John Connell: The Blog

GPS, social networking, and privacy

redpathjohn@mac.com (John Connell) — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 13:25:00 +0000

My wife, Jan, shared my usual trip to Glasgow with me yesterday as she was heading for a meeting with Niamh Fitzgerald of the Create Consultancy (they were discussing a CPD programme on drugs and alcohol for Borders teachers - yes, I know, there's a joke in there, but I'll resist the temptation). Jan told me later that Niamh had mentioned that her journo brother, Ronan Fitzgerald, had just had an article published in Guardian Technology.

Not just any old article, but the lead article on the front page - Follow You, Follow Me! Ronan's article is about GPS - he focuses on American, Tim Hibbard, who has linked his GPS-enabled mobile phone to his website timhibbard .com/wherestim, and goes on to explore some of the highways and byways that this technology now offers.

So, for instance, he writes: "A social networking site could use real-time GPS by letting you add friends to your online profile; perhaps you mark their houses on a map. You also mark other areas where you spend a lot of time - your workplace or your favourite pub. When your friends log on, they can see where you are. You click on their map and you can see where they are. Your phone could even alert you when they're near."

The article as a whole put me in mind of the words of my good friend, Robert Skey which I posted under Thoughts from left field... - we seem to be moving into a time in which long-held notions of personal privacy are changing radically. As Robert said: "Modern ICT users are the least private of any generation (blogs, webcams, flickr libraries, google, etc) yet we live in a world built on fear of identity theft and the shadow of our neighbour. Is this simply because the youth know better and the statesmen have yet to adapt to a modern world built on different principles of privacy? How might this affect future laws and modes of society?"

However, Ronan also mentions Facebook's recent faux pas - Facebook owner, Mark Zuckerberg, has tried to backtrack, and maybe still has some way to go, but this episode certainly suggests that privacy will remain a big issue for a time to come!

Wordpress here I come...

redpathjohn@mac.com (John Connell) — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 14:51:00 +0000

I now have my new blog up and running in 'shadow' mode, with every post and every comment ported over to the new format - I hope to make the change over the weekend. If anyone wants to see how it looks, just stick an 's' on the end of 'blog' in the address above and it will appear in all its glory or just click the image below.

I'd welcome any comment on the new look before I make the final move.

I still have some work to do on other pages ('about me' etc) but it's just about ready to go. I intend to leave all the old-blog archives in place so that links from other blogs etc continue to work. I'll be moving it to the same address as the current blog, of course - i.e. without the 's' on the end.

Are you authorised?

redpathjohn@mac.com (John Connell) — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 09:36:00 +0000

Read Terry Freedman's brilliant rant on Authorised Madness.

Proof, if proof were needed, that we are living in an age of small minds and 'weary willies' who need to lift their heads, smell the coffee, and get a life!

Extreme Learning: East Lothian style

redpathjohn@mac.com (John Connell) — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 19:58:00 +0000

My colleague, Ewan McIntosh, has already posted his first of two reports from the meeting held in East Lothian's Council Chamber this afternoon, where some 3 dozen professionals, including one eminent visitor from Perth Academy - Neil Winton - came together to talk 'Extreme Learning'. Don Ledingham has already outlined the concept in his own blog, so I won't go into any superfluous detail here.

Suffice to say that is was a real pleasure to find myself amongst a bunch of committed professionals getting down to the task of fashioning a radical and exciting notion of learning: a kind of learning in which young people will be able to bring their passions firmly inside the bounds of their schooling (instead of having to defer their real interests to their lives outside of school, as is so often the case); a kind of learning in which what has been peripheral can be pulled into the core; a kind of learning in which the curriculum, or part of it at least, is not fixed by some central authority but is negotiable; a kind of learning in which teachers can accord learners the maximum respect by recognising that they are learners too; and a kind of learning that could be a groundbreaking model for Scotland's Curriculum for Excellence in the future.

