educational technology

  • Why supposedly boring conference calls are actually amazing

    Where phone and Skype remain the gold standard for one-to-one communication (and learning), many of us find value in conference calls, irrespective of the technology (phone, Skype, Webex, Hangouts…) used. Conference calls may seem as unimpressive or mundane as that other piece of paradigm-changing learning technology, the whiteboard – but that’s the point. They are learning technology that…

    Doc Porter Museum of Telephone History, Houston Texas, USA (Texas.713/flickr.com)
  • Quality in humanitarian education

    Humanitarian education is a huge undertaking. Each year, for example, 17 million trainees learn first-aid skills through face-to-face (FTF) training programmes run by the 189 National Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies worldwide. People of varied educational backgrounds join their local Red Cross or Red Crescent branch because they want to learn how to do…

  • The significance of technology for humanitarian education

    First published in the World Disasters Report 2013: Focus on technology and the future of humanitarian action.  Since the rise of the internet in the early 1990s, the most obvious benefit offered by educational technology has been its potential ubiquity or the ability to learn anywhere, anytime. In development contexts, sceptics have asserted that the ‘digital divide’…