15 Ways To Make an Educational Technology Project Successful

How can you make an educational technology project successful? In a sense, the fact that it's to do with ICT in education is irrelevant. There are some generic 'rules' which ought to be abided by.

By ‘project’ I do not mean work given to students, but the kind of research or experimentation that all good institutions should encourage.

It's always good to have an end date in mindFor example, you may want to see how using a ‘voting system’ might help to increase children’s capability in mental arithmetic.

In my opinion, your project must:

Address at least one aspect of your school development plan

There are two main reasons for this. Firstly, as a matter of principle, if the school has a development plan then all school activities should be related to it in some way. If the school development plan doesn’t address things which some people think it should, the ideal situation would be to change the plan over time rather than just ignore it.

However, there shouldn’t be too much trouble linking any ICT-related project to the plan, because ICT can help to achieve almost any educational goals!

Secondly, anything that is perceived to be irrelevant to the school development plan risks losing support, be that financially or otherwise.

Be cost-effective in both financial and economic terms

One of the big problems with technology in education, as I see it, is that it’s very easy to get carried away with the technology. Here’s a case in point. There’s no doubt that a video conferencing system costing many thousands of pounds or dollars will yield much better results, and be able to do far more, than a webcam that comes built in to a laptop. But are the benefits good enough to justify the additional financial outlay? That’s the key issue: not whether the system itself is good, or even whether it represents good value for money (which is mainly a financial matter), but whether the additional benefits of the superior system justify the additional costs.

Be cost-limited

What I mean by this is that it’s very easy for educational technology to suck up more and more resources. Suddenly, the amount of paper being printed out has doubled, because everyone ‘must’ have a manual. Or there’s an optional extra that would make the project so much easier to carry out. Or that free software bundled with the equipment is OK, but the premium upgrade does so much more.

Because of all these – very good – arguments, I would strongly advocate setting a ceiling on the amount of money that will be spent on the project, and stick to it, unless a compelling case can be made to exceed the allocated budget. Because it’s hard to make a compelling case to yourself and then reject it if necessary, you need to have a group of people overseeing the project rather than just yourself. This is covered next.

Have more than one teacher involved

I think all of us have a tendency to get carried away on a pet project, sometimes to the extent that you can start to lose sight of what you’re actually trying to achieve. That’s why it’s good to have two or three people involved, and preferably not all teachers of ICT.

Have a named leader

Even if you don’t like the term ‘leader’, someone has to be named as the person who can account for the money spent, report on the outcomes, and recommend where to go next with the project.

Be consultative, ie not doing to, but doing with

It’s important that the group of people concerned with the project have a collaborative approach. In my experience, that’s by far the most likely way to generate good ideas and, at the risk of sounding clichéd, help everyone concerned to feel a sense of ownership.

Be time-limited

Projects can sometimes have a tendency to go on and on to no discernible purpose. I think there has to be a cut-off date by which a final report will be made. At that point, the question of whether the project should continue can be addressed.

Have targets and milestones, one of which address dissemination

Personally, I think the language of ‘targets’ and ‘milestones’ is ugly – which is why one of my presentations at BETT – Driving Your ICT Vision: how might advanced motoring techniques help us achieve our ICT goals? – will be about a different sort of approach to planning; look out for an article about that soon. Nevertheless, you must be able to say things like “X will happen by such and such a date, Mrs Jones will be doing it, and therefore Y has to have been completed by the week before”.

Be properly documented

This may include reporting on a regular basis, say half-termly, and at the end of the project's life. There may also be short briefings to the senior leadership team and others, and even a supporting website.

Be reproducible

For me, one of the key characteristics of a successful project is that other people can do the same or similar thing with their own class. That’s why the projects in the forthcoming free Web 2.0 Projects ebook are so great: ideas that were used with 5 year olds can easily be adapted to work with HE students and, to an extent, vice versa. I’ll be talking about that at BETT too, in a seminar entitled Amazing Web 2.0 Projects: Real projects in real classrooms with real kids!.

Be scalable

I think the hallmark of a good project is that it can be scaled up, or scaled down. In my anatomy of a successful project which I discussed as part of my talk for Classroom 2.0 Live (and which will be appearing here as a series very soon), I made the point that all the underpinning principles applied just as much to a small single classroom project as the kind of large, multi-school project that was the focus of my case study.

And if you think about it, the same is true of the principles itemised in this article.

Have wider benefits

That is, it should benefit a wider group than only the direct participants. I’m thinking here of groups like parents and the wider community, or perhaps other teachers. Clearly, the project could be successful without addressing a wider audience, but there are usually opportunities to ensure that the outcomes will be enriched by the addressing of wider goals.

That is also likely to be remembered when you look for support for your next project….

Be manageable

It’s very easy to underestimate the amount of time a project can take up. It’s also easy to make the administration of the project, such as the reporting procedures, too onerous. I think it would be better to limit the scope of the project, or even defer it altogether, than risk having the whole thing collapse under its own weight.

Be SMART

That is, the objectives of the project should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Time-Related. Well, that’s the theory, anyway. I think there is a danger that the ‘measurable’ criterion can lead people to adopting a tick box approach in which targets are being met, but the actual overarching aims of the project aren’t. You can easily end up with something analogous to Oscar Wilde’s cynic: someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Be reported

At the risk of stating the obvious, if a project isn’t ‘written up’ in some way then it might as well have not taken place for all the good it will do in the longer term. If the memory of the school resides only in its teachers and pupils, then the long term prognosis is amnesia.

The report could take the form of a video, a case study, a more formal evaluation, a dedicated blog – or all of those and more. The key issue is that it’s preserved in some way so that others may learn and benefit from it.

Teaching Yourself Chinese Through the Internet

We are all aware that the “sleeping dragon” has awoken, and that in the foreseeable future people and businesses will have much more interaction with their Chinese counterparts. It will then be sensible – perhaps even necessary – for Mandarin to be one of the Modern Languages studied in school. In the meantime, over the next few days Adrienne Blaser evaluates some websites for teaching yourself the language. These reviews were originally published in Computers in Classrooms.

With various parts of the world changing, language has become a vital exchange between cultures. Bilingualism, the ability to speak two languages, is becoming a common trend. Although many say that Mandarin Chinese is a difficult language, truly the biggest challenge is finding the right place to learn. Since there are so many great sites out there to learn Mandarin, picking the select few was definitely a challenge.

Livemocha

Livemocha has become one of my quick favourites as a free site unless you decide to buy one of their Travel Crash Courses.

When you first come onto the site, its warm coffee colours greet you. Livemocha is simple, clear, and without advertisement for other sites or products. What makes this site special is that it doesn’t just teach you one language; it’s a site for multiples such as Japanese, Korean, English, Spanish, and Portuguese and each having at least a 101 (beginner) and 102 (intermediate) program. Not only are they brain testers, but each course consists of 3 units with 5 or 6 lesson in each unit. That might sound easy, but in a single lesson you must learn phrases, including the pinyin (pinyin is the name for the system that makes it possible to read and write Mandarin Chinese without characters, by using the Roman alphabet), characters, proper pronunciation, and the English meanings, review them, write them, and then speak them.