It was a privilege to participate, and I hope I can continue to play a part, however minor, in the process as it moves forward

Technorati Tags: extreme learning, east lothian, negotiated curriculum

Open and honest debate

redpathjohn@mac.com (John Connell) — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 20:59:00 +0000

My guess is that Gordon McKinlay heard the same report that I did on BBC Radio Four yesterday morning. I meant to take a glance at it during the day but forgot until Gordon reminded me to follow up the report, which was based on an open letter sent to the Daily Telegraph by a large number of "paediatricians, academics and authors".

As an old fashioned leftie, I tend to bridle at anything the Telegraph prints, but then I remember that at least it's not the Daily Mail and, well, it can't be quite as bad as that scurrilous rag......

I've read the letter and, while it is shot full of assumptions that I do not necessarily agree with, it deserves a second, and considered, reading, especially from anyone involved in education, whether in the classroom or in any other capacity.

Now, if this had been printed in the Daily Mail (note: I can't even bring myself to include a link to the Mail !!), there would have been lurid screamer headlines about trendy education, about hapless parents, about the collapse of society as we know it, and - probably - a call to the gathering mob to string all paediatricians up from the nearest tall trees for being child abusers!

No doubt there may well be some "paediatricians, academics and authors" amongst the 100+ signatories whose position might not be far from the 'Daily Mail' view (minus the bit about paediatricians, I guess), but, in fact, so long as we respond to their words with intelligence and consideration, and without retreating into a bunker mentality, the letter actually outlines an agenda that few in education would wish to ignore, and most would at least want to debate openly and honestly.

If we respond simply by defending computer games or other 'screen-based entertainment', we will miss the point. Few parents or teachers would want to condone a life for a child that leaned too heavily towards an existence in which the screen (whether TV or computer) took up large proportion of their days or weeks. We know that we all should exercise our bodies as well as our minds (I just hope no one who knows me laughs at this point!) and good exercise and good food will always be important for children and young people, especially while they are growing.

How, though, should we respond to the central point of the letter:

"Since children’s brains are still developing, they cannot adjust – as full-grown adults can – to the effects of ever more rapid technological and cultural change. They still need what developing human beings have always needed, including real food (as opposed to processed “junk”), real play (as opposed to sedentary, screen-based entertainment), first-hand experience of the world they live in and regular interaction with the real-life significant adults in their lives."

Is, for instance, the assumption that adults can react to 'rapid technological and cultural change' more easily than children a tenable view - how does it fit with the whole 'digital native / digital immigrant' metaphor? And why would they choose to conflate technological change with cultural change? Are they two sides of one coin?

I would certainly want to question the implicit view that 'real play' will always be better for young people than 'sedentary, screen-based entertainment' - is there not room for both in the balanced ideal life of a child? And how does this view chime with our promotion of Web 2.0 and all those learning and collaborative tools that will be available through the likes of Glow?

I think I agree wholeheartedly with: "...children are expected to cope with an ever-earlier start to formal schoolwork and an overly academic test-driven primary curriculum." It is obvious from this that the writers are basing their argument mainly on how we educate and bring up our youngest children. And the 'overly academic test-driven primary curriculum' may be more about English education than it is about Scottish or other national systems, but the basic point is a fair one, I believe.

So, despite my natural aversion to the Telegraph I would not want to react dogmatically to a letter such as this - to do so runs the risk of widening any gap even further between those who would seek to develop the intelligent and rational use of ICT in teaching and learning and those who would scrap all technology other than pencil and chalk from our school.

And, anyway, who could argue with: "This is a complex socio-cultural problem to which there is no simple solution, but a sensible first step would be to encourage parents and policy-makers to start talking about ways of improving children’s well-being. "

postscript I should have put a link to the conversation on Radio Four's Today programme yesterday with Susan Greenfield and Michael Morpurgo - Greenfield, in particular, has some decidedly odd views about what can and cannot be achieved through technlogy. This, though, is radio at its best - something TV rarely matches - three intelligent people given the time to engage with the subject!

