Computers in Classrooms #23
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ISSN 1470-5524

~ For colleagues who teach or manage information and

communication technology (ICT) in schools ~

From Terry Freedman

Home Page: http://www.ictineducation.org

Email: terry@ictineducation.org

9 November 2006
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Articles in this issue:
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1. Progress in educational technology in the UK
2. What are the barriers to using educational technology/ICT in schools?
3. The value of knowledge
4. User Group
5. Podcast project, plus an invitation to collaborate on another project
6. A Matter Of Time
7. Atoms and other small matters
8. Digital Literacies & Intellectual Property
9. How to "sell" blogging etc to your senior management team
10. And last but not least: a reminder about how you can get involved

1. Progress in educational technology in the UK
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I've been asked by an American journalist to answer some questions by email for an interview to be published. The subject is the progress the UK has made in terms of ICT in schools, and the factors that account for the success. I'm aware that I know more about England than the other countries in the UK, and also that I don't know everything going on in the UK, obviously. So, I'd like to enlist your help, and I thought what I'd do in order to give you a chance to try this out for yourself is set up a wiki for this purpose. That's at: https://ictineducation.pbwiki.com

When you get there, read the instructions about how to edit a page, and then click on the link to the Magazine interview. In order to edit rather than simply read, you'll need a password, and that is "compic", without the quotes. It would help me a great deal if you logged in with your name and email address, so I could give due credit to people who contribute, and seek further clarification if necessary. However, if you'd rather not be quoted, don't provide those details.

Do have a go at this. Apart from anything else, it would be interesting for us to see at first hand what it's like developing a wiki.

I have to send my response to the journalist by Monday 13th November, having received the questions on the 8th November. No rush then.

2. What are the barriers to using educational technology/ICT in schools?

Inspired by an email from Dr John Cuthell, I recently wrote about the barriers to implementing ICT in schools. See what you think of the arguments put forward (they are a combination of John's ideas and mine), and then have your say in a poll.

The article, with the poll at the end of it, is here:
http://terry-freedman.org.uk/artman/publish/article_917.php

If you'd rather go straight to the survey, go here:

http://www.terry-freedman.org.uk/db/polls/

3. The value of knowledge
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What price should be charged for information on the internet? Before going any further I must, of course, declare an interest: I sell a paid-for subscription service myself, so I am hardly unbiased. Nevertheless, I shall try to present as objective a case as I can in favour of charging for content.

There are many people, some of them influential, who voice the opinion that all content on the internet should be free. Their arguments seem to come into two categories.

Firstly, there is the matter of principle: stuff on the internet should be free, period. I have to say, I don't really understand this argument. Not many people as far as I know -- in fact, I cannot think of anyone offhand -- would argue that printed content, such as books, should be free. At least, not as a general rule, although people may expect some things to be free (for example, I object to the idea of having to pay for a store’s catalogue: if they want to sell me stuff, they shouldn't expect me to pay for the privilege!).

I suppose one could argue that printed books cost money; but putting content on the internet isn't costless either. Even on a simple level it costs time to format the content, spell-check it, think about illustrations and upload it. In other words, even if one doesn't add value in terms of the content, the mere act of publishing is not a costless activity.

The second argument I've come across is that voiced by Stephen Heppell in a conference (http://terry-freedman.org.uk/artman/publish/article_918.php) I attended recently. It runs like this:

"Information on the internet is freely available, and to prove it I'm going to do a search in Google. Oh look, there are 16 million results."

This raises the question, which was not addressed by Heppell, of the value of 16 million hits, because the only sensible thing one can do in that situation is apply filtering in order to reduce the list to a manageable number. So then the issues are: what sort of filtering do you apply, do you have the skills to even start to address that question, and how long will it take you to do so?

So now we come to the argument I would use in favour of paid-for content. It seems to me that if a passworded section of a website, or a premium newsletter or other type of subscription, merely charged people for accessing content which had had no value added to it, that would be morally wrong -- on the face of it. (I say that because in some circumstances, such as in countries where access to online content is severely restricted, and possibly punishable by imprisonment or worse, payment for access would, in effect, be compensation for risk, and therefore legitimate.)

It seems to me that value can be added in one or both of two ways.

Firstly, returning to a point made earlier, the subscription may provide a sifting service. In other words, instead of the consumer having to work out which content is worth spending time on and which isn't, the supplier does so, reducing the amount to be looked at in the process. Assuming that you can trust the supplier, this is good value for money because what you are buying is not necessarily the content but the person’s expertise in packaging it.