Speak you say? Yes, this site expects you to practice speaking, by recording it on your computer microphone, then putting it out to the Livemocha public for reviewing. Sure, it might seem like no big deal but once you get a bad review about your tones, you go right back to the lesson to review each sentence, and then do it again.

What truly helps besides seeing the language in its different forms is the pictures. Each phrase has a picture, or in some cases pictures with bubbles to show who is speaking. I find that overall this site is for those starting from scratch who don’t want to be babied and plan to work diligently to learn their selected language. It takes lots of time and hard work because really this is like a college course, you don’t start out from numbers and colours, instead you start from nouns and go to negatives.  

Adrienne explained what this meant, in an email to me. Unfortunately I was unable to reproduce the Chinese characters in HTML, so I have taken a screenshot of her explanation instead:


 

For each lesson besides the required exercises, there are optional exercises for even more practice. In case you’re still looking for options to study, you can make your own flashcards or use ones made by others. Livemocha also offers chatting between language learners, with a handy dandy translator conveniently located on the side. Making friends comes with learning a new language, cultures are blended and bonds are made. I don’t know if I’ll ever meet any of my friends face to face but I can still say that I have friends that live across the world.

This site takes all the methods of learning and puts them together in a manageable way, and I know they are still expanding their site. The opportunity to teach is planned to be going to be available soon. Not only will future teachers be able to practice but they could earn credits or money. Although you must be invited to become a Livemocha teacher, consistently leaving instructive reviews or making helpful flashcard sets boost your teaching score and increase your chances.

Web address: http://www.livemocha.com/

Rating: 5

Adrienne Blaser is 14 years old. She plays tennis, the violin and loves to read. She one day hopes to learn many languages, hopefully one being Chinese, which she is currently teaching herself.

How I started teaching ICT

Full Circle: How I started teaching ICT

Image by Terry Freedman via Flickr

Sometimes people ask me how I made the transition from teaching Economics to teaching ICT. In case you're interested, here's (part of) the story.

In 1986 I was working as what was called a Permanent Unattached teacher in London. Basically, it was supply teaching with a difference. In fact, with two differences. Firstly, it was for at least one term at a time in a particular school, to cover long-term absence. Secondly, it was (in theory, at least), subject-specific. In other words, I was covering lessons in my own subject specialisms.

Although I loved teaching Economics, I was starting to have doubts as to future job prospects in that field. It seemed to me that fewer and fewer schools were offering it as an option, and more and more schools were looking at vocational and business studies courses. I'm not sure if the then government's half-baked notion of teaching economic literacy across the curriculum was a help or a hindrance in the prognosis for Economics. (It's interesting to me, as an aside, how Economics has suddenly become very popular in the mainstream.)

The school I was in at the time was quite forward thinking. It had a suite of computers in the business studies department, which taught word processing. A senior teacher used a computer spreadsheet for helping him work out the timetable.

Now, I had used computers in one form or another since starting my teaching career, but I had used them as a means of enhancing my lessons in Economics (a topic for another article), not as a tool in their own right. Thus I didn't know how to use a word processor or a spreadsheet.

(The school also had a computer club for female staff to learn how to do computer programming. In an appalling act of sexism I was not allowed to join that group. That, too, is a subject for another article.)

You have to bear in mind that in those days the computer programs were not WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get). To make a word bold you had to put a control code before and after it. To centre a paragraph or a heading you had to put a code in the margin. It wasn't exactly intuitive, and you could never be completely sure you'd got it right until you'd printed it off.

The Head of Business Studies, Jane, taught me how to word process. Tony, the Senior Teacher, taught me how to use the spreadsheet. Thanks to them, I learnt enough about using the software to talk my way into my next job, Head of Business Studies and Information Technology.

Eleven years later I was working as an ICT advisor in the same borough. One day, my boss asked me to go down to the school where I'd cut my teeth on word processing and spreadsheets. Apparently, the Deputy Headteacher was trying to devise a spreadsheet that would enable him to analyse and correlate examination results with attendance records and that sort of thing.

I made an appointment through the school secretary, and turned up the next morning. I was shown into the Deputy Head's office. He had his back to me while he desperately tried to clear some papers so I could sit down.

"It's very good of you to come at such short notice, Terry", he said. "Can I get you a cup of tea?"

He turned round to face me and we shook hands.

"Good morning, Tony", I said.

The Big Sweep

Jack Alibi knew how to work. He also knew how to work a scam. Sure, going legit was good, but it took time. Lack of time was something Alibi had plenty of.

The Big SweepHe knew from the wire that the local school was being rebuilt, and that they were looking to put in a heap of technology. As far as Alibi was concerned, selling computers was like a licence to print money.

He staked out the school and got to know the movements of the big cheese, a classy dish who barely looked old enough to have left school, let alone run one. One night he waited in a doorway for her to pass.

As she did he started walking and brought himself up alongside her.

"Hey, honey", he grinned. "How about a little coffee?"

She didn't respond, except maybe her pace stepped up a notch.

Alibi went into phase two of his plan.

"I hear you're looking for high tech stuff. Maybe I can cut you a sweet deal."

She ignored him, but he continued.

"That stuff costs a lot of lettuce. That means less to spend on a fancy office and all the trimmings. Maybe I can help out."

She stopped and glared at him.

"Oh yeah?", she said. "And why would you wanna be helping someone you don't even know?"

"On account that I'm community-minded. Besides, I'd hate to see a classy dame like you being taken for a ride. I can get what you need at a whole lot less."

She remained motionless, but a quick glint in her eye let Alibi know she was interested.

"OK", she said. "Let's suppose I'm interested, which I ain't. But let's be hypothetical. What are you offering, and what's your rake-off?"

Alibi was ready for that: he'd done his homework.

"I get all the tech you need, on a no questions asked basis. Hypothetically. As for me, I work on commission, 5% of the value of the merchandise. That hardly pays my rent. But Like I said, I'm community-minded."

She looked at him like he was something that was tossed out in the garbage the night before.

"Yeah, I can see you're all heart. OK, muscle head, you talk big, but maybe that's all you do? Talk, I mean. My guess is that this ‘merchandise' is old cast-off junk, right? That ain't no use to me. I just took over running this joint, see? I'm the new broom around here, and there's gonna be one hell of a big sweep. No jackass like you is gonna louse things up for me."

"OK, sister, I get the picture, but you got me all wrong. I tell ya, lady, this stuff is so new it uses technology that ain't even been invented yet."

She reached inside her bag. Alibi's hand went instinctively to inside his coat. She pulled out a packet of gaspers, put one to her lips. He lit it for her.

"I tell you what I'm gonna do", she purred. "I'm gonna think about it."

She drew on the butt and let out a plume of smoke.

"Well, I thought about it. No."

"No? How come?"

"Well, Buster, I just remembered the advice my daddy gave me when I was knee-high to a cricket."

"Oh yeah? And what might that be?"

"Never accept suites from strangers."

