andy[at]learningpotential.co.uk
Despite it being the school holidays, I’ve had quite a few emails asking why the SWGfL Conference notes have not been made available. I’ve checked the SWGfL site and although the video has gone up, the notes have not. I have asked the grid to do this but, in the meantime, the notes can be found in the Box widget in the sidebar.
UPDATE: SWGfL site now includes the notes.
I couldn’t quite believe they had the right person when the organisers of the South West Grid for Learning ICT Conferences asked me to deliver the keynote speech at the Bristol and Torquay 2009 conferences. After all, previous speakers had included Lord David Puttnam and Professor Stephen Heppell! So it was a great honour to be asked, and a great honour to speak to so many practitioners. The wonderful Tim Rylands was there and I’m grateful to Tim and Sarah for taking a couple of photos of the Bristol event at the University of the West of England.
The title of the talk was “Reasons to be Cheerful” – I wanted to give a motivational, inspirational and practical keynote that avoided pessimism, national targets, government jargon and all the associated educational ‘bullying’ and hectoring that we’re so often inflicted with. I met a great group of performance artists at Glastonbury this year that summed up the gloom merchants perfectly:
British League of Pessimists
Fortunately, the upbeat nature of the presentation seemed to hit the right note (phew!) with some great feedback from delegates and organisers. A big thanks to John, Hilary, Ken, Uta and all the other good folk at the SWGfL for their encouragement and hospitality.
More on the content of the presentation in the next few days when time may allow…
On the day that California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is reported as having said that books for pupils are outdated, it’s interesting to read about the apparent failure of Microsoft’s Philadelphia ‘School of the Future’. The failure of which was due, in part, to the failure of the technology:
“Although the technology itself was not supposed to trump basic classroom practices, Microsoft and the school’s planners had decided not to allow the use of textbooks or printed materials; instead, all resources were located online through a portal designed by Microsoft.Yet educators frequently encountered problems accessing the internet, because the school’s wireless connection often would not work.” [source]
Perhaps Microsoft’s aim was lofty and laudable (to improve education) but it was also a marketing tactic. Schwarzenegger’s aim seems much more financially driven, with the aim of saving hundreds of millions of dollars. If there is a moral to the Microsoft School of the Future failure, it’s that technology in education needs to be robust, appropriate and educationally (not commercially) driven… How will Californian schools, and their pupils, fare?
Well, those were my first thoughts. And, if news of the school’s failure was correct, then I’d probably stick with the conclusion. But that was until I did a bit of searching around the content of the eschool article and, as with all media reports, there’s always a bit more to the story than at first sight. According to this blog from the school itself, “we don’t feel like a failure” and, according to one of the students, “It hurts my heart to hear people call my school a failure because I have already achieved great thing [sic] and I am not done yet! …when I walk down the aisle in June 2010 [to graduate] I will remember this article and further my education to become the best lawyer Philadelphia has seen all because of the School of The Future.”
So maybe the moral is really to remind us that it’s always dangerous to take any media report at face value…
It’s a long time since I was in Norwich so I took the opportunity to mooch around a bit. Pleasantly surprised by the mix of old and new – bus stops with live information displays in the same street as the castle. It’s hard to miss the cathedral so naturally thought I’d pay a visit. A beautiful place and made all the more beautiful by the choral evensong I happened to chance upon. Very restful and peaceful.
More of the ancient and new is mixed in the cathedral’s pretty good website too.
I was in the east for the Norfolk ICT Conference and found myself in the illustrious company of Russell Prue and John Davitt. Lots in both their presentations… but John shared his Learning Event Generator which is now or soon to be available on the i-phone, and Russell demonstrated the power of dedicated school-based radio. A big thank you to Russell for helping solve the random sound problems caused by Vista’s sound system. Note to self, use XP for future presentations… Thanks to Judy in the Norfolk team for all her help too.
Just back from an exciting trip to Istanbul and interested to return and see a report from Ofsted on the The Importance of ICT – will need a day or two to digest it. Still enjoying the ambiguity of this sign outside Hagia Sophia though…
Just been trying out Mippin. Very neat. In a nutshell Mippin is a free service that uses the RSS feed of articles posted on a blog and creates a version that can be viewed on mobile phones.
