Before the mainstream media and television stations caught on that something was going down in Canberra last night, the Twittersphere was already abuzz with speculation that Kevin Rudd may not last the evening. As Parliament House insiders began tweeting that Julia Gillard, the current Deputy PM and John Faulkner, the Defence Minister and Labor “elder-statesman” had gone into Rudd’s office for a closed-door meeting. Soon other Ministers had joined in the impromptu meeting and speculation was rife.

Once twits had settled on the hashtag #spill, it was on for one and all. Seconds had passed and fifty updates had gone through. Keeping up with the challenge was a challenge.  Twitter had already played a major role in the U.S. election, but this was Australia’s first real go at the population actively discussing our future leadership online in real-time. But unlike the dry, emotional and serious commentary that surrounded the U.S. election, Australia’s effort was far more jovial, keeping people glued to the #spill stream for many hours.

From nowhere appeared a new Twitter account, @KevinRuddExPM - a play on Kevin07′s official @KevinRuddPM account. This Kevin was more outwardly bitter than the real Kevin and provided a refreshing array of tweets that you’d think might actually reflect the (ex)PM’s persona – including this one that tied in the week’s other big story from the World Cup:

“Calling Tim Cahill and Harry Kewell to ask them for some advice on handling a send off…”

Of course, I got my boot in via Twitter as well:

“Hey Ban Ki-moon! You’d better watch your back. Kevin’s available early.”

Julia Gillard’s first press conference as PM: “Look at mooee, look at mooee, look at mooee.”

What were you doing when Rudd was booted? Oh yeah. Tweeting.

Well done Julia Gillard – Australia’s first female Prime Minister.

Feel free to share some of your favourite #spill tweets in the comments.

Image courtesy of philderksen

So what is it that compels me consider placing the iPad into such a revered category of invention?  Prior to its release, Steve Jobs called this thing “magical” and “revolutionary”. Obviously, I’m very skeptical about the “magical” tag, but it’s very hard to quibble with the second descriptor attached to the device.

But why?  We have had LCD screens and internet browsers and email apps for ages. How can something that does what we’ve been doing with computers for years be called a “game changer“? The thing is, it’s not WHAT the iPad does that makes it special. It’s HOW the USER interfaces with it that is the difference - and it’s a massive difference.

For all my adult life, I’ve been using computers on a daily basis. I know what they do and I can do amazing things with them. My children grew up in a world and home life where computers and access to the world via the Internet was the norm. We were totally connected. On the flipside, my wife knew what computers could do, but she just wasn’t interested in using them. If she had a question that needed to be looked up on-line, she knew either our kids or I could do it for her. She had different hobbies and workloads that filled her day and the computers in our house were not part of her routine. There was clearly a barrier there for her that she decided she didn’t need or want to cross. Computers just never excited her - and for her needs, I can truly say there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. But I always felt she was missing out.

And I can’t help but imagine how many others are also in the same boat? The World Internet Usage Statistics suggest that penetration in Australia is just over 60%. How do they work that out? Because so many households have an internet connection and there’s an average of so many people in each household?  Multiply the two figures together and divide it into the overall population and there’s your percentage?  Well my personal experience shows that in my household, there would be an error-margin of 25% in that calculation. My own experience with people in general tells me that the actual internet penetration across the population is less than half.  I believe most western countries would be the same.

When it comes to Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs), we can split the world up into three distinct groups:

• The ICT Rich – Individuals with easy access who choose to be connected regularly
• The ICT Avoiders – Individuals who could be connected, but for whatever reason, choose not to
• The ICT Poor - Individuals who through their situation have little or no access to ICTs.

I classified my wife in the second category years ago and despite my efforts to change that, the barriers were too great for her. Then I heard about the Apple iPad and instantly I could see it as a catalyst for ICT Avoiders to become connected. I decided I was going to buy her one on the May 28 release date. I configured it for her with her rarely used email address and a few bookmarks in Safari as well as some of the more popular free iPad apps from the AppStore and then I gave it to her to try out. Instantly, she wanted to touch it, to test it, to see what it does and what she could do with it. She asked me to put some of her favourite photos and music onto it. My children sent her emails with links to some sites she’d be interested in. I showed her how to turn on and off the wireless connection at home.

On the first day, my wife had been going with the iPad for about 4 hours and I can officially advise that she has finally joined the rest of the family in 21C. I can confirm that it is a game-changer, but is it a stepping stone to traditional computing? I’m not sure that Apple’s walled-garden will allow for that. Still, her excitement was palpable, and computers have never done that for her in the past.

Here are my top-ten reasons why I think iPad is “revolutionary” for ICT Avoiders:

1. Extremely portable – light and not oversized
2. Cold start in 23 seconds
3. Very intuitive. The iPhone user interface “makes sense” to just about everyone. iPad is the same with bigger screen real estate (very important)
4. No complexities added of a permanently visible keyboard and mouse as you have with a traditional computer - for newbies, these are hurdles to overcome – not human interface devices.
5. Simplicity. One app at a time. 
6. > 10 hour battery life 
7. People don’t seem to have any fear that they’ll break something with it 
8. Some of the apps are very practical from a newbie’s POV.  For example, “Epicurious” puts hundreds of thousands of recipes at your fingertips. Tap what ingredients you have and bang, there’s a stack of recipes to try, including feedback from people who have tried them. Very powerful. And that’s just one example. The App Store is a shopping mall for newbies – as is iTunes Store and iBook Store. 
9. Internet browsing without the complications. No plugins to install, things either work, or they don’t (flash). You just accept it as it is. 
10. (so far) It’s reliable. Turn it on and it just works.

iPad will not replace your computer if you are already a computer user. But it’s a handy, convenient option for doing some things, and it does them very elegantly. If you always avoided ICTs, iPad is YOUR gateway to the connected world.

Sorry, I sound like an iPad salesman, but that’s my impression after witnessing the impact it’s had in my own home since Friday – and apart from setting it up and having an initial play with it myself, I’ve been hands-off.  Is it for everyone? No. You can live without it. But if I wanted a way to get “ICT-Avoiders” to start using ICTs, I would give them an iPad.

Revolutionary? I think so. It’s clear that the iPod revolutionised the music industry, and now there is talk that the iPad will revolutionise the newspaper and magazine industry. We’ve had Windows-based tablet computing for almost a decade. If the iPad wasn’t revolutionary, we wouldn’t have so many tech companies rushing to develop a competing product with a similar user interface.

But I’m not going to go as far as 4,000 Britons who were recently surveyed on the “Greatest Inventions of All Time” where the iPhone was voted into 8th place – one in front of the Flushing Toilet. Although I’m sure there’ll be plenty of people using their iPad on the 9th-rated greatest invention of all time.

Do you think the iPad is revolutionary?

Before anyone can work out the point of life for themselves, they must work out their own ground rules. Most choose to simply accept someone else’s ground rules by blindly following the indoctrination of their parents and their religious community and believe in an illogical, invisible and impossible entity which demands of its followers, kooky rituals that confusingly vary widely between multiple different religions that seemingly follow that very same entity – all in the same selfish goal of securing passage after bodily death into an unknown paradise forever more, instead of being sucked into an equally unknown eternal paradisean-antithesis that they morbidly fear. Blind Faith demands obedience.

Now when you put it that way, it makes you think more seriously about the real point of life. Firstly, I share two beliefs with the majority of the inhabitants of Planet Earth. We are born, and we die.  Everything else is debatable.

