I would argue that the majority of lists aren't worth the paper they're not written on. As far as I'm concerned, a list has to meet the following criteria for it to warrant spending any time on it beyond the cursory 5 seconds it takes to decide whether it's a decent list or not. And the criteria should be addressed explicitly.

1. There should be a good reason for it in the first place. Note the two words there: "reason", and "good". Really, the list should seek to answer a question, which would provide a reason; and the question should be one that is worth asking. That would supply the "good" part.

2. It has to enable you to make judgements without having to do further work yourself. Let me explain what I mean. If someone produces a list called, say, "The top 10 word processors" and then proceeds to list 10 applications, all it does it provide a list. Its only value is in collating the names of 10 applications, some of which you may never have heard of, in one place. You will still have to look at each of the applications listed in order to see whether it is likely to meet your needs.

Paradoxically, therefore, the longer such a list is, the less useful it is. A more useful approach would be to write a comment about each one, perhaps giving its unique selling point, or even a personal opinion.

3. The target audience should be fairly obvious. This point is partly, though not wholly, covered by criterion1. For example, the reason for the list may be to provide a list of good word processing applications. But the list might be different, or ordered differently, if the target audience was professional writers as opposed to teachers. Believe me, some of the word processing applications written especially with writers in mind are very different from Microsoft Word and its imitators, because they have a different underlying purpose.

4. There should have a rationale underpinning what's included in the list, and the rank order of the items. Even if the rationale is the list creator's personal preferences, I can live with that. What I do find hard to tolerate is the sort of list that's put together by people nominating items to go into the list, but without any indication of who did the nominating, and how many people nominated the same item.

Put bluntly, how do you know that an item, in this case a word processor, wasn't nominated by the person whose company is selling it?

How many of the lists you see promoted actually meet those criteria?

A rather disturbing aspect of all this is that if you look at the standards for functional skills in ICT, many lists published and publicised on the web would not gain their authors a pass at higher than a Level 1 in communications, and even that is assuming a degree of leniency.

In case you haven't come across functional skills before, they are the skills in English, Mathematics and Information & Communications Technology that have been deemed in the UK to be the ones that people need in order to play a full part at work and in everyday life.

It seems to me that a well-written list is potentially a brilliant source of information, and a wonderful example of efficiency in action, whereas a poorly-constructed list is simply a time-waster. One of the unfortunate effects of fast communications is that rubbish is circulated just as quickly as good stuff.

So what would I regard as examples of good lists? I would suggest the following:

• My own lists. Yes, I know that sounds rather egotistical, but I think my lists are good because they meet all the criteria I've listed above.
  
  Of course, that's all a bit self-referential: I devised the criteria and I wrote the articles, so it would be odd if the two didn't match up! You will need to decide for yourself whether (a) you agree with those criteria and (b) if my lists satisfy them.
  
  My published lists aren't quite the same as the example I gave, being more of the "10 things you can do to achieve X" variety, but I don't think that affects my argument. You'll find some examples of what I'm talking about here.
  
  
• Here's an example of a good list, written by Larry Ferlazzo, on the subject of collaborative tools. It's clear why the list was compiled, who compiled it in terms of populating it, and there is a sentence or two about each item on the list.
  
  Bottom line: if I'm looking for a collaborative tool then this list gives me enough info to not need to waste time looking at applications which clearly don't suit my needs.
  
  
• Here's a list which partly meets my criteria. It's a list of the 50 most influential female bloggers. I don't care for the subject matter much, in the sense that I think drawing up lists of bloggers of a particular gender, race or whatever is divisive, and that people should be judged on their merits.
  
  Nevertheless, that does not fall foul of my criteria. What does is the facts that I don't know who compiled the list, and how he or she is judging how influential these people are. In fact, I don't even know if they are in rank order.
  
  Still, notwithstanding that the comments about each one positively glows, there is enough factual information about each person listed to help me decide which, if any, I will bother to explore further.

Can I give you examples of what I regard as poor lists? Yes, of course. But I don't see the point. What you have here is the following (if I may be permitted to make a list):

1. A list of criteria of what makes a good list.
   
   
2. Three examples of lists which I think are good.

I think it would be interesting to discuss with colleagues and students what they think makes a good list. My main reason for raising this issue in the first place is that I think that the creation of poor lists, and their uncritical acceptance and promulgation by educators, do not provide good role models for students.

I would hope that lists compiled by people in education be a cut above those you might find in a pub quiz. Alas, I am often disappointed.

If you're in charge of teaching information and communications technology, what can you do in order to inject even more life into the subject? Here are 12X ideas to get you started.

This article is available only to subscribers to the Practical ICT eJournal. Click the link to find out more about this high-value, low-cost, subscription, and to download a sampler, and an index to the 40+ articles published over the last school year.

I started the day full of grandiose ideas. My to-do list is always impossibly long, but I derive a great deal of satisfaction from crossing things off. (In fact, it almost certainly wouldn't be as long as it is if I didn't, but still.) However, in any one day, I try to be reasonable in my expectations.

Today, as a case in point, I'd intended to:

1. Write a short post for my My Writes blog;
2. Type up some notes I took on a recent training course;
3. Practise using the application I had made notes about;
4. Write a post for my Ed Tech diary blog over at Hot Chalk;
5. Complete the proof-reading of Practical ICT;
6. Publish the aforementioned journal;
7. Write an article for the ICT in Education website;
8. Respond to some blogs;
9. Respond to emails;
10. listen to the Women of Web 2.0 podcast featuring Elaine and me;
11. Prepare for tomorrow's activities; and
12. Do a spot of shopping in order to get some fresh air.

I usually turn my phone off when I have a list like that, but on this occasion I didn't. Not that it would have helped very much. At the time of writing this I have so far been able to tick off the following numbers from the above list:

#1

#2

#5

#9

#10

#12.

Pathetic! But not really my fault. Here is what happened during the day, in sequence:

1. We had an unexpected visit from the mother of a friend of ours.
2. Someone came to read the gas metre.
3. Someone called to deliver a parcel containing copies of a book I helped to write.
4. Someone else came to deliver a parcel of stuff that my wife had ordered.
5. Someone came to check our burglar alarm system.
6. Someone came to check our gas installation.

It's quite a miracle that I achieved as much as I did, but the consequence is that I still have to get the Practical ICT journal out, still have to write the Ed Tech Diary blog and am also hoping to get some leisure time in as well.

So this is what Victorian England was like. Like many people, I should imagine, I sometimes regret how available I am all the time: through phones, social networks, instant messaging and so on. In fact, I wrote about that recently, funnily enough. But in the 19th century in England, I recall reading, there were constant interruptions throughout the day from tradesmen calling and street vendors shouting. So I suppose in a way that was even worse, except for the fact that the sort of people who other people would call on, and who would be in when they called, would have servants to act as a buffer or filter between themselves and the world.

