Education is something I care passionately about.  I love to learn new things, I love to share the things I learn with others; I feel fortunate to follow a career which allows me to do something I love doing for my job!

A number of themes emerge from the way points I’ve selected from my personal learning journey – autonomy and independent learning, participation in a community of practice and a willingness to pursue excellence. These are factors which fit well with IT as my subject domain; computers and the net are great tools to facilitate independent, autonomous learning, the web has made it much easier to participate in distributed communities, both formal and informal, and the interactive, provisional nature of computer based work facilitates an iterative process of development. These shouldn’t detract from the idea that learning is fun. Right from early years up, discovering new things about ourselves and our world is, I’m sure, an intrinsically exciting, fulfilling thing. Enjoyment features highly too in my experience of technology, and my aspirations for IT education.

So, to begin at the beginning. My earliest memories are of a contented, loving, although far from lavish home life, of my father working long hours and falling asleep in the evenings, of my mother’s unselfish care for my sister and I as we grew up, of the conversations, books, walks, museum trips, recorded music and, I’ll admit, TV that filled home life.

School, I think, took a while to get used to: we were quite an insular family and I think it took me a while to make friends. I remember being frustrated by how easy much school work seemed – my impression is one of purposeful activity rather than new learning, by and large. I recall working on wonderfully baroque designs and stories, which would extend well beyond the time of a single lesson.

Learning beyond the school curriculum became increasingly important to me as I moved up through primary and secondary school, not always to good effect. I suffered somewhat from a butterfly approach, becoming almost obsessively fascinated about with one area or another for a while before moving on to another. Some of these, like programming and ‘recreational’ mathematics, I would subsequently return to, others like poker and Dungeons and Dragons (!) were, in retrospect, not a particularly productive way to spend my time. I fear I lacked the self-discipline to pursue a single area with the focus necessary to develop expertise beyond competence. Radio 4 also figured highly throughout my secondary school years, and indeed beyond, appealing greatly to my butterfly approach to learning.

Libraries have held a special place in my affection from early days on, starting with my parents’ book collection and my own books (much more non-fiction than fiction in both of these collections); the local town library, from which I would borrow large books on all kinds of areas; the school library, and my indignation that as a first year I wasn’t allowed to borrow a book on trigonometry that had caught my eye; Loughborough university library, which we could use as sixth formers; the college, department and the university library at Cambridge, this latter again used for reading on art and theology, way beyond the confines of my maths degree; and then, for research on my MBA, the British Library itself; one of my favourite places and usually featured in my slides for keynotes if I can get it in. With this love of information, it’s perhaps not too surprising that I took to the ‘net quite early on, and that the web has featured extensively in my creative work.

School work had been, by and large, pretty straightforward, especially in maths and the sciences, where I generally could work things out by having a good grasp of the principles rather than memorizing stuff – an approach that didn’t really do me any favours in foreign languages, something I’ve come to regret. I’d enjoyed the occasional coursework projects that captured my imagination – on more than a few occasions going way beyond the requirements of the tasks set. Mathematics, however, at Cambridge was hard. Really hard. That first weekend with a set of introductory problems to solve after the fun of freshers’ week was probably the first time when I had to deal with subject matter that I just couldn’t get. I persevered and survived the three years, becoming a better, more rounded, more sociable person in the process but emerging with a mediocre degree! I’d spent some time helping in a local school during my undergraduate days, and, I still quite liked mathematics, so on to the PGCE. This was a great year; undoubtedly the best of my four: after three of maths, the opportunity to discuss ideas was something I really relished, particularly on Terry McLauglin’s excellent philosophy of education module in the third term.

The opportunities to talk about education seemed few and far between in my first teaching post, but became more common occurrences in my second post, thanks to an enlightened, liberal, intelligent head teacher and a critical mass of folk on the staff sufficiently interested in education rather than just the processes of school; something I failed to achieve in my own stint at headship, despite noble ambitions in that direction. Taking on responsibilities for coordinating IT (and running the network) alongside maths in this post provided plenty of scope for my own professional development: through learning enough about the tech to solve problems and achieve the goals I’d set myself and through engaging with the professional community through the still embryonic web and face to face conferences. It’s interesting to think back to those days and how the web was already allowing, and indeed encouraging, distributed communities of practice to form around domains of knowledge, with IT stealing a march on other school subject areas.

