It’s interesting how open source approaches are gradually tipping the balance in favour of open platforms when it comes to developing for smart phones. Whilst Apple’s highly locked down iOS4 platform continues to command a large slice of market share, things are gradually tipping the other way, with the news that for Q1 2010 in the US at least phones using Google’s open source Android platform (such as my shiny new HTC Desire ) actually outsold Apple’s handsets. Although the iPad and iPhone 4 will have given Apple sales a boost, the connectivity problems with the iPhone when it’s held the wrong way, the continued absence of Flash support and the restrictive terms imposed on iOS developers are unlikely to do Apple many long term favours. Witness, for example, the removal from the App Store of the Scratch ‘player’.

At the moment, Apple continue to command a lead in the sheer number of apps available in their App Store when compared to the Android Marketplace. However, all this may now be set to change, with Google now inviting applications to access a beta of its App Inventor suite of applications, which takes the building block approach to programming familiar to users of Scratch via the Open Blocks Java Library to make it possible for pretty much anyone to make a start on creating their own mobile phone application, making use of all of Android’s core functionality like its accelerometer, GPS and text to speech, as well as interfacing with public APIs for services such as Google Apps and Twitter.

As Google puts it:

“To use App Inventor, you do not need to be a developer. App Inventor requires NO programming knowledge. This is because instead of writing code, you visually design the way the app looks and use blocks to specify the app’s behavior.”

I think it significant that the sign-up form asks questions about whether the App Inventor invite is destined for use in a school or college, together with a dedicated set of FAQ for educators (including the somewhat optimistic, and perhaps unnecessary ‘whom can I talk with about buying classroom sets of phones’). Schools seem to be slowly realising that pupils own phones can now do much of what we used our ICT suites for five years ago, judging by an article in last Friday’s TES.

I wonder if initiatives like Google’s here will lead to a resurgence in bedroom programming amongst school pupils, perhaps spurred on by enthusiastic teachers such as the crowd gathered in Birmingham last Friday for this year’s Computing at School conference, where break out sessions on open source programming tools like Greenfoot and Scratch attracted good audiences. It was good to see Peter Kemp representing the Open Education Disc there too, especially as this includes these programming languages / environments and others.

Other open source mobile platforms are available, including Maemo on the Nokia N900 and the LiMo platform. Palm’s WebOS is also worth keeping an eye on, which is Linux based even if closed source. That said, none of these make programming quite so easy as Google have just done for Android.

So far, things have not gone particularly well for ICT in schools under the new government. We’ve seen Becta’s funding withdrawn, the Rose curriculum thrown away, £100 Million removed from the ‘low priority’ Harnessing Technology grants and now BSF ‘frozen’. Mike Baker’s piece for the BBC on Saturday provided a good summary of the story so far. The worst, I fear, is yet to come with 25% cuts overall in public sector spending. The need to save money wherever possible suggests that open source may be the solution that had been waiting for this particular problem. I’ve remarked elsewhere on the fit between open source principles and coalition policy/rhetoric, but I suspect it’s the massive cost savings which open source could offer that will perhaps lead many to start exploring open source even if it doesn’t fit perfectly with their vision.

Becta’s 2005 survey of the total cost of ownership savings from open source is well worth another look, claiming savings of 24%-44%, but I think, with a little imagination and perhaps a little more courage, significantly greater savings would be possible. I offer below a few thoughts on how to do this, in part inspired by Ray Fleming’s list of ten money saving tips on his Microsoft UK Schools Blog, which include good, platform independent ideas like using virtualisation, switching on power management, and stopping photocopying and printing, although I don’t think Ray goes nearly far enough in terms of how much schools can save by doing things for free and for themselves. As with Ray’s list, some of the following aren’t specific to particular software solutions, but I think the freedom, community and empowerment that are at the heart of the open source movement characterise those suggestions which aren’t directly about open source software.