Technorati Tags: childhood, daily telegraph, well-being, health, lifestyle

CircuitSix.com

redpathjohn@mac.com (John Connell) — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 14:18:00 +0000

"Play them out, share them, sample and mash them, use them as soundtracks or just stick them on your mp3 player. If you really like them, download them, contact us or leave a comment on the blog."

So say a good friend of mine and his web partner. They are musicians who create their own grooves and who have decided to make their music available, on a Creative Commons basis, to anyone who wants to use it.

The site is called: CircuitSix

First track has just appeared, but I know how good a musician he is, so expect more quality music any time soon!

Don't download this song

redpathjohn@mac.com (John Connell) — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 19:38:00 +0000

In case anyone missed it in his comment, Jim Henderson sent me this link after reading my post on CircuitSix. It won't win an Emmy, but give it a listen.....

How long the revolution?

redpathjohn@mac.com (John Connell) — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 09:28:00 +0000

Don Ledingham’s post on our conversation about ‘inverting the core’ led me to something I last read many many moons ago: Raymond Williams’ book, “The Long Revolution”. In a chapter on ‘Education and Society’, Williams wrote (Part II, Chapter I):

“…we speak sometimes as if education were a fixed abstraction, a settled body of teaching and learning, and as if the only problem it presents to us is that of distribution: this amount, for this period of time, to this or that group.”

He went on: “…to conduct the business [of education] as if it were the distribution of a simple product is wholly misleading.”

And finally: “…what has been thought of as a simple distrubution is in fact an active shaping to particular social ends.”

So, the way in which we organise education, the particular structure our education system has taken, the shape of our curriculum, the specific selection of content we choose to ‘deliver’ through that curriculum – all these and more are not timeless abstractions, but particular to the social, political and economic context in which we construct and operate an education system.

This, of course, comes as no surprise to anyone who has ever thought seriously about education, its purpose and its organisation in different societies. Nonetheless, it is good to be reminded that education has two key functions. In no particular order, they are: to reflect the society we live in, and; to reproduce the society we live in.

Tensions arise when our education system no longer reflects our society, when changes in society happen too fast for our education system to keep up. Is that the situation we are in today?

And what if our education system continues to seek the reproduction of a society that no longer exists? If social relations are changing, if our vision of a future society is different from what has been before, how do we ensure that education is set up to help us get there, rather than drag us in the opposite direction?

Does inverting the core have a part to play here? Perhaps it depends on the perspective you take – what level do we attack such issues from? Changing practice in the classroom (micro-level change?) is one thing, but changing the very nature of our education system (macro-level change?) to reflect and (re-)produce the society we seek is a very different beast altogether. Can one lead us to the other? Or do we have to attack both simultaneously and synchronously?

Technorati Tags: raymond williams, inverting the core, the long revolution, educational change

EdBloggerNews

redpathjohn@mac.com (John Connell) — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 18:20:00 +0000

If you haven't yet seen EdBloggerNews (subtitled 'News for Educationn 2.0'), head over there and take a look. Set up by Will Richardson (of "Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms" fame), it, "allows us to post, or direct to the service blogs, news stories, or general web sites to a listing of community selected resources. Then you can vote for the news stories that seem most valuable to you, adding recommendation value to the story, and moving it up the list. Those stories with the most recommendations (value) appear at the top of the list. In a sense, it is a news paper, for which the readers are the editors." Description quoted from David Warlick.

Thank you to Robert Banning for pointing me at EdBloggerNews and at David Warlick's description of it.

But even better, go to Robert's post if your a Blogger blogger, so to speak (as I am for the moment). Robert has worked up some code that lets you put a 'Share it on EdBloggerNews' link after each of your posts, so that if perchance someone happens to think one of your posts ought to be shared with a wider audience, hitting that link will send the link, and a 'vote' for your post, off to the site. [Note the comment after Robert's post for a small bug that has been picked up already, though].

