a lot of practical expertise from our experts, and will share more of that very soon.
xxx
Beyond Droidcon, Richard and I have been busy working on our first official policy position in response to the Royal Society’s Call for Evidence about Computing in Schools. Since Richard has had several years experience teaching ICT in schools and we are now running Apps for Good at Central Foundation Girls’ School, we thought we might add some unusual and radical thoughts to the debate. We would love the hear what you think about it! 
OpenTech 2010
Posted by irislapinski on September 12th, 2010
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of presenting at Open Tech 2010 in London (Thanks, Sam!), where developers, policy analysts, opendata activists and everyone passionate about opening up government data to the public attended.
Jeff Gilfelt, developer mentor of the Stop&Search team at the first Apps for Good course, presented his ASBOrometer app as an example how data.gov.uk data can be used.
The MySociety community spoke about quite a few of their new projects including FixMyTransport; and then there were Emma & friends from RewiredState and Laura from FrontlineSMS. It was an inspiring day and interesting to see how many different people work in this field now or get excited by it.
Apps for Good has a broader remit than government data, but I’m sure that sooner or later students on the course will be passionate about ideas that require public data, so it was good for me to make more links and to meet some familiar faces.
My presentation focused on CDI and the key learnings from the first course. It became very clear to me during the day, that there is one thing everyone who is serious about solving civic problems needs to keep in mind: unless you are a genius like Steve Jobs, most disruptive innovations emerge when you ask the people most impacted. Stop & Search came about because Aaron, Sat and Gregory had real life experience of how it feels being stopped as a young man in difficult areas in South London – which often does not apply to white, middle-aged and middle-class developers [no offence!].
I think the strength going forward lies in combing diverse skills and life experiences on an equal and respectful footing. Then, true disruptive innovation can flourish… OK, enough preaching…
I have been told that there will be an audio recording. Once I get hold of it, I will update this post.