The article leads with the example of Rytis Slatkevicius, an MBA student by day, who, in 2006 when he was ony 18, had assembled the world’s largest database of prime numbers — those which are only divisible by themselves and one. He had done this by harnessing the spare processing power of computers belonging to thousands of prime-number enthusiasts, using the internet. These days professional mathematicians collaborate with him, using the power of his volunteer computing network, PrimeGrid, to address significant problems.

There are nearly 100 science projects using such volunteer computing. Like PrimeGrid, most are based on an open-source software platform called BOINC with volunteer computing. Many address topical themes, such as modelling climate change  with ClimatePrediction.net, developing drugs for AIDS with FightAids@home, or simulating the spread of malaria with MalariaControl.net.

This volunteer computing approach is also facilitating fundamental science projects. For example,  Einstein@Home analyzes data from gravitational wave detectors, MilkyWay@Home simulates galactic evolution, and LHC@home studies accelerator beam dynamics.

These projects leverage a sense of online community. BOINC provides enthusiastic volunteers with message boards to chat with each other and share information about the science behind the project. This is strikingly similar to the sort of social networking that happens on websites such as Facebook, but with a scientific twist. BOINC also provides a credit system, which measures how much processing each volunteer has done — turning the project into an online game where they can compete as individuals or in teams. Again, there are obvious analogies with popular online games such as Second Life.

This is real science, being done by all sorts of real people collaborating together across geographic and political boundaries; people motivated by a sense of enquiry and wonder whose interactions are made possible by social networking.

Well, there you go….

Way back in the 90’s, in educational internet history, the Web for Schools project demonstrated this very fact. We gave our students the tools, the freedom and the support to create and off they went. They were active participants; self-motivated and self-directed learners (there weren’t any tools then, they just had to learn raw coding) and they created lots of interesting. And what’s more, they did it collaboratively, in teams.

There’s nothing much new under the sun.

Learning circles involve groups of students from a number of schools. The groups use each other as collaborative resources to investigate and analyse issues related to the project topic, in this case the theme was ‘One World’. They commit to produce a report which could be video, powerpoint, poetry, a website or anything else that can be published online.

Nothwithstanding these problems, some of the student groups got stuck into the project and have now produced their reports. You can see these at the project site Look out for the obese giraffe – brilliant! The reports – video and powerpoint – show how the kids brought together a number of scientific themes that illustrate how interdependent we are on this fragile Earth.

Now, I thought about this a fair bit before attending and afterwards and here’s a few observations:

We shouldn’t teach ‘ICT’ much beyond KS2. After that it should be embedded in subject teaching and other school activities

(Unfortunately, our kids are increasingly ‘digital natives’, whilst the majority of those with influence (heads, senior teachers, awarding body staff, politicians etc etc) are completely the opposite; so this is highly unlikely for a few years).

A good investment would be to give all kids a high-end laptop, not simply a browser device. They’ll use it to its full capacity doing all sorts of stuff, whereas the majority of older types hardly know where to start.

Project activities should be collaborative to reflect the needs of business and research. For this to happen we need to devote effort to identifying methodologies for assessing individuals’ performance within teams. Focussing assessment on what individuals can do whilst working entirely on their own no longer reflects reality in the real world (if it ever did).

We need to teach the skills of teamwork and project management more systematically. Differentiation isn’t just about kids having different learning styles, it’s also about individuals contributing in different ways to different tasks. We all need to understand our strengths and weaknesses in this respect so that we can be maximally productive in any newly constituted team or working on a new challenge.

To get kids enthusiastic about working in the IT industry (one of e-Skills objectives) involves getting them to do interesting things, not repetetive standardised tasks.

So the idea of controlled assessment being able to offer the chance to work on real business problems is good… Unfortunately, it quickly became apparent that rather than define a set of criteria for what would make a suitable problem, thus enabling schools to use their local businesses to define an issue that’s current,  the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority will want to ‘own’ a set of problems that can be used for assessment. (This, to me, is a bit like saying that because a meal of fresh food is appealing on day one, it’ll still be appealing a year later). Oh yes, and of course it will all be individually based assessment.

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

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.

He quotes the DCFS as saying that EP is being introduced to help young people develop their ability to study and carry out research on their own. Teenagers need to boost their “personal, learning and thinking skills”, according to the Department. And who can argue with that?

Unfortunately, many Universities are apparently reluctant to place much faith in the projects when making admissions decisions precisely because of the impossibility of ensuring they are the candidates’ own work.

Surely this is the critical point – whatever the aspiration for EPs to develop an individual’s ‘personal, learning and thinking skills’, in reality it is highly unlikely that any EP will be a purely personal piece of work. In fact it will be the result of collaboration, completed with the assistance of parents, siblings, teachers and friends (and that’s without considering the potential for ‘borrowing’ stuff from an ever expanding library of dubious online sites).

Is this a problem? Well, I don’t think so; after all we’re social animals, we collaborate instinctively, collaboration is daily reality for most people in the worlds of work and academia. Collaboration in EPs only becomes a problem because of an insistence to treat them as individual pieces of work.

Why therefore don’t we take an alternative approach and acknowledge the inherently collaborative nature of project work? EPs could be structured and supported accordingly, valued for what they truly represent – not just another tick in the box but an opportunity for pupils truly to learn, not merely about a topic but to about the essential skills they will require to participate in a knowledge economy?

And does this mean that projects don’t offer an opportunity for accreditation? Of course not, they just require re-framing so that the pupils’ work is accredited as ‘informal learning through, say, ASDAN’s award processes – so the school still gets the points.

1    Centred on engaging, real-world projects
2    Explored in teams
3    Teachers are facilitators and can point to theoretical knowledge where it is required, which is less often than you would think
4    Different students learn differently; but let them figure it out from a world of information. Don’t create materials ahead of time.

Now, this seems pretty similar to the ideas that I’ve been promoting through this blog for a while. It’s good to know that I’m not alone or utterly off the wall.

You can see a recording of the address at the link above, it runs for just over an hour.