1. Don’t buy any software. No, seriously, just stop buying software licences. If you’d like to carry on using your Windows machines, check out the Open Education Disc, with a comprehensive suite of absolutely free applications providing tools for (almost) every area of learning within and beyond the curriculum, including OpenOffice.org, Inkscape and the GIMP, to replace Office, Illustrator and Photoshop for starters. Furthermore, you’re allowed, indeed encouraged, to duplicate this so your pupils have access to the same software, legally and for free, at home too. Better still, put the temptation to buy more software firmly out of your grasp by switching to Linux desktops, such as the undeniably excellent Ubuntu. This comes as standard with a great suite of applications, with at the last count 30,046 packages (such as Tablix, a genetic algorithm based timetabler) you can install (for free) over the net as and when you need them: think app store for a desktop, but all free and (generally) of very good quality. If you’re worried that your pupils won’t cope with an unfamiliar interface, don’t be, they’ll quickly adjust and will be far more discerning users of computers as a result; if you’re worried that this won’t prepare them for the world of Windows, don’t be, just have a glance at Ofsted’s comments about alternative operating systems.

2. Make use of web-based applications. There is much to be said for making use of all the great, free Web 2.0 apps out there in the cloud, and I’d personally have Google Apps Education Edition high up my must have list, even if it’s not open source. That said, I think the single, best thing you could do for a school’s ICT provision would be to set up your own webserver. Get a box. Get Linux. Get Apache. Get MySQL. Get PHP. Open up port 80 on your firewall (if you’re not allowed to do that, consider becoming an academy, or at least threaten to). From there, any number of things become possible for free – Moodle as a VLE, MediaWiki for your own collaborative knowledge base, Elgg for social networking, WordPress for blogging, Drupal for your school website, Mahara for an e-portfolio, Zimbra for e-mail, calendars and the like, Koha for your library catalogue, MRBS for booking meeting rooms, OTRS for managing support tickets, even SchoolTool for a management information system (although this works a bit differently from the others…). That’s quite a list, and most of these are far, far easier to put in place and maintain than commercial service providers would have you believe.

3. Don’t bother replacing your computers. Don’t feel obliged to keep upgrading your hardware to the latest spec. (Almost) any old machines will have a long, productive life ahead of them as thin clients running off a fast Ubuntu LTSP server. This is also a great way of cutting maintenance costs, and makes updating software or installing new packages a dream, as you only need to do this once on the server for the changes to apply automatically to all the clients. Have a look at the Open Source Schools case study from my old school.

4. Allow the pupils to use their own devices. Many of your pupils might already have laptops of their own that they’d love to use at school. Many more will have smart phones or other devices that can access the web, particularly when their parents upgrade to the latest handset. With decent wifi, a transparent proxy server and all the above web-based, internally hosted services wouldn’t it make sense to let them use their own devices inside the school, educating them how to use these responsibly and effectively.

5. Take control of your Internet connection. Compare the cost of your LA/RBC provided service and that of commercial providers, and check you really do need any additional benefits that you may be paying for- how often do you need access to the NEN? This seems to be what’s hinted at in the DfE’s description of the second Hanressing Technology grant cut as giving schools time to plan to ‘reconfigure their broadband’. I think it interesting that hardly any independent schools opt-in to RBC services. Use Squid as a proxyserver to speed up multiple access to the same pages. Explore some of the filtering options for Squid, such as the kind-of-open-source DansGuardian, which is based on Squid. Think carefully about your filtering policy, bearing in mind that children have a right to “seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of the child’s choice.”

6. Don’t buy or subscribe to any digital resources. Again, the web is the place to go to get these for free, but best to look for resources which you can adapt to make your own, something rarely possible with commercially published materials. Just as software has its open source movement, so content has creative commons, open content and open educational resources. Wikipedia in all its flavours is great for use in schools because it teaches you to weigh its authors claims and to engage critically with what’s said, as well as providing the tools for teachers and pupils to edit what’s there already or add new content. Whilst en.wikipedia.org is fairly demanding, simple.wikipedia.org is accessible for most in KS2 up, and the foreign language versions (including Latin) could have application in MFL (or classics) work. For Open Education Resources, check out wikibooks, curriki and the National Digital Resource Bank (OK, the latter does require a subscription, but this is pretty cheap). Best of all, return to the tradition of creating your own resources: shared, collaborative texts in a wiki, educational games in Scratch or support materials and interactive or social learning activities in Moodle.

