Fortnightly Mailing

Can we design a supportive assessment system? Keynote speech by Paul Black of "Inside the Black Box".

In 2001 Paul Black, with Dylan Wiliam, wrote the brilliant and influential Inside the Black Box - Raising Standards through Classroom Assessment [50 kB PDF], about the importance of formative feedback in learning.

Here, from 4 May 2007, is Paul Black's 1 hour keynote speech from the conference of the Chartered Institute of Educational Assessors [take care - this opens directly in your browser]. The PowerPoint slides that went with the talk are also on the IEA web site [186 kB PPT]. The talk contains plenty of insights into the value of formative feedback, as well as a telling quote from Margaret Thatcher's memoires on teacher-led assessment:

"The fact that it was then welcomed by the Labour party, the National Union of Teachers and the Times Educational Supplement was enough to confirm for me that its approach was suspect. It proposed an elaborate and complex system of assessment - teacher dominated and uncosted. It adopted the 'diagnostic' view of tests, placed the emphasis on teachers doing their own assessment and was written in an impenetrable educationalist jargon."

(Dylan Wiliam's 5 September 2007 keynote "Assessment, learning and technology: prospects at the periphery of control", is accessible from the the ALT web site.)

The first batch of Uruguay's 100,000 OLPC XO laptops are issued

"This week, Uruguay became the first-ever real, non-pilot deployment site of OLPC XO laptops."

I'd probably be linking to Ivan Krstić's 1/12/2007 first hand, detailed, picture-rich report on the distribution of OLPC laptops at School Number 109 in the small Uruguayan town of Florida, even if I wasn't half Uruguayan.

Over the next few months, a total of 100,000 XO laptops will be distributed in Uruguay. According to Krstić, who is the OLPC Director of Security             Architecture, the Government of Peru has just signed for over 250,000 machines.

Some previous posts about OLPC:

• Nov 2007 Wall Street Journal: OLPC "stomped by tech giants"?
• Nov 2007 OLPC begins mass production, and EA makes SimCity Open Source for OLPC use
• Sep 2007 Big IT is taking notice of One Laptop Per Child
• Sep 2007 "University Chapters" - a way to get involved in OLPC
• Aug 2007 David Cavallo, OLPC Chief Learning Architect to be keynote speaker at 2008 Association for Learning Technology Conference
• Jul 2007 What's inside the One Laptop Per Child laptop?
• May 2007 OLPC Laptops arrive in Uruguay: where flooding has caused a state of emergency
• Nov 2006 One laptop per child - further information and progress
• Oct 2006 Jonathan Zittrain: what would you install on one laptop per child? Guest Contribution from Steve Ryan

Yahoo! for Teachers goes more public

Yahoo! has begun to send out authorization codes to people who have signed up to try out Yahoo! for Teachers, "a place for educators to find, create, and share standards-based classroom materials". YFT makes use of a tool, called "Gobbler", that you download and install locally, and which you can use to  "gather images, text clippings, and web pages from the Web into projects in your portfolio", from which "you can create documents to use in your classroom", and which you can (or have to?) make publicly available for others to use. The term "standards-based" caught my eye, but when I searched within YFT for it, I could find no references to it.

At the moment i) the content available is overwhelmingly focused on the US school curriculum and ii) you need a Yahoo!-issued username and password to access the service. You can sign up for an invitation on the Yahoo! site. This Google blog-search will give you an insight (of sorts) into current reactions to YFT.

Wall Street Journal: OLPC "stomped by tech giants"?

Updated 24/11/2007; 26/11/2007.

Interesting and complex piece by Steve Stecklow and James Bandler, who assert in the 24/11/2007 Wall Street Journal that demand for the One Laptop Per Child laptop has been far lower than originally hoped, with, so far, only Uruguay solidly committed to it, and Libya apparently switching from OLPC to Intel's Windows-based Classmate. Stecklow and Bandler imply that Intel, which normally makes chips not devices, is actively seeking to stifle the OLPC laptop with the Classmate partly because the OLPC processor is supplied by AMD, its only competitor in the chip market. Meanwhile, the give one get one programme has been extended to 31/12/2007, "thanks to a growing interest in the program", which is reported to have taken 45,000 orders in its first 9 days of operation.