It seems to me that our technology is very much a double-edged sword. On the one hand, I can enjoy, say, a range of music that would have been inconceivable in times past, without even stirring out of my chair. On the other hand, there are constant demands on my time which, being highly connected yet not rich enough to be able to employ servants, I am not always able to counter effectively.

Nevertheless, it was the experience I had today, of the doorbell continually ringing, that made me more fully appreciate a very important fact. Our current technology, by enabling us to switch it off, see who is calling, forward voicemail and so on allows us, paradoxically, to enjoy a level of privacy that our Victorian forebears could only dream of.

Postscript

I mentioned that I am working on Practical ICT. This issue will be really interesting. One of the guest writers is a teenager from the USA, and the issue covers Assessing Pupils' Progress and the Single Level Test, Intellectual Property, and Special Educational Needs, amongst other things. Look out for it!

Something that all small businesses need to be aware of is the propensity of bigger companies to try to rip them off. I know that sounds rather negative, not to say sweeping, but it's a fact. And yes, whilst it's true that sometimes the near rip-off is inadvertent, I can't help but notice that all such inadvertencies, without exception, favour the company that has made the "mistake".

I think there are several reasons for this, but first, let me clarify what I am referring to. Clearly, in this context I am regarding consultancies like mine as small companies, which is what they are. I am also including authors under that umbrella as well. I know that authors, especially casual ones, may not see themselves in that light, and more's the pity. If they did, if they acted as professionally in that sphere as they undoubtedly do in their day jobs, all of us who write, though not entirely for a living, would benefit.

Types of rip-off

I've identified four kinds of rip-off. Perhaps there is a modicum of unfairness about the term "rip-off", as it may indeed be unintentional, but it does reflect the indignance I feel about the phenomenon. As someone who works quite hard, I feel somewhat aggrieved when someone else tries to take away from me the fruits of my labour. Wouldn't you? Here are the types of rip-off I've categorised.

The competing works clause

This is the clause in publishing contracts which states that the author won't produce any other work which could adversely affect the sales of the work under consideration. If you think about that from the publisher's point of view, such a clause is not merely reasonable, it is sensible. You can imagine a situation in which, in order to hedge his bets, an author had what was essentially the same book published by twenty different companies. Each would earn a pittance because of having to share the potential market with nineteen other companies, but the author would probably do very nicely out of it, in the short term at least. In the long run, some readers would stop purchasing his books after buying the same book twice under the impression that the two books were different from each other, and no publisher would touch him ever again. But he might not care about that if, like Keynes, he took the view that in the long run we're all dead.

So the competing works clause is a sensible one, until it is applied in a non-sensible manner. The difficulty arises, as with another type of rip-off I'll consider in a moment, when the author actually makes a living from producing competing works. What do I mean?

Obviously, any author would be ill-advised to have a book published, and then do anything which could affect the sales of that book. But if you actually work in that field, you cannot help but do so. For example, if you're a teacher of ICT, and you write a book about how to teach ICT, any of the materials you produce as part of your work, or publish on your website if you have one, could be regarded as a competing work. If you were to take the competing works clause at face value, it would mean that you couldn't continue to do your job. It is, in effect, a restraint on your trade.

The difficulty is not insurmountable, it just takes some rather tedious negotiating. But the fact that the clause is routinely in all educational publishers' contracts leads me to the conclusion that most would-be authors don't really care that much. If they did, perhaps such clauses would be written to take account of the author's real-life situation. In fact, I have only ever been presented with one contract that approached the issue sensibly and fairly. Don't authors read their contracts before signing them?

What's mine is mine, and what's yours is mine

Actually, I suspect not, judging from conversations I've had with both authors and other consultants. One of the standard clauses in contracts I'm asked to sign as a consultant is the Intellectual Property clause, which usually states something to the effect that anything I produce as part of the work I undertake for the client belongs to the client.

Again, on one level that's fair enough. After all, they're paying for it. Or are they? I've been presented with a contract containing such a clause after I have completed the work using materials I have developed over the years. True, that sequence of events has only happened to me once, and I refused to sign the contract until the offending clause had been removed. But when I spoke to a couple of other consultants about this sort of thing, they told me that they never bothered to read the contracts they were presented with. What? That strikes me as somewhat ill-advised, given that I was recently asked to sign a contract which contains a clause stating that I will indemnify the client against legal action, but without specifying an upper limit. Yet I must be fairly alone in querying it because the organisation concerned has scores, possibly even hundreds, of consultants on its books. And that despite the draconian legal clause and, surprise surprise, a clause that states that they own the IP in anything I create.

Being charitable, I think the reason such clauses are not dropped from contracts is that the contracts are drawn up to define the working relationship between a company and its employees, rather than a company and any consultants it uses. In that light, the clause is eminently sensible, because you don't want one of your employees getting paid by you to develop something, and then going off and selling it to someone else. But for a consultancy which makes its living from providing such services, such a clause is, in effect, in restraint of trade. At least, notwithstanding the fact that I am not a legal expert, that's how it seems to me.

I came across another example of intellectual property theft in the terms and conditions on a website pertaining to the use of a free utility the company makes available. The terms state that anything you produce with their tool belongs to the company. That's bad enough. Even worse, it states that if you write about the tool, that work belongs to the company. That means that if I write a review of it, the review belongs to the company. If I write a report for my boss on how the tool is being used, the report belongs to the company. Now obviously, any sensible court of law would throw the case out if the company tried to enforce such a ridiculous condition, but looking at it from the other end, what small business has the time and the money to launch a copyright infringement action, and internationally to boot? It's just easier to find another utility that does the same thing but without those conditions attached. But the fact that the clause remains surely indicates that a sufficient number of people accept it to make the company not inclined to change it?

Delaying tactics

I've read recently of a disturbing trend in which companies delay paying their dues in order to help their cash flow. Now, you could regard that as prudent. I know of one organisation, for example, that prides itself on not paying a bean until the standard 30 days have elapsed after receiving an invoice, in order to retain its money as long as possible, presumably to earn interest on it. It's a funny thing to feel proud about: I feel proud about the fact that when we receive an invoice we try to pay it by return post. Our reputation for fair dealing is much more important to us than a few extra pounds of interest. Nevertheless, it is a trend in Britain today that payment times have increased by about a week, from an average of 17 days to 22 days, as reported here.

But the worst sort of culprit is the one which delays payment by an inordinate amount of time. In this article, a company is cited that not only takes about 4 months to settle payment, but also levies a 2.5% "settlement fee". What I don't understand is this: why do small business people sign contracts which have that sort of clause in the contract? Or, like the consultants and authors mentioned earlier, do they simply not bother to read the small print?