When you unravel and expose religion, I simply cannot accept that GREED and FEAR would be the two key motivators of Mankind.

Why was I born and get to live in a country where the average lifespan is about 74 years while other humans are born in and must live in countries that have average lifespans of a mere 30 years?

Why do I and my children have easy access to health care, education, fresh food and clean water, while there are children and babies suffering unimaginable pain from the day they enter this world until they succumb to childhood mortality?

A God that loves us all would not allow this, but blind faith makes you dismiss any questionable event or situation as part of “God’s Plan”, which is conveniently beyond our comprehension.

Within the timeline of the universe and the existence of this world, the reign of mankind is almost an unregisterable blip. But human history has shown evidence of massive progress by the Earth’s most dominant species, all in the name of humanity.

As one of six billion humans, living on an insignificant rock careering around one star out of an almost infinite number, who was fortunate enough to have been born in a developed country at the junction of the Industrial  and Technological Eras, I have my chance to make a tiny difference before I disappear forever.

What kind of difference? Who knows. Improving the living conditions for one less-privileged human; working to benefit your local community;  inventing a breakthrough solution to a known or unknown problem; generating a larger than required income which is then shared with the poor or less-fortunate; educating the masses either directly or indirectly. In other words, making YOUR mark in human history – leaving a legacy for the species and for our current home, Earth.

An ant is born and dies. A cat is born and dies. A shark is born and dies. What is their Point of Life? A human is born and dies. The difference is, many of us have an ability to make a difference, but we individually choose not to. Imagine how it could be if they all did make a difference.

That’s my Point of Life. What’s yours?

 
image courtesy of Financial Services Technology

But often it’s not an email that hooked the poor user. Drive-by websites that drop trojans with keyloggers onto the novice user’s insecure computer are a gold mine for phishers. A steady stream of keystrokes featuring website URLs, usernames and passwords is captured, neatly packaged and emailed off or uploaded directly into a secure database on the other side of the planet. According to Internet Security Vendor McAfee, “there has been a 50% increase in the number of detected so-called “zombie” computers since 2008“. In the four months between January and May 2009, McAfee alone detected 12 million computers that had been hijacked by cyber thieves. Even experienced Internet users have been caught out by logging on via compromised Internet Cafes or using the ”free” unprotected wireless at Starbucks.

Clearly, the solution of educating Internet users to be cautious when using the Internet is a solution that is not working. The problem is getting away from us as a society and in 2007 in the U.S. alone, the cost of phishing was calculated to be $3.2 BILLION - that was up from just $2.3 billion the previous year. What it is today, we can only guess, but everybody seems to know somebody who has been a victim.

And it’s not just banks and credit cards that the criminals are phishing for. It’s account details for PayPal, eBay, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and virtually every email service on the web. Social Networking sites are particularly vulnerable and users are even more unsuspecting when it comes to “sharing” their account information. Their goal? Identity fraud. And since many of the fraudsters are actually located in a foreign country, bringing them to justice is almost impossible.

So if making users more tech-savvy is not the answer, what is?

The vast majority of humans live their entire lives within a reasonably close distance to the place they were born – certainly they stay in the same country more often than not. If they migrate, they choose to stay in the country that becomes their new home. With this fact in mind, it is logical that if an Internet user signed up for a web service of some type in one country, they are unlikely (except in circumstances of overseas trips) to be signing on to that web service from another country. Many of us will NEVER do it.

• How hard would it be for EVERY web service provider to identify and record the country where an account was created (or configured after the event), and then match up the country of each new sign-on request with that original country?
• How hard would it be for the web service to reject logons if those countries don’t match up?
• How hard would it be for the web service provider to alert the user that an attempt to logon to their account was made from another country?
• How hard would it be for an extra question to be added to each user’s profile that says “ONLY Allow logon from the following country: [country list]“
• How hard would it be for the web service provider to include an option for the user to turn this setting off if the user is travelling?

 What are the benefits of this simple solution?

If the cyber criminal is in another country as is often the case, there’ll be an extra hurdle for them to get into your account – even if they do have your username and password. If they happen to be in the same country as you and if they eventually do get caught, then your country’s laws will come into play and real convictions will actually be possible.

Of course, nothing on the Internet is foolproof, but this simple approach can protect those hapless Internet users that are so prevalent (and costly).

Google – Yahoo – Microsoft – Facebook – On-line Banks – eBay - Please take note: You have a responsibility to protect your users from themselves. This is one simple step you can all take so others DO NO EVIL using YOUR services.

What do you think? How can we get web service providers to do this?

photo courtesy of purplemattfish

But it begs the question? “How many light bulbs does it take to change teaching?“

Can our students afford to wait for each of their individual teachers to wake up to the realization that it’s well and truly the 21st century? How long will our governments continue to invest in 21st century ICTs if they don’t see any tangible return on that investment – especially since individual teachers in large proportions continue to, at best avoid and at worst, shun ICTs?

Massive investments such as the Digital Education Revolution in Australia, and particularly in New South Wales are taking the sledgehammer approach to a problem that really should never have been allowed to permeate the teaching profession for so many decades.  In a (wal)nutshell, the sledgehammer approach is:

1. Give computers to every student.
2. Build the expectation in the community that they will be used in school.
3. Shame teachers into action/change.

This is in stark contrast to the ICT investment of the past dozen or more years where the intention was rolling out computers and software to schools in order to lower the computer-to-student ratio. There was never any clearly expressed outcome that all teachers would increase their ICT-skills as a result of these rollouts – their use has always been an option, and as I’ve said before, if you give teachers an option, most will opt-out. Twelve years of rolling out over 600,000 computers to schools in New South Wales has proven this loud and clear.

But now, during the second half of 2009, an urgency was born. Here are some questions that you may like to respond to in the comments below:

How can Australia as a society commit to and spend billions of dollars on computers for students without educational outcomes attached?

How can schools absorb so many computers in such a short period of time and make them effective – or rather, essential tools for learning?

How can teachers reinvent themselves to be relevant in a world where their students have information on tap giving them the power to contradict the “infallible” knowledge of the teacher at the front of their classroom?

What is the teacher’s role in this new 21st Century classroom?

What curriculum, assessments and measurements do we need to implement to complement the ICT resources our students now have ubiquitous access to? 

How big is this problem? Consider your own school. What percentage of teachers at your school fall into the ICT-avoider description?

Although it’s expensive, the sledgehammer approach is hopefully going to be the lightbulb moment that teachers need to shake them into action. I believe the reckoning point will be at the end of 2010. Coinciding with Australia’s next (scheduled) Federal Election and only half-way into this four year “revolution”, there will be the evidence needed to either justify or pull the plug on this ambitious and much needed change in school education. We don’t have three more years to make this work, we have just one.

The days of teachers expecting their professional development being handed to them on a silver platter are gone. The individualized and self-regulated, professional learning network is far more efficient, effective and relevant to teachers today.  But before teachers can turn on their professional learning network, they have to have their own lightbulb moment.

Sadly, here we are at the start of 2010 and only around 10% of the light bulbs are actually illuminated.

The comment was quietly added to “Which is Stronger, Manfluence or Godfluence?“, one of my popular earlier articles. Comment #62 suddenly appeared, and it was close to two years after the last comment was submitted. At 6:30 in the morning I was alerted to its arrival and as I started to read, I was taken on a wondrous journey of intrigue and awe-inspiring writing. Perhaps I was only half-awake, but this comment with its generous use of ellipses made me pause, reflect on and react to each and every carefully crafted statement. Who is this person? Was this really typed in one session as a reader’s comment on a blog article? There is not a single typographical error! Surely this is a cut & paste job? No, the almighty Google says it’s completely original, written just for my article.