Thanks to William Denton for his Dictionary of Hardboiled Slang.

This story originally appeared in the September 2009 edition of Computers in Classrooms.

Wasteful Widgets #4: Maps

Like many bloggers, I have a map on site showing where visitors are coming from. Why?

World viewI think there are two aspects to this question: why have a map, and why show it to the world?

On the first issue, it is quite nice to look at one's reach. I have to admit to a little thrill when I see that someone in Borneo, say, has been checking out my blog. And I find it fascinating that I can write something now, sitting here in my home near London, England, and seconds later someone on the other side of the world, in Australia or New Zealand, can be reading it. I am still intrigued despite having done this kind of stuff for nearly 15 years.

But the other question, about why show it, is more problematic. At first, I did so because I wanted people to see that I am being read internationally. I now feel that one should be able to take it as read that that's the case, and not make a big deal out of it.

I also think, like recent comments, it's a matter of context. When I took part in the Classroom 2.0 Live discussion, people were asked right at the start to click on a map to show where they were listening from. Seeing the whole world 'light up' as members of the audience did so was an incredible experience. And for me, as the guest speaker, it really did bring it home to me that, although I was loafing around in casual clothes and unshaven, I was addressing a global audience in just as real a way as if I had been speaking at a physical event.

So, given that there's not much point in displaying a map on my site, because it lacks context and smacks ever-so-slightly of egotism, why do I continue to do so?

The answer, I'm afraid, will be familiar to married men everywhere. My wife likes to look at it, and doesn't want to have to bother logging in in order to do so.

International ICT in education superstar I may be, but at home I know my place!

Other articles in the Wasteful Widgets mini-series

Wasteful Widgets #1: Most popular articles

Wasteful Widgets #2: Twitter Feeds, and 7 Reasons to Eschew Them

Wasteful Widgets #3: Recent Comments

Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age

In "Sketches Among The Ruins of My Mind", Philip José Farmer depicts a nightmare scenario in which an object suddenly appears in our skies, and proceeds to remove everyone's memories, four days at a time. Gradually, people regress through their chronological age, ending up drooling like babies, and forgetting all their relationships and skills. As people realise what is happening, they resort to leaving themselves notes and tape recordings by which to tell or remind themselves, on waking up in the morning, what's been going on.

That's an extreme description of what might happen if we were unable, unaided, to remember anything about the last three days, but humankind has always tried to find ways of remembering.

John Mack, in "The Museum of the Mind", looks at how different people in different times and places have used artefacts such as paintings and sculptures to help them remember, a story he tells through the collections in the British Museum.

We have always been afraid of forgetting which, as Viktor Mayer-Schönberger has pointed out in a recent lecture, is the "default setting" for human beings. However, we have now entered a digital age in which this balance between remembering and forgetting has been reversed. In other words, the default setting is now remembering, and we as a society have perfect memory.

A good thing? In some respects, of course; but Mayer-Schönberger fears that we have not fully considered the negative implications of perfect memory.

One of the sources he draws upon is the Argentinian writer, Borges. In “Funes, The Memorious”, Borges provides us with a startlingly accurate insight into what a curse perfect memory would be for an individual person. “Startlingly accurate”? Yes, because decades after he wrote this we have discovered a handful of people in the world who have this rare ability affliction.

And the societal perspective on this?

As Mayer-Schönberger points out, a society that never forgets, may stop forgiving. That unfortunate photo of yourself, or that article you wrote whilst a student, may come back to haunt you years, even decades, later.

Such a situation leads people to self-censor, not just in the here and now, but with one eye on the future. It reminds me of a science fiction story I read in which crime was effectively eradicated because the police used cameras that could go back in time to record actual events instead of people's recollections of them. The story centred on one man's attempt to commit the perfect murder: he had to engineer the situation to cause his victim to have a fatal heart attack, so that when the inevitable cameras came, they would record that he had caused the person no physical harm.

Mayer-Schönberger's suggestion is that we should remember to forget. Technology can help us by prompting us to specify expiration dates for the data we store.

It was a fascinating talk, which you can listen to. I am now in the process of reading his book, 'Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age', and will review it due course.

In the meantime, perhaps this is a topic that would make for a good discussion in ICT and even Citizenship lessons.

The books mentioned in this article are featured on my Amazon page, where they can be purchased, thereby providing me with a (very) modest additional income. Also mentioned on the page are Fictions, a collection of short stories by Borges that includes Funes, The Memorious. Although nothing to do with ICT in education as such, these stories make you think. And one, The Library of Babel, really does have echoes in the Web 2.0 world, as I described in this article about collaboration.

Also featured is Google Bomb, which covers similar ground, but looked at through the lens of online defamation and cyber-attacks.

Although I have yet to review them, I will say now that these books deserve a central place in your educational technology library.

 

Collaborative Approaches To Learning: Always A Good Thing?

Collaborative approaches to learning certainly have their place -- but not at the expense of the facts!

This is an updated version of an article which first appeared on Wed, 7 Sep 2005.That sounds like a long time ago, but I think the issues I was describing then are still relevant today. But I'd value your opinion on this matter. It's a longish article: go grab yourself a cup of tea.

In March 1923, in an interview with The New York Times, the British mountaineer George Leigh Mallory was asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, and replied, 'Because it's there'. That seems to be exactly the attitude of some educationalists when it comes to recent developments such as blogging, podcasting and wikis. That is to say, they use them purely and simply  because they are there.

I'm all in favour of pioneering and trailblazing, but the downside is that evangelistic fervour can sometimes outweigh, or cloud over, any objective judgement. In my view, what we educationalists should be aiming for is not to get our students and colleagues to use technology, but to use appropriate technology appropriately. Unfortunately, that message sometimes seems to get lost in the hubbub.

I am thinking in particular of the apparently increasing adulation of, and reliance on, collaborative tools for the purpose of research, especially blogs, podcasts and wikis (the most well-known of the last is, of course, Wikipedia). In case you are new to all this, blogs are online journals, podcasts are recordings, usually in MP3 format, and wikis are web pages which can be edited live on the internet, either by anybody or by people who have subscribed to the group concerned. Wikipedia is an online encyclopaedia which features articles which can be published, then edited and counter-edited.

Is ‘truth’ relative or absolute?

Wikipedia in particular is often hailed as a fantastic resource, and one which has grown through collaboration by ordinary people. It is, if you will, a perfect example of democracy in action -- apparently, at least. The question we need to ask, however, is whether this and similar enterprises are actually useful.

For most people, and societies, the ultimate goal is absolute truth, not relativism. This isn't only a religious quest: in the field of finance, one of the main attributes of money is that it should be a measure of value which does not, in itself, change value. Hence, in modern societies, the attempts to fix a currency's value by pegging it to gold or to another, more stable, currency. Trying to measure the value of something if the value of money is constantly changing is like trying to measure the length of something with a ruler whose length keeps changing.