7. Don’t pay for CPD. You and your colleagues will learn far more through sharing ideas, experiences and insights with one another than from trainers delivering ring-binders full of notes at training days. The web again makes this easier than ever, with many general and more specialist communities of practice using online tools to facilitate networking and the development of shared expertise, such as our own Open Source Schools community. These are much better than the communities set up for training programmes – for a start their members are there through choice, and are choosing to participate. Twitter is a great way of keeping up to date with the developments in your own field, through your own, bespoke ‘Personal Learning Network’. The TeachMeet unconference movement takes these principles of loose networks and peer to peer learning and moves these off line back into real space. If you’ve not been to one, go. If you’ve not presented at one, do. For software support, the open source project communities are great at helping you solve problems for yourself. As play, experiment, discovery, discussion and creativity lie at the heart of learning for children, perhaps they should for grown-ups too?

8. Empower your people. This one is probably the most important of all, and the way that you’ll make the biggest cost savings for your school. When folk come and ask to do something, say yes. Better still, establish a culture in which they don’t need to ask. Think how much more rewarding your network manager’s job, or your e-learning director/computing HoD/ICT Coordinator’s job would be if they were empowered to innovate, to research solutions and to take charge of development in their areas of responsibility. Open source makes this easy, as not only is there no need for budgetary approval, you’ve also got access to the source code to adapt the software to fit your own context or solve your particular problem.

9. Use volunteer support. So empowering your network manager is great if you’ve got a network manager, but what if not? Perhaps a skills audit of your pupils’ parents might be helpful? There’s more to parental engagement than hearing readers, going on trips or running fete stalls: it’s likely that in all but the smallest schools there will be parents who work in IT, many of whom may have skill levels in excess of those that schools could afford to employ and who would be only to pleased to support the school in a way that improved its educational provision and used their own expertise. Parents helping with website content? Parents sorting out networking? E-learning governors? Why not?

10. Share your expertise and creativity. No cost saving for your school here, but massive cost savings for the system if this works: don’t keep things to yourself anymore: as the PM puts it, ‘We’re all in this together’. Wherever possible, join with others and work together, rather than having lots of independent projects all doing the same thing. If you find a great solution, share it with other people so they don’t have to spend the time solving the same problem themselves. If your staff develop a great Moodle course, let others download it. If your class have developed a great wiki, open it up to those at another school. The peer to peer approach to CPD that point 7 is about is dependent on give as well as facilitating take. If you do find bugs in open source code, let the developers know, especially if you manage to fix these. If you do adapt open source code to suit you better, do this properly and contribute your patches and modules back to the project community.

I’ll acknowledge that the above perhaps involves taking on elements of risk that we’ve tended to prefer to outsource in schools, but so do long term commitments to managed services and vendor lock-in. Furthermore, taking responsibility for these things yourself gives you more control over your software, your data, your connectivity, the development of your team, and ultimately the educational provision of your school. As Mark Taylor of open source experts Sirius puts it in his rather Orwellian strap-line, ‘control through freedom’.

Anyone up for doing some financial calculations to work out how much the above would save for a school? For the education system? What about other ways to save money from the ed-tech budget? What have I missed out from the list above?

My move from teaching to teacher training has brought many interesting opportunities and experiences: the freedoms to write our own courses and set our own exams are great, as is access to the university library’s online journal subscriptions, but so is the chance to attend events such as the seminar which one of Roehampton’s research centres ran to mark the 21st anniversary of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Let me give you a couple of general examples from the Convention, before looking at children’s rights in relation to ICT.

Article 3 makes clear that “the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration”, and that a child must have “such protection and care as is necessary for his or her well-being”. Here, initiatives such as Every Child Matters clearly do much to promote the right of every child to such fundamental things as education, health, their safety and economic well-being.

Article 12 gives a child the right to express her/his “views freely in all matters affecting the child”, with “the views of the child being given due weight”. Much is now being done to give children some voice in schools, through representative school councils and similar (and there’s brilliant work being done using VLEs to provide online space for such deliberations). However it still seems unusual for learner voice to extend beyond fundraising, uniforms, lunches and toilets into matters such as curriculum and pedagogy. Furthermore, I wonder whether we’d have seen some rather different education policies in the election manifestos if we didn’t disenfranchise the 13 million people most directly affected by these.