Anyway, I’ve since had a lengthy email discussion on various subjects with “Mr Barry H. Browning“, which is still continuing, but I thought his original comment deserved a wider-audience, so I’ve decided to centre a new article around it, posing his unspoken question, What if God Was an Alien?  Here is Mr Browning’s comment posted in full and unedited. Please check his comment in the context of the original article at the link above, as well as the discussion that followed.

4th November 2009, and last night I stumbled upon this your blog…how cool is that? Just finished e-mailing an old friend that “checking out the Hubble pictures is one h-ll of a way to worship, and a lot more effective than the spiritual gatekeepers and spiritual-tax-collector-franchise-owning ‘Sunday morning country club directors’ can ever be.” Then I run into your blog…. Go figure.

It’s one thing….to “play” with what first seem like abstractions like “parallel universes” and “black holes” and “changes in the space-time continuum”….and it’s quite another thing…for those of us under I.Q. 160, to be able to “image”, without a little photographic help….what all that might look like….and the Hubble has done that, for me anyway….while looking at “deep space”, for example, I can just hear Carl Sagan’s voice from PBS broadcasts: “Mill-yuns….and-mill-yuns….and-mill-yuns….” (only he needs to juice the figures up a little, as in “bill-yuns…and-bill-yuns….and-bill-yuns…) If realizing that each of those at-first-glance “stars”, is actually a galaxy, itself containing-billions-of-stars, doesn’t give us a “Za-Zen” into a limitless….if not “primitive humanoid-bound”…sense of the Infinite…I don’t know what will…. Wow! It takes a good university to hear about Martin Buber’s “Ich-Du versus Ich-Sie”, and Rudy Otto’s “Mysterium Tremendum Et Fascinans”, much less Aquinus’s “That-than-which-nothing-greater-can-be-thought”….(I think what the Hubble stimulates in us humans even-goes-beyond-thinking….but I digress)…

…and after four years of bathing in this in academic splendor, so many years ago, of “decent and scholastically-grounded” Comparitive Religious Studies(Religionswissenschaft), and Philosophy and Psychology, (yes, this included Jung), both in the U.S., and abroad, I have yet to hear anything but a paucity of this from any so-called “Christian” pulpit in the U.S. Well….the Inquisition forced Galileo to “recant”….d’ye suppose some “fundamentalist”idiots will declare Hubble itself “a work of the Dark Side”? I can just hear-it-in-my “mind’s-ear”….”Don’t-confuse-us-with-the-facts, Barry”….

….Now…..and again, this from looking at pictures from the Hubble….how can we….doubt the possibility, given the permutations of billions of billions of stars, and the infinite number of planets that presupposes…..the Europeans of late have done a good job of “proving” from Hubble and other sources, the existence of a specific number of observed faraway planets, which is growing….

….How can we doubt the possibility of other beings?

…And if we don’t doubt this, why, why, WHY…..do we insist, that if-they-exist, they-must-be…..anthropomorphic, bifurcated….humanoids? This is one of the “bastard children” of bad theology….we aren’t aware enough of what goes on inside ourselves psychologically, to recognize a spiritual projection of ourselves on any outside phenomenon when we experience it…..300 hours of good psychological training BEFORE candidates get to go to seminary would fix this….fat chance of that…..

…We are in the process of….”having-the-doors-blown-off”….of what we experience as “real”, and this has not substantially happened in the West, give-or-take-a-few-exceptions, since the Greeks-Presocratics….(but perhaps in the East has been available conceptually ever since the Brahman-Atman Union was described in Sanskrit)….

…and in the midst of this experience…of these discoveries…..

…How are we going to handle the discovery of “intelligent life in the Universe, other-than-our-own”, when on our own Earth, we can neither collectively fathom nor accept the universality of our own encounter with the Infinite in its various and long-established permutations of the world religions, at least one of which is, as this blog’s author has informed us, is more populous in believers than Christianity, and several of which pre-date Christianity by any number of years? How can we HOPE to handle….”intelligent life”, which in all probability, WILL NOT be anthropomorphic, (but may well have the intelligence to appear to us in anthropomorphic form, to save us all from an initial heart attack), when, on earth, and in as “progressive” a country as the U.S.A., we cannot even UNDERSTAND, much less TOLERATE….other world religions…..and when within the revelatory religion of Christianity…..we have a multiplicity of sects, if not of rules, (in direct proportion, apparently, to the lack both of direct experience, and/or paucity of I.Q.)….and where we….can’t….even…..on Sunday mornings….deal with someone next to us with a slight difference in SKIN PIGMENTATION?

…I, for one, suspect that Science has taken us FAR BEYOND the hypocrisies of U.S. religious “fundamentalism”, and that we-have-been-necessarily-lied-to, about what Science and our government actually knows, from EXPERIENCE, about the Universe…..

….but for now am willing to live with Sir William of Occum’s famous Razor…..until-the-little-green-men-come-knocking-at-my-door….I don’t need to modify my life style just yet….

…..and I think this began in the late ’30s, when my mom was leaving Brown University for the weekend, and got caught up in a four hour traffic jam while traveling to East Providence, as the Mercury Theater’s War of the Worlds was being broadcast…

…I’m suspecting that it was decided then, that “we could not handle the truth”, and I must admit, having read the mass psychology studies arising out of that U.S. broadcast event….and its subsequent application in such subsequent world events as Hitler’s Blitzkreig….that they were, and perhaps still are, right…..

….but….a few fun details since then….such as…..rumors of “reverse engineering”….and….perhaps an ulterior motive behind Regan’s “Star Wars” weaponry….and certain observations made by our own and other countrys’ astronauts….and, of late, a suggested other reason for the Hubble’s soon-to-be-engaged, if-not-already-engaged, competitor….the Keppler…..

…Occum’s Razor notwithstanding…..if any of this takes us in the direction which I think it is taking us…..

….then how can the way many, if not most of us, practice Man’s Religions, handle what we next discover, (if we have not already discovered it and are-sitting-on-it)?

…I think……that Man’s Religions….are due for some massive revisions…..

….I think…..that it is well past the time when we….perhaps need a “Religions Race”, to catch up with the results of the “Space Race”….

….I think…..we need a “Weltanschuuang”(World-view)…which admits not only of the existence of other of Man’s world religions, but of their discoveries and unique contributions, collectively, to-what-we-can-claim-to-know-about-ourselves…..

….and I think….it is well past the time for us to accept, much less give lip service to, one unique theology to the exclusion of all others….

…..when there is enough evidence over the centuries, that the Infinite can be experienced by humans, in a multiplicity of ways….and when….for those not “intellectually challenged”, the much overtouted and supposed “differences” between man’s religions, are more a sign of the limited outlook of some individuals….of limited vision….

….and I think…..that if we are to survive spiritually and psychologically in the universe to come, with its implied expansion of intelligent life forms and life-connections…..we need to

…..know ourselves inside more profoundly than we already do…or already accept, is more like it, because the tools to self-discovery have been around for years, and-or are available to us through a variety of introspections and processes…..

….and we need to……expand…..and this greatly…..our SOCIAL model of “what is existentially real”, so that we can HANDLE what we are about to discover, or what we have ALREADY discovered….

