Fortnightly Mailing

A different angle on the term "managed learning environment" - building schools for the future.

Slightly sceptical article in the 7/10/2006 Economist about the current English "building schools for the future" programme which will see nearly every secondary school in England completely rebuilt or heavily modernised over the next 15 years. Many (most?) of the contracts will be won by private consortia who will get a return on the 50% of the capital costs they put up by charging for their services for the subsequent 25 years. The Economist picks up on the use of the term managed learning environment by the consortium that has just won the contract to rebuild Bristol's schools:

"The technology is to be provided by Northgate Information Solutions, which currently issues most of Britain's traffic-infringement notices. Its "managed learning environment" will integrate many different educational programs. It will also allow parents to see what children are doing (by tracking attendance, homework and canteen purchases), teachers to see what students are doing, and bureaucrats to see what teachers and students are doing (by recording the cost of staff phone calls and truancy, for example).

From the point of view of ICT provision, a key concern will be how much scope a school has to make changes to the set-up, once the school is built. The costs of making changes to out-sourced ICT systems are typically high: the supplier will tend simply to "want to get its rent"; and teachers and learners wanting to try out new things may find they get short shrift. And you could imagine, when a Local Authority is choosing between different bids, that the long term suitability of the ICT offering from a curriculum point of view might be both a harder thing to judge, and of a lower priority, than the design of the buildings.

Unlimited Learning - computer and video games in the learning landscape

This 66 page report  [1.2 MB PDF] by Hilary Ellis, Stephen Heppell, John Kirriemuir, Aleks Krotoski, and Angela McFarlane, with a Foreword by Lord Puttnam, and an Introduction by Stephen Heppell, has just been published by the Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association (ELSPA). The report:

"offers a snapshot of what is already happening in the context of games in education and, importantly, offers an evidence base from which informed decisions can be made by practioners, policy makers, the games and education industries."

As you might expect, an industry association publication is not going to hide the industry's light under a bushel:

"The hours they spent with fingers on controllers has transformed how we do business and has set the benchmark for the next generation of digital citizenry. Grown-up gamers’ cultural consciousnesses are suffused with interactive experiences, and it is through interactive methods that they are training the future of Britain."

"Technology has saturated workplaces, homes and classrooms. The availability of ICT hardware and software in the classroom means that a nation of young citizens will push out the possibilities for the Britain of the future in the global digital economy. We no longer need to predict when this will happen – it’s already happening."

But that said, the report is valuable. It is shot through with examples of succesful use of computer gaming in (mainly school-based) learning, seeks to explain how and why games can work educationally, provides clear overview information about the games industry, and includes some useful Appendices, with, for exampe, 36 learning principles essential in good gameplay, an extensive list of references, and, useful for people whose lives are not touched by computer games, a definition of genres.

JISC's new web site goes live

JISC's new web site is now live, complete with RSS feeds, much improved accessibility, faster page-loading, and what looks like an impressively well-designed search interface. Personally I'd prefer it if you could tell that a link is a link just by looking at it, and if the format of visited links changed after visiting. But these sorts of snags are easily fixed. [a] Much less satisfactory is the fact that at least some URLs from the old site do not translate to the equivalent page on the new site.

Revisions and additions: [a] 2006104.

Personalisation - just a slogan in search of a meaning

"Is there any way a teacher can personalise the learning experience for their charges, thereby transforming an ill-defined, throwaway political idea into action that would benefit children?"

asks Phil Beadle in this scathing Comment in today's Education Guardian. I've written previously and with scepticism about the rapidly spreading "personalisation virus", and I feel particularly critical of how the term is used so loosely in education, and especially in relation to ICT and e-learning. But that said, I think Beadle is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. For example giving users (including learners) choice is at least sometimes a good thing, as is involving users in the design of services, both of which Beadle contests, with weary cynicism; and I found Charles Leadbeater's Demos pamphlet "Personalisation through participation" which Beadle slags off without even giving it an author or publisher, and without acknowledging that it was written about public services in general rather than education in particular, gave me plenty to think about during work I did in 2004 with Neil Smith and Nicky Ferguson for JISC, to the extent that we included a table of Leadbeater's as an appendix to our report. I can see why teachers view personalisation as "a duplicitous gimmick".  But the problem is not that offering choice and control  to learners is wrong per se, but that personalisation is being used as a gimmicky panacea, not backed up, in education, by evidence of benefit.

Notes

1. Thanks to Kevin Donovan, who wrote this Guest Contribution earlier this year, for telling me about the Guardian article.
2. With Neil Smith and NickyFerguson I recently finished a peice of follow-up work about personalisation for JISC , which I think will be available on the JISC web site later this year.
3. 10 October 2006. Charles Leadbetter has just published his new book We Think, which argues that the new forms of mass, creative collaboration announce the arrival of a society in which participation will be the key organising idea rather than consumption and work (tell that to a Chinese shoemaker working 6 14 hour shifts per week) in a form which will allow comments to be made on it, for potential incorporation into the final product, which is due next year.

Moodle and other Open Source educational applications being bundled by Intel in India

Intel has started to sell, in India, its Integrated Solution Kit for Education (ISKE), so that PC manufacturers can supply PCs to educational users, pre-installed with a suite of Open Source applications suitable for education. For more details see:

• Intel's web site;
• Intel's technical brief [150 kB PDF];
• 4 September 2006 announcement in Indian Computer Reseller News.

Economist feature about Second Life, a "virtual online world"

I covered Harvard University's use of Second Life on the "Law in the court of public opinion" course in a previous posting. This 3 page feature from the 28/9/2006 Economist magazine provides a clear non-technical overview of how Second Life works, with plenty of examples of how it is being used, mainly by individuals, but increasingly by organisations, including the BBC and Toyota. Here is an excerpt:

On missing trains

Winston Churchill used to cut it fine when catching trains. When asked whether it wouldn't be feasible for Churchill to get to his train a few minutes earlier, his secretary replied: "Mr Churchill believes in giving the train a sporting chance to  get away."

Setting up an RSS feed from a site which does not have one

Thanks to Mark van Harmelen for showing me FeedYes, a service (free or USD30/year premium) that enables you to creat an RSS feed for a site that does not have one. The example Mark created is this feed from the Policy Hub, which I covered earlier.

Policy Hub - "the first port of call for all concerned with policy making"

Thanks to Nicky Ferguson for reminding me about Policy Hub, a web site developed by the UK Government Social Research Unit. The site provides:

• "tailored access to initiatives, projects and tools that support better policy making and delivery;         
• extensive guidance on the use of research and evidence in the evaluation of policy;         
• links to a wide range of research resources and tools from the UK and around the world."

Although you can sign up for monthly email bulletins, it is a pity the there is no RSS feed available, and digging around the site I felt it would benefit from some "cleverer" underlying structure. By chance today I was looking at something which an Oracle blogger describes as a Semantic Web supported "navigator" to Oracle's press release archive, and it struck me that something like that might make the Policy Hub rather easier to browse.

elearning: Coping in a world with software patents

This long piece by Paul Bacsich, partly informed by Paul's involvement in ALT on the Blackboard patent [~110 kB PDF], has recommendations about how individuals and organisations such as universities, state agencies, and membership bodies could/should respond in the new "post-patent" environment. Paul is looking for comments on the piece.