The Iranian elections fast became a trending topic on Twitter last summer as Internet-savvy Iranians protested the inevitable re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. This is the first documentary I’ve seen that looks at the impact the Internet is having in the Middle East. From the blurb: “BBC reporter Jiyar Gol travels across Iraq to discover the extraordinary impact the internet is having politically and socially in the country.” Posted on the BBC iPlayer today, so it should be available for a month – well worth watching.

Making Sense of Privacy & Publicity – Danah Boyd

Danah Boyd gave an excellent keynote speech about privacy & publicity at SXSW earlier this month, discussing people’s perceptions of personal privacy in the context of Facebook, Twitter, et al. Well worth a read for anyone interested in the impact of ICT on society.

Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love – Ken Fisher, Ars Technica

It’s something we tend not to think about – certainly something we don’t feel bad about – but in this age of the freemium business model reigning supreme, using ad blocking software comes with a real cost to popular websites that don’t charge for their content.

The Myth of the Techno-Utopia – Evgeny Morozov, Wall Street Journal

A fascinating essay on the issue of freedom vs censorship online.

News roundup

• BBC News: Visualising the Internet
• BBC News: Internet access is ‘a fundamental right’
• Sony accuses Beyonce of piracy for putting her videos on Youtube – Boing Boing
• The Economics of Perfect Software: Sigpwned
• Google gets little US corporate support in Internet fight with China – New York Times

Related posts:

1. Link roundup: September

• A major update to the content of Some Rights Reserved is incoming over Easter, now improved with the hindsight of a year’s use in my school. The assignment has gone down extraordinarily well, and we’re seeing significantly higher grades coming through when assessing work. If you’re looking for a well-resourced, refined model assignment for unit 1 of the OCR Nationals, have a look.
• I was reliably informed by our web developer that my unit 8 (innovation & e-commerce) Moodle course was by far the biggest drain on the web server a couple of months back. I’ve been having a blast teaching this open-ended jaunt into the theory side of ICT that I felt I’d been neglecting, and have masses of resources to share. I’m hoping to host some of them separately in order to make them available for download, but until then feel free to have a look on my school’s VLE by logging in as a guest.
• And in the final dose of what some might consider OCR Nationals overload, I’ve redesigned our materials for unit 23 (video editing), and intend to share them once I’ve had the chance to polish them off over the Easter holidays.

I have to say I’m pretty happy with the ~300 hits per day this site has been getting, considering no new content has been posted since September, but it’s time to blow off the cobwebs and get back down to the stuff I’m here for.

Related posts:

1. Free scheme of work for OCR Nationals unit 1
2. Some Rights Reserved: Unit 1 model assignment update
3. Unit 23 resources

I really have to start the first roundup of useful links with the first site that got me really thinking about the role of technology in education. Jamie McKenzie takes a cautionary role, looking for the good in applying technology rather than evangelising. He provides excellent food for thought, and was quoted several times in my dissertation.

Key posts

• Avoiding Second Hand Thinking
• The Slam Dunk Digital Lesson
• The Medium is Not the Literacy
• Grazing the Net: Raising a Generation of Free Range Students

Ending the War on Sharing: Richard Stallman

I described Richard Stallman in my famous faces in tech poster series as an “open source evangelist”. Here, he makes an excellent argument against the war on piracy & file sharing.

Stephen Fry on the history of copyright

Stephen Fry speaks on the history of copyright, and talks candidly about his own attitudes to file sharing. An excellent talk on the subject from someone who makes money by virtue of his intellectual property. Downloadable m4a podcast.

News roundup

• New Scientist: Worldwide battle rages for control of the Internet
• The Guardian: Teenage girl is first to be jailed for bullying on Facebook
• Plagiarism: Textiles graduate student caught out
• Wired magazine: BBC launches open-source Digital Revolution
• Social media statistics

Related posts:

1. Link roundup: March
2. Key questioning: don’t skip steps

I’ve added a new option for people who would rather receive post updates via email. You can subscribe to this blog using the By Email link in the top right of the page, or click here.

