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.

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.

I have long thought that we need to develop a carefully crafted model for the learning environments of the future, particularly for students in the state school system attend compulsory education.

Research into the views of young people about their school experience reveal that many feel that it is not meeting all of their needs. If we are intent on delivering personalised learning then we need to listen to young people and build environments. Both physical and virtual, within which they can flourish.

Students also say that they want to be able to engage with other young people and in many cases the opportunities to do this are either difficult to arrange or are not sustained over long periods and are limited to specific projects.

The safe space of a learning platform or VLE, where learners are supported in their formal learning, combined with the more open global tools, where greater opportunities for social interaction become possible, must be our ultimate goal as educators. Our aim should be to ensure that we support learners effectively in their formal learning while allowing them to explore ideas and interests with each other. We also need to reach out to other learners world wide rather than requiring them to enter our closed managed online worlds which may well restrict the nature and extent of the discussion that can take place.

The diagram here shows how we could create much more stimulating online worlds. The use of RSS feeds are probably one of the most powerful ways of linking these external systems into the safer spaces without the need for complex API interfaces and authentication. Educators can ensure that their learners are aware of the risks associated with online system while harnessing them to serve the education process. A larger image is available here.

I would be interested to here how educators and/or learners use these different spaces and just what the impact of this approach might be.

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.

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.