Is collaboration always a good thing?If relativism is not ok in our religious or economic lives, why should it be ok in our intellectual life? We all know that knowledge and understanding are constantly evolving, and that the self-evident "truths" of yesteryear are sometimes found to be wrong in the light of new evidence. That is disconcerting, to say the least, but at least it's a process that happens over years rather than overnight.

It's also a process that happens with the involvement of experts in their field. Now, I am not so naive as to not understand that viewpoints which do not fit into the convention wisdom of the age are unlikely to be heard. You only have to look at the experiences of Freud, Darwin and, in our own age, homeopaths and others to realise that. And the economist J M Keynes, when asked why he had failed his Economics examination at university, said that it was because he knew more about Economics than his tutors.

Nevertheless, you can't have an article published in a scientific journal or the Encyclopedia Britannica unless it has been scrutinised and vetted by another expert. This is in contrast to wikis, where for the most part anybody can come along and change an article without knowing the first thing about the subject area.

Two cheers for democracy*

Now, this may seem like a very anti-democratic point of view, and that's because it is -- in this context. If that sounds arrogant, consider this: if you are the world's leading expert in a particular area, do you really want some virtual passer-by to "improve" your work by chopping bits out or adding bits in? Of course not! But even if you are an ordinary expert, as distinct from a world one, you will still not want someone correcting you. At least, not in that way. You might enjoy a good debate, and be open to have your views challenged, and may even change your views through that process, but that, I would contend, is a very different situation.

Even more important, though, is the potential confusion it creates for students. Imagine finding a great fact to put in an essay, and then double-checking it the next day, only to find that it's disappeared. Does that means it was incorrect, or that someone didn't like it? The only thing the student can do is to seek verification from another source. That's good practice, but the question is: what kind of source?

When I asked Limor Garcia, the inventor of Cellphedia** (a kind of mobile phone version of Wikipedia), how she would advise students to check the truth of the information they find, she said that people would be able to correct each other's answers, but also that they could check the answer in Google. That seems to me to beg the questions: (a) if you are going to check the answer in Google, why use Cellphedia? and (b) how would you know if the information you found in Google is correct?

The Library of Babel

Searching, searching...Interestingly, these kind of paradoxes are not new. In a story called "The Library of Babel", written in 1941, the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges describes a vast library in which there is not only a copy of every book ever written, but every book which could be written. There is, for example, a library catalogue, and an infinite number of variations of it. There is a marvellous passage in which he describes the quest for the "master" book:

"In some shelf of some hexagon, men reasoned, there must exist a book which is the cipher and perfect compendium of all the rest: some librarian has perused it, and it is analogous to a god. Vestiges of the worship of that remote functionary still persists in the language of this zone. Many pilgrimages have sought Him out. For a century they trod the most diverse routes in vain. How to locate the secret hexagon which harboured it? Someone proposed a regressive approach: in order to locate book A, first consult book B which will indicate the location of book A; in order to locate book B, first consult book C, and so on ad infinitum."

(J L Borges, The Library of Babel, in "Fictions", which is featured on our Amazon page)

 The worrying development for me is not the invention and expansion of tools such as Wikipedia and Cellphedia. I actually think they have vast potential and are, in fact, tremendously exciting. From the point of view of the learning process, taking part in such collaboration is bound to engage or re-engage a lot of learners.

What I am more concerned about is the often uncritical stance of some educationalists in relation to these tools. For example, I have read articles which favourably compare Wikipedia to traditional encyclopaedias on the basis of weight, its ability to constantly change, its democratic ethos, and other characteristics. Surely the most important yardstick is accuracy? And a couple of months ago I met the Head of ICT at an independent secondary school who said, quite seriously, "We don't need to teach kids how to search the internet; they use Google and Wikipedia all the time at home."

Essential skills for users of ICT in education

We need to teach our students a number of skills or approaches when it comes to verifying information:

  • a questioning approach rather than a willingness to accept things at face value;
  • triangulation, which is the cross-checking of supposed facts with other sources of information;
  • in triangulation, the use of different types or sources of evidence; for example, there is no sense in cross-checking the accuracy of the comments I've made here by looking at other comments I've made: you should look in other sources; otherwise,it all becomes self-referential.

Above all, we educationalists should not fall into the trap of using a new technology in every situation just because it is there.

Conclusions

So what does this mean in terms of the educational benefits of services like Wikipedia, Cellphedia and, in a wider context, blogs and podcasts? Does it mean we should reject them entirely? The answer is that we need to treat them in the same way as we would encourage our students to treat any other source of information: with caution and, as stated above, to cross-check the information found using them.

We should also recognise that these new tools have some distinct advantages: they are fresh, they allow "breaking news" in academic fields to be published with a lower burden of proof required, meaning that a debate can be entered into at an earlier stage and by more people. They also enable the ordinary person and the maverick to have their say. Finally, they can also have profound benefits in a social context, especially mobile phone-based services like Cellphedia (the need for which has, I would suggest, been superceded by the wonderful mobile phone apps that are available these days) : imagine being able to go to a new area and find out where other people would recommend eating or staying (there are apps for exactly this).

Finally, taking part in such projects can be very useful for students, because it involves the skills of research, writing, collaboration and editing. It is easy enough to set up your own blog, podcast or wiki, as you will know if you've looked at the Web 2.0 Projects book .

In conclusion, we need to steer a fine line between using something in all situations, regardless of how appropriate it is, and rejecting it out of hand. I'm sure that the line is a wavy one as we continue to grapple with and debate these issues.

Postscript: The Demise of Wikipedia?

According to the London Evening Standard, editors are leaving Wikipedia in droves. Apparently, they don’t like the recently changed rules which, supposedly, make it harder to get away with writing rubbish or deleting good stuff. Read the comments too. Kate, for example, got fed up with her expert postings being deleted by some nameless and faceless person who decided that she hadn’t cited enough references. That sounds reasonable, but for me, having your work commented upon and rejected by someone who won’t or can’t even give you their name is unacceptable.

* Apologies to E M Forster.

** Unfortunately, at the time of writing the Cellphedia website seems to be unavailable.

 

Also on the web: 11/25/2009 (p.m.)

Succeeding with Web 2.0 Projects-Special Guest: Terry Freedman - Classroom 2.0 LIVE!

I enjoyed taking part in this. Unable to multitask effectively when giving a presentation (can anyone?), I am gradually catching up with the comments on screen as I listen and watch the recording in bits each day.

The presentation looks at the factors which help to make a (web 2.0) project successful, and includes (mainly) a case study of a multimedia project, and info taken from the forthcoming Web 2.0 Projects ebook. Thanks to Peggy, Kim and Lorna for their support before, during and after the session.

tags: Web 2.0 projects, Classroom 2.0 Live


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Wasteful Widgets #3: Recent Comments

Many blogs display recent comments, either by the blog owner or other people. I've implemented this myself in the past, but now have reservations about doing so, for the following reasons.

Firstly, I'm not a legal expert but I should have thought that if you're going to display people's comments somewhere other than where they originally posted them, you should at least warn people that you may do so. A lot of blogs don't.