The cheque's in the post

On several occasions we've found that we haven't been paid by a client. Sometimes we get the "Oops, we must have forgotten" response. Really? Call me a cynic, but how come that was the only part of the transaction they forgot? They didn't forget to send me the commission, or the contract, or to phone me to ask how things were progressing. They only forgot to pay me. Strange, that.

The guilty parties

So who is responsible for these various kinds of attempted rip-off? Again, I apologise if that sounds too condemning, but from where I stand, whether the rip-off is intentional or unintentional, the result is the same.

Apart from the perpetrators themselves, of course, it seems to me that the people responsible for this state of affairs fall into two groups. First, those consultants, small businesses, and authors who either don't bother to read contracts properly or who think they just have to accept the first thing they're presented with. They don't, and if they didn't then I believe companies would be far less inclined to "try it on". As it stands, the big companies concerned are playing a non-zero sum game in which they stand to gain much, and lose nothing, at the smaller party's expense.

Second, there is a tendency for companies to invite teachers and other educationalists to send in their ideas and materials, to "showcase" them. Read the small print, and nine times out of ten you'll discover that the company takes ownership of the materials and reserves the right to do whatever it likes with them, including selling them without even giving credit to the originator. Yet people continue to provide these companies with the fruits of their labour.

In a sense, this is another manifestation of the first point. However, in one case I looked at recently (yesterday, in fact), a company is asking people to contribute their ideas, and there isn't even a related document called "Terms and conditions" on its website. Combined with the fact that in the UK you can't copyright your ideas, why would anyone in their right minds send in their brilliant ideas when they have no guarantee about what will be done with them? I think you would have to be supremely naive to do so.

But then, naivety on the part of the person or company providing the product or service seems to be the common thread in all of the examples I've talked about here. Let's hope that a positive outcome of the current economic situation will encourage people to value their own intellectual property, and their right to fair dealing, more highly than they appear to have done hitherto.

This article is available only to subscribers to the Practical ICT eJournal. Click the link to find out more about this high-value, low-cost, subscription, and to download a sampler, and an index to the 40+ articles published over the last school year.

Consequently, it was difficult for me to recall what had happened, or upon which day it happened, or the sequence of events on a particular day. This despite having access to a plethora of means by which I could record my activities more or less as I was going along.

In fact, I wonder if that is half the trouble? Pepys maintained his diary despite a complete absence of even the most basic technologies we take for granted. When I want to ensure that I remember something later on, I tend to jot it down in a pocket notebook, with a ballpoint pen. What did Pepys do? Whip out a quill and a sheaf of paper? He must have been a remarkable man to have engaged in all the activities he did, arrive back home from having walked everywhere if his accounts are to be believed, have supper and then write it all down before it became too dark, or until his eyes hurt from straining under the candlelight.

Unless, of course, he was cavalier with "the truth".

I say that not because I have any reason to believe he was, other than my own experience of trying to recollect everything in detail. I'm not sure I succeeded. On several occasions, having spent quite a long time trying to remember stuff, I took the view that in the total scheme of things it didn't matter that much if, say, I had the idea for a new article on Wednesday or Thursday.

I also knew that, as others would be reading the diary (because it was being written for the Society of Authors), perhaps it would be of interest only to myself if I had two cups of tea rather than three (so I omitted that sort of detail), or if I went to a training event on one day rather than the next.

All of which made me start to ponder:

• Did Pepys have a feeling that his diaries would be read by people from all over the world, for generations to come? And if so, did he write them as a journalist rather than a diarist, if that makes sense?
  
  
• Did the absence of technology such as ballpoint pens affect the accuracy or detail of what he wrote, in terms of what he could actually recall of the day's events? I think it's worth saying here an obvious point, but one easily overlooked, that Pepys himself would not have been aware of the absence of the technology. It's only in retrospect that people marvel at how previous generations managed to get anything done with the meagre tools available. Perhaps Pepys himself wondered how anybody ever managed with parchment.
  
  
• Has technology made us lazy? Maybe Pepys really could remember everything, because there was no alternative: no pen, no notebook, no camera, no voice memo device, no cell phone.

Perhaps now and then it is not a bad idea to do what some schools and school districts have done occasionally, and have an IT-free day, just to give kids a taste of a bygone era in which even the simplest thing, like keeping a diary, was not necessarily that simple at all.

If you'd like to read my diary entries, start here and then read the next 4 entries. The diary runs from the 15th to the 19th September (inclusive).

This was originally posted on the My Writes blog, but I decfided that it contained enough about educational technology to merit posting here as well.I'd be interested in your opinions on these thoughts.

• Sharing good practice
• News about assessment information
• Governmental YouTube channels
• Suicide and the internet
• An online conference in the UK

This article is available only to subscribers to the Practical ICT eJournal. Click the link to find out more about this high-value, low-cost, subscription, and to download a sampler, and an index to the 40+ articles published over the last school year.

Let's suppose. for example, that you have set a class the following assignment:

Create a spreadsheet that will enable a person to see what would happen to their savings if the rate of interest doubled.

Now, there may be a whole range of criteria against which the students will be marked, such as ease of use, attractiveness, inbuilt help and so on. But the bottom line is that the spreadsheet has to actually work. It has to:

(a) let you see what happens to a sum of money over time under different prevailing rates of interest, and

(b) be accurate.

If it doesn't do (a), then it is useless. If it does (a) but not (b), it is useless.

So, here is a question: how many teachers would have the honesty, and the courage, to award a grade of "Fail" to a student whose spreadsheet was, according to one of these criteria, useless?

Would you?

In my experience, most teachers would give marks for all the other criteria, which is, in fact, the correct thing to do. After all, if a student has made the interface exceedingly clear and easy to use, she needs to be told that and commended for it. Nevertheless, the final grade should still be "Fail".

If this sounds draconian, and unfair, consider this. You discover a wonderful clock in an online catalogue, so you order it. It arrives, and then you discover that it does not work at all (similar to (a) above), or it runs slow, fast or erratically (corresponding to (b) above). How likely are you to keep the clock on the grounds that its face is so clear you can see it from the other side of the room without your spectacles? Pretty slim, I would suggest.

By the same token, if we are really serious about preparing students for life beyond school, we need to be honest about the feedback we give them about their work.

This logic applies in other areas too. For example, if a student loses all his ICT coursework because his 3 year old brother deleted it, and he does not have a backup, should you:

(a) give him a mark of zero, or

(b) give him the benefit of the doubt?

My answer would be (c): fail him altogether. After all, anyone who did not think to take a backup of his ICT work does not deserve to be awarded a pass, since that implies that he has actually understood the subject.

