Category Archive

I was recently made aware of the School of Everything (great name!) which looks like a very promising opportunity.

They are a UK start up company in the education space with a focus on facilitating learning that doesn’t happen in school, which I think is a really simple proposition that works.

As far as I can make out they have created a web platform (hub?) that anyone who considers themselves to have a domain expertise e.g. drumming, aromatherapy, felt making, yoga, can self nominate themselves for free as a “tutor” with the aim of attracting students and earning money.

Private tutoring basically. A bit like www.eduslide.net but with people instead of elearning content. It’s all about facilitating the relationship between pupil and teacher.

For example if you are a demon backgammon player you can create a profile and market yourself, with details about who you are, where you are and what services you offer at what price.

Educators are signing up from all over the world which is encouraging, as I suspect that to truly find someone with an expertise in obscure long tail subjects (left handed pool trick shots, octopus wrangling, rice grain painting) you are going to have to look much further afield than your own backyard. Also those tutors could potentially earn good money - rare skills command premium rates.

What I would like to see:

1) The ability to rate my tutor and comment on their work. I would like all tutors to be open to a public and open discussion on their methods, knowledge, ability to teach and on going support. Being an expert does not necessarily make you a good teacher. And anyone can sign up so there is no pre-validation of expertise. In a school or college as a pupil there is an (unspoken) trust agreement that the tutors have been through education and a recruitment process.

2) Software built into the School of Everything platform that meant I could video conference/screenshare with a tutor from around the world.

3) See their calendar, check out testimonials, view more photos and loads of other important stuff. I personally want to know more about the tutor, perhaps a chat function that allows me to get in touch immediately whilst the idea’s in my mind. Some stuff about their teaching methods would be nice too.

I’m sure School of Everything have considered the above points and more, they come across as a great team with some big ideas. I genuinely hope they succeed.

They are in alpha development right now and, like us, there’s loads they will want to do but it all takes time and money. C’est la vie.

I can’t help but feel School of Everything (aswell as sharing a similar attitude and space) and ode could link up in someway, via APIs if nothing else. If any of them get this trackback and are listening then get in touch!

John Davitt has included a short paragraph and link to ode in his BETT 2008 review in the Guardian Educational Link supplement.

I hope he doesn’t mind me quoting what he says about us as we’re all glowing with pride here, even if it is only a small mention, as it is alongside some august company.

Little bits of learning

Another company that may have caught the spirit of the times is Ode with its strapline “little bits of learning”. While most other suppliers are working on systems encompassing everything, Ode simply hopes to tag and share small and varied learning resources by working with content holders (blog.odeworld.co.uk).

http://education.guardian.co.uk/link/story/0,,2266345,00.html

In the article itself John has actually posted a fairly damning revue of the BETT trade show this year. The major issue as he sees it is the link between government “interference”…

“The heavy-handed compulsion for all schools to have a learning platform by the end of the year has removed the chance for schools to try some different approaches to find what suits them best.”

…and how the industry reacts e.g. the overwhelming dominance of giant VLE/LMS systems that attempt to provide all singing all dancing solutions.

By fixating on these tools he argues that the smaller more interesting elearning products are squeezed out. Potentially to the detriment of the teachers themselves.

It’s always been a bit of an in joke at each BETT I’ve attended (and I’ve been going for years now) that most of the people you might speak to if you are manning a stand are likely to be industry people who have faked their badges. John is saying we should face up to it.

“Perhaps it’s time to stop talking up Bett as something with mass-classroom appeal and accept it’s become more of a business-to-business event.”

Well, we had a blast running our stand and you might have read about it on our blog, but I guess that’s because we weren’t actually there to speak to teachers as such. We were looking for potential content partners to sell their content through the ode platform. We were quite open about that. We did speak to many teachers though as they too seemed to be intrigued by what we’re trying to do.

(And because they now have these big empty VLEs and nothing to go in them).

