The Future of Technology in Education

This day-long seminar, held in the Royal Geographic Society in Kensington, London. England. Europe.

I do like Kensington.... I aspire to being able to afford a view over Kensington Gardens, but realise that mere mortals will only ever be able to walk through it occasionally.

Anyway, Dr Paul Miller from 'Cloud of Data' helped dispel some myths about Cloud computing. I'm curious to know if the audience are the right one for this. Are they IT Managers, or tech-savvy educators trying to integrate more technology in the classroom and the learning process? And how related will this be to education, as opposed to technology? I imagine that those of us who know already, knew... and those who didn't... are now wiser, but it isn't really going to affect their day-to-day job.

Simone Brunozzi, Technology Evangelist Europe, Amazon Web Services is now talking. He refuses to give his email address as, I guess rightly, it will be clogged by conference delegates asking for a job or help with technical problems with their server configuration or a great new idea they have for a product. But not a bad job he has... something, again, I could aspire to.

But this whole morning is talking about 'Cloud Computing'.... so now they're talking about, surprise surprise, Amazon Web Services.... and all the various services... Simple Storage Service (S3), Import/Export, CloudFront, Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Virtual Private Cloud, Simple Queue Service (SQS), Simple D8, Elastic MapReduce and Mechanical Turk.

I'm sure Simone is excellent at his job... and gets people singing in the aisles when he starts evangelising. Problem is he's talking techie. Now that's never pretty, and I know I'm not the only one who has half-switched off and started surfing the greater Interweb while only occasionally looking up to see if he's moved on from differentiating EC2 and S3 and BBC and whatever.

And essentially he's only talking about security. Is this the concern of most people? They trust Amazon and Microsoft and Google more than their own in-house IT team (remember, most people here are not techies)?

I think he's missed the point.

The main issue against going on the Cloud is when your internet connection fails. What do you do? You're on a bus, train, plane? In a tunnel, in the countryside, in an 'unconnected' country? Suddenly you can't access your files. So, what data should be included and what data should not? At what point must you accept that occasional connection failures are merely slowing you down in the way that slow computers did before?