I know that I sound like I am somewhere to the right of Attila The Hun, but again, let me present you with an analogy.  I recently put in a bid for Government money for a £500,000 (approximately $1,000,000 at the then-prevailing exchange rate), on behalf of a client. The bid was successful, not only because it addressed all the criteria in the right way, but also because it actually arrived! Would it have succeeded if I had lost the file on my computer, and phoned them up to say,

"Sorry, I seem to have accidentally erased the file, but why not give me the benefit of the doubt?"?

I don't think so.

Is this approach likely to alienate students? The "obvious" answer is "yes". I am not so sure.

When I started teaching, there was one boy in my class of 16 year olds who was bright, but preferred to mess around the whole time. Consequently, his essays were poor, and he scored badly on tests. At the end of the first term, I wrote on his report,

"John (not his real name) has the ability to do well in this subject, but has chosen to direct his energies elsewhere. If this continues he will fail the final examination, and therefore it is a waste of time for him to continue."

His mother came to see me on parents' evening, and I told her the same thing, adding:

"If there is not a significant improvement over the next 6 weeks I will take him off the course."

John came to see me the next day. He said:

"I know you were not with my mother for long, but she was impressed by your honesty and directness. I'm going to be different from now on."

And he was. And he passed the final examination with flying colours. Honesty really is the best policy.

This article looks at a fairly simple approach to benchmarking which does not take long to implement, but which can be extremely useful.

This article is available only to subscribers to the Practical ICT eJournal. Click the link to find out more about this high-value, low-cost, subscription, and to download a sampler, and an index to the 40+ articles published over the last school year.

I don't claim any originality for this thought, but I was thinking today of my own workload, and how we do students a disservice by not addressing the disadvantages of technology on a personal level.

And why don't we? Because the curriculum does not explicitly require us to.

Take the ICT Programme of Study in England, for example. At Key Stage 3, under the heading of "Impact of technology", it states:

"Exploring how ICT changes the way we live our lives and has significant social, ethical and cultural implications."

Well, you could interpret that on a personal level, but I have never seen that. The treatment it gets is always in terms of broad social issues like (un)employment, new industries, changes in medical practice and so on.

The NETS standards are no better. Apart from a requirement to:

"select and use applications effectively and productively",

there is nothing. And even the criterion cited carries the implication that it has more to do with achieving the task in hand than preserving one's sanity.

The Functional Skills in ICT, which are supposed to be a set of skills that are what you need to master in order to be a fully-functional member of society, has nothing to say on the subject either.

Without personal discipline and skills, computer technology creates more work rather than reduces your workload. It does so in a number of ways:

Firstly, it is so easy to try to perfect the resources we create, there is no natural end point of our endeavours. Now, I speak as someone who would spend hours creating wonderful worksheets, in colour, using different coloured Banda sheets. But changing something always involved a cost-benefit analysis:

"Given the amount of hassle I will have to go through in order to change this question, is the proposed change really that important?"

Sometimes the answer would be "yes", and sometimes "no", but that isn't the point. The point is that the question was actually asked, whereas nowadays you would only ask it once you had already printed off lots of copies, or you were about to fall asleep at the keyboard. Changing something now is, in effect, costless. As any school child studying Economics will tell you, the law of supply and demand predicts that as the price of something gets lower, the demand for it will expand. That is exactly what happens when doing work on a computer.

Secondly, I feel like the "baby" in the song "29 Ways":

"I got 29 ways to make it to my baby's door
I got 29 ways to make it to my baby's door
And if she needs me bad
I can find about two or three more"

I was reading a  book on etiquette written in 1834. In it, the author states that when communicating with someone, you should either send your card if the person lives close by, or a letter if they don't. That's just two ways. I can be contacted by:

• Landline phone;
  
  
• Landline fax;
  
  
• Mobile phone;
  
  
• Skype IM;
  
  
• Skype phone;
  
  
• Twitter;
  
  
• Yahoo!;
  
  
• Internet voicemail;
  
  
• Internet fax;
  
  
• Email;
  
  
• Comments on my blog;
  
  
• Facebook;
  
  
• Assorted Ning and other communities and services;
  
  
• Snail mail.
  

Now, don't get me wrong: I'm not complaining. After all, I set these up out of choice, for the most part. Well, actually, it was Hobson's Choice in many cases: if I wasn't contactable quickly and easily, I wouldn't get half the work opportunities I do. Personally, I like it most of the time. In a connected world, you have to be easily connectable to. The challenge is to make sure that we are in charge of our lives, and not victims of it.

My point is this: we need to help students to "wise up" to the sort of world we live in, and help them deal with it.

I know what you're going to say: that with their cell phones, mp3 players, multitasking on Skype, Facebook, MSN and the internet, all whilst watching TV and doing their homework, they can cope with it all better than we can!

Well, I think that is a different issue. It's one thing being able to multitask, and quite another thing knowing how to turn off the deluge and how to prioritise it. In any case, we don't know how their frenetic multitasking will affect young people in the longer term.

It seems to me that the issues are as follows:

• There are more ways to communicate with people, as indicated in my list above.
  
  
• People tend to use multiple ways of communicating the same thing. For example, I will often receive a phone call asking me if I received an email. That is using up extra time and energy for no discernible benefit.
  
  
• Instant communication methods have made us expect instant responses.
  
  
• Being able to always be contactable means that people tend to make themselves more contactable -- even when it ought to be quite acceptable not to be. There have been various studies over the last few years showing that people tend to have their work mobiles on 24/7, even when on holiday.
  
  
• Because of the ease with which documents can be changed, there is no natural ceiling on how often or how much they will be changed. It's not just the documents in terms of the physical text, but what they represent: action plans can be changed at the drop of a hat, because it so easy to do so with a few keystrokes.

There are, therefore, things we need to discuss with our students -- and colleagues. For instance:

• What is an acceptable response time for emails?
  
  
• Is it physically and mentally healthy to be "always on"?
  
  
• Is it even efficient, in terms of the quality of decision-making, to be "always on"?
  
  
• What technological ways are there to reduce the communication flow? For example, Friendfeed enables me to keep track of what people I know are doing without bombarding me with data all the time.
  
  
• What non-technological options are open to us? For example, one of my bosses had a policy of checking her email only at set times in the day. The rest of the time she turned it off, to avoid being tempted to check it every five minutes.

It may be that our students think it's all fine, and that they all have coping strategies anyway. I just feel that by not even raising these issues we are in some respects not being entirely honest with them.

Or do you think I worry too much? I'd love to hear your opinion on all this.

In this article I consider 7 ways to maximise the success of the team itself.

This article is available only to subscribers to the Practical ICT eJournal. Click the link to find out more about this high-value, low-cost, subscription, and to download a sampler, and an index to the 40+ articles published over the last school year.

This article is available only to subscribers to the Practical ICT eJournal. Click the link to find out more about this high-value, low-cost, subscription, and to download a sampler, and an index to the 40+ articles published over the last school year.