Even if you don't need to from a legal point of view (and I imagine that would depend on which country you reside in), it seems to me to be the right thing to do anyway, which is why the Terms and Privacy policy on this website states that if you post a comment it may be used elsewhere on the site, or in the newsletter.

However, there is also a moral dimension: is it right to take someone's comment out of context, without at least some clarifying text? Perhaps most of the time this won't be an issue, but imagine this scenario:

Suppose I read on someone's blog that she wrote an article for a commercial magazine, for no pay in order to get her foot in the door, and has now been told that they are not interested in commissioning her for any paid work. However, because her article was pretty good they would always be interested in receiving more, just not in paying for them.

I might write a comment like, "Your first mistake was writing an article for free. You should always agree on the fee before putting pen to paper, as it were."

Taken out of context, that could be quite reputation-damaging. It suggests, for example, that I would only write an article if I am going to be paid money for it. Anyone reading the comment will not have the benefit of seeing the context in which it was made.

In this respect, automatically posting recent comments suffers from a similar consideration to posting Twitter conversations, ie they only make complete sense in context.

As for posting your own comments automatically, I don't see the point in that at all, unless it's to demonstrate to all and sundry how ubiquitous you and your wisdom are. But again, taken out of context, your own comments have little meaning in my opinion.

What I think would be quite handy would be an application that collates comments from all over the place on a particular blog post. I sometimes have few comments on the blog itself, but they appear elsewhere such as on Twitter of Facebook.

I think overall, my objection to automatic comment posting from an educational point of view is that it represents a poor use of ICT in education. To my mind, ICT should seek to solve a problem or answer a question, not be used just for its own sake. Perhaps if someone could explain the point of displaying comments somewhere other than where they were put in the first place I'd feel differently about it.

Wasteful Widgets #2: Twitter Feeds, and 7 Reasons to Eschew Them

Many websites have a section in which their current Twitter conversation is shown. I've played around with this myself, and after some time decided that it was not something I wanted to continue with, for the following reasons.

Firstly, it just looks so ascetically awful on most websites. Maybe that's to do with broader issues, like the blog's template or the blog owner's design skills, but to my eye it usually just looks like a mess. In fact, there's one blog I checked out recently where the Twitter feed was so prominent that it took me a moment or two to work out where the actual latest article was.

When I tried it out I put it on a separate page on its own. That overcame the messiness problem, but it only served to emphasise my second objection.

It seems to me that Twitter is, fundamentally, a conversation, and that conversations take place within a context, especially a temporal context. To take a snapshot of a conversation -- which is itself taking it out of context -- and then put it somewhere else entirely, is surely a double whammy? How can that snippet of conversation be meaningful, except by pure chance?

Josie Fraser is making an effort to make her Twitter stream more meaningful, and it will be interesting to see how that works out, but I'm not holding my breath.

Thirdly, what's the point of it anyway? For me, the idea of Twitter as conversation is that I'd like people to converse with me, not look at what is, in effect, a transcript of a conversation I'm having.

The widget I tried out made matters worse because, for some reason, it showed only my side of the conversation. So you would see these disembodied pronouncements which, if anything, made me look like a complete moron. That leads me on to…

Fourthly, when I was trying it out, because I knew that the conversation, or my side of it at least, would appear on my website, I found myself starting to look over my shoulder at myself, which is physically impossible, I know, but hopefully you will get my drift. I would start to think, "How will this look to anyone who doesn't know me?", and so I began to think twice before I replied with LOL or "Oh no" or whatever. It placed an unnecessary and self-imposed block on my self-expression.

Even if all these objections could be overcome, there is a fifth one. This blog is entirely about ICT in education. Maybe that degree of nicheness makes me the most boring person on earth, but that's the way it is. In Twitter and other places, though, I have more wide-ranging conversations. Having those, or parts of them, appear on my blog would serve only to dilute it as far as I'm concerned.

You may argue that it would be nice to see a different side to me. I agree that it's always nice to see other dimensions of the people whose blogs we read. The answer is: follow me on Twitter! I'll probably follow you back, and we will both gain. Or read my other blog, where I write about anything and everything, when I find the time.

I can see that there may be some value in publishing a Twitter stream from a list you belong to, especially if it's a specialised list. But then, for me, there's another objection:

I don't know what the people I converse with are going to say. Most of them, most of the time, don't say anything which might embarrass me, but every so often one of them will swear or imply swearing. If they did so in a comment I would refuse to publish the comment, but I don't have that facility in publishing a Twitter stream (as far as I know). The swearing doesn't happen very often, but I don't want it to appear on my website at all.

Finally, this highlights a really important issue. I think one of the things we ought to be teaching young people, and demonstrating, is that we control the technology, or should do. By placing code on your website which puts you, in effect, at the mercy of anyone who, whether inadvertently or not, says something you'd rather not see under your name, you're modelling the exact opposite, ie the technology is in control while you are a passive bystander.

All things considered, I think that placing a Twitter stream on a website is definitely a solution to a problem. It's just that I haven't figured out the problem yet.

14 Ways to Make the Most of Teaching Assistants

In my experience, many teachers make poor use of teaching assistants, regarding them as a sort of junior helper on the same level as a school pupil doing a holiday job. This is unfortunate. The teaching assistant can be a vital component in the quest to raise standards. Here are my thoughts about how this can be brought about.

Outside of the classroom

The work starts before even setting foot in the classroom. Generally speaking, to be most effective in the classroom, the teaching assistant ought to be involved in all stages of planning, and given the opportunity to have appropriate training. In particular, the teaching assistant should:

  • Be familiar with the scheme of work being followed. She may even have had a hand in designing it or adapting it to the school's needs.

  • Understand where the lesson fits into the scheme of work, eg it may be an introduction to internet search techniques, which are to be further developed later in the course -- perhaps next year.

  • Understand where the less fits into the current unit of work, ie what came before, and what follows. In other words, the assistant needs to know that in order to understand the main point of this lesson, the pupils need to understand X, which was covered last week, and that if they master this week's objectives they will be in a strong position to understand the objectives of next week's lesson.

  • Understand the intended learning outcomes of the lesson.

  • Understand how the ICT can help to achieve those learning outcome.

  • Be familiar with the hardware and software applications involved.

  • Be familiar with the individual children’s needs.

  • Have access to the school’s data management system (as it relates to pupils) and be familiar with how to use it.

In the classroom

The teaching assistant given the job of supporting children with special educational needs should:

  • Set up specialist equipment if any is needed, before the pupils enter the classroom.

  • Focus only on the children with special educational needs, generally speaking.

  • Not do the child’s work for her.

  • Help children, where appropriate, by adjusting the computer environment. For example, use the display options (if you have access to them) to make the contrast better on the screen, or use the accessibility features if you are using Windows (look in the Programs-Accessories menu).

  • Have a range of paper-based resources handy, in case the computer system goes down.

Wasteful Widgets #1: Most popular articles

We're always hearing about new widgets. I love experimenting with widgets, but I think it's easy to get carried away with the wizardry of widgets. Some of them are, in my opinion, a waste of time, and I thought I'd share my views on some of these.