So how do the rights of the child relate to ICT?

Article 13 of the Convention is an interesting one:

“The child shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of the child’s choice.”

In UK law, the Human Rights Act of 1998 guarantees this freedom “to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority”. It would be naïve to interpret this to suggest that restricting children’s access to the Internet and filtering their Google searches would be a breach of their human rights, and the convention does allow this right to be restricted in its exercise, for the protection of ‘public health and morals’, thus permitting those responsible to block access to the web’s darker reaches, whilst perhaps not immediately justifying a general block on Flickr, Slideshare, YouTube, Facebook and, in some schools, Google. I wonder, as did many of those attending Naace’s recent Subject Associations Think Tank, whether now might be the time for schools to take a more enlightened approach to filtering, by all means using granular controls to filter the worst, but recognising that their duty is to educate rather than to police, and that children learn moral responsibility through direct experience of making moral decisions. The freedoms promised to teachers and heads by the new government imply that they will need to take responsibility for policy decisions themselves, rather than outsourcing the management of these risks. Educating children to use their right to freedom of expression fully and responsibly might, perhaps, also be one way of minimizing cyberbullying: with rights come responsibilities, and we live up (or down) to the expectations others have of us.

The data held by schools and public bodies about children is another area where we perhaps should try a little harder to see things through a child’s eyes. I am somewhat relieved that ContactPoint, the central database storing data on almost every aspect of all children’s lives is not to go ahead, whilst not wishing to denigrate in any way the child protection aims which lay at its foundation. Parents do have an independent right to access their child’s educational record under statutory Pupil Information regulations, although the Data Protection Act (DPA) denies them access to other data without the consent of the child if she or he is old enough to give it. I have concerns that the recent parental engagement agenda seems to pay little regard to the child’s own perspective. Firstly, and as a minimum, shouldn’t the default position be that children as well as parents have accounts on whatever online reporting provision a school makes, as after all the child has their own subject access right under the DPA? I’m encouraged that the report from Naace’s Parental Engagement Think Tank does use inclusive language referring to both pupils’ and parents’ access to data. Secondly, aren’t there occasions when school ought to be a place for children to form their own identities away from their parents? Back in my teaching days, I greatly valued conversations with my pupils’ parents, and would happily report on progress, character and potential, sharing selected examples of children’s work to illustrate this; my pupils and I would have been less happy, I think, about inviting parents in to observe their child in each and every lesson they wished: aren’t some parental accounts on VLEs the virtual equivalent of this? Perhaps teaching children to access, use and, occasionally, question the data the educational establishment holds about them would be one way of making them aware of the digital footprint they leave on Facebook’s and Google’s servers too?

It’s also worth considering children’s own intellectual property rights. Whilst some bemoan young people’s attitudes towards copyright, particularly through peer to peer file sharing of copyright material, I wonder how much attention schools and teachers generally pay to the copyright of their pupils’ own work. Perhaps many are happy to photocopy, scan and upload children’s work, always with the best intentions, without seeking permission or acknowledging authorship. By way of contrast, I heard some very positive stories via Twitter of, for example, schools and teachers that buy art work off their pupils to hang. We could also help educate about copyright by doing more to encourage the acknowledgement, sharing and collaboration that underlies Creative Commons licensing, as well as much Early Years practice.

In short, part of citizenship, be it analogue or digital, has to be educating children about their rights and associated responsibilities. To avoid charges of hypocrisy, surely this means that we should take their rights, including those of free expression, of free access to information, of privacy and of intellectual property seriously, respecting these and defending these when others do not.

As to what the core contains, Gove indicated an entitlement to English, maths, with  British history and MFL being ‘encouraged’, although the latter may be restricted to Swedish There was, unsurprisingly, no reference to ICT.

We live in interesting times.

