This is an issue close to my heart and goes back to around 1997 when my colleagues and I at South Bristol Learning Network developed the Signal Box. This was a piece of kit into which you plugged your network and your connectivity (the days of whole schools on 28.8 modems or 64kbpm lease lines at £11k p.a!) and it enabled you to time-limit the internet access for individuals or groups of students. They could use the time all at once or in increments, as they chose, and would then come back to ask for more, allowing the teacher to check their browsing history, take a look at what they had been doing and help them learn the skills of focused, safe  Internet browsing. This seemed enough to us but to keep our school development partners happy, we had to introduce a mechanism for selective blocking of websites.

Over a meal one day I was explaining this piece of kit to my colleague, Stellan Ranebo from Sweden. He was utterly astonished that such blocking facilities were necessary. I explained that in prurient UK there was a need to reassure parents and teachers that kids didn’t get access to unsavoury (ie porn) sites. His response was that in Sweden they educated children to deal with the issues around pornography, recognising that their exposure to that genre was inevitable.

And here we are, years later, in much the same situation. The mainstream educational world tries to erect digital fences around its pupils to keep them away from the Internet snakes. Unfortunately, the fences aren’t long enough, high enough or of small enough mesh size. Rather than keeping the kids away from the snakes, sufficiently motivated members of both parties can work their way through the fence, walk around to the end or jump over.  And, of course, when they go online at home, the fences aren’t there anyway.

This is plainly stupid, we’re not doing our young people any favours by trying to isolate them from risk. They need to learn risk recognition and management strategies that will stand them in good stead at school, at home and in work. Quite apart from anything else, the social networking tools that are widely banned in schools are now the routine currency of the world of work.

Take down the fences and help kids learn to deal with snakes.

GridRepublic is a nonprofit working in collaboration with BOINC to raise public awareness and participation in volunteer computing. They make it simple to discover, join, and manage preferences as well as multiple computers. Simply register, select project(s), and install.

You can learn more at http://www.gridrepublic.org.”

The necessary computational work adds up to thousands of years of computer time, but will be compressed into just months using World Community Grid, a facility provided by IBM and thousands of volunteers around the world who are prepared to donate their computers’ spare processing capacity for projects that are of community benefit (this could include you…)

You can read the story here.

Anyway, there’s an interactive ‘Intelligent Car Quiz’, informing players about modern, ICT-based safety and green vehicle technologies. It’s available in 6 languages, so there’s no excuse for you not to go there and find out how cars could contribute to saving the planet

(As if !)

From a conference on flexible working

A presentation from Peter James of the Sustainable IT initiative

Robert Mannings, the BT futureologist

The growth in interest in what are [now] called Cloud applications is really quite extraordinary, just do a search in Google Trends for the term ‘cloud computing’ and look at the exponential rise in enquiries. I’m very interested in hearing about any such applications so that I can promote them via the Grid Computing Knowledge Transfer Network to illustrate the way in which new technical infrastructures are changing business practices and promoting new working models. So, if you know any, please add a comment to this blog and let me know what they are, what they offer and a URL, please.

I’m off to Borneo tomorrow to go caving for a month, exploring the greatest caves on Earth. As I like to say, cave exploration is the only true exploration frontier remaining on the planet. Using remote sensing techniques you can see what you are letting yourself in for anywhere else on the Earth’s surface, including below the sea or even in space. (And the proof of this, if you need it, is the availability on google earth of sub-sea detail. Of course, google earth is, itself, an example of a cloud application…)

In caves, you can’t – every bend in the passage represents the truly unknown. (And being below ground means that you can’t get email or the web – bliss!)

He talks about the multiple forms of organisation that have been adopted by people throughout the time we’ve been around and comments on the fact that business schools almost universally teach market managerialism to the almost complete exclusion of every other model. Market managerialism has a tendency to promote globalising, speculative capitalism as being an inevitability.

This narrow focus means that students often get no exposure to alternatives such as local exchange trading schemes, share swaps etc. In these circumstances, is it much of a surprise that our current financial structures and corporate bodies are crashing round our ears? Monoculture may produce good crops for a while but is terribly susceptible to disease… Lets have a bit more variety.