Some old posts have had a little tweak to make them more accessible, including the system life cycle poster, level descriptors wall display, and famous faces in tech posters. I have also stopped hosting my posters with Box.net because of bandwidth limitations. The original reason was so as not to put too much stress on this server, but that doesn’t seem to be too much of an issue at the moment.

I’m also going to start running a weekly roundup of interesting websites in education & technology that I plan to use in the classroom. I hope to keep it topical, but may throw in some older sites that I’ve found useful. If any of you have suggestions, please feel free to submit them in the comments.

This draws me nicely on to my final point. I set this blog up effectively as a continuation of the conversation on Twitter – very much a two-way street, yet by the very nature of this being a (relatively) static website, it presents information in a top-down way. I’ve had lots of very favourable comments about how the site is useful, and I’m glad to hear that resources I’ve posted here are being used, but I’d like to set out my stall as someone up for collaboration. By combining Debbie Jones’s knowledge with mine for the moral issues in ICT handouts, the finished resource was better than if either of us had done it alone.

So, you can see what interests me plastered across this site, my Delicious bookmarks & on Twitter. If you’re working on something you’d like to collaborate on, or have an idea for a poster but don’t have the software or time to draw it up, drop me a line.

No related posts.

Please do let me know via a comment or email if you spot anything that I haven’t fixed – the next couple of days will be spent tinkering, tweaking, and (the biggest job) putting together excerpts of each post, again in an effort to make the site more accessible. Any suggestions would be appreciated!

Related posts:

1. Housekeeping, subscribing & collaborating

From firm foundations…

When I was training to teach, one of my tutors had a section on his lesson plan proforma entitled “vocab”. At the time, I wondered what possible reason there would be to have a vocab section for an ICT lesson plan – the kids know the vocab, right?

Early this year, my department ran a survey for all key stage 3 students (11-13 year olds) to find out attitudes and opinions on ICT. I would say I picked the first answer at random, but as the student’s first and second names both began with A I’m not sure that’s entirely accurate. Regardless, here’s what we saw:

Question one: is ICT important?

Yes. ICT is everywhere so it’s very important to understand it.

Question two: what do the letters ICT stand for?

I’m not sure.

So she knew that ICT was important, yet didn’t know what it was? This student was in year 9, so had been receiving two lessons a week for over two years at my school – not to mention the years she spent studying it at primary school – without covering a simple definition of terms.

Saying that she didn’t know what it was is a little harsh, granted, but after realising this good student didn’t know what the fundamental acronym stood for, in a subject littered with abbreviations, acronyms and a raft of otherwise alien words, that vocab section I derided as a trainee started to make an awful lot of sense.

According to this blog’s stats, the most popular resource on this site (by a considerable way) is the Bloom’s taxonomy document. I have to say that I’m glad about that… posters have their place, sure, but they’ll never have the kind of impact that really thinking about how you teach your subject will.

I was responsible for the year 7 scheme of work this year, which I put together largely over the summer, but after reading this girl’s insight into the role vocab has to play in truly understanding ICT concepts I opened it back up to add a vocab section to every unit. Key words were flagged up with definitions, and time built into the scheme for what some might think was a step backwards: vocab tests.

I went to a grammar school which taught very much as tradition dictated, and out of my three French lessons per week, the first ten minutes of the first lesson was dedicated to a simple, ten question vocab test – completed in the back of our vocab books, mere tantalising pages away from the answers which we’d written in the front. Under the keen eye of either of the stern Mr Wilby or the frankly terrifying Mr Ryder, we would learn our vocab in preparation for the test, do it, swap books with a neighbour, mark them together and by show of hands the teacher would determine… something.

What I didn’t know at the time was what exactly they were determining. Check your taxonomy – they’d just assessed our knowledge. What was next? Comprehension of this vocab (applying different cases & genders) & application (forming into gramatically correct sentences).