I have no privileged information, but have been following the primary curriculum developments with some interest. My (personal) reading is that the Education and Children bill promised for the autumn will have something close to the Lib Dem manifesto commitment to ‘CurriculumLite’, ie a minimum core entitlement, with a degree of autonomy devolved to all schools in terms of how this is taught and, perhaps, on how it might be supplemented. The Secretary of State certainly seemed to be indicating this on the Today programme on Wednesday.

Gove maintained that the National Curriculum is “too crowded and cluttered and too prescriptive”, whilst the first two may be the case, I think he may be confusing the statutory curriculum with the plethora of non-statutory ‘guidance’, such as QCDA schemes of work and numeracy and literacy frameworks in regard to the latter.

As to what the core contains, Gove indicated an entitlement to English and maths, with British history and MFL being ‘encouraged’, although the latter may be restricted to Swedish There was, unsurprisingly, no reference to ICT.

My reading of the Academies Bill is that the new primary academies and won’t be required to follow the National Curriculum, merely to provide a ‘broad and balanced’ curriculum as with registered independent schools. I would expect the same provisions to apply to the new Free Schools.

There are perceived contradictions over such things as Gove’s views on systematic synthetic phonics and the promised freedoms over how to teach, but from what he’s said elsewhere, my guess is that advice will be offered, but that schools who do well in SATs and impress Ofsted won’t be required to conform.

The announcement yesterday that QCDA is to be wound down rather confirms this. It’s significant that the SATs are here to stay but that Gove wants QCDA ‘to withdraw as soon and as far as is practicable’ from the curriculum.

Where then does this leave us?

I think we’ll see some specification of a minimum core curriculum for LA schools, and a requirement for ‘breadth and balance’ for other (ie academies, free and independent) schools. How this is taught and supplemented will be down to governing bodies and headteachers, although I’d expect to see a number of organisations (including local authorities, publishers and other groups) developing their own curricula, covering the common core but providing their own particular approaches and extensions to this: the Rose recommendations or QCDA’s interpretation of them might be two such approaches, as might the Alexander model, IBO Primary Years Programme, a primary version of Futurelab’s Enquiring Minds approach, materials developed through the RSA’s Whole Education project, or the commercial Dore creative curriculum.

The maintenance of core entitlement and robust accountability measures would, I think, open up many interesting possibilities, and indeed the responsibility, for schools to offer distinctive, challenging and relevant curricula reflecting their unique character. I don’t doubt that many schools will be eager to ensure that their curriculum makes the best possible use of technology to enhance learning and teaching, although the requirement that they do so may now be a thing of the past.

[The above was originally posted on Naace's Advisory talklist]

The Treasury announced this morning that Becta is to close as part of a package of some £670M education savings.

I, for one, would like to record my gratitude for all Becta have done to lead the adoption of technology in education over the last few years. Their interest in, and support for, open source software pre-dates my own: I have fond memories of attending an excellent ‘expert technology seminar’ chaired by Dr Malcolm Herbert, then one of the Becta team, now at RedHat, back in 2000 when I was head of maths and IT at a school in Oxford, just starting to experiment with Linux and setting up a Samba server. Despite others’ comments on Twitter and in response to Rory Cellan-Jones’ article, Becta have done much to encourage schools to explore open source, albeit in a way which maintained the level playing field that was part of Cabinet Office guidance, and subsequently the Conservative manifesto and the Coalition’s Programme for Government.

Their balanced perspective provided a degree of authority to the important findings of their 2005 study of Total Cost of Ownership on the huge savings that schools could make through the use of open source software. Whilst the procurement model chosen for the learning platform services made it hard for Moodle service providers to make it onto the approved list, I have it on good authority that a Moodle/Elgg solution passed all the technical tests, and Moodle has been adopted by large scale deployments in Buckinghamshire, West Sussex, Cumbria and Lancashire and elsewhere; there’s more about this in Ian Usher’s excellent and perceptive post. Becta’s support for open standards, most notably SIF, but in other areas too, such as interactive whiteboards, was necessary to enable open source to interoperate with closed, proprietary systems, even if the FLOSS community haven’t always made the most of these chances. Open source was available through one of the other procurement schemes, when open source specialist Sirius made it onto the software framework agreement list.  Becta’s support, both financial and moral, for this community has been important, representing their willingness to grow a grass roots community of independently minded teachers and techies, as well as a way of sharing information and case studies about Open Source.