….and “not go mad”, as the Greek Tragedies would have instructed us…..

…..”You cannot see G-d and live”……

….We are about to test that statement……can we handle it?

….I suspect….that if what I’ve been suggesting is out there, and is currently happening for us…..

….that we flip ourselves into the category of “meta-cognition”…..(that is, “thinking-about-thinking”), and…..

….ask ourselves, what with the bill-yuns-upon-bill-yuns… of stars-and-planets….”out there”…..

….whether…..any…..

…..culture of primitive intelligence which is trying to expand, such as ours…..

….has ever….encountered….or ever will…..

….intelligence(s) of greater knowing……

….and has survived the experience…..and this, perhaps, under the guidance of the superior intelligences…..(let us, at least, hope so…)

More than any of you may have wanted to deal with on a Wednesday in 2009?

Wow.  Well the odds are, that there ARE powers greater than our own out there in the glorious magnitude of the universe. And while they may not actually be listening to our wall-of-sound prayers, they may well be planning a visit.

Thank you Mr Browning.

 
Photo by NSW Maritime

Man often thinks he can do anything. Clearing jungles, re-routing rivers, building cities. But it’s nothing to crow about as we are cautioned that with just a shudder, Mother Earth is always in control. 

Imagine the power. With merely a breath, the planet can pick up five million tonnes of dust and dirt whip it into a front 800 kilometres long and drive it more than 1,100 kilometres from Central Australia to the east coast and out to the Pacific Ocean – all in less than a day. Coating anything and everything in its way, the dust storm caused havoc, stopping industry and transport and costing millions in lost productivity.

This planetary nudge was a reminder that from Dust we came and to Dust we will return. Man’s miniscule reign is just an itch in Earth’s four-billion year grandeur. All we are is Dust in the Wind.

Relive the IWBnet Conference via Visible Tweets

Through wireless connections using notebooks, netbooks, iPhones and iPod Touches, educators retold quotes, shared links to resources and commented on what they were seeing and hearing – in real-time.  And these contributions are captured forever, through the consistent use of hash-tags (#iwbnet09) on each of their posts. The above Visible Tweets link will let you relive some of the  conference experience as well as gather numerous pearls delivered to you via links. This Twitter “back-channeling” virtually places you in a seat beside the other attendees. By tapping into a back-channel, you even have a voice. You can join into the discussion by using the same hash-tag; asking questions, commenting and responding.

How is this all done? Surely these conference attendees and those participating in the back-channels are our teaching-elite? No ordinary teacher could do this stuff. Why would you want to anyway? As Marc Prensky said in his keynote today, which was paraphrased and tweeted by Chris Betcher then turned into a pair of cartoons by my son:

We have a massive gulf in the mindsets of today’s educator and learner. As teachers, we have a challenge of monumental proportions facing us. The “teacher” MUST become the “expert learner”. Or else, the situation tweeted by Matthew Wells will become reality, where the students will be saying, “stop interrupting my learning with your teaching!”.

When a young Robert Zimmerman wrote about “mothers and fathers” way back in 1964, little did he know he was perfectly describing early-21st Century Teachers:

Your old road is
Rapidly agin’.
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’.

Lately, we keep hearing the term “tipping point“, but it always seems to be about oil and climate change. We never seem to equate it to education. I believe we are getting very close to a tipping-point in teaching and learning as major political programs like the Digital Education Revolution start to take root. As information and communications technologies continue to become prevalent in our schools, our students will expect them to be used.

It really isn’t as hard as many teachers think to change direction, but individuals must make that step themselves. Don’t focus on the complexity of technology, focus on change. Learn how to learn. If you’re waiting for training, you’re already a lost cause.

With time quickly running out, it will be up to each and every teacher to make an important decision. Do you want to be relics, or relevant?

The original $2.3B promise quickly blew out as states realised that supplying a laptop alone is not going to be enough to deliver the Digital Education Revolution promised.  The state of New South Wales  was steadfast in its push for more funding for its share, to deliver its ambitious interpretation of Kevin Rudd’s revolution - to provide a well-configured  and quality software-laden wireless netbook to each and every year 9 to 12 student in all public high schools. This was a solution unmatched by other states, and with the New South Wales Department of Education and Training (NSWDET) being the single largest educational authority in the southern hemisphere, it was always going to be a massive undertaking.

This represents almost 200,000 students plus all their teachers spread across almost 500 high schools in an area as big as France and Great Britain combined. With each high school ranging in size from less than 50 students to close to 2,000, from large cities and regional centres to outback rural communities where Internet access is scrappy at best – the intent was to provide the same user experience regardless of the situation. Technically, it was a minefield that few would even consider, let alone attempt – but the impetus was still there from the highest office in the land. This was not a time for a half-hearted commitment, there is too much public money at stake.

The planning started well and truly in early 2008 with consultation of all key stakeholders. The first things that became obvious were the numerous and varying-height hurdles that stood in the way – technical, social, cultural, ethical, security, usability, accessibility and all those 19th and 20th Century schooling paradigms that are so steadfastly refusing to allow teaching and learning to change. To address them all, a coordinated approach within the NSWDET was vital – this is not an IT project, it is not a Curriculum project and it is not a Professional Development project. This is revolutionary. It needs clear leadership, direction, focus and commitment - department-wide.

Before this solution can work educationally, it MUST work technically. If it doesn’t work technically, it won’t work at all. It must be fast, reliable and effective. If it can’t do that, teachers will abandon it for their comfortable old shoes in an instant. 1:1 laptop programs are nothing new. Schools and school systems around the world have taken them up since  the late 90s. Few succeed. Fewer are sustainable in the long term. This had to be different or it too would suffer the same fate. It would end up being less a revolution and more an unnecessary, expensive detour.

The Netbook – 2008 was the year of the Netbook. This reasonably-powered sub-notebook brought two important educational aspects to the table – it was small enough for students to carry around and it was affordable. In the end, Lenovo were contracted to supply over 250,000 of their souped-up s10e Ideapads to the NSWDET over four years.

The Operating System – When the plan was first mooted, everyone assumed one of the many flavours of Linux would be the chosen OS, probably Ubuntu – but everyone was surprised when NSWDET opted for Microsoft’s newest and at the time incomplete Windows 7 RC for the first netbook rollout to teachers in June 2009. Microsoft was clearly crowing when the decision was made, especially since NSWDET chose to totally bypass its ailing Vista platform, sticking with XP. So happy were Microsoft, they gave every support NSWDET needed to ensure the fledgling OS was ready and capable to take on the Revolution and  provided the final release of Windows 7 to NSWDET more than two months before its worldwide release. In addition to Windows 7, NSW DET has also contracted Microsoft to supply the Office 2007 suite and Student software, while Adobe is supplying its Web Standard package with Dreamweaver, Flash, Captivate, Acrobat, Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements. A slew of other educational freeware apps is also included.

The Wireless – Untethered links are essential to allow students to freely roam around the school, but stay connected. 802.11G simply did not cut it. 54MBit/s (theoretical) per access point was nowhere near the bandwidth needed to cater for class sizes up to 30. Though still not ratified as a standard, 802.11N was selected because of its bandwidth and range. But NSWDET did not skimp on access points – they would install one in every single classroom and learning space throughout each school. Theoretically providing 300Mbit/s each, the intention is to ensure that each netbook in a class is guaranteed a minimum 2MBit/s link to the school’s network. In practise, with 30 students in a class, that limit should be closer to 5.  Of course, these are no ordinary Wireless Access Points – this is a managed wireless solution using an Aruba controller to provide load-balancing, free-roaming, WPA2+PSK security and monitoring of the air. The IBM-supplied Aruba solution offers a central management point that is critical for providing effective and reliable wireless connections to, in many cases, several hundred netbooks simultaneously. Furthermore, this solution is totally scalable – well beyond the needs of any school in NSW.

