Hi all, I’m a new poster to the odeworld blog. My name is Peter Marshall and I’ve recently joined the ode team as a software engineer and was prompted by Mr B to blog a couple of observations that peaked his interest. So here goes!
I saw an announcement today for another £100 laptop for school kids, the “Elonex One” http://www.elonexone.co.uk that will be running the Linux OS. This also comes hot on the heels of the Eeepc from Asus http://eeepc.asus.com/uk/guide.htm and they’re both very impressive.
I can also say, from first hand experience, that there is a lot of interest in these small PCs from my children and their friends. The interest to own one is being driven by the children; it doesn’t appear to be a parent led thing as in “lets buy a PC because its educational”.
I am also seeing a significant change in the way my children use and collaborate on work at school.
I think its beginning to turn into a movement driven by and for the student.
The government and schools always thought that they had to provide email for pupils. I distinctly remember there were government led initiatives to provide an email address for every school child (they failed). It became apparent it was unnecessary. No school child uses their school email address (even if they have one). They have always sourced their own.
The same has happened to documents and files. Schools thought they had to provide networks and file space and protection and all kinds of administration and support for children to upload homework files etc. Well, they don’t. Not anymore. My children use Google docs to collaborate (IN REAL TIME) with their mates to create work.
They also don’t bother to use the school network anymore. The school network naturally restricts how much space they can use to store work and students moving from the mindset outside school of web hosting services that freely grant upwards of 100GB of space to a school model that perhaps gives them 50MB and you can see why.
I can see that moving forward the only service the school has to provide is high speed access to the internet. Both the Asus Eeepc and the Elonexone devices come with full wireless internet access. Aside from any mindless controversy I think schools will very soon start to provide blanket wireless access points for pupils. In fact, it’s inevitable.
My children have made videos of their friends explaining all about pathogens for their biology homework. They upload the videos on to Youtube or Vimeo and present them in school (the school has not blocked Youtube…yet!).
Before the lesson most of the class has seen the video and rated or commented on it (because the link was shared using social networking sites in a peer to peer fashion). All this happens long before the teacher saw it in class.
What does this imply? That the teacher in this instance has become the slow link in the learning chain. And it will take a fundamental shift in thinking to make them once again an intrinsic part of the learning loop going forward.
From the students perspective a lot is changing very fast and the technology is naturally appearing to facilitate it. Demand and supply. I can see children progressing and branching in their own direction at such a pace I fear schools and the education sector are just getting left behind.
These small incredibly cheap PCs come with Linux, access to open source collaboration tools and wireless access and I think they are going to cause some big changes.
Go and see the video here: Biology video about Pathogens from Pierre Marshall on Vimeo.
4 comments
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March 6, 2008 at 10:13 pm
Martin Hibbert
Wow
March 26, 2008 at 12:42 am
David Hicks
I’ve worked with the IT staff and systems in quite a variety of schools now, and I agree with the general gist of what you’re saying (schools are looking a bit left behind when it comes to 21st century technology), although there’s a few things worth commenting on:
> No school child uses their school email address (even if they have
> one). They have always sourced their own. [snip] My children use
> Google docs to collaborate (IN REAL TIME) with their mates to create
> work. [snip] They also don’t bother to use the school network
> anymore. [snip] I can see that moving forward the only service the
> school has to provide is high speed access to the internet.
There’s a couple of problems - reliance on the Internet connection, and reliance on the goodness of Google.
Internet connections, especially in schools, tend to be a touch fallible. They are often slow (limited bandwidth) and sometimes conk out. They also have a distressing tendency to be run by the local education authority, who tend to embody everything the word “bureaucracy” brings to mind. The school Internet connection, for the reasonably foreseeable future, will be a limiting factor - limited bandwidth, latency (also bear in mind that future increases in bandwidth are likely to be negated by the uses we find for it - the expectation for higher-quality YouTube videos will grow). It doesn’t do to rely too much on the Internet connection right at the moment - best to have services such as your VLE local to the school, or at least a cache of some sort.
The other thing is the relianace on Google (or Microsoft, or Apple, or LocalSmallCo, or whoever). This isn’t an anti-capalist rant, it’s just that companies are companies and in business to make a profit, not to look after the best interests of school children. Google make money by pushing adverts along with email - nothing wrong with that, but I kind of feel that children should have an advert-free learning environment.
> I think schools will very soon start to provide blanket wireless access
> points for pupils.
There are technical problems doing this at the moment - there is only so much wireless bandwidth available, and 30-odd laptops per room all accessing the network will soon use that up. It’s the sort of thing that will get sorted out eventually, but it’ll take a few years. The UMPC is decidedly first-generation right at the moment.
> Before the lesson most of the class has seen the video and rated
> or commented on it (because the link was shared using social
> networking sites in a peer to peer fashion).
Which is good and all, but the teacher is still the one who is best able to judge the work’s worth. You can and should get marks for presentation and effort, but at some stage someone’s got to say whether the information content is right or not. Sure, it’s good if the teacher can maybe find and comment on an online presentation - but then again, the teacher is then endorsing an external, commercial organisation’s system. Why should pupils have to do their work on YouTube’s system (and watch YouTube’s adverts)? It’s good that the teacher is the “slow” link - there needs to be someone to get pupils to stop and think, not just blunder blindly on.
–
David Hicks
March 26, 2008 at 10:27 am
Mr B
Hey Mr Hicks,
I agree - a reliable internet connection and high bandwidth capabilities are paramount towards achieving a learning environment as touched on above.
If it was up to me I’d try to make sure schools benefited first from bandwidth increases. Speed increases are unstoppable - it won’t be long before we see 100mbps speeds in the UK when BT pull their finger out and get on with fibre conversions. I’d just make sure schools got that first.
No one would deny a teacher is best placed to assess the quality, accuracy or relevance of a students work. I don’t see too much wrong about about a teacher commenting on a students work hosted on a video service as long as there is a more formal assessment later on. The alternative is not to be involved in the conversation at all.
Perhaps they need to encourage posting to educationally focused sites instead. Check out our (mock) VOX learning site: http://learn.vox.com/ . We quickly built it to show how a teacher could construct an online learning space for little cost. Then their students could be encouraged to show and tell in that safer space instead (plus the teacher would be more in the hot seat).
Of course you do suffer dependencies on external services. ode will have the same issue - do you feel safe having your content hosted with someone else? What if the site goes down or the service gets canceled? And so on. It is a risk that should be carefully considered and where locally hosted services could be more appropriate.
Thanks for your comment though - stimulating as ever!
April 6, 2008 at 8:30 pm
David Hicks
Sorry - meant to check back for replies earlier!
Just been having a conversation over on Edugeek about a BBC article:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/7329992.stm
conversation at:
http://www.edugeek.net/forums/general-chat/17677-bbc-click-us-broadband-report.html
We’re basically saying that school are going to have “slow” broadband speeds for a while yet. Actually some schools could theoretically have speedy connections right now - I know my old workplace in Cambridge had a fibre backbone running right past the front door, but the broadband connection was provided by the LEA instead.
> ode will have the same issue - do you feel safe having your content
> hosted with someone else?
Nope - I’d offer content on Ode, but I’d want a school to be able to download and use it locally.
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David Hicks