The greater autonomy which my move to deputy head and information systems manager brought provided opportunities to start setting an agenda and engaging in informal action research at classroom level. I started studying for an MBA in education management at this point, following a distant learning route, which allowed me to explore my own interests within the course’s framework; in retrospect I wish I’d had more opportunities for face to face conversations as part of this study. Professional development through conferences, rather than courses, went some way to filling the gap; one course though, David Burghes on a social constructivist approach to mathematics education had a lasting impact on my approach to web based learning. My MBA readings had already suggested an interesting avenue using IT to help manage a school’s knowledge, and then Becta’s 2004 research conference hinted at schools in the US that had been virtualizing parts of their curriculum, thus prompting my work exploring if and how VLEs would work in primary education. This work really took off, providing so many opportunities to engage with the wider ed-tech community beyond my classroom and school and, I hope, contribute something to the national discussions taking place around a new technology. I found this hugely rewarding, both personally and professionally.

Completing my MBA and moving to headship was, I think, something of an anticlimax for me, and whilst I kept up, and indeed increased, my involvement in the education and technology communities, fitting this in with the ‘day job’ was a challenge. I became increasingly aware that it was my participation in these communities beyond my school that I relished, and that allowed me to make a more significant contribution than through headship.

This brings me, at last, to Roehampton, to teacher training and to academic life. I’m excited about the opportunities to share my insights and experiences of ICT education with the next generation of teachers, by the opportunities to get back to academic research, hopefully not too far removed from the cutting edge, and for more time to engage with these wider debates around education.

Mirandamods are a particular style of unconference, bringing something of the reflection of an academic seminar to the participatory, micropresentation format of a teachmeet, and thus I took my turn presenting, taking the above title as my theme.

• There is clearly a shared domain – the project, and I guess at its heart, the code itself.
• Whilst it’s certainly possible to use the code without participating in the community, these big projects have very active communities, happy and eager to “engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other, and share information.”
• Furthermore, there is, at least because all members of the community share the use of the same code,  a shared practice: members: “develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems—in short a shared practice”

A few other features of these large open source projects strike me as significant from a CoP perspective:

There are built in steps which make it easy for an individual to move from layman, simply a user of the open source software, to active participant in the project, such as

• gaining experience installing the software on their computer or to a webserver,
• contributing to discussion forums
• contributing to documentation and advocacy
• spotting bugs and testing beta releases
• modifying code to customize the operation or fix a bug
• creating a module to extend functionality – it’s no coincidence that the examples I cite above all have highly modular architecture
• submitting patches and modules for peer review and incorporation into /contrib or /core repositories.
• becoming part of the core developer team with commit access to the CVS tree.

This progression offers a very informal sort of apprenticeship, although it’s interesting how many of these project communities allow members to display badges recognizing participation and particular roles (eg Moodle’s developer, partner and ‘particularly helpful moodler’ badges, and Ubuntu’s beans.) The early stages are very close to the notion of legitimate peripheral participation that Lave and Wenger discussed back in 1991. I wonder if we see in these big projects something which has at least some points more in common with the cathedral than the bazaar (qv Raymond 1999)?

Because open source software is free, a gift culture tends to be present (Raymond 1998). The rewards for contributing to open source projects aren’t therefore always, or even mainly, financial, but are more about kudos, the respect of one’s peers. Similarly, as the software’s downloaded for free and is what it is because of the contribution of a community, users perhaps feel that bit more willing to ‘put something back’, embarking on the path to participation in the project’s community of practice.

Whilst community involvement in software projects is something we’re seeing in the world of proprietary code too, for example with sharepoint and frog in the learning platform market and, I guess, iphone apps, access to the source code makes it possible for apprentice open source coders to learn from the work of the master craftsmen in a way that’s not possible through use of APIs and SDKs alone, although Etienne pointed out in his talk at the ‘mod that the master-apprentice relationship is certainly not necessary for a community of practice. Sripting languages such as php make it much easier for even relatively novice coders to see what’s going on behind the scenes and apply customisation and fixes, allbeit at the risk of making things difficult for themselves come the next release of the codebase.