For example, as part of the Leading & Managing Educational Technology subscription service, we provide an occasional e-briefing which lists, usually  on no more than a side of paper, websites which you should be looking at or issues of which you should be aware. Sometimes, there may be only 3 or 4 resources listed. Now think about that. What we, the suppliers, are saying is that, based on our experience of this field, based on the knowledge accumulated from attending conferences, reading newsletters, trawling websites and going to meetings, these are the things that you, a busy person with 101 other things on your mind, need to know about. In other words, we're charging for a combination of our time and expertise. Now, you can't argue with that, unless you also argue that printed magazines should also be free.

The second source of added value is "insider" knowledge or expertise. Now, we have to be careful here. I myself regard with suspicion services or resources emblazoned with terms like "76 secrets of marketing", especially when the punchline is a $400 price tag. But we have to acknowledge that there *is* information which is actually quite difficult to get hold of.

To illustrate this point, I will again use my company as an example. I have held high level posts in Local Authorities, the Qualification & Curriculum Authority and schools. What I am saying is that I don't only know about education, but I know how the larger system works, from having been on the inside. In other words, what’s being sold is not merely opinion or a collection of content, but experience and expertise.

I think this is an important point. I remember in one school inspection I did, the deputy principal was very unhappy that I'd graded one aspect of the educational technology provision as "very good" rather than excellent. His objection was based mainly on the fact that I'd only seen 2 lessons, looked at the statistics, looked at some students’ work and spoken to some students. In his estimation, I'd spent far too little time to be able to make an accurate assessment.

"Your judgement is based on only 1 day’s scrutiny", he told me. "Yes", I said. "And over 30 years’ experience of teaching, using, and advising on educational technology: I didn't just parachute in from nowhere."

Now here is a strange thing: the people who pontificate about content being free do not, as far as I know, decline speaker fees, book royalties or consultancy fees. In fact, the people who are against paying for content on the internet do not have a second thought about paying speaker fees, buying books or paying consultants. It’s a very strange thing, if you think about it, to be willing to pay for information when it comes in one form, but not another.

If you'd like to know more about our paid-for subscription, either email me or look here: http://www.terry-freedman.org.uk/db/premiumsub/ Or both :-)

4. User Group
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I have started a user group to try out various products and aspects of the Educational Technology: ICT in Education website. If you'd like to join, drop me an email saying who you are and what your role is. The benefits are that you'd get first look at up-coming features, and all e-products free. In return, your commitment will be to provide me with feedback on ideas and products in a timely manner, and observe the usual rules of confidentiality. Obviously, I can't take everyone on board, so I'm looking to restrict membership to around 6. So, please get in touch ASAP if you are interested.

5. Podcast project pedagogy, plus an invitation to collaborate on another project
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In the last issue of Computers in Classrooms I asked if a school would like to work with me on producing podcasts, and I'm delighted to say that Mike Adams, of the John Hanson Community school (http://www.jhanson.hants.sch.uk/) in Hampshire, England, has offered the services of himself and his students. The first thing I did, obviously, was to check out the school's own podcast, at http://www.hansonradio.co.uk/, and I was astonished at the quality.

So, at the moment, Mike and I are communicating via email and a web page on which I place files to be incorporated into the podcast. I've recorded a few sections, and Mike and his Year 7 and Year 8 students (ie 12 to 13 year olds) will be working on some music and jingles to insert. The first podcast will take a while to produce, but if it works out well, we should be able to get into a routine that will make future production much quicker. We're hoping to get this one out before Christmas.

If this sort of thing, ie getting your students to work with me on a real project, floats your boat, then you might like to consider this. I'm a writer, not a graphic designer. I'm writing a book at the moment which I hope to publish via print-on-demand, and if you'd be interested in getting a bunch of students to work with me on a cover design then get in touch. The potential learning gains from this kind of collaboration are not trivial. The students will be doing real work for a real audience.

6. A Matter Of Time
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Microsoft Excel can easily handle clock-related calculations -- and about time too!

Time is a mystery. That is to say, it’s a mystery to most of us how you can do calculations involving time. Try entering a time on a spreadsheet, and you immediately hit the problem of how it should look. If you separate hours and numbers with a dot, the spreadsheet will assume that you've entered a number with a decimal point in it.