BETT was good to us this year but will have our own stand next year? Nope and, currently, neither will the BBC. We do hope to attend Teachmeet 09 if we can, rightly highlighted by John as one of the true stars of BETT 08.

If we do our job right and build a worthy kick ass platform for education that our users love and evangelise we simply won’t need to. Especially if BETT keeps leaning further and further towards B2B.

Also when I see EMAPs bland corporate response at the end of John’s article where they seemed to claim Teachmeet was their idea “…building on the success of the TeachMeet, our plans for 2009 are already underway to develop this feature further.” - it wasn’t, Ewan Macintosh takes all the credit for his unconference here) I don’t really warm to them.

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.

This week BBC Radio 4 are running a series of broadcasts on intellectual property called “Mine all Mine”, starting today, focusing on “the global war between the defenders of intellectual property and those determined to share it”.

It’s a look at the legal implications of digital delivery of virtual content and should be really interesting. The 4th and 5th one are of particular interest to us.

www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/mineallmine/pip/lprx3/

My Idea -Monday 25 February 15:45-16:00
Most scientists and inventors want to protect their work with patents, filing hundreds of thousands every year. But without patents could the world have cheaper healthcare and more efficient cars?

My Name- Tuesday 26 February 15:45-16:00
Trademarks have to be protected, but should anyone be allowed to trademark a colour or a phrase? And is it really a sin to buy a fake Rolex watch?

My Music- Wednesday 27 February 15:45-16:00
The music industry has been revolutionised by the internet explosion. With free music available online, why should anyone pay for it?

My Pictures-Thursday 28 February 15:45-16:00
Anyone with a broadband computer can now download and watch virtually any movie free of charge. This is illegal, but the chances of being prosecuted are close to zero. Some consider this the death of an industry, but others call it healthy anarchy.

My Words-Friday 29 February 15:45-16:00
Plagiarism has become a nightmare for teachers, publishers and journalists. Anyone from a lowly GCSE student to a high-profile writer can easily copy a chunk of text from a website, and it is equally easy to catch someone doing so. But there are those who defend the free exchange of other people’s words as a basic liberty.

I hope they don’t mind me cutting and pasting their listing into this blog. That would be ironic, eh?

As a visitor (or stand owner, it wasn’t too clear) at BETT I was emailed a link to a web survey this morning which at the end promised me exclusive access to a NERP report (National Education Research Panel) concerning the “new technology outlook (for schools) in 2008″ driven by data gathered from “422 primary and 272 secondary schools cross the UK” in Dec ‘07.

Amongst the usual bar charts and stat heavy paragraphs I soon noticed that mobile learning was taking a real hammering and schools were instead focusing heavily on front of class ICT.

In Primary Schools “…mobile devices continue being of little value or not utilised by the majority of Primary schools.“

In Secondary Schools “…little or no investment is planned for mobile devices“.

This contrasted massively against the move towards more teacher-centric (or should that be static?) ICT utilities:

“Broadly, it can be determined that primary schools are more likely to value teacher-facing technologies such as IWBs, while secondary schools are more likely to value the core ICT infrastructure.”

“Secondary schools are mostly likely to make large investments in learning platforms (22%), and IWBs (23%).”

Again and again mobile ICT learning came out badly and teacher led ICT learning came out strongly.

Initially this led me to wonder if the fault lies with the mobile device manufacturers for making their products too expensive when compared to the (perceived) benefit it brings to the learning (”Secondary schools are…most likely to identify mobile devices as offering poor value-for-money“) . Or does the emphasis lie with mobile content publishers for not producing assets that capture teachers imaginations?

“Registration systems and mobile devices are more likely to be perceived as offering poor value-for-money.”

You could simply read into all this that teachers think the cost to benefit ratio is too high. But when you see this data alongside the drive to IWBs and VLEs it starts to look more than a cold financial decision: are schools afraid to move from a teacher controlled, front of class model (the interactive whiteboard) to a distributed, more student controlled model (the mobile device)?