One thing I see a lot of is the Most Popular Articles widget. The idea is that people can see at a glance which articles on your website or blog have been most clicked on. I've messed around with this myself, and when I started this new website just over a month ago, I was a little disappointed that Squarespace provides no obvious way of displaying this information to the public.

"But", said my wife. "Isn't that sort of widget just a self-fulfilling prophecy?"

She was right. The existence of such a widget is designed to encourage people to click on your most popular articles, thereby making them even more popular. I suppose it's based on the idea that all these people can't be wrong.

But what if the current zeitgeist changes? If your most popular articles all seem to be about X and the new Zeitgeist is Y, doesn't that immediately put people off, especially first time visitors to your blog?

In any case, far better, in a way, would be to encourage people to read your least popular articles.

A more useful variation of this sort of widget is one which provides links to related articles, which is why I like using Zemanta.

That is not to say that knowing which articles are the most popular isn't useful. I use the information to try and guide my writing, to some extent.

I think if you want to draw people's attention to other articles on your site, the best approaches are to list the most recent articles (which is the one I've adopted, and has also been adopted by Windowsbytes, where it works really well, I think), or to show which other posts are related to the current one being looked at, as seen at Problogger (although Darren Rowse, who owns it, also includes a popular articles section). When I come across sites that do one or both of these I tend to get drawn in, which is what the blog owner wants to happen.

If we transfer these ideas to an educational context, it seems to me that a widget in a virtual learning environment which automatically (or semi-automatically) showed related articles or links would be very useful indeed.

It would certainly be more useful, and probably less fraught with potential problems, than one which showed the most popular articles or links.

Awards for the best use of technology in schools

Becta has announced Inner-city comprehensive Broadgreen International School in Liverpool and independent Prospect House School in Putney, London as the top two schools in the UK when it comes to the best use of technology.

I think it's worth reading the article below, and going to the Awards website (see below), in order to pick up some more ideas about what constitutes great use of ICT in schools.

The prestigious accolade of ‘Best Whole School’ is given to only one secondary (high) and one primary (elementary)school each year. The two schools beat more than 100 other schools across the country to collect their awards at Bristol’s newest science venue, At-Bristol, last night.

Both schools have demonstrated that they have successfully placed technology at the heart of learning as well as wider school management.  This has helped to enhance teaching and bring lessons to life. It has shown how technology makes a difference, not only in the classroom, but at home within the family and across other school activities. As I will say in my talk at Classroom 2.0 Live tomorrow,

"People ask: how can I use this application in my teaching? That’s starting with the technology and hoping it will lead to the education bit. A better question is: what applications can I use to help my students achieve X? That starts with the education and leads on to the technology. I think there’s a reason our area of expertise is sometimes called ‘educational technology’ as opposed to ‘technological education’!"

Broadgreen International School impressed the judges with its futuristic technology centre and use of ICT to involve the wider community in every aspect of the school’s life including its deaf resource base and a lively ‘silver surfers’ group.

The school’s Deaf Resource Base was able to create an online British sign language version of ‘Living in the Blitz’ for history lessons. It is fully accessible by deaf pupils, allowing them to work alongside and complete the same work as hearing pupils.

Students and teacher at Broadgreen School

The school also has ‘Silver Surfers’ groups for older members of the community learning to use technology. Age is no barrier and Les, an original member of the group who is ninety next birthday, regularly communicates via webcam and has his own blog about his war time experiences.

When giving advice to other schools looking to boost ICT, Peter Banks, Assistant Headteacher, says: “Use the Becta self review framework to see where you are and how you can improve. Ensure your ICT equipment is up to date and sustainable in terms of financing. Visit schools that are using ICT well so you can learn from them.”

I would certainly agree with all this, and made that last point myself in the article 10 Ways to Become an Inspirational Teacher.

The SRF is something I very much go along with too. It's comprehensive, and at the same time generic enough to incorporate as-yet-uninvented technology.

Prospect House has students who are confident, enthusiastic and independent in their use of computers, mobile devices, digital cameras and virtual learning platforms across the entire curriculum. From reviewing their sporting performances on screen to creating animations in art lessons, technology is used in every lesson to help students achieve more. It sounds like the school has successfully embedded the use ICT right across the curriculum.

The school also posts podcasts of lessons on its Virtual Learning Environment, so that parents can see how, say, long division is taught. This has helped to raise parental involvement in their children's work.

Pupil at Prospect House

When reflecting on why the school won the award, Dianne Barratt, the Headmistress, says it is a combination of a shared vision by the Senior Leadership Team, including the school governors combined with an enthusiastic staff, all of whom are committed to developing their practice with the aid of technology. 

For more information on the Awards, please visit the Winners 2009 website, where you will find details of other winners, as well as further information about each one along with short videos. On a personal level, I was delighted to learn that The Havering ICT support service was a joint winner in the Support for Schools section.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Kate Brennan of Shiny Red for information, case studies and photos. I’ve amended the written stuff (not the photos!) with permission. Thanks also to Dave Smith of Havering for additional information. Read Dave’s Havering blog for more ICT-related news.

Further information

The ICT Excellence Awards is an awards scheme open to all schools which aims to identify and reward excellence in Information & Communications Technology (ICT). The awards acknowledge UK schools approaching technology in outstanding or innovative ways.

See also the Next Generation Learning website.

 

Getting permission to go on an ICTcourse or to a conference

So, you’ve discovered a conference you’d like to attend, but there’s a real possibility that your boss will say “No”. What can you do to maximise your chances of being allowed to attend?

The suggestions which follow cannot, obviously, be guaranteed to succeed. However, they will almost certainly give you more of a fighting chance than the usual approach, which is just to ask for 3 days off. The trick when talking to supervisors is to make your problem their problem, and their problem your problem. Let’s start with the first, making your problem their problem.

Making your problem their problem

Reasons to be allowed to attend

It’s a big challenge keeping up with current thinking and research and practice, so a conference can be a very useful way of doing so very quickly. The issue is: will you get more from going to the conference than you could obtain by other means? In this respect, two factors come into play.

First, does the conference, or a particular theme or strand of the conference, deal with something you’re especially involved in?

For example, are you running a particular course, are you about to buy and implement a particular type of learning platform, are you about to enter your students for a particular examination? These kinds of needs, if addressed by the conference, are powerful arguments in favour of your being permitted to attend.

Second, do the speakers have particular expertise in the area of concern? Note that this is not the same as “is the speaker famous?” If you’re about to start a new course, and the main speaker is one of the writers of the course, or from the relevant Awarding Body, that is likely to be much more useful than an entertaining but, ultimately, empty talk by a well-known personality.

There is a need to network. Even the best schools can become complacent or out of touch, if they have no external reference point by which to judge themselves. When I used to do inspections of schools’ ICT provision I often found myself recommending to the subject leader that s/he starts to make visits to other schools to see what they’re doing. You can’t really pick up good ideas from reading about them in quite the same way as you can by actually seeing the ideas in practice and asking questions of the appropriate people.

