John Connell: The Blog

So even Microsoft is start­ing to get it!

Tech­no­rati Tags: microsoft, live mesh, soft­ware as a ser­vice, web as platform

After chat­ting to Pro­fes­sor Mar­tin Weller a cou­ple of nights ago over a pint (or two) I got think­ing back to my own time(s) at uni­ver­sity — 3 stints at var­i­ous points over the years — and won­dered what would have made all those dreary lec­tures more inter­est­ing, engag­ing and educa­tive (which is not to say that all the lec­tures I went to were dreary, just most of them). A remark by Stephen Downes in Old Daily chimed with me, and I decided that just one sim­ple step would have increased the learn­ing poten­tial man­i­fold — if I had been able to hear the lec­ture before the lec­ture actu­ally took place, and the ‘lec­ture’ itself became instead an open dis­cus­sion on what I had already heard.

Tuto­ri­als tended to ful­fil a sim­i­lar pur­pose, but they were almost always run by some­one other than the lec­turer him­self or her­self — no chance, then, of debat­ing the key points with the per­son mak­ing those points in the first place.

And, of course, we now have the tech­nol­ogy, as they say. There must be some uni­ver­sity teach­ers out there doing some­thing like this.….….

Tech­no­rati Tags: uni­ver­sity, lec­ture, edu­ca­tion, tech­nol­ogy

Pride, they say, is a sin (so I’m glad to be an athe­ist) but I have been feel­ing the odd burst of pride recently.

It has been immensely grat­i­fy­ing to read some of the com­ments I have seen recently on Glow as it devel­ops, slowly, into a main­stream tool in Scot­tish edu­ca­tion, as I know it will over time. Most recently, the reflected glow (sorry) from Lau­rie O’Donnell’s Edu­topia Award, com­ments by Car­o­line Gib­son, the quirky lit­tle video on Ewan’s blog, good work by Gor­don McKin­lay in Ren­frew­shire, signs of Glow Groups begin­ning to take off via Tess’s blog, and so many oth­ers, have given me heart that this lit­tle germ of an idea that started for real 8 or so years ago is start­ing to grow up into a full blown epi­demic of the very best kind.

The words that have pleased me most, though, came today from Jaye Richards in her blog — Miman­i­festo — when she wrote about the activ­i­ties and dis­cus­sions that she and oth­ers had taken part in dur­ing a two-day work­shop on Glow at Stir­ling Man­age­ment Centre:

“.… I guess this is what the “cre­ative sub­ver­sion” pro­fes­sor Debra Myhill advo­cates. She defines this in the fol­low­ing way…

This is what we are about with GLOW…and a room­ful of class­room prac­ti­tion­ers have just spent two very pro­duc­tive days doing just this.

A very good friend and col­league from those early days, Neil Mac­Far­lane (who is still heav­ily involved in the pro­gramme), a civil ser­vant with a wickedly dry sense of humour, used to say that we will know that SSDN (Glow’s orig­i­nal title: Scot­tish Schools Dig­i­tal Net­work) is finally a suc­cess when it enables anar­chy to break out in Scotland’s class­rooms. We all agreed with him, since we knew what he meant by ‘anar­chy’, and Jaye’s men­tion of ‘cre­ative sub­ver­sion’ comes very close to that def­i­n­i­tion. Every­one in that tiny ini­tial team that drew up those first plans for Glow tried so hard to work to instil into that spec­i­fi­ca­tion the capac­ity for oth­ers, one day, to be able to make use of the envi­ron­ment it would offer in what­ever way they wanted to. Although we could not have expressed it thus at the time, we were try­ing to cre­ate an instance of the ‘Web as the Learn­ing Plat­form’ — we envis­aged an open envi­ron­ment that would be flex­i­ble enough to per­mit a whole series of dif­fer­ent appli­ca­tions to live within its bound­aries, and more impor­tantly, that could con­tinue to engage with other appli­ca­tions whether on the Web or else­where, inside and out­side Glow.

Those who, over the years, have tried to typ­ify Glow — before they had seen it — as some kind of restric­tive, centrally-directed, managed-service mon­ster will, with the help of peo­ple such as Jaye, Car­o­line, Tess, Gor­don and so many oth­ers may now be able to see that Glow is, indeed, sim­ply a web ser­vice (though a rich and com­plex one), and one that can be used — or abused — by the teacher in what­ever way they wish.

My hope is that, in line with Jaye’s com­ments, teach­ers and learn­ers in Scot­tish schools will take Glow to heart and, more impor­tantly, take con­trol of it, each in their own way to suit their own pur­poses. Across the coun­try, the extent to which that will be pos­si­ble will depend on how each local author­ity sets up Glow for use in its schools — those author­i­ties that try to main­tain too tight a con­trol over the ser­vice will make it hard for cre­ative sub­ver­sion to flour­ish. I hope that proves not to be the case any­where in Scotland.