Anyhow, back to the Mirandamod. One thing that I’m sure struck many of us were just how many of the online CoPs described by my fellow Mirandanet fellows were based on Moodle. Moodle might not be the best software for facilitating the development of a CoP, given the distinction its course structure makes between teachers and students, but it had certainly captured the imagination of many of those presenting, allowing some really interesting professional development to take place in a very diverse range of fields. That Moodle is free is part of this, I know, but it’s also worth remembering that Moodle is grounded in a social constructivist paradigm and has evolved to include the tools that educators in many sectors and contexts have come to find most useful. It’s a tribute to Moodle’s flexibility as a platform that teachers are as happy using it with their pupils as they are for their own professional development.

Etienne Wenger himself was inspiring and Leon Cych’s video captures his talk in high quality. He explored concepts that would be familiar to those who’ve read Wenger 1999, but one of my lasting impressions was of how central the social dimension of humanity was to his understanding of learning: that as we’re essentially social beings so our learning is essentially a social process; something I think Moodle captures well. Ettienne also touched on the embedding of organizational knowledge within the social fabric of the organization – something which had struck me too in my work exploring the links between VLEs and knowledge management.  He made some interesting points about the importance of self-government in order to establish trust within a community – these are themes explored in Jono Bacon’s eminently practical book on the Art of Community (2009) for O’Reilly, and something which Ubuntu has strived to do well, despite (because of?) Mark Shuttleworth’s position as Self Appointed Benevolent Dictator for Life . There was also an emphasis on the role of identity, I think as something socially constructed, with knowledge as integral to identity; Etienne said it wasn’t about asking what your students can do, but about where they have visited.

I think there’s some really interesting territory to explore here, and I’m confident that community of practice theory gives a very good framework for exploring the nature of the communities that grow up around open source projects, and perhaps provides a few pointers for how to make these communities, and thus the projects around which they gather more effective.

Research

Zotero 2: I’ve tried many bibliography management tools in my time: I like the open source and Mac only BibDesk, which is a GUI for BibTEX and thus integrates particularly well with LATEX, and nothing comes close to the Mac only Sente for integrating notetaking into bibliography management, but I’ve been won over by the latest (beta) version of Zotero, a Firefox extension that does a great job of keeping track of a bibliographic database, with support for folders, reference scanning, automatic record creation and bibliography export in multiple formats on the fly, all from inside the browser. Zotero’s real strength comes through its use of the cloud to store the database, making it available via any connected computer, and any attached source files such as pdfs, as long as you’ve got access to a bit of connected storage, typically WebDAV, like Apple’s idisk. There are also tools for collaborative bibliographies, but I’ve not got started on those yet!

Diigo. With the browser profile in the cloud, the need for another portable bookmarking tool is largely removed, but the web 2.0 aspects of social bookmarking should not be discounted. Delicious has good firefox integration, but Diigo has a better social dimension, and also does nice highlighting and notes for webpages.

EverNote. I was a bit late coming to the EverNote party, but I’ve become something of a convert, thanks to its ultra smooth integration between iphone and browser – I like using this as a ‘save to read later’ tool; it’s also very useful for collecting together websnipets which might not need bookmarking or saving to Zotero’s bibliography database.

Googlepedia: I have classic google as my home page, having tried igoogle and popurls in the past, but finding the overhead just a bit sluggies and, I’ll admit, liking the simplicity of google’s original homepage. Googlepedia presents the most relevant wikipedia article alongside google’s search results for any search term – often just what one’s looking for, and also providing a human counterpart to the ice cold mathematics of PageRank.

Usability:

Weave: The portable apps version of Firefox looks really impressive, but isn’t alas cross platform, and development appears to have ground to a hold on a USB Stick based cross platform. Anyhow, USB sticks really can’t survive as we head cloud-wards, can they? Thus, using a few computers fairly regularly, the problem of how to manage bookmarks, history, passwords and the like across them all – Weave to the rescue! Weave does an excellent job of storing all the really important bits of a firefox profile out there in the cloud, with fast, transparent and apparently secure syncing between local and cloud profiles as you browse. It’s also the nicest implementation of OpenID that I’ve seen, thanks to its tight integration into the browser. The ambition of the Weave project goes far beyond this sort of use, as ‘an open extensible framework for services integration.’

Adblock Plus, gets installed whenever I set up Firefox, no matter who for, and I wouldn’t browse without it. Whilst I know Safari can now do ad-filtering, and I guess this would be possible in Chrome, or even IE using proxys, this one feature alone makes Firefox the ideal browser for schools.

I have Greasemonkey installed too, but only really use it for filtering out ads (such as in gmail or google search results) that Adblock doesn’t reach.