In this article, English, Economics, culture, geography and tourism are highlighted.

Like most of the pictures I take, this one was unplanned. I saw all these boats in the evening, as I crossed over the bridge in York town centre. The scene struck me as rather poignant.

But then I got to thinking, it would make a great starting point for several avenues of study, such as:

English: Why are the lights of one of the boats still on? What's going on there? What's the story, in other words?

Tourism: What is the role of tourism in general, and river trips in particular, in the life of the city? Are these things essential, or simply extras?

Economics: What sort of ancillary industries are you likely to find in the area? Presumably, there will be several trades associated with boats and rivers?

Culture/Geography: What part does the river play in York? In London, for example, the River Thames serves as a cultural as well as a geographical dividing line. The London south of the river is very different indeed to the London north of the river.

Local history: How has the city evolved over the centuries, and what part, if any, did the river play (or tourism, or the boat industry)?

I think you'll agree that this one photo could stimulate quite a bit of discussion, and be the starting point for a wide variety of projects.

What is there in you area that would make a photo with similar wide-ranging applications?

Before signing off this post, I'd like to draw your attention to a comment by Amran Nordin about my "Greyfriars" post. That was based on some pictures of the ruins of an abbey, and Amran said:

"I think students would need some guiding questions for them to get them started."

I think he is right, and that probably applies to all of these articles. For some students, or curriculum areas, more guidance will be needed than in others. It would be good if the students had access to a series of structured guidelines and/or questions to get them started and help them when they're stuck.

However, it does not follow from this that the teacher has to do all the work. Why not use part of a lesson to get the class itself to come up with a series of questions or steps?

Amran goes on to say:

"I think it is quite hard for kids today to imagine what those ruins mean."

I think he may well be right, especially in areas where students would never have come across ruins in everyday life, or even on TV (unless they watch the History Channel). However, the issue can be resolved by recourse to the use of Ausubel's Advance Organizer concept, and in particular the principle of integrative reconciliation. This is a fancy way of describing what good teachers do all the time: relating new concepts to the student's existing knowledge.

The students themselves can play an active part in this process, through class discussion.

However you approach it, the interesting thing for me is that the use of a few well-chosen pictures can really open doors -- including a few that you may not even have known were there!

In this article I look at 14 suggestions.

This article is available only to subscribers to the Practical ICT eJournal. Click the link to find out more about this high-value, low-cost, subscription, and to download a sampler, and an index to the 40+ articles published over the last school year.

Today I'm looking a some photos that might have sparked off an historical investigation if I'd had more time.

Whilst looking for a nice-looking hostelry in Dunwich in Suffolk, my wife and I came upon the ruins of a monastery. We decided to investigate.

I don't know why, but I love these kind of sites. I try to imagine what life must have been like in those days -- not only for the people who lived in the monastery itself, the monks, but for the townsfolk too.

Perhaps pictures like these could spark off a similar interest on the part of pupils?

The monastery was called Greyfriars, a name derived from the fact that the monks -- or friars -- used to wear grey robes. This is another fascinating facet of history: the history of placenames, and etymology.

The monastery shown here dates from the 13th century, but is not on its original site. Dunwich itself is very much older, as you will discover here.

Very little of the original Dunwich remains today: these ruins are just about it. A few hundred years ago, it disappeared into the sea because of a geological phenomenon known as "soil creep".

Now, interestingly enough, many towns along the Suffolk coast are facing similar problems today, and it's estimated that some areas will no longer be in existence in a hundred or two years. In some areas, the Government has advocated a policy of "managed retreat". That is to say, it will allow nature to take its course. So, in a sense, there are some parallels to be drawn (or not?) between events today and those of 700 years ago.

I hope you enjoy these photos. No doubt you will be able to think of other ways in which they might be used to stimulate interest in history and other parts of the curriculum. If so, please leave a comment and tell us!

What better reason to give each curriculum leader a set of digital cameras to use as they like?

Other articles in this series:

Portrait of an artist

Litter Britain

This article is available only to subscribers to the Practical ICT eJournal. Click the link to find out more about this high-value, low-cost, subscription, and to download a sampler, and an index to the 40+ articles published over the last school year.

Rather unusually, we're running three surveys at the moment:

Are blogging and writing different from each other?

How should the design of this website be changed (if at all)?

How frequently should Practical ICT be published, and what sort of articles do you prefer?

You can read a bit more about these surveys, and ones we've run in the past, by clicking here, where you will also find links to the surveys. I look forward to your input!

You can always view the survey page by clicking on "Have your say!" in the menu on the front page of the Articles section of the website.

This article is available only to subscribers. There are two subscription options.

Computers in Classrooms is a free newsletter, for teachers who teach or use educational technology.  Click the link to find out more.

The Practical ICT eJournal is a paid subscription for leaders and managers of educational ICT, and which gives you access to all published articles on the site. Click the link to find out more about this high-value, low-cost, subscription, and to download a sampler, and an index to the 40+ articles published over the last school year.

The K12 Online Conference was a nice idea when it was first launched in 2006. It was, and still is, a great resource for teachers exploring the potential of educational technology, especially Web 2.0 applications. Now, its organisers are also organising a Not K12 Online Conference. Except that it's not an unconference but an anti-conference. Maybe. Confused? You're not the only one.

I've listened to a podcast about this twice, and this is -- how can I put it diplomatically? -- not the best idea I've ever heard.

Towards the end of the podcast Bud Hunt says:

"If you think this is the worst idea you've ever heard of or the best idea let us know, leave a comment, we wanna be transparent, we wanna have those critical friends".

So, as a self-appointed critical friend I'm taking up Bud's invitation. I don't like the idea at all, and here are my reasons why.

What is the K12 Online Conference?

Just in case you haven't heard about the K12 Online Conference, here is a quick summary of what it looks like. Just like a physical conference, it takes place in a particular period, during which presentations in different strands are made available, partly at the same time, and partly chronologically. There are Keynote speakers, and leaders for each strand. And, just like any well-run conference, the presentations remain online ad infinitum. The keynote speakers are decided upon by the conveners of the conference, and the other presentations are selected from submissions which are evaluated according to a set of criteria by a blind review process.

A bit of a paradox is identified...

Now, if you think about it from a completely logical and dispassionate point of view, having an online conference that mimics a "real" conference makes no sense whatsoever. Unlike in a physical conference, there are no physical limitations on the number of presentations you could host. So, naturally, there have been rumblings by various people about that.

"Why not make it completely open?" ,

they say, in effect.

That, apparently, is what Bud Hunt asked at the recent NECC conference:

"Why do I need K12 Online to publish my presentation? Why couldn't I just go off and do it on my own, or something like that?",

according to Darren Kurupatwa. 

