My first experiments with the Wordle site were with children's reports: these were great, would make brilliant report covers, but alas pupil confidentiality prevents me posting them here! The survey Terry Freedman and I conducted last month of children's use of technology outside school produced some great, if non representative, quantitative data, but also a fair number of qualitative responses which a former mathematician such as myself struggles to analyse. Wordle to the rescue! Here are the clouds generated from the five main write-in questions. I think they make very interesting reading. Do note the significance of games in all these! Give examples of things you have learnt using technology that are not related to school work.

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It was an honour, once again, to be asked to present alongside Terry Freedman for the BCS Education and Training Expert Panel at BETT this year. Our previous presentations had looked at the e-strategy, web 2.0 and personalised learning through technology, so how to follow that? We’ve both become increasingly interested in the area of informal learning through technology, ie that beyond the formal school curriculum, an area which we’d touched on briefly last year but had failed to do justice to, so that looked like a good area to focus on, especially as it would provide an interesting contrast to much of the curriculum based resources on sale outside the seminar theatre.
Terry had gleaned some statistics from his wide ranging reading, had some results from his own social networking survey and a few illuminating case studies. I’d done a fair bit of reading round the subject over the past few months, which remains a fascinating one, and had dusted down my statistical background to number-crunch the results of our own google based survey from the end of last term, which collected close on 1000 unique, valid responses. Although our sample was far from representative, it was interesting to see some of the differences between the ways boys and girls use technology, as well as the enthusiasm with which children engage with technology for communication and entertainment. We concluded with a few thoughts on the implications of our findings for work in schools: moving children from communication to collaboration and from consumers to creators of culture.

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The Open Source Schools presentation at BETT on Saturday 17th January was very well received, with good numbers joining the team in Olympia's Club Room, despite the early start. I introduced the presentation, outlining what open source means as well as exploring some of the advantages which it offers to schools; I also spoke about Moodle (much to Ian Usher's surprise) and the Open Source Schools community. Michelle Walters talked about Open Office and some of the ways which teachers could get started with open source. José Picardo talked about the Audacity audio editor and Doug Belshaw discussed some of the many ways in which he's using Linux powered netbooks in his school. It was a great pleasure to work with such wonderful people on this. Audience members took Ubuntu and OpenEducationDisc CDs away with them so they could try open source software out for themselves.

The presentation was filmed in association with BBC Backstage and Learn4Life, with Leon Cych of Learn4Life doing excellent work editing this footage for the Web. Leon's also written about the presentation over on his site.

Video at http://blip.tv/file/1688600

It was a great joy to attend my first ever teachmeet at BETT last Friday. Ian Usher, Drew Buddie, Leon Cych and many others had done an outstanding amount of work to make the evening the success it undoubtedly was, not least through securing some significant sponsorship to keep the drink flowing freely.

The evening was a gathering of the ed-tech clan, or at least its paramilitary wing: really good to see so many old friends all gathered together in such a relaxed atmosphere, and a great treat to meet other folk, known through their blogs, tweets and podcasts, face to face for the first time. As with many a conference, the joy of the unconference was the conversations around the tables, and indeed in back channels like twitter, but that’s not to detract from the presentations themselves.

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After feedback from its own community, Becta and a number of other stakeholders, the AlphaPlus team behind opensourceschools.org.uk invited me to take over the website, so guess how I’ve spent most of my Christmas holidays!

The idea now is to make it much easier for anyone to create content for the site, to reflect the community driven aims of the project. There’s a blog-like front page, which I’m hoping the community there will regularly create content for, and I’ve streamlined the original forum areas. I’ve also brought in headlines from a few aggregated news feeds, worked on the navigation and set up email notifications, although this latter has not been without its problems. All feedback gratefully received.

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Terry Freedman and I are presenting for the BCS at the BETT show next January, with the above title. We’re going to be exploring some of the ways that young people are using technology outside of school for informal learning, such as social networking, digital photography and video, games and perhaps even blogging, drawing some comparisons with more formal learning inside school and looking at some of the implications of the former for the latter. It’s a huge area, and I know our allotted 45 minute will hardly let us scratch the surface (a problem we’ve encountered in our BETT presentations before…), but it’s fascinating reading some of the existing research in the field, and we’re looking forward to selecting a few illuminating case studies.

Anyhow, as well as the literature review and case studies, we’d like to collect a little quantitative data of our own, and so have assembled a Google-Form based survey, which we’re hoping teachers (and parents) might find 10-15 minutes for pupils to complete online. The survey’s at http://edtechuk.net/ .

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Terry Freedman and I are busy using google docs and skype to plot our presentation for the BCS at BETT on ‘What are they learning whilst you’re not looking’. I’m really enjoying using this as an excuse to read up on some of the academic research into the, for me, fascinating field of young people’s informal learning and use of technology away from school. My most recent find being a paper produced for Becta in March with the above title by Sue Cranmer, John Potter and Neil Selwyn.

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It was a great privilege to be invited to join the head teachers of Islington’s Education Action Zone for their sixth-monthly gathering. Despite the differences between their contexts and my own, my presentation on ‘personal learning journeys’ was very well received, even if I didn’t get through half my slides because of the interesting conversations the first half had provoked. Sandra Crapper, who’s The Zone’s ICT Consultant, followed on, giving a brilliant, concise briefing on the national picture.

One area that came up in both her and my sessions was the promise held by real-time, online reporting, as maintained secondaries are expected to have in place by 2010, with primaries a couple of years later. The opportunities which virtual learning environments present for giving parents access to their children’s learning in real time are hugely exciting ones, but I’m not absolutely certain that this has all been thought through with enough care.
It’s fair, I think, to say that what the government have in mind is actually not that exciting. I was re-reading Leadbeater’s splendid Personalisation through Participation (2004) in advance of my presentation, and it struck me that of his five stage plan:

A more customer-friendly interface with existing services

More say in navigating through services

More direct say in how money is spent

Users as co-designers and co-producers of a service

Self-organization: the public good emerging from within society

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A while ago now, but I did enjoy my visit in Half Term to BAFTA for Stephen Heppell’s ‘Be Very Afraid 5’, a celebration of outstanding use of ICT from schools around the country, set out much like a trade fair, but with the stalls manned by each school’s students, who’d happily engage the great and good of UK EdTech (and one or two issued invitations in error, such as yours truly…), in conversation about their projects and all they’d learnt through them. As well as bumping into folk like Terry Freedman, a personal highlight was approaching BAFTA’s burly security guard with the words, “Be very afraid”! Continue Reading »

After exploring the artistic side of teaching, I suppose it’s only fair to redress the balance and look at teaching from a scientific perspective. A post form ‘the frustrated teacher’ a few months back explored this distinction and came down strongly in favour of seeing teaching as an art: I love the idea of ‘Double the pay, and see who shows up!’
Coming at teaching from the other perspective does make some sense though, and I think that the move to evidence based practice in medicine and social policy might yet be followed by a greater respect for research evidence in teaching too. There was a wonderful CalTech commencement talk by the great Richard Feynman on cargo cult science, a term he coined to refer to research which looks like science but lacks the scrupulous integrity essential to the scientific method - he cites educational research as an example here. Well, I don’t know that this is necessarily the case, but just because it’s difficult to conduct educational research scientifically doesn’t mean that regard for scientific method and basing practice on evidence isn’t of value.
It’s perhaps worth teasing out a few aspects of the scientific method and exploring how they relate to educational research and teaching.

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