The answer is, in Excel at least, to separate the numbers with a colon (:), but to be absolutely on the safe side, once you have entered what you *think* is a time, click on the cell, click the right mouse button, select Format, and then select one of the Time formats. If you don't, Excel might think you have entered text (ie it could be fooled by that colon). If that happens, then you won't be calculating anything.

OK, so that’s that problem solved; but what about adding a length of time to a time? This is tricky, a fact which you can easily prove for yourself. Enter a time in a cell, say 08:00 (ie 8 am). In the next cell, enter 2, for 2 hours. In a third cell, put in a formula that adds the two together. The result: apparently nothing. In fact, what has happened is that Excel ‘thinks’ that the 2 you entered means two days. You can see this for yourself if you reformat the first and third cells as follows:

First, get to the Format menu, as before. Next, select the Custom option, and choose the format which looks like this: dd/mm/yyyy hh:mm. That will show the date as well as the time. Now you can see at a glance that the date in the third cell is 2 days after the date in the first cell.

And it’s no use entering that figure 2 as 0.2, or :2 or anything else, because Excel simply won't understand. Fortunately, however, all is not lost. There is a handy function, or built-in formula, you can use. Known, unsurprisingly, as the Time function, its syntax look likes this:

=Time(h,m,s).

So, to enter the length of time of 2 hours, you would enter:

=Time(2,m,s).

Now, that’s a little unwieldy. Nobody wants to unpick a formula every time they need to enter or change a simple number. But there is a way out of this dilemma: designate some other cells to hold the hours, minutes and seconds information. Let’s say the three cells are D1, D2 and D3. That Time function then becomes:

=Time(d1,d2,d3)

and from now on you can ignore that altogether and just enter the hours, minutes and seconds in cells d1, d2 and d3 respectively. Now at least you'll know that you're unlikely to accidentally mess up that Time formula by fiddling with it!

You can do some pretty nifty stuff with dates too, but that’s for next time!

(A variation of this article first appeared in Micro Computer Mart.)

7. Atoms and other small matters
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Here's a great resource, even though it's over 50 years old. It's a cartoon film made by General Electric explaining what atoms are and how it all works. Very enjoyable, and even understandable. Thanks to Tim Tarrant, whom I was chatting to a few days ago, for this tip. Tim is one of the directors at the Training and Development Agency (http://www.tda.gov.uk/), with responsibility for Initial Teacher Training strategic priorities.

"A is for Atom", made in 1953, is available in a variety of formats, including one for video i-Pods, from here:

http://www.archive.org/details/isforAto1953

8. Digital Literacies & Intellectual Property
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In this extract from his chapter in the forthcoming second edition of "Coming of Age: An Introduction to the New Worldwide Web" (http://web2booklet.blogspot.com), Leon Cych explores some of the implications of active participation in video creation as opposed to passive consuming.

[...] We are talking here about digital literacy -- if you don't take stuff apart and analyse it you won't be able to effectively construct it -- people are becoming active participants in learning with regard to media rather than passive viewers.

This has now become manifestly true in the enthusiasm for a whole new culture of ripping, mixing and uploading content. Many web 2.0 sites now enable you to upload and edit video online through your browser. Sites like Motionbox, Dabble, Eyespot, Jumpcut and VideoEgg show how popular and easy this is to do making a mockery of IP.

Paul Gerhardt (http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue44/gerhardt/ ) Director of the Creative Archive BBC said recently in the July online JISC journal -- Ariadne :

"There is also growing evidence that media files are the new currency of the Web. The downloading and sharing of moving image files is driving the latest phase in the growth of the Internet, following the previous waves of text, pictures and music. In 2003, the downloading of video and other files grew to make up slightly more than half (51.3%) of all file sharing in OECD countries, while music downloading fell to 48.6%. The technology now exists for moving images to acquire the same intrinsic characteristics as text: for people to carry with them, to quote from, to manipulate, and to share with others. Almost all of this activity contravenes existing copyright arrangements -- particularly broadcasting, which remains geared to providing one or two 'opportunities to view'. "

That viewpoint has rapidly changed again recently and the BBC amongst many other media companies is desperately trying to play catchup. The head of the BBC's new 'future media and technology' division, Ashley Highfield, gave a vision-of-the-future speech  on the 26th August 2006 at the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival. In an interview with the Financial Times he hinted how "convergence" might happen:

"On the distribution side, offering our programmes and channels on-demand is just the beginning. We must think creatively as to how our audiences want to consume our content: via bbc.co.uk or via YouTube? As whole programmes or atomised and re-aggregated around their interests? A one hour compilation of all the best Stephen Fry clips -- from 'QI', 'BlackAdder, 'A little bit of Fry and Laurie' created on the fly from our archive? As video or audio? -- I think EastEnders, with audio description, would make good radio drama. And so on."