Is it fear of letting go some of that control that is pushing mobile learning further and further from their minds? ICT has exploded into classrooms since the late 90’s and I can imagine schools are only now starting to get a true handle on it all. So is m-learning just a technology too far right now?

Or is it the perhaps unspoken idea that somehow the outside world of ipods, mobile/smart phones, Sony PSP, Nintendo DS, Palm Pilots and so on are intrusive, chaotic and blur too obviously the boundaries between study (work) and non-study (play)?

Or is it something more practical? The small size of these devices could be an issue - after all a teacher can at least physically monitor a laptop screen or a Whiteboard - who can tell what’s going on on 30 small mobile devices in the classroom?

I don’t know - I’m not a teacher. But it’s obvious something fundamental has to shift and I think it’s a mindset, from LA level to Classroom teacher.

Of course data such as “…more than half of primary schools indicate the best delivery method for curriculum content in 2008 is via websites” and the emphasis on IWBs and VLEs is great for ode in general, it’s still a little disheartening that mobile learning investment is on such a downer.

Perhaps ode could contribute a kick start to m-learning - after all little bits of learning suit little learning devices, right?

The scope for mobile learning is enormous. The Wolverhampton “Learning2go” project has done some incredible work and companies such as m-learning.mobi look really interesting. There’s even a dedicated conference, Handheld Learning, although anyone that promotes a conference by using a quote from a Guardian journalist that says “These are not new technologies, and the speakers weren’t saying anything they hadn’t said several times before” doesn’t exactly fill you with confidence.

I am 100% sure that one day someone will crack it and break down the barrier. It may be a generational thing - a mobile savvy 7 year old in a classroom today could be a captain of m-learning industry tomorrow.

I’m at the lovely Teachmeet 08 gathering at Olympia, ably unorganised by Ewan McIntosh.

18:12 ish. I was chuffed that Ewan described ode as “funky”.

Things are moving quickly so this might be pretty incoherent until I get a chance to come back and clean it up a bit.

18:35 Ian Usher is talking about Moodle. We like Moodle…we really want to provide tools that work with Moodle in the future. He had a quick word about content and content providers. To paraphrase… “teachers don’t like buying a “big fat box” of it”…he mentioned ode too. (edit- It went by in a slight blur but hopefully it was mentioned as an exception to the existing content provider paradigm. Here is Ian’s blog post about Teachmeet)

Right now a great mashup of Subterranean Homesick Blues just finished playing in his presentation.

It’s all very interesting with other things talked about so far…Resources for Innovators in Schools plus a look at the Asus EeePC.

Unfortunately, Alex Savage was due to speak but had to leave to catch a train.

18:45 Blogging in a primary environment using Honeycomb is being presented by Vivien Bailey.

18:50 Yacapaca sounds pretty neat!

PS - After a long day on a stand at the trade show, the beer is tasting good

20:28 Just heard Derek Robertson’s great talk about games in education in Scottish schools…really good. Had a small nap…but I’m back!

Now for some pizza.

The growing buzz we were generating at BETT soon made us forget our tired feet and sore backs as our stand became swamped almost from the moment the doors opened. So forgive the ebullience of this post: we’re just having so much fun.

What surprised us (we all thought beforehand that we’d be lucky to get any visitors to our stand beyond people asking if we knew where the toilets were) was how many people deliberately sought us out. We’ve never shown ode publicly before and we assumed no one knew who we are; we had hoped to catch people’s passing attention at best.

Hmmm, that was a little naive in hindsight.

People who had read the blog, heard about us on the industry grapevine or seen our entry in the BETT literature, liked what they saw, made a bee line for us and were excited by what we are trying to do.

Some simply wanted to say “keep up the good work, I hope it succeeds”, others wanted to quiz us on technical details or put faces to names.