I realise I’m way over-egging this particular pudding, but in thinking back to my experience in my formulaic but effective French lessons, I saw what I’d been doing wrong as a trainee. Expecting students to understand the difference between a database and a spreadsheet is more than a little unreasonable when you haven’t provided them with a definition of either. I see this all the time with new students in year 7. “What’s a spreadsheet?” “Microsoft Excel.” “Okay, that’s an example of spreadsheet software, but can you tell me what one is? What does it do?”

I’m not sure whether this is something only I have had to deal with, but sometimes we feel like we’re regressing too far. “These kids have had ICT lessons virtually from the womb… why do they need to start from scratch when they arrive in my room?” was an interesting question from a high school ICT teacher I met at a conference. Just as interesting was the question “Do you have to complete the database task in Access, or can you do it in Excel?” from a qualified ICT teacher.

Students with a firm foundation in vocab and definitions go on to form confident opinions, and apply their understanding. By starting lesson one of spreadsheets with =A1+B1, there’s a hell of a lot that you (I) just missed.

Encouraging higher level thought

Equally important is what comes next. At the end of year 7, all students completed a project in small groups where they came up with a vision of some form of information technology they would expect to see in ten years’ time. Here’s how we broke it down:

What can computers do?

Pick a current example of some kind of ICT – mobile phone, games console, PDA – and list what it does. Everything that it does.

What could computers do ten years ago?

Sticking with the same genre of technology, pick an example from ten years ago. If you chose the PS3, pick the original Playstation. Write down what that could do, and note any differences you see.

So what can you expect in ten years time?

Think about the context you’ve just discovered – think about what’s next. Think about input & output devices. How will you control your invention? How will it relay information back to you?

In three manageable chunks we covered past, present & ideas for future technology, with the likelihood being that they’d only really experienced the present examples. Understanding.

Short assessment tasks were prepared – students had five minute interviews with me as an industry expert (eyes rolled) in which they describe their product and I give feedback. Often the ideas were along the lines of “It’s like an iPhone, but with more memory.” Or “It’s a PS3 that can play Xbox & Wii games.”

With that last example, we got into an interesting discussion about why Playstation, Microsoft & Nintendo would allow their games to be played on one console. We also discussed what the controller would look like – they presented me with a kind of Frankenstein’s monster of a games controller – chunks of all three console controllers Photoshopped together, but with a little discussion they agreed it wouldn’t work so moved on to another idea.

While giving current examples, I used the Nintendo Wii (again) as a key example of the kind of change we’ve seen in recent years. I started my lesson with the key question:

Why might it be surprising that Nintendo is having one of its best years on record? And why do you think that is?

As expected, nobody volunteered an answer – those are two difficult questions, and take some thought. So I left it on the board with the promise of a praise slip for anyone who came up with an answer before the end of the lesson. I did this with three separate year 7 classes, and in each one the answer came at around the 30 minute mark.

It’s surprising because we’re in a recession, and they’re making so much money for two reasons. Firstly, the Wii is a lot cheaper than the Xbox or Playstation 3, and secondly it’s a very different interface. You have to be more active to use it, and a lot of the games involve more than one person so parents are buying them to play with their kids.

A question like that digs a little deeper than a vocab test, drawing on awareness of current events as well as understanding the appeal of different consoles to parents – the ones who hold the purse strings. A games console no longer means hours of solitude locked away in a darkened bedroom.

After some thought, these students got that – but it only came after setting those firm foundations in vocabulary & encouraging them to build upon these themselves.

I feel awfully preachy having read this post through, but please don’t imagine me standing atop my soapbox trying to preach to a choir of grandmothers about the virtues of sucking eggs – this is more a description of the issues I had with building competence in my students.

It’s all too easy to fake understanding in ICT lessons: doing doesn’t necessarily mean understanding. By introducing key questions teachers can assess what’s actually being learnt. My resolution for next year is to do more digging in order to assess genuine understanding.

Related posts:

1. Searching the web & information literacy
2. Expectations & user interface design
3. Pupil speak level descriptors

The Human Oriented Technology Lab at Carleton University’s website reads “As technology becomes increasingly sophisticated and pervasive in people’s lives it is important to foster research and innovation that remains closely linked with the needs, wants and capabilities of people.”

