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 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.

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.

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.

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