The ceiling-mounted Aruba 802.11N WAP with Power over Ethernet

The Aruba Wireless Controller and HP Layer 3 Head-end Switch

The Parallel Network – With close to 500 high schools and no previous concrete standard for local area network cabling, NSWDET quickly discovered that existing school networks ranged from simple teacher-strung cables around rooms to high-tech, gigabit-standard structured cabling solutions with all possible permutations in between. Installing a brand new well-designed wireless solution and bolting it onto these existing school networks was never going to be workable nor supportable. The radical decision to leave the existing school network in situ and build the wireless on a parallel network using fibre backbones meant duplicating cabinets in each building, but also meant that the wireless network was predictable, supportable and provided no impact on the school’s existing local area network.

The wireless campus distributor on left, the school’s campus distributor on right. Two separate networks with a single gateway out of the school, all managed by the HP head-end switch on the left.

The Distributed Infrastructure Platform Server – The “DIP” server installed in each high school provides read-only Active-Directory authentication for students and staff as well as DHCP services and local mirrored data storage for each user. NSWDET’s directory contains some 1.5 million user accounts covering school and TAFE students, teachers and State and Regional Office staff. All users have authenticated internet access with varying levels of filters based on grade for students and user level for staff. The 45 terabytes of Internet traffic (as at July 2009) that comes into NSWDET every month and is distributed to close to 3,000 sites across the state, demands reliable network infrastructure. The selected wireless solution complements the existing NSWDET Wide Area Network nicely.

The IBM DIP Server and UPS

Resource Management Utility – How do you manage 250,000 laptops, their serial numbers, who they are allocated to, what happens to them when they are damaged or fail, or when they are stolen or lost? RMU is an amazing product which links the NSWDET active directory with a powerful asset management database and Absolute Software’s Computrace laptop security solution. As soon as a brand new Lenovo is received in a school, RMU knows about it. When it is turned on and configured, RMU automatically updates its status. When a student authenticates for the first time, that laptop becomes theirs – no-one else can authenticate to it and use it and RMU allocates it to them. If the student reports it stolen, the laptop’s status in RMU is changed to lost/stolen and as soon as anyone tries to use it and connect to the internet, Computrace will kick into action, killing it. And Computrace’s self-healing ability will ensure it continues to lock-out the laptop, even if the hard drive is reimaged or even replaced.

Technically, the New South Wales Department of Education and Training’s interpretation of Kevin Rudd’s bold plan is cutting edge. As of this writing, Year 9 students at the first four high schools have received their laptops, along with 30% of all high school teachers in the state. Technically, this solution will work, providing a robust and manageable 1:1 digital learning platform for 200,000 high school students in one single education system. It begs the question – Is this technically the best 1:1 rollout anywhere in the world?  New South Wales Public Education – Take a bow.

Teachers and Students – the ball’s in your court. Let’s take this excellent Digital base and mount the best Education Revolution we can!

Now I don’t run a school and I’m not even a teacher, but here’s what I’d do with the laptops and how I’d decide which teachers get them.

1. Allocate ALL but two or three to specific teachers (i.e. exclusive individual use, NOT shared).  The two or three are the only ones shared. If you allocate most of your laptops to be shared then you are wasting a major opportunity because part-time or infrequent access is not the way to develop skills in any of your staff.
2. At least one laptop per faculty, but depends on how many you get and staffing numbers. All departments in your school must understand they have a part to play from day one.
3. As principal, I would email all my staff (I wouldn’t tell them I was emailing though), requesting expressions of interest for exclusive use of a laptop:
           – How would you use it?
           – What would you hope to achieve?
           – How will you commit to sharing what you’ve learned?
4. I would judge each application on merit as well as how long it took to get back via email/follow-up.  I would want keen existing-ICT users only to apply. There is little point giving a T1 laptop to a beginner.  Sure, they might slowly develop their own skills, but they’ll offer little to the rest of their colleagues.  We need educational-technologists to blaze the trail for everyone else to follow.

By doing it this way instead of just randomly handing them out, I would avoid complaints of favouritism, seniority or any other non-merit based process.  All teachers would have the same opportunity to apply for a laptop, and getting one in the T1 round is clearly seen is a privilege that comes with expectations that:

1. You would commit to developing your own skills with the laptop
2. You would develop educational programs to use with the laptops in class
3. You would share what you’ve discovered.

If you can’t guarantee these three things from the teachers you hand them out to, then you shouldn’t be handing a T1 Laptop out to them.

What do you think? How is your school handling T1? Will it work?

Image by Tragicomedio

So what is “Lifelong Learning” anyway? According to some, it’s:

“the idea that learning can and does occur beyond the formal structure of an educational institution and occurs throughout one’s lifetime.”

OK, that’s a pretty broad statement and is interpreted by some teachers as “life experience” or “work experience“.  Experience is what counts according to many teachers. Even promotions within the teaching faculty are based more often than not on experience or “seniority”.

Unfortunately in the 21st Century, “experience” alone just doesn’t cut it anymore. Knowledge learned over many years or even decades of practise is great for perpetuating past practises, but does nothing for promoting change. And it does little to assist with the implementation of new technologies in an ever-changing world.

I prefer the definition of Lifelong Learning as:

“The concept of continuous personal development through personal (self-actualized) learning.”

Lifelong Learning is a personal thing.  It’s individuals taking responsibility for their own learning and development beyond the formal education of their youth. Lifelong Learning is not the responsibility of employers. The world is changing 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

In a world that more and more operates on efficiency through understaffing, our daily grind leaves little room for individuals to indulge in their own continuing education.  Clearly, Lifelong Learning is NOT a 9 to 5 job.

[this article was written on Sunday at 5:07pm]

image by Jeff Weston

That felt sooo good. Someone had to tell him and I’m glad it was me. He just stood there gobsmacked as I walked away. He thinks he’s so smart, but I showed him. My friends thought it was hilarious when I told them. “You can’t stop now!”, they said. “That bastard deserves it!”. “I’ve got his phone number from that time he sent me a text about his stupid homework assignment.”

It was only three little words. They weren’t even particularly well-chosen. Everyone was coming up with ideas for the next message. And the next. And the next. All sent from different phones. It was sweet. We could clearly see his face squirm everytime his phone beeped.

“What can we do next?”
“Let’s call him from the payphone.”
“We can take his picture. Make a Facebook for him.”
“Why don’t we do an I.M.-bombardment?”
“Does anyone know his MSN password?”
“Yeah, it’s ‘creedfan’.“
“What the?? He’s going down!”

I remember he didn’t come to school again for a few days. It was so peaceful. But then “Little Miss Try-Hard” decided to get in my way. I love my phone. I love I.M. I love my friends.

 - Of course, there are two-sides to every story. The U.K. Department of Children, Schools and Families tells the other side in this excellent video:

Cyberbullying: Laugh at it and you’re part of it.  Let’s all fight it together.

“My students tell me I’m their most-favourite teacher!”

