Speaking of time, I had a meeting yesterday to discuss a bid for some loot from the Association of Learning Providers to produce some e-Content. Due to lack of time, we decided not to bid (5 days to put it together and we are all up to our eyes). But the funding call set me off on a rant.

On July 25th 2008 the official google blog carried an item about passing a milestone – they had indexed a trillion pages on the web. That’s 1,000,000,000,000 unique URLs. Now, by anyone’s standards, that’s an awful lot of content and that was over a year ago.And that discounts print material, of course.

So, why on earth do we need more content when we’re awash with the stuff? Most of it’s drivel, some of it’s dangerous (plain wrong or malicious) and all of it is out there to be found, copied and pasted.

I’d suggest that we don’t want more e-Content. What we want is for our young people, colleagues and peers to know how to critically evaluate the stuff that’s out there, make sense of it and work with others to use it.

More e-Content, pah! And why pay for it – after all I’m adding more of it for free – maybe someone can make sense or use this bit. Or add a bit more content in response.

Miri airport, Sarawak.

I’m sitting at a table in a well-known brand of global coffee shop, about to go cyber-incommunicado for 3 weeks in the heart of the Mulu National Park, exploring more of the world’s greatest caves.

It’s a novel experience these days – there’s no internet connection, no GSM network and, as we are based in a steep gorge, a satphone connection for only about 3 minutes at a time, if you’re lucky, as a satellite passes directly overhead. We haven’t got one anyway, so that’s irrelevant on this trip.

It’s such a difference from my first trip here in 1980. Then it was a 3 day journey on ferry and outboard powered-canoe to reach the Park, the great brown Baram River meandering through seemingly endless forest – now it’s a 40 minute plane ride over cleared land and palm plantations.. Then our base camp was a simple wooden structure with a tin roof – now on the same location is the 180 bed Royal Mulu Resort. Then, a trip into Deer Cave, the largest single cave passage in the world, was a rare privilege – now hundreds of tourist go there to watch the spectacular evening flight of bats (and there is even a live webcam, focused on their roost).

In those days, when I set out on an expedition, work was left behind as a distant memory – now I’m accessible online right up to the Park HQ and this netbook will come with me so that I can exploit every useful moment (assuming we have fuel for the generator!)

It’s a shrinking world, in time, space and diversity. I’m not sure that it’s better for it.

This prompted two thoughts – firstly that computers are great at crunching numbers and making decisions based on rules. But (at least so far) they are pretty hopeless at solving real problems because they are unable to analyse context and sort out what’s important from unimportant. This seems to me to be a significant barrier to a machine honouring the Conventions. After all, faced with a figure in a chador holding a bundle, even a human might have problems determining whether or not this was a woman carrying a small child, a female suicide bomber or a male insurgent in disguise. What would the machine do, shoot first and then apologise?

The second and more depressing thought was about the ways in which we prioritise our activities. Apparently, the US defence research establishments have spent over $4bn on this strand of development – using human ingenuity to develop more sophisticated ways of killing other humans. This is against a background of decreasing food stability, increasing poverty across much of Africa, increasing political instability, environmental degradation, antibiotic resistance in pathogens and, of course, climate change etc etc.

Finding positive examples of the use of human ingenuity is therefore both a relief and an affirmation of goodness. Another story this morning was of a MSF surgeon working in poor conditions in Congo who took guidance by SMS text messaging from a colleague thousands of miles away. These instructions enabled him successfully to carry out an amputation, saving the life of a young man.

Another, which I mentioned in a blog a few days ago, is the use of the World Community Grid to help the search for effective treatments for Aids. I’m grateful to a comment from Brian drawing my attention to a video that WCG created to commemorate World AIDS Day.

The discussion is interesting. There’s a quiet minority who say things like, “I’ve tried it, it works, it offers enough functionality for my students” and a more vocal majority who don’t like the idea. Their reasons for not liking it are varied but many revolve around worries about losing service and data, about being locked in and not being able to move stuff out of apps to another system, about the software not offering sufficient functionality or that this is a ‘bad’ route and we should be setting up systems based on integrating open source software for use in schools.

I’d make a few comments on this (I suggested google apps as a route for delivering school software so long ago that I can’t now be bothered to wade through my archives!). Firstly, most schools (smaller ones anyway) don’t have the technical capacity to set up and maintain anything vaguely complicated.

Secondly, worries about service reliability are perfectly valid, as they are with all computing (I’ve had a blue-screen of death today on this machine) and there should always be backups of critical data held in another format (and yes, you can shift stuff out of apps fairly easily, it isn’t locked in).

Thirdly – how much functionality do you need? I’ve watched my kids working on computers for several years now. Two things consistently p*ss me off – the fact that we don’t teach kids to type and so they spend time looking at keys rather than thinking constructively while they work and also the fact that they waste time messing about with appearance rather than focusing on content. So,  reduced functionality could be a good thing for kids’ thinking skills!