I have Shorten URL for tweeting – you can set this up to use any one of the URL shortening services out there. [@andyjb points me in the direction of Awesome Highlighter, which not only shortens the URL but allows highlighting, although the URLs aren't as short as is.gd for instance]

Web Developer’s installed too, but doesn’t get used very much these days – great for working with CSS and though.

On the Mac, I’ve installed the PDF display extension, which allows PDFs to be viewed in the browser, as on other platforms. Again, on the Mac, I have the full screen toolbar button, which is occasionally handy when presenting.

After reading about Doug Belshaw’s use of CoolIris to present about Open Source Schools, I dowloaded this, and have been seriously impressed by how great this is for browsing through a collection of images, either on the web or locally.

TwitterFox (now called echofon) was my favourite of the twitter extensions, although not a patch on the likes of tweetdeck. I’m trying out an early release of Snowl at the moment, which, although its lacking functionality as a Twitter client, is a decent aggregator and has much potential.

The last one worth mentioning would be Ubiquity, which has a fairly steep learning curve and is still kinda beta, but brings the benefits of a keyboard interface as seen in applications like Quicksilver and Google’s Quick Search Box to the browser, and makes possible some rather nice in-browser substitution and editing.

The ease with which Firefox can integrate web 2.0 tools for research and collaboration: eg Zotero, Diigo and Evernote, not to mention the near magical portability provided via Weave, make it a brilliant platform for the PLE – the need for institutions to provide web-based platforms which allow students (and staff) to integrate multiple online resources , including e-portfolios and VLEs, is elimenated when each learner can configure their browser to communicate quickly and easily with their network via all of their online services out there in the cloud.

The above is very much a personal selection, and that is, of course, the point – a personal learning environment does rather need to be personal – that extends to its architecture as well as its theme and content.

In school, I’d say a core set of Firefox extensions use would be Adblock, Googlepedia, Web Developer and perhaps Diigo – although I’m interested in the possibility of doing bookmark sharing inside the walled garden here. Suggesting Firefox for use in schools tends to throw up a couple of objections: – firstly that it’s harder to configure or install than IE – well, on Windows I guess that’s probably true, given that one comes bundled with the operating system, but Firefox.adm allows Firefox to be managed in Active Directory and FrontMotion have done a good job of providing an MSI installer for Windows, and will ; secondly, that you can’t force it to use a proxy server – actually, you can using mozilla.cfg or policies, but that misses the point: the proxy should be sitting transparently on the gateway machine so that all traffic is filtered, logged and cached, irrespective of whether the browser’s been set up properly or not.

One last trick, although Weave doesn’t (yet) pull down extensions from the cloud for you, the hassle of installing all these add-ons separately every time you setup a new profile on Firefox can be avoided by bundling the ones you’d like to use (or you recommend your pupils use) together as a collection. Another extension, collector makes the process of adding extension to a collection very straightforward. I’ve collected the above together at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collection/mberry.

I hope some find this of value, but I’d be very interested to hear about your favourite add-ons.

“With an extra 10,000 undergraduate places in ‘Stem’ subjects, how can teachers encourage sixth formers to take the technical route into higher education? Hannah Frankel reports

So you thought the dot-com bust in 2001 spelt the end of the computing boom? Well, that’s not what the Government thinks. Despite the chronic shortage of university places this autumn, it recently announced 10,000 extra undergraduate places for the so-called “Stem” subjects: science, technology, engineering and maths.”

Read more on the TES website

What is meaningful learning? It is learning with a purpose, learning which allows those who engage in it to attach more meaning to the world around them, learning in which things make more sense. Jonassen’s exploration of this area (2007) argues that meaningful learning is characterized by its being: active, constructive, intentional, authentic and cooperative. It is worthwhile thinking about each of these aspects to consider how ICT might make learning more meaningful.

Active: at its best, ICT can offer much to promote active learning- children using a computer creatively are actively engaged in their own, for them meaningful, work, often experimenting with the affordances of an application, such as a word processor, painting package or presentation program, for themselves, actively exploring and attaching meaning to icons, buttons and menus as they do so. The experience of trying multiple strategies to make a program do something is commonly encountered. The same experience is found with many a computer game, where through experiment, play and direct experience, users become immersed in the virtual world of the game, manipulating the tools provided to overcome barriers and achieve goals. At a higher level, the creative activity associated with programming provides a rich medium for creating or adapting software tools.