Well that’s a good start. You incorporate the gadgets. You let the students use fun stuff that the other teachers seem to avoid. Of course you’d be popular.

“I have to spend a lot of my own time learning how to do this, but it’s really worth it!”

Technology changes very rapidly. When we started our ICT Info Days, it was all about installing applications and transferring files. Now it’s blogs, wikis and personal learning networks.

“Why is it my responsibility to show other teachers how to do this when I had to do it myself?”

I stopped to think about this. It’s a good point. But in the end, I decided it was a selfish point of view. Is school teaching a case of “every man or woman for themselves“? I certainly hope not. Especially not in high school where each student has multiple teachers. ICT-innovators are trailblazers. They need to forge the path for other teachers to follow. They need their fellow teachers to follow them. But not everyone can be Marco Polo. Consider yourself your school’s own Marco Polo. An adventurer discovering new worlds for the benefit of future travellers.

“It’s plainly obvious that when using technology my students are engaged and performing.”

There is definitely an attraction by students to information and communications technologies. 

“Continuity is the biggest problem I see for the students that leave my class at the end of the year.”

It almost begs the question, “why do this extra work at all?“. If you’re operating as an island when the most of the rest of the school is a technology desert, are you really helping? If your year 5 class is buzzing with effective interactive ICT activities, how will your students feel when they go to year 6 where the only time the computer gets turned on is when a student finishes their cloze passages stencil early so they can “play“?

“If I leave the school, it will probably be the case that the ICT programs I run will cease.”

This is one of the biggest tragedies that come out of working alone. While the teacher will probably leave (often with a promotion) to continue her ICT program elsewhere, the school they left goes right back to square one. We need a way to identify, package, promote, share and develop effective ICT teaching practices – not to keep them as one teacher’s secret weapon.

So, what do you think?

So these rashers were starting to really bother me, and I decided I’d better go to the chemist to get some oinkment. When the chemist asked me how I got the rashers, I told him, but he said my tale was a curly one and that I was telling porkies. But I persisted and it quickly became obvious that I was starting to boar him, so I left. It was then I realised that the flu hadn’t affected my urges because the policewoman that I passed as I left the shop was a Babe!

On my way home, I swore I could smell truffles, so I investigated a little in a mud hole. Fortunately this flu is not making me sweat. After some digging around I started to feel a little gilt, especially when the Rabbi walked past and totally avoided me. It was clearly time to sacrifice my goal to find the truffles as I didn’t want anyone to think I was being greedy. I mean it’s not fair to hog them all for myself. On the way back home, on the ground I found a pen and had a sudden feeling that I was already at home, when I wasn’t. Well, not really.

Back at home, I thought I’d better research this a bit. Jumped on the internet to find my email inbox full of messages. Unfortunately, it was all spam. Then I found an advice website by Mia Farrow. What an unfortunate name with this nasty virus going around. Anyway, fortunately I discovered the answer to all my problems. An oinkment made from salt, honey and maple syrup coated all over me and left on for a few weeks and I’ll be cured!

Australia’s Digital Education Revolution is coming. Even before it started, it was identified that the $1.2 billion promised was not going to be enough, so now with the injection of a further $807 million, Educational Authorities across the country are investigating hardware options including laptops and wireless connectivity. But Dr Alan Kay is still not convinced that this will be the revolution our children need.

So who is Dr Alan Kay, and what would he know anyway? Well, apart from being directly involved with many of the milestones of Information and Communications Technology, including the development of the graphical user interface and mouse at Xerox PARC and defining the conceptual basics for laptop and tablet computers and E-books, Kay is a forward-thinking educationalist.

He has been anticipating an “Education Revolution” for over a decade now and way back in 2003 Kay was interviewed by Scholastic and related many of reasons why the Revolution has been delayed.  Sadly, most of those reasons are still with us today.  And we are still waiting.

When asked why he believes that the computer revolution hasn’t happened yet, Kay replied:

“Most schools define computer literacy as being able to operate Microsoft Office and maybe do a little web design. They’re missing the point. That’s like saying, “If you know which end of a book to hold up, and you know how to turn to Chapter Three, then you’re literate.”

Literature is first and foremost about having ideas important enough to discuss and write down in some form. So you have to ask, “What is the literature that is best written down on a computer?”

In this new age of the social web, the literature our students write needs to have an audience – to read, to appraise, to respond and to discuss. Rote learning and regurgitation  does nothing to promote the critical thinking that is essential in an ICT-based world.

When asked about the return value of the $40 billion spent on ICT in U.S. schools, Kay said:

“It’s a chicken and the egg thing. What’s happened is probably a successful egg—but with no chicken yet in sight. I can go into virtually any school that has computers and see children who are happily using them, as well as see teachers who are happy that the kids are using them. Parents are happy, principals are happy, and school boards are happy. But if you know anything about computing or about math and science, you can see that very little of importance is going on there. “

Of one-to-one computing in our schools?:

“I think the big problem is that schools have very few ideas about what to do with the computers once the kids have them. It’s basically just tokenism, and schools just won’t face up to what the actual problems of education are, whether you have technology or not.

You can put a piano in every classroom, but that won’t give you a developed music culture, because the music culture is embodied in people.  The important thing here is that the music is not in the piano. And knowledge and edification is not in the computer. The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas.

Educators have to face up to what 21st-century education needs to be about, and start thinking about solving that problem long before they bring the computer on the scene.”

Yet here we are in 2009, six whole years have passed since this interview and we are about to introduce hundreds of thousands of laptops into schools - the instruments are arriving before we have the musicians who can play them.

Fidel Castro once said, “A Revolution is a struggle between the past and the future”. His fellow revolutionist, Che Guevara said, “The Revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall”.

It appears that our apple has already rotted but is still hanging on due to the overwhelming force of apathy. Still, the Revolution is coming.

In most classrooms today, the teacher asks a question and usually one person will reply with the answer. If it’s right, the answer is accepted and the lesson continues – regardless of whether the rest of the class agrees with or understands why the given answer was correct.  In a “clicker” classroom, the teacher displays the question she would like to ask and offers four multiple choice answers.  EVERY student then offers their answer by pressing a button on their clicker and seconds later, a bar chart appears on the screen with the results of everyone’s personal understanding.

Was the correct answer the most selected by the whole class? If not, it’s clear that the teacher has some more explaining to do. Even if it was the most selected, did any students answer incorrectly?  Instantly we have the opportunity to question further and reinforce the subject matter in all students. The power of participation with instant feedback cannot be underestimated. There are so many educational advantages when using audience response systems. Just take a look here.

Many K-12 teachers and schools are seriously contemplating spending many hundreds or even thousands of dollars on hand-held “clicker” devices from one of the thirty or so different companies that are producing them. While features like battery life, robustness and ease of use are important, the best aspect of most clicker solutions is the software and how it deals with the responses and reports back the results to the teacher or presenter. With so many players in the game, it’s not going to be easy to determine which way to head.

Then when you think you are ready, you jump in and buy a kit of 30 or so clickers to “share” between classes. Then you realize that when these devices are shared, they need to be registered for each user, each session!  This takes up valuable lesson time and makes using the clickers a lot more cumbersome than they really should be. Why do you think it is that most colleges and universities that use clickers force the students to buy their own? While that’s reasonable for a college student, it’s not really for a K-12 student and it certainly isn’t for ICT Training participants.

Then one of the biggest problems is that taking on a student response solution often requires some changes in teaching practice. It can be an expensive choice buying a hand-held clicker solution only to find it’s not getting used as effectively or as often as one would hope. We’ve all seen that happen to ICT purchases in the past.