[24/11/2007 addendum prompted by Wayan's comment below.] For a detailed discussion of the WSJ article, with plenty of comments, see Wayan's piece in OLPC News. [26/11/2007] Further details of the scale of demand under Give One Get One, see ZDNET's How do we guage success: will 490,000 units do?.

A tempting idea for Christmas

It is a pity that the small cheap device to jam your train-companion's mobile phone, described by Matt Rudd in jammer's revenge in the 18/11/2007 Sunday Times on-line, is not legal in the UK.

Northern Rock fiasco, Google, my local primary school, and the OLPC device

Guest Contribution by Dick Willis

Those of you who listen to Radio 4's 'Round Britain Quiz' will be familiar with their format - the team has to work out the connection between various apparently unrelated items. Well, here's one for you: the Northern Rock fiasco, Google,  my local primary school, and the OLPC device?

OK, don't waste your time, you've got your email to deal with; I'll tell you...

David Weinberger: the future of book nostalgia

Updated 5/12/2007 with link, also via Weinberger, to Mark Pilgrim's "Future of Reading".

Long and interesting piece by David Everything is Miscellaneous Weinberger about the future of books and libraries, written as a response to Anthony Grafton's Future Reading - Digitisation and its Discontents in the New Yorker. Weinberger is no "anti-library philistine" - he is notably enthusiastic about libraries and librarians - but that does not stop him from acknowledging what he describes as the "existing and coming discontinuity" in the way that knowledge is/will be stored, mediated, and distributed, and the changing role of printed material. Weinberger's article, which is worth reading in full, concludes:

"Many of us share Grafton's nostalgia for books. But what will we miss about them, truly? The way they feel and smell? What does that have to do with knowledge, wisdom, understanding? We should not be shaping our systems of education and learning around the fetishes of collectors.

When we have interactive, networked, paper-quality devices, we will say good bye to books, and good riddance.

And our hearts will break a little."

I suppose my feeling is that the "when" should be more of a "maybe", notwithstanding Amazon's Kindle. Having stuff to refer to, search, annotate etc - a lot of it - on or accessible from a device is one thing. Getting down to some serious reading on a device rather than on paper is another, and the sheer utility and flexibility of print for this, in the bath, in bed etc., will take some beating. [5/12/2007] And for a provocative and much deeper and broader view, see Mark Pilgrim's 19/11/2007 The Future of Reading - A Play in Six Acts.

The revolution will not be downloaded

Despite its punning chapter and section titles, The Revolution Will Not Be Downloaded looks like it will be worth reading when it is published next year:

"This book attacks the often implicit and damaging assumption that 'everyone' is online and that 'everyone' is using online resources."

OLPC begins mass production, and EA makes SimCity Open Source for OLPC use

Originally written 7/11/2007; updated 11/11/2007

Today there are plenty of reports that the OLPC laptop has gone into mass production. I'm trying to get my hands on one through the (US only....) give one / get one programme that will start on 12/11/2007, with a well-organised media campaign, including a full page donated advert in the Economist, and professionally produced public service announcements on YouTube such as this one (the "Download video!" link does not function): 

Meanwhile the global games company EA has made Will Wright's original SimCity open source so that it can be ported onto the OLPC laptop. Some of the companies that subscribe to Fortnightly Mailing have content that might be suited for OLPC re-use, though SimCity is, as a learning environment, rather in a class of its own); and conceivably some of the material from Jam, the BBC's scrapped £150m on-line content service for school pupils, upon which the BBC has gone rather quiet, might also be suitable.

Just in time learning, not just in case learning - video podcast from Reuter's Charles Jennings

This 31/10/2007 video talk by Reuter's Charles Jennings, who is Head of Global Learning at Reuters, is worth its 15 or so minutes, despite its very lumpy flow (it seems to have been designed to work smoothly only on a very fast Internet connection). I'd not heard the striking "we need just in time learning, not just in case learning" point made before (watch out: its use will quickly spread), and Jennings's description of the needs of "knowledge workers" of the type employed by Reuters, and how the company seeks to meet their training and development needs, is lucid. There are more podcasts about workplace e-learning on the generally impressive "Towards Maturity" section of the e-skills UK* web site, as well as an RSS feed, if you want to keep an eye/ear on the updates.

* e-skills UK is the employer led sector skills council for IT and Telecoms.

[With thanks to Howard Hills for pointing this site out to me.]