Have you tried turning IT off and then turning IT on again?

Just over a month ago if someone had told me that by mid January, both D&T and IT would have been let loose from government control I wouldn’t have believed them. In fact I’m not entirely sure I do now, even after Mr Gove’s recent announcements. Meanwhile it must be galling for teachers of English, Maths and Science who have faithfully done as they have been told for the last 20 years or so to learn that technology teachers are obviously all so clever and trustworthy that they can just be left to get on with it, and that somehow just through the means of social networking they will magically lead us into a new golden age of prosperity.

Sadly, nothing could be further from the truth. No technology teacher under the age of around forty has ever been in the position of having the freedom to determine their own course content, and suddenly asking them to do so is a little like sending a domesticated animal out into the wild for the first time. I suspect most IT and D&T courses will in reality stay well within the safe confines of exactly where they are now. The lack of expertise in the current workforce means that there’s going to continue to be a lot of working in Wood and Word for some time yet.

In a few schools there will be outstanding exceptions, and enlightened enthusiasts will form collective departments that use the time to create new schemes of work that imaginatively merge IT and D&T to explore the creative processes of designing innovative electronic products, services and systems that are easy and satisfying to use. It is these schools that are likely to provide the future programmers, developers, interaction and games designers that can potentially save the country’s future economy and global standing. But there are unlikely to be many of them.

Meanwhile the responsibility for defining the technological curriculum of the future would now seem to be in the hands of the examination boards. No school is going to offer a course in Technology that does not lead to a GCSE or equivalent recognised vocational qualification at 16+. And at the same time, those boards will have to face up to the challenge of providing a format for examinations which can be seen to effectively assess technological capability – a three hour written or multiple choice question paper taken in the school gym just isn’t going to reveal evidence of the ability to undertake creative and collaborative open-ended problem-solving.

Now that the current Technology curriculum is about to be switched off, there is a potential opportunity to create something new and exciting, and finally provide a grounding in what are frequently referred to as 21st Century skills (or more accurately, the late 20th Century skills that were never provided).  The question is how?

And, one wonders, was Mr Gove given an iPad for Christmas and at some point needed to be told to try switching it off and then on again?

Keep taking the tablets

So, with today’s Amazon announcement of a range of new Kindles, assuming the colour version is released in the UK sometime next year and costs less than £199, is this likely to have an impact on the number of pupils in 2013 owning their own tablet that they bring into school – or on schools deciding to equip students with such a device to save on the purchase of textbooks?

If this happens, as the Kindle does not include a camera or microphone, will the potential to use tablets for other than reading texts severely limit its value in the classroom?

Will Apple be forced to compete with cheaper cut-down educational iPads or iPhones?

And will teacher-phobes continue to reject the idea of using such devices in schools?

Is this going to be the device that sets the world of education on fire, or is it yet another damp squib?

Comments please…

Hey! You! Get off of my iCloud

The use of the term ‘cloud’ as the name for the new computing services being offered by the so-called ‘Cloud Capitalists’, ie Apple, Amazon and Google, is an interesting one. Presumably the idea is of a never-ending cycle in which my files ‘evaporate’ up into the cloud and fall back down to my desktop as a shower of digital data?

I am indebted to a recent article by Charles Leadbetter, author of ‘Cloud Culture’, for exploring the analogy further. He refers to the first classification of cloud types, created in 1803, in which some 52 varieties of cirrus, stratus and cumulus clouds were identified, each with different qualities and characteristics. It is this variety and diversity that makes our clouds a thing of beauty, wonder and delight, and what I suggest we need to strive for electronically. Surely the last thing we want is a continuous blanket of grey digital cloud cover?

Meanwhile educationalists are starting to wonder if there’s anything in the Cloud for them? Apple’s free 5Gb of storage, bypassing the need for local area networks that won’t easily speak to each other, is certainly a plus in the development of personal e-portfolios – but of course it only works if all participants are on the same type of cloud.

As for All Change Please!, we’re patiently awaiting the development of iCloud 9 – that’s the one we want to be on. ‘Cloud 9′ is defined as ‘being in a state of great happiness’.  Apparently – if you believe anything you read on the internet – there are 10 cloud-types and Cloud No. 9, ‘Cumulonimbus’, is the highest-topped and most comfortable-looking. So, nothing at all to do with drugs then.

Or perhaps this is all just iCloud cuckoo land, where, according to a play by Aristophanes, there is a perfect, unrealistically idealistic city in the clouds.

But surely the iCloud is actually made up of lots of smaller individual clouds – one for each of us. How secure are these mini-clouds? Do we want to be able to share our personal clouds with each other? As the Rolling Stones didn’t sing back in 1965, ‘Hey! You! Get off of my iCloud’. 

And as William Wordsworth warned back in 1807, clouds can be rather solitary, when he didn’t write ‘I wandered lonely as an iCloud…’

The great e-scape

During the past five or so years I’ve been involved as a consultant with Goldsmiths Univeristy in London for a project looking at the development of on-line portfolios. Not the sort of interminable ‘Make a Powerpoint presentation of your finished project and upload it to the exam board’s website’ sort of portfolio, but one in which learners’ thoughts and actions are recorded as they happen using words, photos, audio and video immediately uploaded into a webspace that they themselves own and control. In turn this has led to research and development in ‘comparative pairs’ – a remarkable new way of holistically and reliably assessing work on-line that is set to dispense with traditional approaches to ‘marking’.

To find out more go to:
http://www.gold.ac.uk/teru/projectinfo/projecttitle,5882,en.php

Here you can download the web-based e-scape ‘brochure’ and the full report of Phase 3 of the project.