Constructive: in learning to use any software, users are directly engaged in constructing their own models of how a program functions – which causes have particular effects. When software, particularly simulations and games, behaves in an unexpected, puzzling way, cognitive conflict causes users to develop more and more refined models of the virtual world on screen, thus providing experience in the construction of new ways of understanding things, with ready application beyond the screen. ICT also empowers its users to construct their own artefacts, be they digital photos, audio recordings, video, simulations or spreadsheet models, which embody something of their perception of the world around them, partly clarifying their understanding of the world but also allowing more meaning to be attached to observations and experiences.

Intentional: Papert’s work (1980) on giving children control over computers through the Logo programming language is but one, early example of how good use of ICT can put children in control, not just of technology, but of the learning process itself: as children set the goals for leaning, deciding for themselves what it is they want to achieve or what they want the computer to do, the learning they engage in to accomplish such goals becomes more meaningful for them. Again, software that supports children’s own creativity is where this can be most clearly seen: think of the child mastering painting or video software to produce just the effect they want, or a child exploring the functionality of word-processing or presentation software to present things in the way they want. Children’s use of the Internet to search for, and learn about, topics of their own interest also provides for personally meaningful learning as their own goals are pursued. ICT makes the personalisation of learning more practical, in ways that go far beyond the limits of automated adaptive learning design.

Authentic: working on the computer allows children to engage with authentic, real-world situations that would otherwise be beyond the scope of even the bravest, most well resourced schools. The Internet provides access to almost the whole world’s knowledge, with some excellent resources now written with children in mind. Tools such as Google Earth and Flickr allow children to experience places and cultures far removed from their own. Conversely, digital media tools allow children to document their own unique experiences. Spreadsheets, databases, simulations and games allow complex, real-world situations to be modeled, analysed and explored without resulting to the over-simplifications typical of text book questions.

Cooperative: ICT is most effective in supporting meaningful learning when its power to facilitate communication, collaboration and cooperation is utilised – this can be simply a group of children sharing a laptop, classroom computer or PDA, a whole class working together with an interactive whiteboard, or the use of social software and other Web 2.0 tools through the school’s learning platform. Learning platforms allow the conversations about learning that begin in the classroom to be continued beyond the timetable and the school gate. Indeed, the internet brings opportunities for meaningful, collaborative learning between learners in one school and another, here or abroad, within reach of every class teacher.

Simply using ICT doesn’t magically make learning meaningful, but when used well, ICT can do much to make learning more active, to support pupils construction of meaning, to allow pupils to pursue goals of their own choosing, to engage with real problems and to cooperate beyond the limits of the classroom. Young people’s learning is not, of course, limited to what happens in school – thanks to the near ubiquity of the home computer, these aspects of meaningful learning can be found in children’s informal learning beyond the curriculum as well as their more formal school based studies directed, supported or scaffolded by their teachers.

References
Jonassen, David H. et al. (2007) Meaningful Learning with Technology. 3rd ed. Allyn & Bacon.
Papert, S. (1980) Mindstorms: Children, computers, and powerful ideas.

It’s great to see Open Source Schools community member Michael Kölling’s new book, an Introduction to Programming with Greenfoot published.

Greenfoot is one of the new wave of graphical programming environments written with learners in mind. Like Scratch, Alice and E-Toys, it’s open source software, and as with these other examples, it’s a toolkit which lets learners start writing code for themselves, taking control of the computer and learning through problem solving and experiment, providing a powerful way of looking at the world. However, where Scratch, Alice and E-Toys all nod in the direction of the historically significant (and still used) Logo programming language, Greenfoot supports Java, with its users learning standard object-oriented programming in Java, admittedly within a development environment that makes working with interaction and graphics very easy. As Michael puts it in his introduction, “While Greenfoot is an educational environment, Java is not a toy language”.

The book is great. Whilst suitable for introductory undergraduate courses, it’s accessible and interesting enough to be used with upper secondary pupils, who’d find plenty of motivation and challenge. It (and indeed Greenfoot) would also be within the grasp of bright, motivated students wanting to learn programming and happy to work independently – perhaps something for a G&T project? One of the book’s particular strengths is the way theory and practical work are very closely mixed: this is not a book to sit and read – it’s very much one which you work through, editing the code on screen in Greenfoot as you do. Michael manages to cover some fairly meety programming concepts through the projects he explores, which, for once, go beyond game development to model some complex real world situations (qv Tom Hoffman’s recent discussion of supermarket checkouts and Star Logo).