There is no question that clickers can be valuable and effective teaching and learning resource. Unfortunately though, as already mentioned, their up-front cost  puts them out of reach of most K-12 schools that already spend most of their ICT budgets on computers, networking and ongoing maintenance of their existing computer facilities.  But many schools are fortunate enough to have a computer lab and some even have one-to-one laptop programs. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to use the existing computers in front of each student to get them to operate like a clicker does?

That’s exactly what Student Response Network is. A quick, reliable and effective clicker solution that anyone can operate. No IT specialists required. Up and running in seconds. Integrating ICT into teaching and learning the easy way.  For almost no cost, your school or training centre can get all the advantages of a traditional clicker solution to test, to evaluate, to train your staff. There’s little or no risk and Student Response Network can still be a stepping stone to the more expensive hand-held solutions when your staff are really ready for it.

Don’t risk making a dud purchase. Try Student Response Network and see if this type of technology is right for you.  Oh. By the way… Did I mention I developed it? 

For a free product, it’s actually quite impressive and it’s already been downloaded over 27,000 times. So what is it?

Stu’s Double Jeopardy (for Windows) borrows from the lasting legacy of the popular TV gameshow, Jeopardy! to make an exciting, interactive and educational computer-based gameshow available to everybody. It can be used in so many different situations – in schools and colleges, at conferences, trivia nights and parties. But the main use is expected to be in classrooms.

As Interactive Whiteboards (IWBs) and data projectors become more widely used in schools, there is a need for motivating, interactive and educational software to complement them. Many of the IWB titles available involve working with one student while everybody else looks on. That’s where Stu’s Double Jeopardy is different. Firstly it’s all about teamwork – Jeopardy can be played by up to 6 teams!

So, once you’ve split your class up into the desired number of teams, it’s time to select a Jeopardy Quiz to play. This is where real interactivity starts and why my Jeopardy website is so important. With Stu’s Double Jeopardy, you can quickly and very easily create your own quiz files. Now I’m hoping that everybody that creates a Jeopardy quiz file will be happy to share it – making the site grow into a huge repository of Jeopardy quizzes covering every subject under the Sun and beyond. There’s already a good range of quizzes available for download, provided by people from all over the world.

You keep score automatically by pressing [tick] or [cross] against each team as they answer the questions. Play on through the board to reveal hidden “Daily Doubles” where the team in control can wager any or all of their score on the outcome of the next question. Then it’s through to the showdown – Final Jeopardy. Everything you know and love about the TV show, Jeopardy! is in Stu’s Double Jeopardy! But then there’s the real power of this program – The Question Editor.

With the Question Editor, Teachers can create question files. Students can create question files. One class can create a question file for another class to use. Build question files that cover every Key Learning Area and topic. Make the creation of question files a whole class activity! Every student can contribute questions individually, or groups can contribute a whole category of questions. Use the games for topic review. Use the games as a reward. Share your question files via the Stu’s Double Jeopardy website. Download shared question files from the Jeopardy website. It’s a great group activity that can be used over and over throughout each year.

To better explain the program before you go and grab your free copy, I’ve put together a short video to explain it a little better.

Alternatively, if you’d prefer to see a full-screen high definition version of the video in your browser, click here.

Do you think this would work well in a classrom?

During the election campaign, Mr Rudd was seen holding up a notebook PC, calling it “the Toolbox of the 21st Century“, then announcing that if elected, he would provide every Year 9 to 12 student in the country a computer. Now with victory secured, work has actually started with the first round of funding to be delivered in July to allow for these computers to be ordered - catching most education authorities and independent schools by surprise. With the equivalent of $1,000 provided per computer, per student, this represents a massive increase in ICT funding in school education.

As soon as the announcement was made, schools and each State started to think of the ACTUAL costs of providing a computer to each of these students. Aging power supplies in schools, inadequate networks, furniture, accommodation, storage, security - the list goes on and on – each item with its own price tag. Increasingly, schools started to realise that desktop PCs were out of the question, and even full-size laptops were disregarded due to the impending damage to our children’s spines. So it appears that a form of sub-notebook – possibly specially designed for Australian school needs will be required. Thanks to the global influence of the “$100 OLPC Laptop“, several companies including Asus, HP, Dell and Intel have produced sub-notebooks, all less than US$500 and all in the running for a slice of Australia’s Digital Education Revolution. The change leftover can then be used to buy all the sundry essentials that will be needed to make these notebooks work in a school setting.

But in a country with six State and two Territory governments that each look after school education in their own way, plus the various religious and independent school systems, there is little hope that Mr Rudd’s plan can produce the desired SINGLE revolution. There is every chance that there will be EIGHT different solutions adopted across the country with the funding distributed to the states.

It’s obvious that Australia’s Digital Education Revolution(s) has massive potential for changing the face of education as we’ve known it for the past 50 or so years. But it also has the potential to be the biggest, most-expensive flop ever undertaken by any education system in the world. Providing every student in years 9-12 their own notebook PC with wireless (filtered) Internet access at school alone represents a huge shift in direction for public education in particular.  Picture this:

Twenty-five Year 10 students arrive Period 1 to their Maths lesson on Monday morning. They each take out their nice, shiny new, fully-charged notebook and open it up. Student expectations are high. The teacher stands there holding his piece of chalk…

The problem is not sourcing or delivering the Notebooks. The problem is not the required wireless access, nor the Internet bandwidth, nor the battery life, nor the software and not even the warranty or on-site support nor the ongoing reimaging needs. All of these minor concerns can be overcome. From a pure ICT perspective, the job is not difficult – it just needs money, and it seems there’s plenty of that.

The real problems are not technical problems at all – they are all social problems.

Teachers are conditioned (and expected) to deliver the syllabus. A syllabus designed to fit into a rigid structure with an inflexible examination process that is the key measurement benchmark. We teach facts and we expect our students to regurgitate facts under exam conditions – and that hasn’t changed since… well… ever.  On the other hand, ICTs extend horizons. They introduce new concepts. They promote critical and free thinking. They extend students by expanding opportunities for creative output, shared learning experiences, outside and global communication. Human Interactivity through technology.

If they deliver a notebook to every year 9-12 student WITHOUT completely revamping the curriculum and syallabi, they risk ICT anarchy. To my way of thinking, you cannot allow the hardware and the technical solution to be delivered WITHOUT the education framework authorities seriously taking into account the enormous influx of ICTs that are coming soon and for them to change current educational expectations. If they try to “shoehorn” the new Notebooks solution into the existing curriculum by simply “implementing a professional development program around the use of the laptops in classrooms“,  then they are NOT being serious about a “Digital Education Revolution“.

Across the world we’ve seen the impact of ICTs in school education over the past decade or so, since the introduction of Internet access and the ongoing smaller computer rollout programs. Over this time, enormous amounts of money have been spent often for little or no educational change. If we did a cost-benefit analysis of computer rollouts and scrutinized classroom internet usage over the years, we’d be hard pressed to justify this expenditure.

The real problem, as I see it, is the use of ICTs in school education has always been and still is – in 2008 - an opt-in resource. For 10 years, educational authorities have been tinkering around the edges and walking on eggshells around teachers when it comes to integrating ICTs into the education of our students. That is because the already-full and concrete curriculum tells teachers that they “could” use ICTs as an “add-on”. But the world has changed incredibly in just the last 20 years. You only need to glance at what our teenagers are doing using ICTs, independently of school, to see that many of our young produce more “work” and display more creative and critical thinking on a daily basis at home than they would in a whole day of set lessons at school. This is not just a problem in Australia - it’s worldwide.

