Webucation

I was going to call this piece 'Teachers' - Gatekeepers or Keyholders?' the role of the teacher is critical in fostering learning and we all have had experiences of good and bad teachers in our school lives.

Some years ago I did some work for local schools to create a single sign-on system to allow schools to access a wide range of free and purchased e-learning content from a number of different suppliers.


The idea was to provide access to a wide range of learning resources for use at home and and at school which was always available. Interestingly some of the materials that schools bought were provided as content services covering a number of subjects.

Some months into the project I did some surveys of how the service was being used by speaking to students and teachers in some of our High schools. Pupils reported that they found some of the materials very helpful in clarifying or explaining things they had covered in class. Others said that they were able to look up other things they were interested in. Teachers were far less enthusiastic. Some said they hadn't promoted the content related to their subject as they didn't like it or it didn't explain topics in they way they wanted things explained. More worrying was the comment that they didn't want content made available for topics coming up in the future as it may 'spoil their lessons'!

What were were attempting to do was tap into the huge resource that is out on the net to support learning drawing on as many services as possible to increase the range and type of material available to young people.

The system we put together was based on the Shibboleth authentication and it worked very well - we ended up with more than 40 commercial services and some free content linked into the system but our real goal was to tap into the growing number of learning repositories around the world. Much of the work being done is focussed on university level students but a number of repositories also explore and index content for school age children.

One of the first we looked at was the Merlot repository which contains a large number of peer reviews materials including simulations, presentations, text materials and apps for mobile devices. Merlot allows integration with other search systems and the aim was to develop the search side of the system to allow pupils and teachers to access the materials they needed to support their learning or to use in their teaching. The potential is huge and the number of repositories has grown over the years, some specifically aimed at the younger students. A visit to any one of these repositories is well worth it - spend a little while there rather than dipping in - go to iTunes U and take a look at the awesome materials that are available there - again well worth an hour or two of your time.

So why is it that we are not all accessing learning where and when we need it? - why is it that these fabulous materials are not used across the world to support teaching and learning on a daily basis? How come that when you speak to almost any teacher they have never heard of them?

There are probably too many reasons to list but for me the main ones are:

1. Teachers are fixed in the way they work and teach - many do innovate but the critical mass of innovators in any particular school to change to way we learn and teach has not been reached. If something takes a bit more effort to do than their existing ways of doing things it tends not to be adopted.

2. Content is still difficult to locate and it means that teachers have to search for just the resource they regard as 'valuable' before they build it into their teaching. There is no common standard for indexing materials so you have to navigate each repository rather than being able aggregate many of them and carry out a single search.

3. Authentication into some of these services is not easy to automate so you end up registering with multiple sites and that involved too much fiddling about to get at the resources you need

4. Peer review is powerful, in that it establishes a 'value' placed on the resource by other practitioners. Trouble is there is no standard and no real match between the teaching you may do as a teacher and the reviewers

There are others but the potential is huge and the quality and range of resources is impressive and all given away free by educators. Once we have cracked the indexing, searching and access issues, the opportunities for personalised and independent learning would expand rapidly. Teachers would have access to a wealth of materials to promote the learning of their subject and students would have control of their learning. Institutions and formal learning would still be a key component of education systems around the world - I'm not a de-schooler, but the focus could become more individualised and to a degree paced for each learner.

It may be a vision for the future we never achieve but having a direction of travel is important and there are many that share the vision and are working hard to achieve it.

In the UK we have spent a lot of money over the years creating a high speed infrastructure for schools. Many schools have fast internet connections but I wonder just how many of them are working to establish what might be called an infrastructure for learning. What does this mean?....

Is a device like an IPod Touch sufficient
as a 'use anytime' device?
Having worked with schools, learners and teachers for a number of years I am increasingly convinced that a single technology device is just not enough! Various surveys have been done about the use of technology by learners at home and at school as well as attitudes towards technology across the age range.

Some of the more recent research makes interesting reading such as the recent 2009 e-Maturity Study produced by some of the leading researchers in the UK.


What the research like this does not do is to study the actual use of technology by young people and teachers and what the minimum technology they would need to meet their immediate needs. Having observed a large number of lessons where ICT is used it is clear that many do not require the power provided in the majority of the hardware devices that are actually used. Teachers may use their devices to create materials for classroom use but during lessons the technology is mainly used for presentation purposes. Pupils use of technology varies depending on what they are doing but again in the majority of cases the devices are not used for creating content.

It may be that we are all waiting for the right technology to come along e.g suitable sized keyboard, long battery life (longer than a school day) high quality screen etc etc but in fact maybe all you need to be able to do is take notes, perhaps snap a picture and access information. The more heavy weight uses such as creating presentations, editing movies or creating publications need more processing power.

