Honeycomb makes debut at NAACE Conference

Many thanks to Doug Dickinson for his contributions regarding web2.0 to the NAACE All Members Autumn Conference 2007 at Cisco Bedfont Lakes, Middlesex on Friday and Saturday.

You can follow the audio of Doug’s presentation via this podcast or download the mp3 file. The presentation ran via a special blog site - a very neat idea that I only wish more presenters would consider.

There was quite a debate at times and this served at least to crystallize some of the key reasons why web2.0 technologies would be beneficial in the classroom - more of this later.

Doug’s introduction was by way of a request to ‘turn our phones on’ so that we could text in our questions during the session that Doug shared via his laptop. Remarkably, apart from my own, all the questions and comments were entirely sensible…

Note to boss - what a useful thing such a Smart Phone would be…(!)

Trying to succinctly sum up the benefits of the wide range of web2.0 tools is actually not always as easy as you might think. One clear concept, however, that Doug discussed was about giving learners greater choices for how they wish to learn. For example, choices about which media and tools they prefer to use as well as when and with whom they wish to work.

After all, won’t pupils that make their own decisions - and take responsibility for their choices - have a greater sense of creative control, ownership and purpose for their learning, no matter what the subject?

The key, as ever, is that software must be easy-to-use, reliable and secure. “ICT must be transparent to the learning” goes Doug’s familiar refrain…

So, with just minutes to go until the end of the session, Doug gave us the briefest of glimpses from the live development version of Honeycomb. However, thanks to the power of thin-slicing, this was already enough to raise considerable interest and several prompt enquiries for further information.

Expect to hear more about Honeycomb very soon…