Technorati Tags: edbloggernews, will richardson, robert banning, david warlick

Jim Buchan

redpathjohn@mac.com (John Connell) — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 10:30:00 +0000

I'd like to welcome a new blog to the landscape - that of my good friend and colleague, Jim Buchan.

Jim, for those who don't know him, is the real technology brain that underpins so much of Glow. People, over the years, have been very kind in granting me much of the credit for realizing the original vision of SSDN that grew out of the early work of Stuart Robertson and Neil MacFarlane, but the real credit should go to two people, one of whom is Jim.

[The other is Robert Skey, whose own immersion in Web technology ensured that the original specification for SSDN made sense and provided a realistic basis for the long and complex procurement and, now, the implementation of the whole venture.]

Jim has a genuinely profound understanding of how the different bits of technology (telecoms, hardware, software - the whole caboodle), involved in an enterprise such as Glow 'hang together'. His ability to think a long way ahead, to see connections in the future that are dependent on making the right decision now, to understand the deep-level linkages between the technology and education (Jim, for all his technological expertise, is at heart still an educationist) - all these attributes and more have ensured that Glow is now in good heart and in rude health, as I have said elsewhere.

His blog is in its early stages but I know that if he hangs around in this landscape for any length of time his wisdom and experience will prove useful to any who come across him or who make contact with him.

Welcome, Jim.

ps if you don't know Jim but hope to recognise him in the future from the photo attached, add a little sprinkling of grey to the hair and you'll be fine......

What you can find when you meander......

redpathjohn@mac.com (John Connell) — Sun, 10 Sep 2006 19:05:00 +0000

Because I'm thinking of moving my blog away from Blogger and onto Wordpress, I was interested in Warrick Wynne's experience in moving from Blogger to Edublogs (which uses Wordpress) - his old blog is here. Warrick's blog deserves further reading, which I will follow up over the next day or two.

I'll not waste your time with the precise route, but over the next half hour or so, from that start in Warrick's blog, I found myself amongst a number of interesting and stimulating blogs

I found Graham Wegner's blog - Teaching Generation Z. I had come across Graham's name before on ELGG, and his blog is a mine of worthwhile material. He likes the extended post, it seems, and, with his primary school context, I immediately identified a kindred spirit in his attitudes and interests!

It was great, also, to come across Smith's Ninth Grade Blog - I've pointed readers towards a particular post (her latest as I write this) because you just have to read the comments on the post! All are from students in Anne Smith's class and, unless she is paying them vast sums of money to say what they have said :-) their pleasure and enthusiasm for Anne's willingness to use her students' mobile phones for an activity shines through loud and clear. One of them, kayla257, writes: "Mrs. Smith is the number one teacher and the only one who finally got into our century and used it to our adavantages." Says it all.

I got to this blog, by the way, from a joint blog that Anne is involved in - Learning and Laptops.

Somewhere in my meanderings, I also found someone who had tabulated many of the blog software packages against a range of criteria - you'll find the table here - a massive amount of work by Owen Winkler - and you can find his lengthy explanation of which is to be his choice of package here. I haven't read it all yet, but I will do so - and just look at the amount of comment this has generated when you go to his site!

From Warrick's blog, I also found my way to think:lab a blog that considers "the future of learning and the environments that shape educational engagement" - some good stuff here, amongst which I found this gem of a blog from Andrew Pass! Here is a blog that has pointer after pointer to great teaching and learning ideas based on current events. Go look if you want some inspiration.

Jimmy shows the way

redpathjohn@mac.com (John Connell) — Sun, 10 Sep 2006 10:34:00 +0000

Google caved, as did Microsoft, Yahoo and others before them, but Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia has refused to censor Wikipedia for the Chinese government. It's all or nothing for Wikipedia - we should applaud his stance.