Becta have also documented open source successes, such as myself and three other Moodlers recognised in the ICT in Practice awards back in 2006, Buckinghamshire schools featured on the learning platform DVD and a number of schools using open source have received ICT Marks, including Paul Haigh’s Notre Dame, which went on to win an ICT Excellence Award.

Looking ahead, Coalition support for open source appears clear, although the proof of the pudding will be in the tasting. The Programme for Government states:

“We will create a level playing field for opensource software and will enable large ICT projects to be split into smaller components.”

The chancellor, George Osborne, when in opposition certainly seemed to ‘get’ open source, as he discussed at the RSA back in 2007 and in a Times article last year, seeing it as a way of making significant savings across government IT procurement. I suspect that as cuts begin to bite across the public sector, we’ll see more and more schools turning to open source as a way of both saving money and delivering robust, innovative solutions. More significantly, open source fits in very closely with the ideal of the Big Society, as Osborne’s ‘open source politics’ notion makes clear, with organic, flexible communities gathering together around a shared project which makes things better for themselves and for others:

Whilst I will miss Becta and wish my friends there success and happiness in their new ventures, the evolutionary changes in technology and society make it far easier for schools and teachers to support and challenge one another than was the case in 1998 when Becta came into being. Perhaps, though, we wouldn’t now be ready for these changes if it wasn’t for the difference that Becta had made.

Open source or software freedom isn’t simply another way of procuring software, it’s more a state of mind, a particular attitude to technology. Of course, you can just treat it as a cheap way of getting high quality, robust code, and there’s certainly no requirement to grow a beard, wear sandals or drink real ale in order to install open source applications. However, the philosophies that lie at the core of open source as a movement are important, and, I think have much to offer to education more generally; furthermore, open source approaches to development can apply to things even more important than software, such as curriculum resources, school policies and even the curriculum itself. This brief paper seeks to explore some of these areas.

There are strong parallels between an open source approach to software development and some educational theory. Piaget, Montessouri, Froebel and Dewey all placed emphases, to varying extents, on the importance of play, exploration and direct experience; qualities which will not be unfamiliar to those developing open source software. Vygotsky’s social constructivism argues that meaning is something developed through conversation with others, anticipating the importance of efficient and effective communication in the development of open source projects involving more than a sole developer. Papert’s notion of constructionism, in which knowledge comes to be embodied in the development of shared, public artifacts continues to be of importance in computing education, and is the pedagogic approach that has underpinned Moodle’s phenomenal development as an open source VLE.

So what does an open source approach to education look like? ‘Access to the source code’ surely implies a willingness to adopt transparent approaches in education, in which freedom of information requests about school curricula, schemes of work and policies are never needed, as these, and perhaps other, documents are shared as a matter of routine with all of a school’s stakeholders – thus not only is collaborative planning made possible amongst the teaching team, but pupils and parents too have access to lesson plans, enabling them to read ahead and to become something closer to partners in the educational process. Similarly, such openness would suggest, as a default position, a willingness to share pupils’ work and pupils’ data as widely as appropriate, with children’s work on the school website or blog and an enthusiastic approach to the parental engagement agenda.

This equivalent of ‘access to the source code’ of education is pretty much necessary if teachers are to be empowered as professionally autonomous and accountable, and if pupils are to be empowered as independent learners, each taking their full share of the responsibility for the learning that takes place in their classes. The opportunities to take control over the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of learning, and perhaps to start addressing the ‘why’ of education, provide many opportunities for a radical step change from the present top-down approach, as we’ve seen on many occasions with open source software development, most clearly with the open nature of the Internet. This provides teachers, and other stakeholders, with the opportunity, or even responsibility to engage in creative, innovative ‘tinkering’ with the education in their classes, and to collaborate with others in sharing this practice:

The ‘tinkering’ teacher is an individualised embryo of institutional knowledge creation. When such tinkering becomes more systematic, more collective and explicitly managed, it is transformed into knowledge creation” (Hargreaves, 1999)