Sure, but whose needs, wants and capabilities were taken in to account before now?

For decades, gadgets marginalised people who didn’t understand them. In the 1980s programming your VCR was as much a standing joke as airplane food. In the 1990s, nobody over the age of 20 could send a text message in less than half an hour.

These gadgets didn’t meet our expectations. Tapping dozens of buttons, scrolling through list-based menus or trying to work out what two circles joined by a line at the top aren’t natural ways of interfacing with the world. That’s not to say they weren’t popular, but rather than them being used intuitively their owners had to sit down and learn how to use them. Not quite man-machine synergy.

I am 24 years old, and for 14 of those years I have been the technology expert in my family. My dad, an intelligent, articulate, savvy man, has not only been confused by his gadgetry, but has sometimes been so flummoxed by the thing that he’s been unable to describe the problem.

Why? Because they don’t do what he expects them to do. My nan’s first mobile phone didn’t have predictive texting on it. Her second one, bought after a year of practicing with her first, did – and did by default. She couldn’t work out how to turn it off, so she stopped texting again. Are we born with the innate knowledge that hitting the hash key twice switches from predictive to normal texting? I’m no neuroscientist but I doubt it. Is not understanding the intricacies of these gadgets her fault? No.

If anyone’s to blame, it’s the guy who designed the phone, but we have to bear in mind the limitations imposed on mobile phone designers over the last ten years – size, cost, performance, hardware limitations, battery life… when you really start to think about it, there’s little wonder the things have been such a chore to use.

There is an awful lot that we do innately understand, though. Bobby McFerrin demonstrates this brilliantly in the video below:

Did you know that he was demonstrating the pentatonic scale? Even if you did, did you need to in order to sing along? Thankfully, we’re now at a point where technology has advanced enough to meet us half way in rising to these natural expectations within us all.

The two examples that leap to mind are the iPhone and the Nintendo Wii.

Give someone an iPhone (even, shock horror, someone over the age of 40) and just through playing with it they will very quickly learn how to use it, initially being impressed by the clever little touches like swiping to scroll, pinching to zoom & twisting to rotate up to typing on the qwerty keyboard & noting the changes in interface when the accelerometer detects it has been tilted. It’s outselling most other phones in most markets, and not just because it’s cute.

The majority of Nintendo Wii games are cute, with oodles of the fuzzy anime-like charm Nintendo does so well, but the real reason behind the blinding success of the console is in its revolutionary, pseudo-real movement-based interface. Demonstrating this with my year 11 top set, I mimed my way through several different games with a Wii controller in my hand (baseball, tennis, shoot ‘em up, golf, etc) while dragging a hapless volunteer to stand beside me and mime the same genre of game using a PS3 controller. Smirks all round, but they got the point. These inventions make sense.

“Who here has a Nintendo Wii?” Hands fly up. “Keep your hand up if you have ever needed to read the manual.” Hands snap back down.

So are we there? Have we truly reached the technological nirvana of seamless human-computer interaction? Not quite, but over the last few years we have seen some considerable steps in the right direction.

“What else do we need?” was the next question for my class. Here’s what they came up with:

• Voice recognition & commands: lights on, music, coffee
• Gesture recognition: wave, point, stop/go, nod/shake
• Further developments of touch technology: integrate with PCs, not just phones
• Develop movement recognition: Xbox Project Natal is another step in the right direction
• Biometrics: fingerprint, iris scan, DNA recognition

Quite an extensive list, really – I was impressed by the last one. The guy who suggested it had been reading up on the ID cards that have been causing a furore since they were announced several years ago. The idea of biometric integration with technology reminded me of the closing section of an excellent lecture given at Huddersfield University last year by Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys, inventor of the DNA fingerprint.

In the lecture, he described the effect technological progress had had on the process of identifying a sample for DNA fingerprinting – identification of a person, or even a person’s relatives, by using samples of skin, hair or bodily fluids.

When he invented the process in 1984 it took two weeks in a laboratory in order to get a result. In 2008, it took about an hour with a kit that could fit into a briefcase.

