Dick Sblog

Sometimes I’m just amazed at the ideas people have. Today I went to two events that had innovation at their hearts. At one, I met Matthew Thurling who has, single handedly and with almost no support, set up science.tv If you are interested in science, as I am, this is a great site - a sort of youtube with meaning.  A social networking site based around giving people the opportunity to upload videos that describe scientific concepts.  Brilliant - take a look or , better, produce and upload a video.

There are some fascinating videos here -  exploding  methane bubbles,  recombinant  DNA,  dandelions opening/closing in response to sunlight: wonderful. I wish I had thought of it first. Surely there’s an opportunity here for a major technology company to sponsor a set of videos explaining some core technological concepts, maybe around computing, for example. This would provide them with marketing profile whilst doing something useful to contribute to improving the lamentable state of UK science education.

At the other event I was exposed to GoScience, a local (to me) company that’s developed an underwater sensing robot based on a ring-wing design; take a look at their videos and watch this device in action.

The other, Tidal Generation, also a local start-up company, is a bunch of folk who worked for one of the established tidal energy companies. Despite their commitment to the technology and its potential contribution to helping reduce climate change, they left the business in near despair. Their problem was that conventional device designs required specialist vessels to position the tidal generators. There aren’t many such ships and, as a result, you have to book them years in advance, creating a major bottle-neck in deploying this much-needed technology.

Faced with this problem, they took a radically different approach and designed a device that could be deployed by a  simpler vessel at the rate of one a day (in the right weather conditions, of course). They also overcame the problem of maintaining generators running at 40m depth in tidal races of 4m/second by simply recognising that if they were made to float, they could be easily brought to the surface and then towed inshore for any necessary work. This is in contrast, once again, to the need for a specialist vessel with heavy lifting equipment.

Two great examples of using science and engineering principles to solve real, multi-disciplinary problems through teamwork and good project management.

I do so like a nice bit of irony.

Here am I, quietly banging on to noone in particular about the need to develop skills of collaboration amongst our students, particularly in distributed working environments., when along comes Peter Kingston in the Guardian with a piece about an unpublished report on the Learning and Skills Council.

I quote:

‘”unnecessary duplication abounds” in the nation’s biggest quango and there is a lack of collaboration between different departments and its nine regions in England’.

and

‘…there is scant evidence of collaboration across the organisation’

and

‘Some staff told the report’s compilers that the LSC’s most recent organisational changes had “specifically discouraged collaboration and knowledge sharing”‘

I rest my case.

I recently applied for money to fund a project addressing the issue of work related learning. Predictably,  my approach was focused on distributed working. The growth in flexible/home based and distributed working is one of the most significant changes to working practice in recent years and with the pressure on to reduce travel costs and carbon footprints, these new models of working are only going to grow in importance.

Needless to say, I wasn’t successful. (This fits with my life experience - I think the only signficant thing I’ve ever won was a china horse, when I was 6. Well, it was significant to me then. Mind you, I won £5.20p on the Eurolottery last week so things may be looking up). However, this particular failure was a real disappointment as participation in the project was fairly well sewn up and involved a group of schools, led by the Head of Bedminster Down School, The Hub, (a social enterprise providing shared facility/networking facilities) and iEARN, about which I’ve written often before.  All were enthusiastic about developing a model in which the topic for a learning circle was to be determined by a group of employers who would themselves, then providing online mentoring to the participating students. (A learning circle is an iEARN method involving teams of students from 5 schools, collaborating in a study). It seemed to us that the approach was scaleable and could be adopted anywhere in the country, working with local or distant school partners and/or employers.

The beauty of this was that the learning circle would focus on a specific, real-world problem determined by employers (in our case social entrepeneurs) rather than a curriculum example which has been covered ad infinitum by earlier cohorts of students. So the method harnessed the motivation of doing something useful as well as the novelty of using new technologies and the engagement factor of social networking.

I’ll be interested to know if any of the successful pilots address the issue of distributed working - I live in hope.

All this puts me in mind of another socially useful potential piece of collaboration. At Grid Computing Now!, the government supported Knowledge Transfer Network, we have just launched our 2008 competition. So, in the unlikely event that this blog is being read by someone with an interest in developing ways in which grid or related technologies can contribute to saving the world from the superheated mess we are dragging it into - go to our competiton page

Today I came across a new acronym - ITS, the Internet of Things and Services.  The concept of the “Internet of Things and Services” is based on the possibility of seamless integration of physical objects and services via automatic identification of things, discovery of Things & Services, communication, service selection and composition, resolution and invocation of services. This concept embraces a range of exciting internet-enabled technologies for individual life/work-style support as well as an opportunity for commercial and business exploitation of emerging technology platforms.

It seems to me that missing from this definition is the word ‘education’. Surely ITS embraces a range of exciting educational opportunities too?

Mind you, I’m hoping that I’m not one of the ‘things’ that will be open to discovery. I’ve just spent a week in S.Devon staying in a cottage with no mobile phone coverage - it’s reminded me what life used to be like. The weather was so good, the sea so inviting, my canoe so wanting to be paddled and the kids so wanting to fish, climb and jump off rocks that I just didn’t have the heart to make my way up the hill to the 500sq m in which I could get a signal. It was sheer bliss.

Now, where do I sign up for the ITS Preferencing Service to register the fact that I want to be left alone..?

(but check this website if you really want to know about ITS)

There’s an interesting post on the profy blog, “Computers Without Borders: Cloud Computing and Political Manipulation” looks at the implications of political control of the developing ‘cloud’, the network of networks that is increasingly providing the opportunity to deliver services down the wire, rather than off a local drive or server. Political control of the Internet always seems like a fairly boring topic but this posting makes a good point about education.