You can get a good flavour of the sort of thing students can accomplish in Greenfoot through the Gallery, with many of the uploaded scenarios making their source code available too, true to the spirit of computer science and open source software.

Members of the BCS (British Computer Society), including those on its Education and Training Forum and Expert Panel, have studied Sir Jim Rose’s recommendations for changes to the Primary Curriculum and associated documents released by QCA. BCS is pleased to submit its online response to QCA on these recommendations.

BCS welcomes the proposed changes, and believes that the proposed structuring of the curriculum with a core of essentials for life and learning and six broad areas of learning will provide a good foundation for education and allow children and teachers to make connections between interrelated subjects. The proposed curriculum would appear to be one which has the potential, given the right pedagogic approach, to “instil a love of learning for its own sake”. Increased opportunities for independent learning, including learning through play, provide some opportunities for tailoring the curriculum to each child’s enthusiasms and aspirations, as well as their abilities, although the recommendations might have paid closer attention to personalisation of the curriculum.

We are pleased to see information and communication technology (ICT) take its place as one of the essentials for learning and life, as confident, independent use of IT is now essential for children’s effective learning across the curriculum and in preparation for adult life.

The integration of ICT within the programmes of learning in the six areas is also welcomed, and we are pleased to note the extensive indications given for the use of ICT within the six statutory areas of learning, particularly in relation to the arts. Our attached response makes a number of suggestions for additional ways in which ICT may be studied within the six areas of learning, further extending or enriching learning in these areas.

This integration will, however, necessitate significant professional development for many primary school teachers, and the role of the primary school ICT coordinator is likely to need further development in many schools, where these individuals may need to take on responsibility for coordinating such training, as well as perhaps acting as e-champions. The delivery of ICT across the curriculum must be carefully monitored to ensure all pupils benefit from the proposed changes.

We are pleased that some attention has been paid to ICT-specific subject content (such as programming), particularly within the scientific and technological and mathematical areas of learning. These areas might, however, be extended further in recognition of the importance of an understanding of the principles and practices of computing, such as logical thinking and a rigorous, structured approach to creative problem solving. We were pleased to see that the importance of e-safety is recognised, and would suggest that ethical, legal and environmental aspects of ICT might also merit inclusion.

We also welcome the revision of the ICT subject level descriptions; these appear to provide more ‘challenge’ overall. We were surprised that explicit reference to pupils becoming independent, confident users of ICT at level 4 or 5 had not been made, and that criteria for ‘exceptional performance’ had received only minor revision. Some members felt that greater recognition should be given to pupils’ use of communication and collaboration tools and techniques. Teachers might find it helpful for the proposed level descriptions to match more closely the wording of the ICT elements within the programmes of learning.
BCS is very pleased to have had the opportunity to respond to these proposals. We would be happy to provide a more detailed contribution to the ICT elements within the programmes of learning if that would be useful.

Those who’ve been following the recent Open Source Schools discussion thread on open source MIS systems will be pleased to learn of the release of SchoolTool v1.0 after what developer Tom Hoffman describes as a long and winding road, stretching back to 2000.

SchoolTool, whose development has been supported by the Shuttleworth Foundation, is a web-based, open source, student information system and calendar server designed for primary and secondary schools worldwide. The goal of the project is for a simple, turnkey system. Today’s version 1 release supports demographics, gradebook, attendance, calendaring (inlcuding timetables and resource booking) and reporting. With a well documented API and modular architecture, it should be possible for other developers to customize SchoolTool to local requirements and add in extra functionality, as well as supporting integration with other web-based tools. There are more details of the feature list at http://book.schooltool.org/htmlhelp/features.html

SchoolTool is released under the GPL v2, and is buit in Python on Zope 3, with internationalisation already in place via Launchpad’s Rosetta service. It’s a three step install on Ubuntu Linux.

Tom and his team are commited to continued, brisk development prior to a number of scheduled deployments for the next academic year, and are keen that “schools, service providers, government agencies, vendors, hackers and other interested parties” have the chance to test, use, deploy and offer feedback on SchoolTool over the next few months.

There’s already been some discussion on the SchoolForge UK MIAS list.