... And several mistakes made

And here is where the K12 Online crew made their first mistake, in my opinion. The correct answer would have been:

"Yes, you are completely right. There is nothing to stop you publishing your own presentation, and you certainly do not need this conference. However, our conference aims to plug a particular gap, by targetting a particular type of teacher, and so opening it up would not be appropriate."

Unfortunately, they decided that they ought to look into opening it up, and hence the idea of the "Not K12 Online Conference" was born, with Bud heading up a committee to look into what this might look like.

Now, nobody can doubt the conveners' passion, and they admit themselves that they have no idea what this "non-conference" might look like, but the podcast throws up all sorts of half-baked notions and paradoxes:

"The aim of the non-conference is to give everyone a chance to participate."

Well, they already do have a chance to participate. You can get started with a free blog in about 5 minutes tops, and web space is so inexpensive these days that just about anyone can start their own online presence. In fact, they could start their own Ning community and have it all.

OK, people may not feel confident to do that, and in any case doing a presentation under the auspices of a well-known entity is a good way of ensuring that it will be looked at by people other than you and your mum and dad. So, does "giving everyone a chance to participate" mean a kind of free-for-all, with no restrictions?

Um, no. Wes Fryer (I think) says:

"There will still be some boundaries and some guidelines".

Why? Either everyone can participate or they can't. Or are you saying that people can participate as long as they do so according to your rules?

In my last teaching job, the Headteacher called me into his office on my second day. He said:

"Terry, I just want you to know that I run a democracy here."

"Oh yes?", I replied.

"Yes", came the response. "You are free to agree with my decisions, or resign!"

Have the K12 conveners been to the same school of management?

Well, possibly not, because Darren says, a few moments later:

"There will never again be a voice that cannot be heard"

Great. So that means I have no worries then, right? Er, not quite. Darren again:

"How does the cream rise to the top?"

Cream? Oh, so there are going to be judgements involved, and the implication is that if my submission for the non-conference is rejected, I am definitely not the cream!

So what restrictions will be lifted? Wes states that the current 20 minute limit will go out of the window. Wait! Does that mean that we could end up seeing presentations appearing that last for 3 hours? I like the 20 minute limitation. In fact, it's too long: if you can't say what you need to in 5 minutes, you really don't have a grip on your subject!

Now, I'm not saying all this to ridicule the people involved in any way. They themselves repeat over and over that this is full of contradictions. That's why they have set up the committee: to see if Bud and his colleagues can sort this out into something coherent that makes objective sense.

But in my opinion, the second  mistake they made was to make this podcast available at all. By all means publish a blog where you put forward a few half-thought-out ideas and invite opinions. Or even make a short podcast. But I really don't think a 20 minute podcast of a discussion in which the participants are, in effect, thinking out loud does anybody any favours. A blog or a wiki would have been fine; a podcast is too difficult to comment on. In getting the few quotes I have used in this post, it has taken me ages to go backwards and forwards trying to find the right snippet, and then stopping and starting the playback whilst I typed up what exactly was said. Even so, the quote from Bud about wanting critical friends is not absolutely precise, but it's near enough for me to have not changed the sense of it at all.

Making a long-ish podcast of this nature is brave, yes. But is it sensible? I'm not so sure.

The third mistake they made was calling it "Not K12 Online", which was an error of judgement for two reasons they may not have been aware of.

Firstly, last year I was approached by three separate people asking me if I would work with them to set up an alternative online conference, because they didn't like certain things about K12 Online. I declined all three invitations.

However, when I got wind of the fact that there was something called "Not K12 Online", I immediately assumed that someone had gone ahead with an alternative event, for negative rather than positive reasons. Then, of course, I discovered that the K12 people themselves had come up with the concept. Unfortunately, the negative connotation has never quite left me. So in PR terms I think the name was a bit of a mistake.

Secondly, in a sense it was also a mistake because there used to be a satirical TV programme in the UK called "Not the 9-o'clock News", and The Times once produced a spoof edition called "Not The Times". You can read about both of these here. It is hard to hear the term "Not K12 Online" without associating it with some sort of joke.

So, to summarise so far, I think the following mistakes have been made:

1. Even considering the idea of expanding the conference beyond its original remit.

2. Making a podcast about it before they had fully thought it through.

3. Calling it "Not K12 Online".

What to do about it?

I think the K12 people have several options open to them, none of them mutually exclusive:

• Ignore this post. That would be their prerogative.
  
  
• Tell me I'm wrong. I am very happy to be corrected: if there is a real need for a non-conference I'd love to know what it is, and if they don't think they've made mistakes, I'd be interested in that too. I do not have a closed mind on these issues!
  
  
• The one mistake that was not made by the K12 organisers was getting Bud Hunt involved. He has made a podcast about it which is coherent and logical. So, I hope they will make the most of this by letting Bud and his team get on with it.  He makes a more compelling case than they do, though I am still yet to be convinced.
  
  I don't know what the exact relationship is between Bud's committee and the rest of the K12 Online Conference, but I think his committee should be allowed to be as autonomous as possible. It will then be interesting to see what comes out of it.

My advice to Bud and his committee

• I think Not K12 Online is predicated on a completely undesirable premise: that we actually want anyone to have a voice, as Darren put it. Or at least, having had experience of people wasting my time with long rambling forum posts, emails, or whatever, sometimes including some quite insulting, if not offensive content, why would I want to help facilitate that?
  
  One of the primary duties of a conference organiser, surely, is to accept the responsibility of sifting through submissions in order to end up with what they think is the best. We may disagree with the final decisions, but the answer is to make the selection process better, or different, not dilute it or get rid of it all together. It all sounds too 1960s for me: if I wanted to be a hippy, I'd join a commune!
  
  So my advice here is to not open it up to anyone, but perhaps find a way of involving people who might have submitted a proposal to the main K12 Online Conference had the themes, or their expertise, or whatever been slightly different.
  
  
• Alternatively, focus on virtual poster presentations, ie mini-presentations that serve to showcase a project or bring a particular event to people's attention.
  
  
• Do not make it a space for presentations that didn't quite make it to the K12 Online Conference: nobody wants to be thought of as second best.

This article is available only to subscribers to the Practical ICT eJournal. Click the link to find out more about this high-value, low-cost, subscription, and to download a sampler, and an index to the 40+ articles published over the last school year.

I think it needs some work. When I get a bit of time, perhaps I will create several versions, showing different settings. I hope to use this as a sort of warning indicator -- so that you can read the rants and ignore any post that looks like it might be all sweetness and light.

Anyway, rather than dwell on all of the things that have got me "wound up" (which I will deal with gradually in my own time, after a bit more research/investigation) I just want to focus on the following:

Politicians ("Warm" setting)

Politicians

I attended a dinner recently where I shared a table with people from Becta, the QCA and other government-related organisations, including a Member of Parliament. Now, obviously I don't want to mention names, especially as he was extremely personable, good company, and generally very pleasant and interesting to talk to for several hours.