I quote, “Other projects depend on cloud computing overcoming politics to be successful as well. What good is One Laptop Per Child bringing laptops to remote areas of poor countries (including our own) if there is no internet cloud of information, applications and services for the computers to access? How will it help these countries overcome hardship if they get cut off from the flow of information and the global economy because a bureaucrat in a suit thousands of miles and several time zones away is closing access to a data port to keep citizens in his country in the dark about political maneuvering?”

She’s right.

Sometimes the most arcane and tiresome issues have got staggeringly important implications.

I’ve just caught up with the vIII of Howie DiBlasi’s YouTube video, ‘Did you know?‘ (I’m a bit slow here, it was released last year). I don’t think it’s as good a presentation as the earlier one but it reinforces some key points. Here are a couple:

“this year 1.5 exabytes (1.5 x 10power18) of unique new information will be generated. That’s more than in the previous 5000 years”

“Technical information is doubling every 2 years. For students starting a 4 year course, half of the first year’s content will be potentially out of date by their third year of study. By  2010 it’s estimated it will double every 72 hours”

[That's assuming we haven't screwed the planet irretrievably, by then, of course.]

This reinforces the point made by George Siemens in his collectivism blog, which is that there is simply too much information around for any one person to handle, knowledge is now in the network - how else can we begin to deal with it?

It also reinforces for me the value of the approaches to complexity offered by Dave Snowden and his colleagues at Cognitive Edge, including their methods for deriving statistically significant evidence through the analysis of narrative, by exploring patterns in metadata. Thus removing the interpretive bias introduced by expert analysis of raw data. This human approach to sense-making offers some hope to me in a world increasingly dominated by real-time, automated analysis carried out by machines programmed by nerds.

The Cognitive Edge approaches also lend weight to the value of social networking environments as tools for effective knowledge exchange. A factor that underpins the need for schools to embrace such technologies rather than blocking them out of their networks on the grounds that kids waste time on them or they utilise too much network resource.

‘Do you know?’ v3, includes some quotes by Alan November, the educational technologist which emphasise “the necessity of students learning with others around the world and stress that 3 skills are needed to teach our children:

1) To deal with massive amounts of information

2) To engage in global communications

3) To be self-directed and understand how to organise more and more of their own learning”

I agree with all of these and, as you’ll know, am an advocate of developing the skills network collaboration. However, there are some interesting questions to be asked around the issues of self-directed learning/knowledge is the network/learning to know where to find knowledge. These all depend on kids having sufficient basic skills to know what it is they need to know. A simple ‘key skills’/'basic skills’ approach isn’t enough - this may provide the basics of the 3 Rs and keyboard skills - but surely there is a need for some definition of basic skills in particular subjects too. After all, if you are a geologist, you can’t go looking up the fundamentals of the subject each time you are faced with a problem - so, where’s the boundary between knowing [information] and knowing where to go/who to ask [to find out more information]

“Despite regular complaints about standards of literacy and numeracy, it is the so-called soft-skills that are at the top of the organisations list of concerns regarding the lack of skills of new employees joining from school, college or university. 66per cent of respondent organisations feel that new employees lack both communication/interpersonal skills and management/leadership skills (54%), yet these skills top the list as necessary for organisations to meet business requirements in the next two years”. (source: eGov Monitor)

No change there, then.

I’m grateful for Lisa Harris of Southampton University for drawing my attention to a short video on YouTube. Created by Michael Wesch in collaboration with 200 students at Kansas State University, it summarises some of the most important characteristics of students today - how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime. Created by Michael Wesch in collaboration with 200 students at Kansas State University.

A Vision of Students Today 

Inspired by my old friend Dr Alan Rae, I’ve finally got around to creating my first squidoo lens. This lens, not surprisingly, is on the topic of networked collaboration - referencing a couple of recent bits of research and beginning to shape an approach to introducing networked collaboration into the hermetically sealed world of secondary education…

Last week I attended a consultation workshop organised by NESTA (the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) and BERR (Dept for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform). The workshop was staged to get feedback on a report prepared by Outsell on the topic of, “Innovation in Internet Content Services”.

The report contained a SWOT analysis of the opportunities for UK plc. The potential market in this sector is huge and the UK has a lot going for it. Unfortunately, it also has some serious weaknesses, including ‘Management skills - understanding of ICT relatively poor’ and, damningly, ‘Educational system inadequate to prepare pupils for this emerging networked society’.

This point is elaborated in the document, I quote, “With schools now commendably producing a much more machine proficient workforce with a far larger knowledge than ever before of the role and importance of the computer in society, there is now a need to push forward to a recognition of the proper use of networked collaboration. Such skills development would in turn help students in future employment in real or virtual workplaces. SIG members [the special interest group that was consulted for the report] also observed that it is hard to envisage this barrier being overcome in an educational system where, all to often, heads and staff have been slow to recognise the need for change in the school’s own use of network applications, collaboration and e-learning to secure greater productivity, better decision-making and more effective compliance with policy and regulation”.

That says it all, really.

Back at the end of the ’90s, the Web for Schools Project, was set up. It involved us training 700 teachers (across the then 15 European States) to author html - this was the era before html editors - and to train their students to do the same. This resulted in 2000 kids being trained to code and the establishment of 70 transnational collaborative projects. Actually, that’s unfair on the kids - once they got going they trained themselves, they couldn’t be bothered to wait for the teachers and our trainers to catch up! The really interesting thing about this project is that it was funded by the trade ministry in Brussels, not by Education, because they were so worried about digital competition from the Pacific Rim. WfS was about demonstrating to educationalists and teachers what could be done with a bit of imagination and the achievements of the participating students were fantastic.

Depressingly, 10 years further on, I would suggest that there is a case for BERR to think about doing the same thing now and fund some more such projects; schools still don’t seem to have got the message.