FOTE at Imperial College

I went along to the FOTE event yesterday. FOTE is a one-day conference aimed at looking into the technologies, trends and core drivers that will impact the academic sector over the next 18 months to 3 years. The agenda was really good inckluding presentations fro the commercial and education sectors that covered and broad range issues like Cloud Computing, Social Media in education, Shared Services, Internet Video, 21st century skills & learners.

So here are the sessions that I found of particular interest. Well naturally I found the work being conducted in Second Life by Pauline Randall of Virtual-E particularly interesting and there were some innovative approaches coming through you like to take a look at their website. Google were represented by Sam Peters who explained the search engines vision for Cloud Computing, using their growing array of on-line applications, which will certainly find a place in many sectors of education, least not those were there is a need for low spec mobile cloud type devices. Though I am not an Apple user, my only experience seems to be centered on the act of closing down i-Tunes from the family PC once the kids have finished their Homework! I was impressed by John Hickey from Apple, when he presented the coming I-Tunes U, which it seems is going to be a free resource rich repository of links and content, look forward to that one.


The last presenter of the day was Alistair Mitchell from Huddle.net. If you have yet to hear of Huddle and it was new to me, then its basically a web based application that provides a collaborative file sharing workspace that encourages us to make use of the best of the and new application. On their website they do say that its free to get started so I guess must be worth giving it at try.

And last though by no means least Tom Abbott from the University of Warwick demonstrated a really impressive in-house live capture blog

The event was hosted at Imperial College, and needless to say it was a very nice and enjoyable day.