A piece in the Observer today - Wikipedia defies Chinese censors - also highlights the 'irrepresible.info' campaign run jointly by Amnesty International and the Observer. The site offers a pointer to a piece of javascript that displays random excerpts from material that has been censored somewhere in the world - see the result in my left sidebar.

Technorati Tags: jimmy wales, censorship, irrepressible.info, amnesty international, observer newspaper

Soutra without the Kama

redpathjohn@mac.com (John Connell) — Sat, 09 Sep 2006 17:35:00 +0000

Someone asked me recently where my occasional online pseudonym - Soutra - comes from. I've used it for many years as my default login name for various services, including Technorati (although I've now amended that to show my full name instead).

First things first - it has, unfortunately, nothing to do with the Kama Sutra!

Those of you who know the Scottish Borders, and especially those who use the A68 (Edinburgh to Newcastle) road, will know all about Soutra Hill. Some 20 miles south of Edinburgh is the hill that I have used as a kind of psychological threshold between work and home, more or less every working day, for more than 16 years now, since I moved to Lauder in 1990. When I feel the need to, I can drive south across the big hill every evening and leave my working cares and concerns behind, and then let them come back to me the next morning as I drive north once more for another working day.

Interestingly, though, with everything that is happening in Scottish education at the moment, I haven't felt the need to make use of the hill's shield-like qualities of late - there's just too damned much going on that is exciting and energising in our country's education system at the moment, and too much of interest happening across the world in education to permit me any negative thoughts just now. Long may it continue.

addendum: Soutra Hill is the site of a very important Scottish historical site - Soutra Isle. Founded around 1160, the hospital at Soutra (known as the House of the Holy Trinity at Soutra) "was, in its heyday....one of the three most important hospitals in Scotland."

The hill was also on the route of the ancient Roman road known as Dere Street, that linked York and Perth by way of Cramond on the Forth Estuary.

Most recently, the hill has played host to the Dun Law Wind Farm - 26 majestic wind turbines - I like them, by the way!!

Technorati Tags: soutra, lauder, dun law, soutra isle

The Don!

redpathjohn@mac.com (John Connell) — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 18:59:00 +0000

I enjoyed a stimulating chat with Don Ledingham over a pint (two, actually) in the Lauder sunshine this afternoon - to be honest, I think it's probably impossible to have any other kind of chat with Don! For a September late-afternoon in Scotland, it was certainly warm and sunny sitting outside the Lauderdale Hotel. We're both lucky enough to live either in (me) or close to (Don) the lovely old Royal Burgh of Lauder in the Scottish Borders.

It was a conversation dotted with references to multiple metaphors, extreme learning, inverted cores (turning the traditional curriculum priorities inside out - Don might explain himself in his blog), Prince 2 (its use and abuse), openness in public sector finances, the non-linear nature of change, and oh-so-much more - all within 40 minutes or so!

Great way to end the working week. I'd recommend it!

Technorati Tags: don ledingham, lauder, extreme learning, multiple metaphors

Thus spake Tim

redpathjohn@mac.com (John Connell) — Sun, 03 Sep 2006 14:10:00 +0000

Carol Thomas picked up on comments from Tim Berners-Lee on the meaningfulness or otherwise of the Web 2.0 name. Tim says:

“Web 1.0 was all about connecting people. It was an interactive space, and I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along.”

This reminded me of a passage in John Naughton's book A Brief History of the Future in which he writes that: "Tim Berners-Lee was...very critical of the addition of the <IMG> tag. Andreesen recalls being 'bawled out' by him in the summer of 1993 for adding images to the thing. The frivolity that the visual Web offered worried its inventor because 'this was supposed to be a serious medium - this is serious information'."

Like the old platitude: if you love it, let it go.......

Technorati Tags: tim berners-lee, Web 2.0, Web 1.0, john naughton