Education and the Internet of Everything: Live Update from the IoT World Forum

We’re here at the Internet of Things World Forum with over 800 delegates in a very wet Barcelona. This morning, Chris Yapp eloquently introduced the uses and potential uses for IoT in education and Jane Alexander blew us away with the innovations at the Cleveland Museum of Art in Gallery One in the first of three education-focused workshops. I was left with a wealth of ideas about how IoT can really engage learners in innovative, authentic and relevant ways.

In the second session, two Barcelona residents discussed some innovative tools to support learners. Muriel Garreta Domingo from the Open University of Catalonia discussed the development of IoT tools that would enable remote learners to feel more connected to the university, their teachers and their peers. Eva de Lera from Raising the Floor then showed how simple IoT devices could be used by any learner to access technology in ways that best suited them by a simple tool that recognised their profile and adapted the user interface. This means a visually impaired learner, for example, once they had swiped their card, would find that their screen rendered text in a suitably large font.

At the end of the session I launched the white paper – Education and the Internet of Everything: How Ubiquitous Connectedness Can Help Transform Pedagogy – that I wrote with Jim Buchan and Ana Sepulveda from the Cisco EMEAR education team, the content of which we discussed in a recent blog post, and showed the accompanying video (below), which was really well received. The paper picks up a number of the themes that were talked about today and will be talked about tomorrow at the final session in which Paul Lefrere and Ajay Krishnan explore some of the tools and technologies hat will support IoT in education and Lev Gonick will consider how we will need to prepare the IoT workforce of the future.