The ‘four freedoms’ of the free software definition would have even more radical consequences when applied to education: the freedom to run the program for any purpose, implies, I think, not only an education without charge, but also one which built on the principle of children developing the critical and cognitive skills to think things through for themselves, rather than accepting political, religious or cultural dogmas – something akin to the rational autonomy that can be seen as an overarching aim for education; the freedom to study how the program works and change it to make it do as you wish, would, if applied to education, mean that personalisation would have to be taken seriously, in ‘choice and voice’ terms, not merely as alternative modes of presentation or assessment, it would mean students having a real say in what and how they learn; the freedom to redistribute copies would firstly imply an end to schools keeping their curriculum and resources to themselves, moving towards a position in which publicly funded schemes of work and materials are readily available to any who would wish to make use of them; this would be extended by the fourth freedom, the freedom to distribute modified copes to others to produce a culture of genuine collaboration and partnership between teachers and their schools.

The communities of practice which grow up around open source projects could have much in common with the networks and communities of educational, curricular and pedagogic ‘developers’ which school leaders and teachers have the potential to become, if given the necessary encouragement, opportunities and freedom. Loose communities of teachers working together to develop educational resources, schemes of work or other educational innovation would foster creativity, ownership, and the legitimate peripheral participation [ref] necessary for professional development, as well as being a highly cost effective way of producing some great educational benefits over and beyond education technology. As Hargreaves (1999) has it:

“Transfer is difficult to achieve for it involves far more than telling or simply providing information… This is most easily achieved when a teacher tinkers with information derived from another’s professional practice.”

In practical terms, what’s needed now is a shift away from Crown Copyright schemes of work, National Strategies and glossy commercial schemes and resources to local or distributed networks of teachers, technologists and pupils working together to produce the ‘public knowledge artefacts’ which embody their understanding of their subjects and of pedagogy, and which can be freely adapted and re-used by those working in similar, or widely different schools elsewhere. Rather than spending public funds on commercial schemes, consultants and developers, why not fund just a few cover periods, or pay a little overtime, for teachers and their colleagues to work together to develop these materials for their pupils and for others’?

Just as the Internet made it possible for worldwide communities of developers to work on open source code together, so the web provides at least some of the mechanisms for collaboration on open content: we have a whole host of creative commons licenses to choose between; wikibooks, wikijunior and curriki have made a fine start to the collaborative development of online texts and learning materials; web 2.0 repositories like slideshare, flickr and blip.tv provide support for creative commons licensed content; and many universities are starting to share their content openly, including at least some materials from the Open University here. I’m optimistic that the National Digital Resource Bank will encourage local authorities, schools and teachers to share materials, Vital’s Open Course Movement approach to some of their ICT CPD courses bodes very well, as does their default Creative Commons licensing. Perhaps even more impressive is the willingness with which teachers engage with collaborative projects happening beyond institutional boundaries such Tom Barrett’s Curriculum Catalyst, Doug Belshaw’s Move Me On and the TeachMeets.

The lecture was number eight in a 10 module ‘Introduction to Programming for Primary Teachers’ course for our first year ICT specialist primary education cohort. Rather than just focussing on programming in Scratch, the lectures in the module weave together relevant educational or computing theory with more practical hands-on programming activities, hence the above title. I spend the first part of the lecture giving a quick synopsis of a number of social and constructivist educational paradigms, making some explicit connections with learning ICT where I can, before discussing open source and creative commons development as real world examples of social constructionism. The best bit of the film though is the last 10 minutes or so, where you get to see my students critiqueing some pupils’ work on the Scratch website as well as providing feedback to one another on the educational games they developed in Scratch. I’m hoping that the course materials might yet be released under a creative commons licence – I’ll keep folks here informed…

There’s more on social constructivism and its links with Web 2.0 in a paper that Steve Lee and I wrote for Terry Freedman’s ‘Coming of Age: an introduction to the new world wide web‘, an off-print of which is available here. The audio from my ‘Finding Nemo from Scratch’ micro-preso from the BETT teachmeet is also online, thanks to David Noble, for anyone interested.

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.