Others wanted to see what had only existed as words on a blog in 2007, others still brought friends and colleagues to the stand as they had seen some potential and wanted to open their eyes too.

It was a very eclectic mix of visitors, both private and public sector, and we loved speaking to you all. There’s no greater buzz for me than trying to sell something that I am passionate about.

And with ode, during the demo, there was ALWAYS a moment when they grinned. It might have been :

• when they were informed all content in ode is NC Specifier tagged thus making it easy to find.
• when they saw the playlist function.
• when they saw a video streaming or an audio file playing directly from their ode library.
• that content would be peer reviewed.
• the idea that we would let users reduce what ode can do to make their experience as simple, direct or complex as they wanted.
• when they saw how small and cute our business cards were.

Without naming names, one LEA Elearning Director said until he saw ode he was worried BETT would be yet another waste of time and that it has “made his show”.

Another Head of ICT commented that he was sick of paying £400 for a CDROM and his teachers only using £40 worth and that it was hugely encouraging finding a platform that would allow his school to buy only the £40 worth, thus freeing up funds for content from other brands.

We also had a representative from the Malaysian Government swing by. He loved the idea and wants to discuss integrating ode and it’s content partners products into Malaysian schools which adds an exciting new global dimension to what ode can do.

In fact we spoke to many international visitors today - BETT is probably the biggest dedicated elearning show in the world.

A Managing Director from a Greek educational publisher wants to discuss localising ode for the Greek market. Local versions of ode depend on the rights over content for this type of sale and local curriculum tagging but we fully intend to have ODE Greece, ODE France, ODE Spain, ODE US and so on. Eventually, of course. With all the technology/platform partners we could have gathered today we wouldn’t get anything real out the door until 3008.

By removing physical distribution as an issue (all the product on ode is virtual) publishers large and small can enter markets all over the world overnight at little cost. Which can only be empowering for any teacher in any classroom when the range of trusted professional content available at affordable micropayment level is only a few clicks away 24/7/365.

It is too soon to mention every supplier we spoke to although I will do a proper update next week when I have all the details from all 4 days.

But what’s the big announcement, I imagine I hear you cry?

We signed a deal yesterday with the UK’s biggest online teacher community, Schoolzone, who are now our “Official Community Partners”.

In a nutshell we will be integrating the ode shop into the Schoolzone website, so their 100,000 registered teacher users will have immediate access to all the fantastic disaggregated content from ode at the click of a mouse. We are really excited about this collaboration and are really happy to be working with the great team at Schoolzone over the next year. And I got to swan around the Press Office shouting “Hold the front page!” too. More news on this venture as it happens.

The official PR statement below:

+++++++++++++++++++++

Pearson Education and Schoolzone announce partnership deal in revolutionary web-based personalised e-learning store

Bett, London, 10 January 2008 - Pearson Education today announces that it has linked up with Schoolzone to be its exclusive schools community partner for ode, the next generation, free-access content store for educators.

Ode, backed by Pearson, is working with more than 20 education content publishers to provide teachers with the means to buy, download and create personalised lessons. The platform will sell ‘little bits of learning’ on a pay-as-you-go basis, allowing teachers to buy or rent individual pieces of content on demand – videos, audio files, worksheets, presentations, exam papers, interactive tools, animated games and so on – the list could be endless.

Chris Bradford, ode co-founder, says: ‘ode is a platform, rather like Amazon or iTunes, that will give educators unparalleled access to digital assets. We’re building to launch in stages throughout 2008 to bring together a community of educators and content providers. The partnership with Schoolzone is a significant phase in the development of ode.’

Elizabeth Collie, Commercial Director of Schoolzone, says: ‘Schoolzone is the natural home for content stores like ode. Embedding the service into our site will enhance and enrich our community offering, while providing ode with a ready-made community of educators looking for content.’