However, a curious thing about most politicians most of the time is that they are like walking party manifestos, and to an extent my dinner companion was no exception. One almost expected a comment such as

"The soup is delicious"

to be greeted by the response,

"Yes, under our governance, the number of people reporting that their soup is delicious has increased by 12%, and our target now is to measure restaurants' capacity to improve soup rather than only the quality of the soup itself."

A few years ago I was at a party given by a friend of my wife's, and one of her friends (ie my wife's friend's friend) was a Member of Parliament -- and she was exactly the same. Pleasant, personable, and a perfect embodiment of The Party.

So, I was thinking about this, and it suddenly dawned on me where I'd come across this sort of thing before. Many moons ago I used to belong to an amateur dramatics society. At the end of my first play, a club veteran told me that I should never go "out front" in costume, because it would spoil the illusion. In fact, he said, you should not go out front at all until the very last member of the audience had left -- for the same reason.

In other words, an actor is "always on", and I suppose it is precisely the same for politicians, only with more at stake. After all, they don't know what will happen if they let their guard down and let slip something that perhaps they shouldn't. How would they know that you won't publicise it in some way? 

So what is it that winds me up? Actually, I'm not sure I can put my finger on it, but I suppose it's this. If you take any particular area of life, whether it's knife crime or the percentage of schools with an internet connection, the politician will almost never deal with the situation as it appears real to you.

For example, you might say something like:

"I know of schools where the so-called internet connection consists of one dial-up modem that is located in the Vice Principal's office and available for use only every other Wednesday afternoon.",

and the response you get will be along the lines of:

"Over the past 5 years the number of schools with a fast broadband internet connection has reached 98%."

We can learn from this, of course, by becoming politicians (with a small "p") ourselves. The next time your Principal says that she is surprised and disappointed that having walked around the school she saw hardly any teachers making use of the educational technology in their classrooms, remind her that since you were appointed the percentage of teachers stating that they feel confident in using educational technology has increased at a far greater rate than at any time in living memory, and now stands at 78%.

(Please remember that anything said in this column does not constitute career advice, and if you get fired as a result of saying anything like that I am not responsible.)

Politicians, on the whole, do not deal with reality in any objective sense. Yes, there are unfortunate facts, but there are fewer than under the previous lot, and they are being diminished at a faster rate than at any other time since the Normans invaded back in 1066, or since the Declaration of Independence.

To be honest, I find this all rather humorous, as you may have gathered from my somewhat tongue-in-cheek attitude. But to be serious for a moment, it seems to me that what we need to be aware of is the full facts and figures as they pertain to our own situation, and to be prepared to challenge things on that basis.

For example, some years ago a school Principal told me that the school's computers were nearly ten years old because they didn't have the money to replace them. I asked him what he had done with the money that had been given to the school each year over the past 5 years specifically for buying computer equipment.

In fact, I think I was universally hated by school Principals in that particular area because each year I sent an email to the Head of ICT or ICT Co-ordinator telling them the exact amount of money that was being given to their school for educational technology, the associated budget code, and the date it would be in the school's account.

In another example, I proved to my head teacher, through a spreadsheet analysis, that the reason I was running out of funds months in advance of everyone else was that the school's English department was using my facilities to make hundreds of full colour printouts each week, because it was cheaper (for them) than paying the school's reprographics department to photocopy them. What I needed was either less money, with each department getting their own slice of the budget, or more money so I could pay for it. What I did not need was to be told that I had been given a fair allocation of the school's finances, because it was not a fair allocation in any real sense.

What each of those cases has in common is that the Principals concerned each had their own version of reality, which I was able to challenge because I had the right facts and figures at my fingertips.

Although I started off this article being somewhat flippant, I do think there are serious points to be made:

1. People at all levels of authority can yield to the temptation to see how things ought to be rather than how they really are. This is, in fact, the inverse of Ambrose Bierce's definition of a cynic:

"A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be."

2. By the same token, there is a huge temptation to use statistics in such a way as to prove something that, by any real measure, is patently untrue. It is surely no accident that Darrell Huff's "How To Lie With Statistics" was such a huge success when it was first published?

3. Not acknowledging that there is a problem is only a short-term measure. Take knife crime in the UK. This is perceived to be something that has arisen fairly recently, and suddenly. In fact, all the signs were there 20 years ago but, as I recall, were not talked about.

Politicians, principals and other people are perfectly entitled to see the world through their own tinted spectacles. But I think that it's incumbent upon educationalists to  be prepared to challenge those perceptions where they conflict with our own experience, and the education of our students.

And yet, if you're to ensure consistency of standards, and high ones at that, it is essential that they do attend. Or is it? Here are seven techniques that have been found effective.

This article is available only to subscribers to the Practical ICT eJournal. Click the link to find out more about this high-value, low-cost, subscription, and to download a sampler, and an index to the 40+ articles published over the last school year.

This article is available only to subscribers to the Practical ICT eJournal. Click the link to find out more about this high-value, low-cost, subscription, and to download a sampler, and an index to the 40+ articles published over the last school year.

Here's the second instalment of a new two-parter on the same theme, with 22 suggestions. There are 12 new suggestions today; the first 10 were published here.

This article is available only to subscribers to the Practical ICT eJournal. Click the link to find out more about this high-value, low-cost, subscription.

In this series I'm looking at how well-chosen digital photos can be used in different areas of the curriculum. In the first one, I looked at the problem of litter.

This one, however, is about a much more pleasant subject: a local artist.

I visited a beach in Suffolk recently, and came across someone painting the landscape. It was a great occasion to have my camera with me!

So who was it? Read on to find out, and to consider some possible curriculum links.

Serendipity

But before that, let me just point out that I could not have hoped for a better illustration of the correctness of my "philosophy": always carry a cam! You never know when you're going to happen upon something that would make a great photo. I would certainly recommend taking one on every class trip. In fact, I would recommend having one camera per teacher, as well as at least one class set that teachers can borrow for field trips and so on.

Extravagant, you say? Oh come on! I was in a supermarket today and it was selling a pretty ok-looking digital camera for less than £30. You could buy a class set (sharing one between two) for less than the price of a single computer system, so what's the problem? But I digress....

The artist

The artist was (and no doubt still is) Patrick Boswell. He lives in Norfolk, which is in a different County (though not too far away). So what was he doing in Suffolk?

Patrick informed me that he was working on a follow-up to his last book. He spent a year painting Norwich street scenes, and you can read about that here.

This time, the theme is beach scenes, and the book should be out next year. I presume it is going to be published by the same company, Frontier Publishing, so look out for that on their website if you like local art and paintings of seashores.

Patrick also has a website, where you can view his paintings in miniature.