It creates a Mippin address e.g. mippin.com/andyhutt that’s accessed from a link on the blog page or typed directly into a mobile phone. Could be a great way of keeping parents up-to-date from a class blog, for example.
“OK – hands up if you use the Internet for any of the following: booking flights and holidays; shopping; comparing prices; email; web-browsing; watching BBC programmes with i-player; banking, buying insurance; lesson-planning… My guess is that most of you reading this use the Internet for at least some of these. It’s part and parcel of our lives today. Increasingly, it’s a part and parcel of children’s lives too…”
That’s how I began the first of two short articles on e-safety for Junior Education.
This question of e-safety is playing a lot on my mind at the moment. One, my recent botjacking experience. Two, reading The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. Three, working with trainee teachers on the PGCE programme where awareness and knowledge of Internet risks haven’t been as high as I’d imagined they might be. Indeed, it seems as if it’s going to fall to ICT teachers to be up-to-date on the issues and resources and bring a good understanding of e-safety into schools – will other secondary school departments see it as part of their responsibility? Hmm… Finally, it’s Safer Internet Day!
Lots of materials around to support this and, as so often, some thought-provoking reading on the subject is available at Terry Freedman’s invaluable site, where my recent botjacking experience even gets a mention!
I thought I’d protected my PC pretty well. You know, anti-virus software, firewall, anti-spyware software etc, all updated automatically. But just before Christmas I opened an email claiming to have a Christmas greeting for me from Hallmark Cards. I’d had a few e-cards already and I guess I was used to opening them. It’s at that point that think I let a Bot into the system. Of course, I had no knowledge of it as Bots like to sit there unobtrusively not advertising their presence. It wasn’t until I had an email from myself promising me miracles in the manhood department that I began to suspect something was wrong (with my computer that is!). I’d been botjacked. Not a nice feeling. I’ve since installed a good spam filter at the mail server, ran every malware programme I could find and installed a Bot checker. I think I’ve cured it now but I’ve lost a bit of confidence in the system and I might yet have to start from scratch and reinstall Windows. My experience is not untypical, a friend has just had the horror of finding his business blog hacked into and, beyond the anecdotal, it’s estimated that there are at least 150m Bot-infected PCs.
That’s why it’s been very timely to be reading “The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It” by Jonathan Zittrain. The book’s a very readable account of the development of the Internet – and the PC. According to Zittrain, both are “generative” i.e. they are adaptable, freely configurable and therefore capable of unexpected development and innovation. The trouble is that all of this is under threat from the kind of attack I’ve just experienced and, if this level of threat continues, we might all be forced into ‘tethered’ locked-down devices that don’t have ‘generativity’. Doesn’t sound too bad at first but the book argues compellingly that ‘tethered’ devices have their own dangers for individual and collective freedoms, which is why the ‘generative’ Internet has to be maintained. A recommended read as is his (longish) lecture:
Always exhausting but always somehow invigorating, BETT’s a chance to meet up with old and new friends, see some new things, and mix the social and the business. I spent much of the week working with RM on its Shaping Education for the Future programme – speaking at a couple of seminars and supporting the exhibition area.
RM Shaping Education for the Future
So, I didn’t get a chance to see as much of the show as I’d like but there’s never enough time anyway. Maybe we need a permanent educational exhibition area along the lines of the National Self Build Centre?
How did I get to December without updating this blog? Just too busy I guess (excuses, excuses…) with starting teaching at university on the PGCE teacher training course, writing the content for a new site supporting schools with the Primary Capital Programme, regular writing articles on ICT in education, supporting schools on the new Diploma qualification, and training on Learning Platforms and Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs). Oh, and trying to lead a life…
Looking back on the past few months reminds me of those time lapse films where time is condensed into a few seconds. It’s something that can be easily done with the simplest of technology. I even wrote a short article for Scholastic’s Junior Education on it a while ago.
I’ve just remembered this video that shows time flying by:
Maybe I’ll need to make a New Year’s resolution to slow down the time lapse effect…