Sugar

Sugar is built on the idea of activities rather than programs, with an interface designed to be ‘discoverable’, ie one which children can learn through play and experimentation. Sugar also affords a social experience of computing, as activities are sharable with other students using the same mesh server, thus allowing collaborative text editing, browsing, graphics and indeed programming.

For me, one of the most exciting things about Sugar is the prominence given to programming – logo, etoys and scratch are all available with lovely graphical development environments, there’s a python interpreter, pipi, and indeed the source code of all the activities is accessible to the user.

Like Moodle, but uniquely for an operating system, Sugar is built on the soundest of educational principles:

“Based upon 40+ years of educational research at Harvard and MIT, Sugar promotes “studio thinking” through demonstrations, projects, and critiques, as well as “studio habits of mind”, by developing craft, engagement, persistence, expression, observation, reflection, and exploration. In the context of Sugar, studio thinking is applied not just to the arts, but to all disciplines. Reflective practice involves students applying their own experiences to practice while being mentored by domain experts. In the context of Sugar, the expert could be a teacher, a parent, a community member, or a fellow student.” (source)

Announcing the release of the Sugar on a Stick beta, Walter Bender, Executive Director of Sugar Labs, said

“Sugar is perfectly suited for children in the classroom with its simple, colorful interface, built-in collaboration, and open architecture. Sugar on a Stick lets you start a computer with Sugar and store a child’s data on the stick without touching the host computer’s hard disk. Sugar’s Activities such as Write, a shared word processor, and the recently announced InfoSlicer Activity, which enables teachers to easily collect and package web-based content for the classroom, benefit fully from Sugar’s collaboration features.”

SugarLabs are keen to have teachers involved in improving the Stick, prior to a scheduled version 1 release in the Autumn, and feedback is invited to feedback@sugarlabs.org. One of Moodle’s core developers, Martin Langhoff, gave an inspiring keynote presentation at the UK Moodle Moot on the OLPC project, Sugar and his own project, the development of a class server for XO-1s to connect to. This will come with Moodle as standard, but not a standard Moodle, as Martin is keen that the class server be as easy to set up as possible, with a moodle instance purpose built to reflect the OLPC principles of collaboration, experiment and discovery (slides, audio).

There’s now a UK OLPC mailing list up and running, with a Europe wide SugarCamp over in Paris on 16th May.

Ofsted’s report on The Importance of ICT was published over a month ago, and was met with perhaps a degree of surprise at some of its criticisms about aspects of ICT provision in schools, most notably for higher attaining and older pupils. There’s much in the report to strengthen the case for greater use, and indeed development, of open source software in schools.

The report acknowledges that, particularly in the primary phase, good use is being made of ICT across the curriculum, and also notes the opportunities that the use of modern technology provides for pupils creativity and collaboration (p8), whilst admitting that it was only in the outstanding schools that use was made of peer assessment and critical reflection (p12): the process of peer review is one familiar to both academics and open source developers, and certainly something which schools’ learning platforms ought to support (well at least Moodle does), even if such facilities aren’t always used.

A criticism found in several places throughout the report is that the present state of IT teaching in schools tends to focus too much on training children to use a particular OS and set of applications, “running expensive commercial operating systems and standard ‘office’ suites of software” (p33), something which, in Ofsted’s view, “taught them the idiosyncrasies of just one platform which would quickly become out of date” (p14) and which “may actually be hindering the development of their skills” (p34), whereas students in schools that had deployed a mix of operating systems and a greater variety of software were seen as being “better equipped to cope with rapidly changing technologies” (ibid), as well as having an awareness of different platforms’ strengths and weaknesses” (p19). Ofsted see ICT education as being more about a development of learners’ capabilities and generic and transferable skills (p5, p21).

Another recurrent criticism concerns the lack of challenge which such a limited interpretation of ICT affords, with progress slowing down as early as the upper years of Key Stage 2 (p8), but being particularly problematic in Key Stage 4, where many students don’t appear to have any ICT lessons at all (p19), and many others follow vocational qualifications worth the equivalent of 4 GCSE and yet include tasks not much beyond the Key Stage 3 curriculum: “much of the work in ICT at Key Stage 4, particularly for the higher attainers, often involved consolidating skills that students had already gained proficiency in and therefore the rate at which new skills were learnt was relatively slow.” (ibid). This, I suspect, is related to the lack of balance which Ofsted perceive in the delivery of the curriculum, where far greater emphasis is placed on presentation and communication skills than analysis, data handling, control and programming (p4, p8):

