Fortnightly Mailing

Roy Pea at Becta's 6/11/2008 Research Conference

Source: NSF LIFE Centre

Vanessa Pittard gave a candid and impressive introduction today to this year's Becta Research conference. She and her team at Becta seem really to be getting to grips with building up and funding a long-term and wide-ranging policy-relevant research effort, one important aspect of which is the longitudinal approach that is being taken. The latter is now providing a much clearer understanding of what is happening on the ground in schools and colleges and how this is changing over time. (See Harnessing Technology Review 2008: The Role of technology and its impact on education. Summary; full report.)

Roy Pea from Stanford University gave the main keynote at the conference, focusing on the Report of the NSF Task Force on Cyberlearning¹, which I covered in September, which takes a long term, detailed, cross-sectoral view of what is happening at the intersection between learning and technology, and how this might affect provision in the long term. (Later this month a video of Roy's talk will be available on the Becta web site.)

The NSF report's focus is on learning in the sciences (broadly defined) rather than the humanities, but the implications of the report are not restricted to learning science.

Server-side data visualisation tools from Google

I do not pretend to understand the detail of this, but Fortnightly Mailing reader Rob Hindle definitely does, and saw fit to send me a link to this 3/11/2008 posting on the Google Code Blog.

Getting parents to pressurise schools to up their game with ICT

According to Becta:

"Schools that integrate technology well across the curriculum and wider school life have reduced absence rates and achieved a higher percentage of A*-C grades at GCSE level."

Assuming this is true, and the reader's first reaction is to ask "compared to what?", it is quite a big leap of faith to conclude that effective integration of technology across the curriculum is the cause of the reduced absence rates or higher achievement levels. Instead, it might be a product of the schools which integrate technology effectively being well led or well managed or having good teachers. (Becta, elaborates more on this issue in various places, and here is a slightly extended summary of its evidence.)

I'd be interested to know what others make of this new feature on Becta's "next generation learning" web site, which enables you to find out if schools near you have the ICT Mark. (The image above shows the paucity of ICT Mark schools near where I live in Sheffield.) Becta implies that having the ICT Mark provides a proxy for how well a school is integrating technology into the curriculum, and urges parents to pressurise schools to get it:

"As your school is not listed you should ask about their ICT plans and whether they plan to work towards the ICT Mark."

Certainly this is a not a standard approach for a Government Agency to be taking, but given Becta's remit "to ensure the effective and innovative use of technology throughout learning" you can see the rationale for it. 

Research comparing the performance of schools with ICT Mark with those without it would be of interest, if any reader is aware of any.

Hospital cleaner stolen to make moonshine

Amended 11/11/2008

One of my sons, now living in London, has started to publish the texts of the hoardings used to sell the Hackney Gazette, his local weekly paper. The RSS feed may be of interest, from the look of past hoardings:

PROTEST
BLOCKADE
THWARTS
EVICTION

HOSPITAL
CLEANER
STOLEN
TO MAKE
MOONSHINE

MISSING
WOMAN
REMAINS
FOUND

NOWHERE
LEFT TO
BURY
DEAD