In the UK the BBC, in terms of the Creative Archive initiative which has a large repository of film and video resources, adopted a Creative Archive license for use with schools and this was very territory-specific in that the site where multimedia artifacts reside was locked to a UK IP (internet Protocol domain specifically) under terms of its UK license. This is unfortunate in that it excluded British schools overseas and the educational institutions in the Armed Forces which fell foul of such a clause. It also does not address, in some cases, the problem of "underlying license issues" already outlined above. Also in the UK a report to the common information environment group, using criteria based on Creative Commons licences has begun to address these concerns with an examination of common use and click use licenses. Some of their suggestions were:

* Resources should be made available for reuse unless there is a justifiable reason why they should not.

* The reuse of resources should be as unconstrained as possible. For example, resources should be made available for commercial reuse as well as non-commercial reuse wherever possible.

* The range of permitted uses of resources should be as wide as possible, for example, including the right to modify the resource and produce derivative works from it.

* Reuse should be encouraged by permitting others to redistribute resources on a world-wide basis.

* Resources should be made directly available and discoverable electronically whenever possible.

* The conditions of use for each resource should be linked directly to the resource so that they are reusable at the point of discovery.

This study was commissioned by  Becta, the British Library, DfES, and others; whether it is ever implemented remains to be seen.

The reality is increasingly that there will be so much content you cannot build it out -- not allowing people to see stuff will be stupid because the sheer volume of video content will be overwhelming -- it is a media tsunami about to hit any day now. In fact, it already has and is washing over society generally except schools. The sanctions following viewing and uploading inappropriate video content will have to be carefully thought through, but trying to lock down the sheer volume of copyrighted content will just be playing the role of a latter day electronic Canute.

A licensing system that accommodates and does not stifle creativity is essential as media becomes freely available to copy, disassemble, reassemble and distribute around these networks and on converged systems such as mobile networks -- especially in education. The difference between copying and mass distribution on the one hand and reworking media on the other must be stated and allowed for. [...]

Leon Cych is a web designer, coder, teacher, poet, artist, broadcaster and journalist. He set up the nationwide poetry networking magazine, Poetry London Newsletter in the 1980’s which later became the print publication Poetry London.

In 2005 he was editor of Computer Education for Naace and wrote the Social Networking section of Becta ICT research publication Emerging Technologies for Learning. (http://www.becta.org.uk/corporate/publications/documents/Emerging_Technologies_Accessibility.pdf)

He has written regularly for the UK's Times Educational Supplement and regularly speaks at Initial Teacher Training events, conferences and keynotes. He is a member of blogs.ac.uk and is an evangelist for blogging and web 2.0 tools in the educational sector in the UK.

He has a podcast blog at http://www.L4L.org.uk/@blog A personal opinion blog at: http://elgg.net/leoncych/weblog and a website disseminating useful web 2.0 resources for educators on a daily basis at http://www.L4L.co.uk

9. How to "sell" blogging etc to your senior management team
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There isn't really the room in this issue for much more stuff, like the review I was going to include, for example. So, this is just a quick tip: if you're interested in getting blogging and so on up and running in your school, but are meeting resistance, I've produced a set of resources -- a complementary (and complimentary) podcast with accompanying (and detailed) notes. This was my presentation at the K12 Online Conference, and you'll find it here:

http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=72

10. And last but not least: a reminder about how you can get involved
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* Contribute to the wiki I've set up at https://ictineducation.pbwiki.com (see item #1).

* Join our user group (see item #3).

* Work with me on a book cover design project (see item #4).

Next issue:
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Amongst other things, a Review of Shakespeare Works I hope.

Disclaimer
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Good morning, Judge. I wasn't even there; it wasn't my fault; he made me do it, etc. Seriously, though, all the information and links in this newsletter have been checked, and offered in good faith. For the full text of the disclaimer, please see:

http://www.terry-freedman.org.uk/about.html.

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