Post­script — Inter­est­ingly, I still have in a folder on my Mac a copy of the very first Glow spec­i­fi­ca­tion that Robert Skey, my key col­league in those days, and I pre­sented to the wider, but still small, group in the Scot­tish Exec­u­tive and in LT Scot­land, as the ini­tial out­line of where we wanted to go with SSDN. It was actu­ally ver­sion 3, because Robert and I delib­er­ately kept ver­sions 1 and 2 close to our chests until we were happy to open it out for oth­ers to see. The inter­est­ing thing is that, despite the 18 months of close scrutiny and amend­ment that the spec­i­fi­ca­tion under­went in the hands of the large group of edu­ca­tion­ists from every Scot­tish local author­ity who helped us improve the spec, despite almost two years of the ten­der and con­tract nego­ti­a­tion process, and despite more than two years of devel­op­ment by RM since we signed the con­tract with them, that little-old Ver­sion 3 of the spec­i­fi­ca­tion still describes, I would esti­mate, around 75%-80% of what Glow has ended up as today.

Well, it’s inter­est­ing to me

Tech­no­rati Tags: glow, ssdn, spec­i­fi­ca­tion, anar­chy, cre­ative subversion

From a recent edi­tion of the Guardian:

“It took two cen­turies to fill the shelves of the Library of Con­gress with more than 57 mil­lion man­u­scripts, 29 mil­lion books and peri­od­i­cals, 12 mil­lion pho­tographs, and more. Now, the world gen­er­ates an equiv­a­lent amount of dig­i­tal infor­ma­tion nearly 100 times each day.”

And we still think we can get away with a form of edu­ca­tion that puts teach­ers in front of classes and asks them to incul­cate, some­how, a pre­scribed body of knowl­edge decided by who­ever?

Tech­no­rati Tags: guardian, edu­ca­tion, cur­ricu­lum, Library of Congress

I won­der how far we have moved on since Jim Hacker’s superbly pithy descrip­tions of the read­er­ships of the main UK news­pa­pers at the time? Great to see and hear this again.

Tech­no­rati Tags: yes min­is­ter, yes prime min­is­ter, news­pa­per, jour­nal­ism

Is this for real?

Tech­no­rati Tags: shoe­tube, youtube, video, shoes

Ques­tion: is it enough to attribute own­er­ship of a cre­ative com­mons pho­to­graph by sim­ply link­ing back to the orig­i­nal, or should there always be an explicit and named credit for the asset? I have to admit to hav­ing done the for­mer on occa­sions with­out also doing the lat­ter (I have checked on a cou­ple of occa­sions that the own­ers were happy with this form of attri­bu­tion, and both were).

I recently used a photograph from the Flickr site of Rashunda Tram­ble with­out explicit, named, attri­bu­tion but I did link back to her orig­i­nal on Flickr. Rashunda has taken me to task for doing so, and I have aplo­gised to her. How­ever, I would like to see how oth­ers feel about this issue.

Rashunda, by the way, is a hard-working and expe­ri­enced jour­nal­ist work­ing out of Switzer­land — given her back­ground, I can under­stand her issue with explicit attribution.

From here on in, I will take the safe (and cour­te­ous) route by giv­ing clear attri­bu­tion at all times.

Tech­no­rati Tags: cre­ative com­mons, rashunda tram­ble, attri­bu­tion, copy­right

Mark Nichols, an edu­ca­tor in New Zealand, rebukes me, politely, for my “rhetoric and gen­er­al­i­sa­tion” in my recent post on Teach­ing at a Cross­roads. It is always good to be pulled up and forced to con­sider your own state­ments in some detail, and to respond (which I shall do once I wake up prop­erly from my trip back from Mexico):

“Hello John,

Mark.”

Thanks, Mark — I’ll get back to you

Of course, any­one else who wants to dis­cuss Mark’s points should feel free to join in.

Tech­no­rati Tags: teach­ing, learn­ing 2.0, mark nichols, rhetoric

This dis­play in the won­der­ful Anthro­po­log­i­cal Museum in Mex­ico City was sim­ply stun­ning, and yet sim­ple enough. It cov­ers a whole wall around 15 metres wide, and shows many of the facial types that exist around the world, but the dis­play has each pic­ture set up so that you can look either at the face itself or, by mov­ing just a cou­ple of feet to the left or right, an image of the skull beneath.

I decided this was the clos­est facial type to my own ruggedly hand­some vis­age (now now!).….

.…and when I stepped just a lit­tle to the side.….the skull beneath showed up.

Tech­no­rati Tags: mex­ico city, anthro­po­log­i­cal museum, facial types

One school dis­trict in the USA takes the plunge and shifts from Microsoft Office to Apple iWork — and they save them­selves $50k in the process.

Tech­no­rati Tags: eric pin­gel, microsoft office, apple iwork