My contention is that we need a ' use anytime' device that is used mainly for the less sophisticated but important tasks such as the researching, note taking and watching with additional resources available 'when needed' to do the more demanding tasks.

There is much discussion about Transforming Education but what does this mean and how can you transform something that in many countries is driven by achieving specific outcomes. We all know that we need our schools to deliver citizens ready for work in the 21st Century but what does that actually mean when the measures we have for success are largely the ones that we have used for hundreds of years.

Thomas Deacon Academy in Peterborough UK was one of the buildings created to demonstrate an entirely new approach to the design of schools as part of the UK's Building Schools for the Future programme. The design, brainchild of the well known designer Norman Foster, is certainly nothing like any school I have been to before. The Foster and Partners business has been responsible for some of the most celebrated designs world wide.

The Academy is actually an amalgam of three previous schools to create a school of over 2000 students aged 11 to 18. I visited the school during a typical school day the fact that 2000 pupils were are work there was pretty difficult to believe as the place was not overcrowded, nor were corridors overflowing with the rush of bodies between lessons. First Myth exploded for me was that a school has to look like the schools we all attended.

As with any design there were issues that could have been addressed slightly differently e.g that classrooms were a little smaller than you night ideally want, but they were bright inviting places geared to focused work. Very few straight walls in the design which is often frowned on by teachers as not being suitable for standard classroom use - but these are not standard classrooms with fill glass walls on the interior making classroom activity visible to anyone passing. Two further myths exploded for me were that you have to have rectangular rooms and that working in classrooms that are open for all peer into.

Again this might put some people off claiming that students would be distracted by things going on outside the classroom. I was pretty impressed to see a group of students sitting chatting and laughing outside one of the classrooms sitting on a settee with students inside the room not taking a jot of notice - the novelty had obviously long worn off.

Another exploded myth is that they use thin client systems throughout the school, 1,100 terminals for a school population of 2,200 students! The technical team reported that they were reliable - suffered from some glitches as with any system and had been delivering everything that the students and teachers wanted. There are some fat clients for use with CAD/CAM or some other specific curriculum tasks but everything else is delivered through thin clients.

The concept of floors seems to vanish as although there are levels there are also structures that defy the normal idea of floors - the library is built above the dual lecture theatre but that is buried into the ground so the layout looks very different from what you would normally expect.

All in all the school opens a whole new set of ideas around the notion of what a school should look like - not surprisingly the students seem to love it.

Libraries have been important places for the sharing of text based materials for centuries. There are many famous libraries across the world holding some of the most amazing resources. Trouble is that many of these resources were only available to researchers or academics until the arrival of digital technologies.

In schools the library has also seen changes with the arrival of digital resources with many more school libraries now equipped with computers so that users can carry out research using the web as well as other resources held by the library. In some schools this combination of technology and traditional printed material has been merged to create the Resource Centre or the Media Lab.

The change in use of school libraries has been interesting. Schools now tend not to spend money on expensive resources such as encyclopedia when they can access up to date and low cost resources that do the same job online. The non-fiction resource has become the internet which has allowed some schools to report that they have been able to expand their range of fiction materials and stimulate an increase in reading for pleasure.

So are libraries of the future only places where the balance between the non-fiction and fiction materials will shift further to become more and more digital? If this is the case why bother with a physical space? If it has social aspects (not something I tend to see in libraries) then is not the social networking provided by digital technologies far more powerful than could be achieved simply by meeting in a physical space called a library? Maybe libraries are gradually going to shrink to become the repository for the rare original artifact that you can go and visit....... We need to think more about the function and role of libraries in schools - what sots of things should be available in these places and just what will they mean to the generation that is growing up as avid web users and who often report that they feel agitated when not connected!

This video clip explores some interesting ideas about the potential of the lib. Interesting that the library of the future is a physical space and that there are actually books there - also interesting that it does not look like any library that I have visited..... yet!

What do we mean by quality indicators when thinking about building a new school.                                                                            

The following information was provided as part of the UK's BECTa Agency work for UK government. Becta was disbanded in 2010. The links below have been updated to archive copies of materials which are still perfectly valid documents

There are loads of examples of innovative design on web site, in magazines and presentations - how did those come into being? In the majority of cases where good design can be identified the designers and architects have spent time working with the owners or users of a building to convert their vision into reality.

The fact that there are so many bad designs around would suggest that something has gone badly wrong in such cases. In the case of schools might this be because the users are used to their current buildings and can only envisage a better version or that the designers and architects are unable to convert the requirements into suitable designs? Not sure- but whatever the reason there is a desperate need to spend a long time thinking about alternatives and testing our existing thinking around school design before any real planning begins.