A bit of a thrill

OK, perhaps I have lived a sheltered life, but in all my years I have never actually seen an artist in at work, in situ. (Unless, that is, you count a few pavement artists I've come across.)

Also, I'd always assumed that you couldn't paint quickly in oils. I don't know why I thought that, but I did: I've always associated that sort of painting with watercolours.

In any event, it's pretty admirable. If I'd been asked to paint beach scenes, I'd probably take photos and then paint them instead, at my leisure!

Relevance to the curriculum

Schools often arrange visits by local artists and authors. Why not supplement that by photos of the artist at work? Obviously, it would take a bit of arranging, but it could be done.

On the other hand, if you and your class were to come across a local personage, it could be used as a starting point for further research. The obvious focus of the research is the artist himself in this case, and you could get the pupils to do a very nice presentation involving links to the paintings as well as some biographical information about the person concerned.

However, there are other possibilities too:

IT

How could the artist's website be improved, if at all? Could a group of students come up with a specification for selling more paintings over the internet?

Local geography and local history

How has the local area changed over the years, according to how it has been depicted in paintings and drawings, and photographs?

Citizenship and social studies

What's it like working as an artist? Should artists (and musicians and writers) be funded by the State if they're not selling enough to live on? Are there any other people living in the area who are local craftsmen and women?

Media Studies

Are the paintings by people like Patrick realistic? Are they meant to be? Do they depict the scene in a way that is meant to elicit a particular kind of feeling or viewpoint?

English

Use the picture as a starting point for a poem or story.

Conclusion

As I think this brief article has shown, being in the right place at the right time, armed with a digital camera, can open up all sorts of educational opportunities and possibilities. I'd be interested to learn if you can think of any other curriculum applications for this kind photo and the circumstances in which it was taken.

If you enjoyed this article and found it useful, you may also like the one about litter in the English countryside.

Here's a new two-parter on the same theme, with 21 suggestions. There are ten new suggestions today; the next eleven will follow in two days' time.

As you may have seen, I've been thinking about making a few big changes for some time now, and have recently set up a survey to find out what people think. This has been very useful so far, and I've been experimenting and acting on some of the suggestions. My primary motive is to try and make the information more accessible, in the sense of letting people know what's there.

I'd like to thank Andrew Field in particular, for some very pragmatic suggestions and links. Check out his Effective ICT website, especially 20 Ideas in 20 Minutes. It's excellent, both in itself and as a way of getting the old mental juices flowing.

Anyway, here is a list of the things I've done so far, not all of which may be permanent: please bear with me!

• Moved the yellow menu up to the top of the page. It had gradually moved lower and lower as I added more links and widgets.
  
  
• Added a few items to the menu: the main RSS feed links, plus links to information about the Computers in Classrooms newsletter and the Practical ICT eJournal.
  
  
• Changed the text of one or two menu items.
  
  
• Changed the menu font.
  
  
• Removed the Live Help widget.
  
  
• Changed the font of the most recent articles from Arial and Georgia to Tahoma.

If you have any views about these changes, please feel free to comment, or complete the survey.

Thanks.

I was recently invited to an event at Nottingham University. Known as "the sandpit", it was an opportunity to look at developments in Web 2.0 technology being undertaken by the Learning Sciences Research Institute.

I was quite taken with one application in particular, Video Pathways. Here is a description and explanation of what it does, and how it might be used in schools.

What is Video Pathways?

Video Pathways, which is currently in an alpha version, is quite a nice fresh take on making use of YouTube in the curriculum. The basic idea is very simple: you find videos on YouTube, and then arrange them in the order of your choice (a pathway), after which they will be played in sequence with no further input from you. In a sense, it's a way of mashing up video clips.

So what you do, in effect, is this:

1. Think of a project idea. It could be, say, to show the changes in dress over the last 50 years.
   
   
2. Find videos on YouTube that you could use in such a project.
   
   
3. Arrange the videos in different ways in order to being out different points.

Here are some screenshots I took to illustrate the process.

In the first one, I had already found the video I wanted to use, and copied and pasted the URL into Video Pathways.

In the second one, I searched for the clip I wanted from within Video Pathways itself.

The final screenshot shows my completed project. It consists of 4 movie clips, which I have arranged into 3 different pathways.

The editing facility is fairly basic, allowing you only to trim the video clips, not to add titles or effects or anything like that.

Uses for Video Pathways

I can think of a number of uses for Video Pathways, such as the following:

Sequencing activities

Create a movie project complete with video clips, and ask the students to create a pathway with the clips in the correct order. This type of activity would work for technical processes, history, and even subjects like Citizenship. Digital storytelling is another obvious example of how this might be used.

Create your own viewpoint

Alternatively, give students the project title, and ask them to find the movie clips that would illustrate the theme. You could ask them to create different pathways to show different interpretations of the same "facts".

There was a marvellous tv advertisement on British television some years ago, for The Guardian newspaper. The punchline was:

"It's only when you see the whole picture that you really see what's going on."

Have a look at it:

Advantages of Video Pathways

I can see the following advantages in using Video Pathways:

• It's a good way of making use of video content that already exists. If the aim of a piece of work is not covered by creating a movie, this would make it easy to use "off-the-shelf" content. If you think about it, students should not need to create their own videos, just as they don't need to create their own clip art.
  
  
• It makes it very easy to illustrate and practice sequencing skills in a variety of ways aside from programming or music.
  
  
• Schools could create their own bank of video clips and upload them to YouTube for use in their own Video Pathways projects.
  
  
• It would, perhaps, encourage students to look for video content on YouTube in a purposeful way.
  
  
• One spin-off might be that students would be less inclined to take at face value video clips shown on programmes like the news or documentaries.

Disadvantages of using Video Pathways

At the moment I can see the following disadvantages with this application:

• It works only with YouTube. As a proof of concept it's great, but ideally it should work with any video-sharing service. In particular, using Youtube is not a good idea as it is banned in so many schools.
  
  
• The intellectual property rights issue would need to be sorted out, but I can't see that happening any time soon.
  
  
• The editing facilities are very limited. It would be useful to add titles and transition effects between video clips.

Conclusion

There are lots of video-sharing websites of varying educational relevance. I think that Video Pathways gives us a glimpse of how such sites could progress from being just a publishing and sharing space, to something that enables the viewer to be more creative with the content available.

Acknowledgements

I'd like to thank Ralph Barthel of the LSRI for kindly giving me login access to Video Pathways.

Over to you

I'd be interested in your thoughts about Video Pathways. I'll draw Ralph's attention to any comments you may have.

I've been spending part of the weekend updating parts of the website that are to do with my work, and what people think of my work, the Practical ICT subscription,and thinking about the design of the website.

I have also set up a survey to obtain feedback.

These are the relevant pages:

• I have updated my onl