The point was driven home to me this week. I’ve been working on a project to set up a skills academy. We proposed that the governance of this new institution should be vested in a Community Interest Company.

This form of organisation was established by Act of Parliament in 2004. It’s intended to make it easy to establish organisations that trade but have purposes that are for community benefit. CICs have an asset lock so that their value can’t be given away. (They are an alternative to jumping through hoops to have a charity with a trading arm). Despite the fact that they’ve been around for 4 years and despite the fact that social enterprise is [has been] a significant growth area in the UK, they’ve not been heard of by two of the major public bodies with which I have been dealing.

With help from the World Community Grid, a philanthropic public computing grid organization started by computer giant IBM in 2004, hundreds of thousands of volunteers have so far donated over 84,000 years of unused computer time to researchers worldwide. If you want to assist, go here and click ‘join now’.
This will start a process by which the project will send data to your computer. When you’re not using your computer its processing capacity will crunch their data and send the results back to the project. It’s safe and it provides a means for all of us to contribute to solving this hideous global health problem.

And tell your friends…

The iClass system translates the ideas of the pedagogical model into an online platform which invites the learner to ‘plan, learn and reflect’. It is a prototype of what may well be common place in a few years’ time: a system which helps learners creates their own learning paths based on their preferences, mode of learning and character”.

It’s interesting, take a look.

One interesting feature is that there were no UK schools involved in the project. Similarly there were no UK projects featured in their recent survey of “laptop programmes for students, an overview through Europe and beyond”. No doubt we’re still installing lost of electronic whiteboards here in the UK, so that’s OK then.

If only.

Anyway, what’s that got to do with education? Well there’s an issue about educating people to see through the crap and look at the reality of economy that’s based on gambling but doesn’t value manufacturing and long term research. That’s one thing.

Another thing is that new modelling and simulation techniques, often based on grid computing, have a major role to play in helping to save us from ourselves. The UK’s Grid Computing Now! project (a Knowledge Transfer Network funded by the Technology Strategy Board) is running a competition on the subject of “Grid Computing for a Greener Planet”. So if you, or someone you know, has an interest in programming and a desire to save the world, take a look at the competition details on the project’s website.

A third thing relates to the software you are running. The era of licensed software is drawing to a close. Increasingly you’ll get your applications served down the wire on a subscription basis (which may be free of course, like Google). What does this mean for schools? Well, there’s a good side and a bad side. The increasing implementation of virtual learning environments runs the risk of squeezing out small, innovative educational sofware developers in favour of those software houses that do deals to be included in the VLE offerings. However, on the other side of the fence, the availability of ‘cloud computing services, like those from Amazon, means that smaller software houses can deploy their software as a service anywhere in the world without having to invest in their own infrastructures. The opportunity, for those whe can sieze it, is immense.

Georgina Ellis from SGI introduced Year 6 at her local primary school to the wonders of grid computing with a little help from the National Grid Service.

The NGS supports a number of initiatives for schools and colleges and, when approached by St Johns Primary School in Wetley Rocks Staffordshire, they were happy to provide resources to their IT Development Day for the Year 6 Students. The Developer Day was devised by Georgina, a Parent Governor and High Performance Computing Salesperson at SGI.

Georgina explained that she “wanted to give an introduction to an aspect of computing that in many cases is unheard of in schools, until University or even PhD level; yet children at this age, 10-11, are more IT literate than any previous generation. However their knowledge is more point and click rather than devise and programme. I wanted the children to see the possibilities afforded by modern computing so they could begin to develop their skills and aim themselves toward them.”

(Now, there’s a revolution… Introducing kids to programming)

During the day pupils were divided into teams and each team was tasked with programming a Lego Mindstorms robot – complete with ultrasonic sensor and electronic compass – to complete an obstacle course including garages to park in and baked bean tins to slalom between! The teams recorded their robot programming experience by making a short video which required the teams to film the programming and trial runs of the robot and to capture their thoughts on the task. Each film was set to music and given titles and credits before being shown on the hall projector as part of the day’s summing up.

Great.