Ends

About Pearson Education

Educating 100 million people worldwide and with offices in over 30 countries, Pearson Education is the global leader in education publishing, providing scientifically research-based print and digital programmes to help students of all ages learn at their own pace, in their own way.

In the UK, Pearson Education is the largest and fastest-growing educational publisher. It offers leading-edge teaching and learning resources under the BBC Active, Causeway Books, Edexcel Learning, Ginn, Heinemann, KnowledgeBox, Longman, Payne-Gallway, Pearson Phoenix and Rigby names.

About Schoolzone

Schoolzone is the UK’s busiest online education community, with a strong reputation for online teacher and curriculum focused search engines, peer group reviews and evaluations of digital content. The site receives over 30,000 unique users a day, making it one of the UK’s most used educational sites, as well as the biggest – it lists 41,000 educational sites reviewed by teachers, 6,000 events and organisers, 35,000 schools and colleges, 6,200 educational suppliers and many, many thousands of educational products and services.

+++++++++++++++++++++

More news next week about Friday and Saturday at BETT and James and Ed’s attendance at the cutting edge Teachermeet at BETT tonight.

We are contributing towards their pizza extravaganza. This is the first thing we’ve ever sponsored officially which makes us feel all grown up but to get our idea in front of so many ICT/elearning thinkers who are doing some brilliant and envelope pushing things is an honour and well worth it.

Have fun, guys.

I am writing this in our hotel suite after our first ever day at BETT. Our feet and backs hurt but what a day! We’ve had massive amounts of interest from an eclectic range of suppliers and spoke to lots of teachers about ode. Basically we’re exhausted but glowing with pride that our platform was received so warmly by so many people.

But you’ll have to excuse this short post as my feet hurt and there’s a Wagamama round the corner and I’m starving. I will post much more considered and reflective detail later this week when I’ve had time to absorb it all.

I’m also BURSTING to tell you about a deal we sealed today which we’re all excited about but I want to make sure we announce it right. So come back tomorrow for the news hot off the press.

Anyway, if you visited us today we are humbled and grateful for your time and interest - it was a genuine pleasure to speak to you all. Have some photos to tide you over until proper posts later this week.

The riot of elearning goodness and bottomless marketing budgets that is BETT

Our stand. It can’t compare to the carnival of excess on the lower floors but we like it. Plus the rolling green hills make us feel soothed.

Anthony entranced by our massively over the top 24″ imacs.

An arty photo by Dik, clearly influenced by a quiet period

In the words of Jim Anchower, one of my favorite all time Onion columnists, I know it’s been a long time since I rapped at ya, but the pedal is to the metal right now, if you know what I mean.

Alongside progressing a host of exciting content and platform partnerships that I’d love to tell you about (but should wait for the ink to dry first or the lawyers will send in the big dogs) we’ve been trying to get ready for our first BETT.

For those of you who don’t know about it or have never been BETT is THE elearning industry trade show in the UK. It’s run over 4 days and held in Kensington Olympia in London. I’ve been many times, occasionally manning a stand (tough, tough work), most times as a visitor and last January as a one man band bugging whoever would listen that ode was coming.

This time we have our own stand: N30 on the upper balcony. It’s 4m x 2m (about the same size as a walk in wardrobe) and will be our first outing in the glare of the public. Up until now other people have always set stands up for me but going through it this year for the first time I have a new found respect for those people who organise these trade show events.