In fact, networking is so important that whenever I am involved in organising conferences I ensure that there is time for people to meet informally, and I always try to have this billed in the programme as “social networking” or “networking”, as opposed to “Bar”. Having “bar” as a timetabled activity almost invariably elicits the response “Why should I have to pay for you to go on a junket?” The fact that it takes place in your own time doesn’t make any difference, because it’s the perception that counts in cases like this.

Making their problem your problem

1. Minimise the disruption. If it’s possible to set work that requires very little effort by another teacher, but which is still useful, then do so. For example, you could set everything up on the school network in advance.

You can also compile folders for each lesson. Imagine being a cover teacher, and handed a folder containing the instructions to the class “Log on and click on the X icon”, a list of students’ names and their login details, and simple instructions about what they have to do.

2. Minimise the cost. While you’re away, the school may have to hire a temporary teacher. There are two main ways you can try to avoid or minimise this cost.

First, it may be possible for you to organise cover within your team, if you have one. This make sense from a learning point of view, because it means that the students will still be being taught in your absence. However, if your co-workers agree to this arrangement, you must negotiate a quid pro quo whereby they will not be asked to cover others’ lessons in addition. In other words, nobody should end up doing more cover work than they normally would.

The second is to see if there is a possibility of volunteering to assist with the conference arrangements, or to speak at the conference, in return for a free place and money to cover supply teachers. Obviously, not every delegate will be able to enjoy this kind of arrangement, but in my experience most of them never ask.

As I’ve said, these approaches are not absolutely guaranteed to work, but one thing is for certain: they mark you out as a professional who believes it’s their right to have access to continuing professional development.

Robot rights

"I will NOT have any daughter of mine bringing a robot into this house!"

You can just imagine the family rows of the future, should technology ever reach the point where it isn't possible to distinguish between humans and non-humans merely by looking at them.

And what of the ethnic monitoring forms of the future? Will employers have to ensure that a certain percentage of its workforce is non-human? An ethnic monitoring form of the future?

An article in the Daily Telegraph reports that people have already started to think about such matters:

"Society must decide if it is willing to accept relationships between humans and robots before the machines become so sophisticated they start demanding rights, a legal expert has warned."

I recall reading a short story some years ago in which a person discovers that they're not human, but a robot, and has to leave his job because of antagonism which I suppose would be classified as 'robotism'. It gives grist to my mill that, as I argued recently, science fiction can be a great starting point for discussion in a whole range of areas.

Furthermore, as this story in the Telegraph shows, the pace of technological change is such that we cannot assume that just because something is still confined to the fiction area of the bookshop it is not worth thinking about for its implications in actuality.

What Anna Russel, the legal expert referred to, has done is to extrapolate from current technological developments to potential problems for the future. This kind of exercise can be quite useful in getting students to think about the (possible) effects of technology on society, which is part of the National Curriculum in England and Wales and the curriculum of other countries.

What's RSS and why is it useful?

Here's a quick guide to RSS, which you may have seen mentioned on websites and blogs. (Note: I've written this guide with the complete novice in mind. If you already know what an RSS feed is, think about bookmarking this article in order to refer to it colleagues who are less knowledgeable than you. Thanks!)

What does RSS stand for?

The most commonly accepted answer is 'Really Simple Syndication'.

What does RSS let me do?

It makes it easy to do two things really easily. Firstly, it lets you read the articles on your favourite websites all in one place, using an application called a 'feed reader'. Secondly, as an extension of that, it lets you collate the latest posts from several blogs all in one place. It doesn't have to be only blog posts. It could be latest comments on someone's blog, or their most recent tweets in Twitter, or anything else that has an RSS feed.

Taking the first point, it means that you don't have to traipse from one website to another to check if there is anything new: new stuff will show up in your feed reader automatically.

How do I obtain a feed reader?

Just search for the term 'feed reader' and then find one that suits you. You can have one which is installed on your computer, or one that resides on the web. I prefer the latter, because it means it doesn't matter whether you're sitting at your own computer or not when you feel like checking for new content. Some installed feed readers let you synchronise with a web-based one, meaning that you potentially get the best of both worlds.

Popular feed readers include Bloglines and Google Reader, which are web-based. For other readers, look at this article about feed readers.

Update: since this article was written, Google has decided to discontinue its RSS Reader service. There are plenty of alternatives, however. Check out RSS isn't dead: the best Google Reader alternatives. Read the comments too, as there are suggestions in there as well. Feedly has been cited lots of times in articles. I myself have started to try one called The Old Reader, which seems quite nice.

How do I subscribe to an RSS feed?

If you've installed your feed reader's browser toolbar, you should be able to do so by clicking on 'Subscribe', if the blog or website has been set up to allow this. Otherwise, look for an icon like this: and click on it; your feed reader should do the rest. If it doesn't, right-click on the icon and select the menu item which reads 'Copy link location' (or similar), open your feed reader, and then paste the link into the New Subscription box. Don't worry: it's all a lot simpler and quicker than it sounds.

How do I read new articles?

Just open your feed reader and see what, if anything, has been added to the various websites since you last looked.

Conclusion

RSS makes it easy for you to keep up with lots of reading in a shorter period of time than would probably otherwise be the case, because you're not racing all over the internet from site to site.

If you're a teacher, it can also benefit your students. For example, if your school uses a virtual learning environment (VLE) you could set up areas for students to visit where the latest headlines from a range of websites are displayed. That could be used purely for reference, or you could incorporate it into lessons. For example, the first five or ten minutes of each lesson could be spent discussing what's new in the world of hospitality and catering, or in business and finance. At the risk of sounding clichéd, the uses for RSS are limited only by your imagination.

I hope you have found this useful. Feel free to comment on the article.

18 highlights from the 140 Conference

Yesterday I attended the 140 Character Conference in London, where I met up with Bill Gibbon, Neil Adam and Bill Lord.

From left to right: Neil Adam, Bill Lord, Bill Gibbon, Terry Freedman

Here are 18 highlights, any one of which could be the start of a rich conversation. I think if you take the volume and variety of the presentations overall, you would have to conclude that any schooling which does not address matters such as etiquette in, and use of, Twitter and other social media is not really a fully rounded education at all. Anyway, here are my ‘takeaways’.

I love the idea of Buy A Credit. Donate £1 and you get to have your name listed on the credits of a film. The money goes towards financing said film. What an ingenious idea. @buyacredit.

In the eracism slot, Kyra Gaunt told us that racism gives us the opportunity to be courageous.

Apparently, one fifth of businesses in the UK are on Twitter.

Several people, such as Stephen Fry and the lady from SB Buzz reminded us that Twitter is a relationship channel, not a sales channel.

Alex Bellinger told the story of a high street florist which engages its customers with Twitter. The plasma screen in its shop, displaying Twitter conversations, attracts curiosity, and then converts. This would probably be a good tactic to adopt in a school setting, both as a way of engaging other teachers and, on open days, parents.

I liked hearing from Dean Landsman and Dean Meyers that an augmented reality system tried out in New York provided the information that, in a particular direction, the nearest tube was 3,000 miles away. This is almost science fiction: think of the great creative writing you would see if you used this anecdote as a starting point.