And so he revealed his vision for the future; a Britain where nobody would ever worry about losing their keys. A nation of doors without locks or handles – when you get home you wouldn’t have to put your key into the lock. You would spit on the door, it would analyse the DNA contained in the sample and as if by magic open before you.

A utopian vision of the future; millions of homes with phlegm-covered doors.

Yeah.

Related posts:

1. Key questioning: don’t skip steps

Last week, in all the excitement of being a brand new blog owner, I started having a look through my old waste books; a stunning variety of notebooks, few with anything interesting inside, even fewer anywhere near full… nothing at all like Lichtenberg’s, despite having stolen the name from his wonderful pocket idea machine.

After scouring them for what started life as old journal article ideas, I ended up with an array of posts sitting happily in Wordpress’s admin control panel, including this one.

I started out by saying that thanks to handy tools like Etherpad & Google Docs for brainstorming & collaborating on curriculum developments, Moodle for giving feedback to students, Twitter for talking to other teachers both in and out of my school, as well as more conventional techy applications like email and word processing, I’d almost eliminated paper from my classroom. Back in for the first day of the summer term today, I honestly don’t know what I was smoking. I, like everyone else, had charged out of my classroom on the last Friday of last term at full speed, leaving a stack of papers on my desk – some useful, most decidedly not.

I was in school for three days over Easter for year 11 coursework catchup, of course, but with two of my students bringing in their toddling cousins for the day it just meant the papers ended up covered in chunks of plastecine and felt tip pen marks. I never got the chance to tidy up, so the first free period of my new term was spent cleaning up last term’s crap. During this time, I realised that none of the scraps I was picking up were mine. In my school, we have hugely irritating sheets sent around on an all too regular basis entitled “How’s he/she doing?”, which for me at least is a much easier question to answer via email, rather than having to send a student with it down to the pastoral office. Same for the SEN version.

I’ve never been a technophile, really… I spent longer deciding on a nice fountain pen than I did on my last computer, and as I’ve already mentioned I have a bewildering array of notebooks that I either like the look or feel of. I never thought I’d see the day when I became a digital convert, but it slowly seems to have happened as the technology got to the point where it could replace the more traditional ways of working. Combining Delicious bookmarks or even the newest addition to my “that’s bloody brilliant” list, OneNote, to write down snippets of goodness means I no longer need the notebooks, or the dozen lever arch files of articles I collected together when I found a way around the print monitor at university. I actually felt a pang of guilt about that when I heard that my alma mater was in financial trouble.

I still have my old notes, and I can’t see me ever getting rid of them, but even my trusty yellow legal pads are going unused now. I can’t imagine trading my excessive book collection for a Kindle, no matter how crisp the screen… I’m in love with my iPod Touch, but wouldn’t want to read a book on it. Some things won’t – shouldn’t – change, but in terms of day to day working I’m pretty much paperless – now I just need to spread the word.

No related posts.

Yet for all this apparent tech savvy, it’s taken me a good two years to realise that web 2.0 is more than candy-striped buttons and bizarrely-named websites. I feel like the kid proudly waving his eight-track tape player in the face of fully iPodded youths. I’m 24, for God’s sake… I don’t know why it took me so long to catch on.

It’s not like I don’t keep up with the Joneses… I own an iPod Touch, have a six-digit ICQ number from back in the day, and managed to bag “j.greenwood” early on in Gmail’s beta, before at least half a dozen other people who seem unable to cope with the loss and have their email sent there anyway. The next time a plane ticket arrives I’m using the bloody thing, whether it says Jacqueline Greenwood or not.

I suppose I’m so used to having messages of “omg! try this it sooooo roxxorz” or “hello friend, try new Floosh, the lavatory cleaner that also freshens breath” that I filter out anything that isn’t a recommendation from a friend as… well, spam. Seeing the little buttons at the bottom of websites, hearing teachers talk about it at school – even seeing it on the news – it didn’t quite register.