“Coverage of control, sensors and databases was limited in many of the schools, as was the provision for students to learn the logical thinking necessary to program, write scripts or macros, which was cursory and superficial.” (p23)

It’s nearly 30 years since Papert wrote Mindstorms, with its vision of children learning for themselves through programming computers, and almost as long since many of today’s developers cut their teeth on BBC Micros, Sinclair Spectrums and Commodore 64s. A rediscovery of programming as an essential part of the ICT curriculum, not just for the higher attaining pupils who Ofsted see as insufficiently challenged (p5) seems long overdue. The good news is that there are plenty of open source platforms available for children to take their first steps towards taking control of technology, such as Scratch and Etoys (both, significantly, part of the standard install on the OLPC’s Sugar operating system), as well as great, not-too-tricky interpreted languages like Python and PHP with which web-based applications can be developed.

Scratch is, I think, what Ofsted are referring to with a great case study of a primary school that was providing opportunities for programming:

“An urban primary school had good provision for developing pupils’ programming skills. Two Year 6 pupils attending provision for gifted and talented pupils at their local secondary school were introduced to a freeware application which enabled them to design and program a two- dimensional computer game. Their enthusiasm prompted their class teacher to download the software and to introduce a new unit of work for the whole class based around it.
Pupils were asked to design the graphics, layout and functionality of their own computer game and to write the program to implement their ideas for its design. Over a series of lessons, pupils used a ‘paint’ application to design their game backgrounds and sprites. Having completed the graphical elements, pupils wrote scripts to control movement and interaction in their games. This required them to learn to use sophisticated programming constructs such as ‘repeat… until’ and ‘if… then’ in capturing keyboard input, managing variables and testing whether particular conditions had been met.
The choice of task and software motivated pupils who were therefore able to make good progress. Most were able to write a series of executable instructions to implement the features of their game design. One autistic pupil excelled at this task and made better progress than his peers. He made outstanding use of loops, conditional jumps and incremental counters in his program. His skills exceeded those of his teacher, to whom he had to explain the principles of what he had done. “ (p9)

More opportunity for students to experiment with programming earlier on might also afford opportunities for independent learning and creative thinking (p21) and lead to an increase in students studying computing at GCE (p17), and beyond. Alas, there are, I suspect, too few teachers with the technical skills to teach programming well (p6). A little CPD might be in order (p7), perhaps in line with that cited for staff at a specialist media college, who were “expected to research, experiment and keep their skills up to date” (p35). Anyhow, that shouldn’t stop children learning to program, given the right opportunities, and perhaps a little encouragement from technical staff and open source developers acting as mentors, such as we see for college students engaged in Google’s Summer of Code programme, and such learning should at least be recognised by the school (p30).

Ofsted seem very critical of the poor value for money represented by much ICT spending (p6, p27), and particularly the failure of schools to apply principles of best value, such as comparing performance with others, challenging how services are provided or consulting stakeholders (p32-33), conditions that have to be met for delegated funding. They make a strong case for schools considering open source:

“open source operating systems and software are now a reliable and cost-effective solution, enabling the few schools that choose this route to achieve excellent value for money.” (p33)

This would appear to apply particularly to VLE procurement. I suspect it’s Moodle that they refer to when they state that “A few schools have used open source software for establishing a virtual learning environment, enabling them to obtain several years’ worth of development with no licensing costs.” (p34). An earlier Ofsted report had explored VLE usage in some detail, and the present report reports very limited use in a small number of schools (p15, p24), rarely going beyond the resource presentation mode that forms a very small subset of Moodle’s functionality. The slow pace and high cost of learning platform rollout comes in for some criticism:

“By the time all schools have established virtual learning environments, the technology may well have moved on, making them an expensive irrelevance. Further consideration should be given to the value for money provided by this national initiative.” (p35)

Mobile technology, much of it powered by open source platforms such as Android phones, Nokia internet tablets or Linux netbooks, is regarded more positively: “ICT has the greatest impact on learning when there is a greater availability of resources, particularly laptops and hand-held computers. “ (p14 qv p36)

Good, on-site, technical support does really seem to make a difference to teachers’ and pupils’ willingness to experiment with ICT; something which, it is to be hoped, BSF Managed Service Providers will take on board, although one school’s example of using able 8-11 year olds as tech support (p14) might provide an alternative for schools assimilated into the BSF hegemony.