In the musicians’ slot, Manny Norte started a sentence with the words, “M and M comes from an age…”  That was only 5 years ago! He went on to say that if M and M were starting out now, he would almost certainly use Twitter to engage with fans, as part of the marketing strategy.

I have to say that, in the ‘brands’ session, talk of ‘humanising the brand’ all sounded very cynical to me. Why not just be upfront and admit that Twitter is part of the marketing mix and be done with it?

JP Rangaswami, chief scientist at BT, asked why we couldn’t subscribe to a car park’s Twitter feed. Brilliant idea: you’d know which car parks are full in advance. After all, Tower Bridge has a Twitter feed and sends out alerts when the bridge is about to go up.

Josie Fraser gave an excellent talk about retweets, followed by some fake stats. I didn’t realise: RTs are a rarity apparently.

If you’re a consultant, maybe you miss the buzz and gossip of the office? Federico Grosso suggested that Twitter is actually a gigantic water cooler. Nice idea! Does that mean, then, that home-working is now not only technically possible, but feasible from a ‘human’ point of view too? A question for business studies students perhaps?

Some of the more ‘switched-on’ police forces, both here and abroad, have used Twitter to find missing persons and murder witnesses. Chief Inspector Mark Payne explained how using Twitter as a two-way information stream allowed the police to be deployed in the most efficient way during demonstrations, and to keep the public informed of what they were doing, and why. Question for citizenship students: is this a step towards policing with people rather than the policing of people?

The education session was interesting. James Clay stated the obvious (which is often necessary) when he said that “We need to get educational leaders to understand the value of social media.”

I was impressed by Ruth Barnett, of Sky, who emphasised the need for integrity when quoting from sources like the ‘Twitterverse’. For example, when covering the recent troubles in Iran, Sky apparently did its best to ensure that the tweeters it obtained information from were people who had already been reporting on it before it became the hot topic.

I also thought what she said about the challenges of networking with China was very interesting: they use a different character set and different networks. I’d also add that they probably have a profoundly different world view. All cultures differ, of course, which is what makes all this so interesting and, ultimately, rewarding.

Vikki Chowney made the point that, at the G20 conference, live blogging was difficult because of the volume of data being thrown at the audience. Twitter became, in effect, a tool for live blogging. That’s exactly what goes on at many conferences these days, of course.

She said that Twitter closed the gap between politics and people.

Finally, the author Thembisa Mshaka listed the differences between celebrity and stardom; for instance, a star has a tireless work ethic. She said, in a way reminiscent of Malcolm McLaren’s talk at the Handheld Learning Conference, that mediocrity becomes the order of the day because it is so easy to get away with.

 

An end to paid writing?

Paid writers

Does the existence and widespread availability of the web mean the end of professional, ie paid, writers? Stephen Downes thinks so. He asserts:

"It's a funny thing, how often I read articles that say, in one breath, that internet technology is one of those that "changes everything" and in the next breath talks about how people will still be paid for writing. You know, if everybody's doing it, people aren't going to be paid for it any more. Take reading - it used to be, kings and lords hired scribes not merely to write but to read their correspondence. And of course the average person would depend on a monk or a priest to read the Bible for them, much less any more mundane communication. Try getting yourself hired as a reader today! And imagine the laughter you would face if you boldly asserted that you would no longer share your reading unless people paid you money!"

I believe he is wrong, both about reading and writing.

Reading

  • Over 5 million people in Britain can't read or write today (see this video although, as one of the commenters says, the teacher in the video uses 'laying' when he should have used 'lying', which is rather unfortunate given the subject matter, but still). Presumably many of them have to have people read stuff to them, and possibly even pay for that service.
  • We do have paid readers, and we call them 'actors', 'poets' and 'news readers'. As Geoff Martin says in a comment on Downes' blog, "… even today we get professional readers - take the narrators of audio books, or the people who read the news."
  • When I have managed teams, I have often asked a member of the team to read a report to me and then let me have a summary of it and suggested actions. It's not that I can't read myself, but that it was a better use of resources to ask someone else to read it for me, thereby in effect paying them to read for me.
  • As a person who has some understanding of business and publishing in particular, but who is not a legal expert, I never sign a contract without having an expert read it over for me and then give me their opinion. As a member of the UK's Society of Authors and Federation of Small Business I pay subscriptions, partly in order to avail myself of this service.

Writing

Similar arguments apply to writing, where too we find the themes of necessity, convenience and expertise, and an economic argument.

  • The people who can't read or write need someone to write letters and fill out forms on their behalf. They may not always pay for the service, or pay directly, but the need for such a service is there.
  • It's true that anyone can write about anything. However, if you want something to be written by someone who actually knows what they're talking about, you may well want to find an expert in that field and pay them.
  • If you want something to be written well, again, you may need to pay someone. There are loads of people who think they can write, but who are actually pretty bad at it. Don't believe me, or think that's my ego talking? Have a look at Angela Hoy's collection of 'worst book proposals' .

    I have an interesting example to share from my own experience. A couple of years ago someone commissioned me to write an educational ICT strategy for a Local Authority. One day, I was in a meeting with him, and was astonished at the ease with which he could reel off figures -- accurately -- without reference to any notes. When I told him that afterwards, this is the conversation which ensued:

    Client: Well, everyone has different strengths. For example, I couldn't do what you've done, and write an ICT strategy.

    Me: Of course you could. All I did was write down what we both know about.

    Client: No, I'd sit there staring at the blank sheet of paper, not knowing where to begin.

    What was going on there was what is known in economics circles as the Law of Absolute Advantage. I was (perceived to be) better at writing than the client, and he was better at remembering figures than I was, so it made perfect sense for him to concentrate on the numbers while I focused on the writing.
  • But what if he had been better than me at both skills? That's where another 'law' of economics comes in, the Law of Comparative Advantage. In a nutshell, although the client may have been better at both skills than me, if he was comparatively better at the number skills than the writing skills, it would still have made sense for him to pay me to do the writing.

For all these reasons, I don't think that people whose earnings derive from writing need worry too much about paid writing opportunities disappearing any time soon.

Web 2.0 Project: Bill Lord's work

Name: Bill  Lord

Project title: Virtual Balloon Race

Application type: Twitter

Age range: 5-7 years

Description of project

Three KS1 classes (aged 5-7 years) will be using Twitter to microblog daily as one of a range of strategies to develop writing.

They will also seek to use Twitter to make contact with schools across the world.

They will also use Skype later in the year.

I met Bill today at the 140 Characters Conference, and his excitement about this project was palpable! Follow Bill on Twitter, where is username is @joga5.

Benefits of using Web 2.0

Motivation,Participation,Collaboration,International links

URL: Follow the project on Twitter: @giraffeclass

Are you doing interesting work with Web 2.0 applications in your school or college? If so, why not contribute to a new ebook containing ideas that other teachers can pick up and use? Further information is right here:

http://www.ictineducation.org/home-page/2009/10/14/web-20-projects-book-deadline-extended.html