The fact that so many kids are not turned on to schools would suggest that what has become the 'standard' school designs are no longer fit for purpose. As an aid to thinking the issues through there is a useful resource at the School Design Research Studio by one Jeffery A. Lackney from the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has produced a paper entitled 33 Principles of Educational Design. The paper provides some real food for thought when considering the design of any new school.

If these principles should contribute to the creation of a vision for new accommodation or be a stimulus to thinking about what outcomes are required for any building programme then perhaps these slides illustrate the results of such thinking.

Alan November is well known in countries around the world for his work on Information Literacy. His book 'Empowering Students with Technology' is an essential read for anyone trying to harness the use of the net to support learning.

Alan has also been in a position to visit a number of the most innovative schools in the US and elsewhere and in his usual candid way is well able to set out his opinions about everything from e-safety to school and curriculum design.

After the BLCO7 conference in Boston this year I asked Alan to take part in a discussion about the future of learning via Skype.

We discussed a number of issues as always Alan brings his experience to bear on the issues and provides insightful comments on the challenges that are ahead.

WebQuest UK was produced by the Worcestershire Learning Technologies team in 2001 following a visit to Quebec in 2000 with a group of secondary teachers looking at the way in which ICT was being used for learning.

Professors Graham Whitehead and Kevin Warwick came together to speak to around sixty teenagers at Worcester Rugby Club in the UK on various aspects of Information and Communications Technology.
Graham is a Futurologist who worked for British Telecom for over 34 years has extensive experience of digital and communication technology. He is a visiting professor to Salford University and a number of others and won the Queen's Award for Technology for the trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific submarine
cable system.

The development of tools for social interaction and which foster collaboration and membership of online communities has exploded in recent years. Myspace, Flickr, Bebo etc are all sites which draw people in, share their identities and interests and then share in all sorts of ways (some not quite legal).

There are tensions in the educational world regarding such technologies. Leading advocates like Steven Downes would claim that Web 2.0 will provide massive opportunities for learning but absolutely not in the traditional school or even a school at all. Others say it is the way forward and it has a significant contribution to make to, what you might call, more formal education.

The term Learning 2.0 was coined (I guess) by those advocates of Web 2 technologies to claim the educational ground and to promote their vision of the way the future of learning should go. Learning 2.0 is really what Wikipedia would refer to as e-learning 2.0 i.e. the second generation of e-learning tools based around collaborative tools such as wikis and blogs etc.

Most innovations in learning and which have an ICT component have come and gone - remember the CD ROM? We have been through a whole raft of software and hardware systems which we have put into schools. In most cases the ones that stick are those that seem best to fit the traditional mode of teaching and learning e.g. Learning Platforms as course delivery systems or whiteboards which look a lot more interesting that black ones but still hang on a wall at one end of a room and have everyone looking at it!

The same fate may lie in wait for Web 2.0 and e-learning 2.0 if we try to fit it into the standard school setting other than to be used by a few interested people with a passion for exploring at the edges of what we still refer to as schooling.

Alan November was asked a question about the relationship between web 2 and learning 2 at a recent conference - although the audio is poor his comments are pretty realistic.

What constitutes a community? Are online communities real communities? Are online communities important for education?

Users of YouTube think they are a community........





Research about communities is extensive - do a search on Google Scholar and you get 9 million hits, try Learning Community and you get 1.8 million with the top hits leading to some of the leading thinkers in this area. From my reading around this I was attracted to the definitions of 'community' presented by Kowch and Schwier (1997) where they describe four different types of community, each with distinguishing features and which meet the needs of different groups of participant. Reil and Polin (2004) explore the notion of online communities and identify three different types. Task based communities tend to be where groups of people are working on a common task or problem. Practice based communities often share goals or expertise and knowledge based communities are often people who come together with diverse expertise and can establish new areas of knowledge.

This all sounds grand but I wonder just how the notion of community sits within our education system. We don't assess group contribution or how well students share expertise or work together to create new knowledge - at least that is the case in many school I visit. We only seem interested in assessing the individual or what contribution they make to the 'community' (usually through social good works). Seems to me that we have much to do to explore online educational communities and harness them for learning.

The question remains - is the YouTube Community a real community?

In the UK some local authorities are working flat out to come up with designs for schools that will stand the test of time for the next thirty years. The UK government's Building Schools for the Future programme set out in 2003 with the grand vision to replace the secondary school stock throughout England over a fifteen year period.

Similar programmes are underway in other countries. Ask different people what the key characteristics of such schools will be and there are as many views as there are learners that will attend these schools.

It is clear that a single characteristic or feature is unlikely to dominate but there might well be a small number of vital ones - use the poll below to choose the three that appear to be the most important to you.