To borrow from Mr Rudd’s campaign-speak, we are at a fork in the road. We can choose to keep pouring more ICT money into the bottomless-pit of our 1950s education systems in the hope that a few more teachers might become beacons for the masses to (optionally) follow, or we can really and seriously start to shape a new, modern, underpinning education system for the 21st century. Both of these options will appear to voters that we are doing something positive – but only one actually will be. In the term “Digital Education Revolution”, of the two adjectives, I believe “digital” should hold 10% weight, while “education” should hold 90%. To me, the Digital Education Revolution is NOT an ICT project – and whilstever educational authorities see it as one, it is destined for failure.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m very optimistic and excited by the potential for this Revolution to change the face and future of a whole nation, but unless unprepared eyes from all education authorites are opened and unless the will for true education revolution is there, we’ll continue to do a lot of ICT work for little gain.  Feel free to discuss in the comments. 

A human could quickly look at a photograph and immediately identify all the elements in it - a man, a woman, a park bench, a tree, a child on a bicycle, grass, a pathway and a cloudy sky. But who could be bothered teaching a machine these elements that even a child can easily identify? How long would it take to type in all those words and point out each of the elements in just one photo? Then even if you did teach the machine everything about one photograph, would the computer be able to identify the same elements in another photo taken from a different angle?

What about words? A computer may have data that labels milk and cola as liquid foods, but it wouldn’t know that milk goes with cereal, but cola doesn’t (usually). The human ability to recognize and recall experiences allows a person to make appropriate decisions. But how can these skills be imparted on a computer? The amount of data entry required would be astronomical. The cost of the required data entry operators would be prohibitive and the staff burnout would be disheartening.

That’s where Games With A Purpose (GWAP) comes in. If there’s no money for the staff required to teach the machine, you need volunteers. But volunteers come and go and usually represent a miniscule proportion of society. This was the challenge facing Carnegie Mellon University. How can we get ordinary Internet users from around the world to teach the machine? And how can we be sure they are teaching the machine accurately? Who will quality control that amount of teaching?

I will. You will. We will. And we’ll do it because it’s great fun, motivational and promotes thinking skills. Teaching the machine is a by-product as far as the players are concerned. I’ve been playing it for two days now and have amassed over 100,000 points.  What for? Who knows, but it’s really enjoyable. Five different games to choose from and you can come back whenever you like to carry on your score.

Quality control? You play in real-time with another unidentified, uncontactable person and the machine is watching. In the game Verbosity (my favorite), one person (the narrator) receives an input word and using pre-supplied template sentences must accurately describe that word sufficiently well so that the second player can guess it correctly. Only English words can be used. Multiple players agreeing on terminologies and contexts ensure accuracy. The game is quick at only four minutes and each player takes turns being the narrator.

In Tag a Tune, each player listens to music and using words, describes the music they are listening to. Fast, slow, baroque, violins, techno, opera, rock. Based on the descriptions they see from their unseen partner, they each must decide whether they are listening to the same or a different piece of music. All the while, the machine is learning that this MP3 file has these attributes - provided to it and cross-checked by multiple human game players!

Of course, you won’t think you’re actually “working for Carnegie Mellon University” because you’re enjoying it so much.  And one of the first things you’ll discover is that most of the people you are chosen to play with must be complete idiots!  It could never be you who is the idiot. GWAP is tackling a complex problem in a very innovative and effective way. So instead of firing up that next game of Solitaire, why not try a Game With a Purpose?

If you are just one teacher that wants to do this at your school, I can STRONGLY recommend that you don’t do this alone. Make sure you recruit another teacher to also setup a class blog for their class and that way, you can work together – bouncing off ideas and working through issues together. Then when you do work it out, it’s much easier to spread across the whole school from a base of two classes rather than a base of just one.

The first thing you’ll need before you even go anywhere near a blogging service is a username and a title for your class blog. The username needs to be one word (no spaces) and should relate somehow to your preferred blog title. Finding these names is a great classroom activity that can involve all students and get them enthused about the class blog from the onset.

While “Class 5J” might be the name of your class, it’s not a great name for a class blog. For a start, there’s probably a lot of “Class 5Js” around the world. “Room 14″ also isn’t a great name as it shows little imagination. Instead of these obvious (and boring) identifiers, why not turn your class into a blogging team with an appropriate TEAM name suggested by and democratically agreed to by the students? Your students probably have a lot more imagination than I do, but a class at a waterside school might call themselves “The Splashtastics” or a Gifted and Talented class might call their blog “Smarticles”. You should probably come up with three different names, just in case your preferred name has already been taken at your preferred blog service. Ultimately, it’s probably best not to divulge your school name in your blog. It’s fine enough to say which city or town you are in and focus more on the “team” than on the school.

Now while the students are being busy thinking about a username and a blog title, the teachers can consider which (of the many freely available) blog-hosting services you’ll use – oh yes, and a password for your blog. People don’t seem to take passwords seriously, so I invite you to read this article - by the end of it, you’ll be thinking about changing all of your passwords using that method.

As for blog-hosting services, I’d suggest you don’t try to host it yourself on a server in your own school, for a start, the setup can be complicated and you’ll probably end up restricting your audience to the people within the school only. When there are so many good, free services available offering great features, it makes little sense to try and reinvent the wheel.

The obvious starting point is EduBlogs.org - they currently host over 100,000 blogs created by schools, teachers, librarians, lecturers, school administrators and individual students. For the cost of zero dollars, you get 100MB of space per blog with no ads and the ability to upload images, photos and videos – but if you start getting into videos, expect that 100MB to disappear pretty quickly. Fortunately, for US$25 per annum, you can upgrade your available space to 1GB. If you want to really splurge, starting at US$500 per annum, you can get 50 linked blogs for your students, each with unlimited space. More details here.

Another option is PodBean.com which promotes itself as a platform for hosting podcasts and vodcasts (videos), but is really a blog-host. Their free service also offers 100MB of space with a 1GB upgrade for US$24 per annum.

Interestingly, both of these services are actually based on the WordPress blogging engine, so they look pretty much identical to each other. And speaking of WordPress, we can’t forget WordPress.com – where this blog is hosted. Why did I choose WordPress.com? At last count, almost 3 million blogs are hosted here. For the basic FREE price, you get 3GB of disk space with unlimited bandwidth. The limitation here though is that you cannot upload videos and podcasts without paying for a space upgrade. For US$20 per annum, they’ll give you an extra 5GB of space with the audio/video restriction removed. Plus, being hosted by the makers of WordPress means you get all the latest updates to their blogging engine as soon as they are developed.

There are several other free hosting providers, but I don’t believe they can compete effectively on features and price. If $20 per annum is not a concern, I can highly recommend WordPress.com. If you want to do it for free, go for EduBlogs.org. If you want your students to individually blog, definitely go for the EduBlogs Campus product.

So after setting up your class blog, how would a school pay for the upgraded hosting service?  Basically, a teacher should pay for it with their credit card, print off the receipt and then get reimbursed by the school. That’s by far the easiest way.

In the next article in this series, we’ll look into the structure of a good blog, useful widgets and managing the blog. Until then, feel free to share your thoughts with us in the comments section.