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.

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 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.

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.

Among her many comments she says, “…most visual media are real-time media that do not allow time for reflection, analysis or imagination — those do not get developed by real-time media such as television or video games. Technology is not a panacea in education, because of the skills that are being lost”.

“Studies show that reading develops imagination, induction, reflection and critical thinking, as well as vocabulary,” Greenfield said. “Reading for pleasure is the key to developing these skills. Students today have more visual literacy and less print literacy. Many students do not read for pleasure and have not for decades.”

Parents should encourage their children to read and should read to their young children, she said.

I couldn’t agree more.

You can read a summary of her research 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 !)