Finally, this discussion provides a wake up call. Cloud services are coming… There are several reasons for this. One is that it solves the problem of pirated software – it provides a model for payment for the service as you use it, rather than paying for a CD/Download which can be hacked and redistributed. Also, it provides a significant route to reducing carbon emissions. IT is responsible for 2% of global carbon emissions; having data stored in massive, highly efficient data-centres which are sited alongside renewal energy generation sources is much more sensible than everyone having their own servers at the end of the hugely inefficient power distribution system that we call the National Grid. Accessing applications through the browser is going to become more and more common, get used to it.

Check out the UK’s Grid Computing Knowledge Transfer Network for more information about grids and cloud computing.

This is, of course, bollox.

This post is prompted by clearing my office desk. In the process of doing so I found a bit of the Guardian letters page which I had torn out, months (years?) ago. It’s not dated. The fragment has a letter from Prof. Lewis Lesley. I think this is so relevant that I’ll repeat most of it in full. After a couple of comments about the stunning cost and staggering waste represented by the Thorp plant at Sellafield, he says…

“… All of these false starts miss one vital point. Uranium is a fossil fuel. There are no uranium reserves in Britain.

Mining, refining and transporting uranium generates significant environmental impacts and greenhouse gas emssions, which need 10 years of nuclear generation to balance. As a scarce commodity, uranium prices will rise to follow oil. Noone knows wht to do with the waste, except make weapons of mass destruction.  For 10% of the tax money spent without results on nuclear power, we could have retrofitted 100% of our housing stock to a zero-carbon standard and saved 40% of our energy consumption.”

We’re cascading towards a recession and unemployment is rising. Wouldn’t spending money in this way, creating thousands of relatively low-tech jobs, be preferable to investing huge sums of money in a technology that has consistently failed to perform, consistently created highly hazardous and long-lasting waste, which will employ a very small number of individuals many of which will have to be recruited from overseas (because we don’t turn out enough engineers in the UK) and for which the financial value of construction and operation will pass overseas?

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.

The bad thing was seeing the Windows blue screen of death when I started my pc this morning. Fortunately the beast worked when I rebooted it, so most of the day has been spent backing everything up and failing to find out why several error messages have started to appear. I thought I’d better write this before I press the off button ‘cos, based on past experience, it won’t work thereafter.

The good things…

1. Finding out the Ed Milliband has announced that the Government will introduce a clause into the forthcoming energy bill that will provide for a guaranteed feed-in tariff. If you don’t know what that is, it means that folk who install renewable energy generation capacity can get a decent price for any surplus energy that they export to the grid. This is standard practice around Europe and accounts for why Spain, Portugal and Germany are doing so well in developing renewable energy sources. In fact Germany is doing so well that it will apparently take the UK 150 years to catch up at present rates. So, with a proper feed-in tariff we may now catch up with them in about 80 years instead <sigh>. And maybe now there will be an incentive to start exploiting some of the technology we’ve developed here in the UK instead of exporting it for others’ benefit, like Pelamis.
2. Finding out from Andrew Dean at Exeter’s Marchmont Observatory that NASA has launched eClips. It’s yet another wonderful resource to help convey the fascination of science.
3. Listening to the news and hearing that Ed Balls has had the common sense to abandon KS3 SATS. Hurrah and about time too. KS2 SATS next please and be quick about it.

Oh yes, and there was a small step forward here in Bristol a couple of weeks ago when the wonderful Mary Gowers of iEARN UK initiated a learning circle as an initiative towards Science City Bristol (not that the project merits a mention on their website!) Teams of students from 5 local schools will be working together online to undertake an enquiry-based collaborative learning project.

Things are looking up… Shame about the global economy.

On September 9th, the Guardian ran a piece entitled, ‘Rapid rise in flexible working’, quoting a CBI study suggesting that the number of flexible workers in the UK has jumped sharply over the past 4 years. Of the CBI’s sample set, almost half of the employers said they offered teleworking from home to staff, up from 14% two years ago and only 11% in 2004.

There seems to be some slight disagreement here,  in the headlines. Despite this, it’s clear that home and flexible working are here to stay – driven increasingly by the mayhem that is the British transport system (or, rather, lack of system) and the need to reduce cost and carbon emissions.

Meanwhile, over on the continent, under Geneva, one of the most exciting experiments in human history is taking place. Leaving aside the tabloid nonsense about black-holes destroying the planet (I think we are doing a good-enough job anyway, just by burning petro-chemicals), this is a stunning example of scientific research across distributed networks – data from the LHC will be processed on computer grids and scientists in hundreds of different locations will be working on the results.

So, given that distributed working is obviously on the agenda for businesses and researchers (to say nothing about kids collaborating across chat networks etc in the evenings) shouldn’t we be using more of it in education? By the time current business technologies become mainstream in schooling, we may well have been swallowed by a black hole – after all, the cosmos operates on timescales of millenia, a bit like UK education.

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.