Twitter was just another of those words I smirked at the first dozen times I heard it spoken aloud. Much like e-assessment site Yacapaca, Mahara, or hell, even Google.

I’m still not sure whether I’d want to change the way I use Twitter now by extending it into my classroom; having students follow my personal account doesn’t exactly appeal, though I can see the benefits on a short-term basis (project work, etc), and have already set up a separate account I’ll use for teaching.

I’m also wary that there’s still a lot of hype that surrounds web 2.0 – this has died down over the last year or so, but there are still people who believe that web 2.0 offers “solutions” to “the education problem”. In reply to my mini-profile “ICT teacher up North, hopping on the Web 2.0 train a little too late. Blaming leaves on the track.” @jonesc_nc said:

As a new Twit and blogger, I’m sure there are many people who think I’m buying into the web 2.0 hysteria I’ve made a point of avoiding, but I think it’s shortsighted to avoid using tools that have a positive impact on your job because they might seem gimmicky.

So to close, I’d love to hear from anyone who has successfully used Twitter in their classroom, or anyone with a Who eight-track… the Pistols are getting old.

No related posts.

I’m very fortunate to work in a school where new technologies are embraced, and that we have a core group of people from different backgrounds, teaching different subjects, eager to share ideas. Compared to many schools, we have regular informal meetings where we would try to collaborate on some activity or other.

Working on things like this – a project, a club, a link between departments – offers the opportunity to expand your field of vision beyond the limitations of your subject as well as giving the opportunity to reflect on your own teaching, but as with so many things in teaching the biggest obstacle is time.

Inter-departmental projects are often rewarding, but finding the time to put one together can be far more difficult than it would seem at first glance. Recently, our leaders of learning (lol) and senior leadership team (sadly there’s no way to turn that into rofl) decided there should be themed homework projects across departments for next year’s year 7 cohort. Topics included “who am I?”, plots and protests, the world about us, etc – nothing too restrictive, yet some kind of over arcing theme.

I took on plots and protests, deciding to make a project based on cryptography. I started with some historical information about the Babington plot to oust Elizabeth I by using coded messages shuttled back and forth between Anthony Babington & the prison where Mary, Queen of Scots was being held in the cork of a beer barrel for some good historical background. I then moved on to introduce simple substitution (Caesar) cyphers using the excellent Cryptoclub website, and ended with a choice of research questions:

• Describe how important encryption of information is on the Internet, or
• Describe how complex the maths behind cryptography can get once you apply the power of computers.

Lovely. I sat back and marveled at what had turned out to be four hours of (thoroughly interesting) work to put together one-and-a-quarter-A4-pages-that-I-knew-I’d-be-told-to-cut-down-to-one-page-but-didn’t-have-a-clue-how.

Then I remembered… it was for year 7s. Alright, I wasn’t asking for them to crack 128-bit encryption, I was asking for an explanation of why the process was difficult, but yeah… kind of silly, really.

Back to the point of this post, taking me out of my comfort zone of spreadsheets, databases and Photoshoppery, I put on a history teacher’s deerstalker for an afternoon and learnt a hell of a lot. Several web-based resources made that process much easier; the excellent resources section of the Bletchley Park website, the Cryptoclub website mentioned earlier, Simon Singh’s Cracking Code Book, and – most importantly – a handful of people on Twitter, including the head of Humanities at my own school.

Good advice, and a couple of hours later, I had my homework project complete, ready for the little cherubs come January. The point I’m trying (a little too hard, maybe) to make is that the biggest part of CPD is reflection. Through something as simple as planning a homework activity a little outside my comfort zone, with the help of other teachers, I spent an afternoon doing little else.

While I’m not sure exactly whether, or how, I’d integrate Twitter into my classroom in a major way, the potential for sharing good practice and getting help from a large and still growing community of professionals worldwide is huge. If you haven’t taken advantage of it yet, do.

“So why aren’t you saying this there, you wordy bastard?” you ask… well, I’m on 653 words so far. Try get that into 140 characters, I dare you.

Related posts:

1. Why so slow, Joe?
2. Housekeeping, subscribing & collaborating