Trust me, it’s a labour of love and frustration. And the whole time you cannot shake the feeling that it’s a lot of money with a questionable return on investment. So you have to know why you are going and how to measure success. These are some of the major questions we have had to ask ourselves…

1. Why are you going? Strangely enough, the answer to this is usually because everyone else is so you should too. But it’s always a good idea to have a secondary interest and know what you want to get out of it before you go. We want to meet any content/platform companies interested in ode and get them on board. And if any educators want to join in as beta users even better. We will have a little postcard thing to fill out just for that purpose.
2. Who is going to run your stand? This is important - remember these folks will be meeting your customers and clients face to face, perhaps for the first time. Can they sell your idea? Are they all aware of what to say and how to get value from visitors to your stand? You may also have to have a thick skin as people may knock or not be impressed by your product. You must certainly have a strong bladder. Then you have to rota everyone, organise the hotel, sort out stand food, a place to hang your coats…
3. How do you want your stand to look? We’ve employed a proper agency to design it for us. Left to our own devices it would have been a cardboard box with a laptop on it.
4. What do you want people to wear? Suits? T-shirts and jeans? Some sort of all in one star trek type velor jump suit?
5. Who will come to your stand? It’s worth analysing who is likely to be interested in your product. Obviously we are brand new so no one has heard of us. Ultimately we want to engage with potential content suppliers who are also exhibiting at BETT and hopefully sign up a handful of interested teachers to contribute to how ode works. With all the huge educational suppliers dominating the show it’s unlikely we will register on most visitors radars but some may stumble on us - you are very welcome.
6. Should you give something away? I cannot believe some of the pointless freebies I have picked up over the years - branded pens, fluffy gonks, lightbulb erasers, highlighters, paper weights, mousemats and the current freebie du jour, the USB memory stick. So, to save some money, we thought we’d look more original by NOT giving any freebies out. There will be minicards though.
7. What’s your contingency plan? Something will go wrong I promise. Someone could go sick, the internet connection could drop out, the product could crash in front of an important customer or client, meetings could be missed, your logo might be misspelled on your stand banner, your stand could be right next door to Loud-House-Music-And-Shouty-Salesperson-Software-Company, someone could trip on a loose carpet tile and douse one of your monitors in coffee and so on. Have a selection of back up steps to cater for Muphy’s law.

Dealing with all this will cost you a fortune but you can make some brilliant contacts at events like this.

We’re not selling anything except the opportunity to collaborate with us. Even if it all goes wrong and we’re reduced to the cardboardbox/laptop scenario we’d still love to speak to you. So if you are interested in ode in any way please book an appointment with us by emailing support@odeworld.co.uk .

See you there!

Harry Verwayen at “Images for the Future” in Holland has commented in his blog on the ambitions we’ve laid down for ode, which he broadly supports. Well, he believes strongly in the vision, but, like most people, hopes to see it done right as he believes liberating educational content is vital to embrace the modern student’s outlook and behaviors.

“This is an environment where changes have been notoriously slow to take root. Where the current generation of young children that have in fact been ‘born digital’ spend their free time between msn, gameconsoles and their pc but receive their education primarily through old fashioned books and whiteboards. “

This is an evident dichotomy facing education today. A student has to walk between two worlds, you might call them “analogue” (the classroom) and “digital” (everything outside the classroom).

We should take comfort in the fact that the line is blurring (there are loads of fantastic digital torch bearing educators out there, unfortunately they are still the minority) but essentially todays students are still immersed in the same education system you can trace back through generations.

I think what we’re doing is simply the next natural evolution in teaching. In fact I’d say education lends itself more naturally to this disaggregated approach to content than most other industries - teachers have always been extremely passionate about collecting the very best materials to suit their style and their students, no matter where they come from.

The Internet has given educators an unbelievable treasure trove of content and interaction but it’s not designed for that specific use, in fact the Internet is not ‘designed’ at all - you simply find the least painful resource e.g. Google and try your best to wring everything you can out of it.

But even the mighty Google is ham strung by being designed to work for everyone (which is another way of saying it’s designed to work for no one). So as we (the collective group) get “better” at the Internet the more sites like Google will frustrate us as our needs become deeper and more profound, well beyond keyword searching.

ode will be one of a number of new “find engines“, not “search engines”, for education. The difference being a search engine expects you to know exactly how best to search for something e.g. the right combination of keywords, and gives you a single object back (the right one hopefully), a find engine provides a number of facilities to help you locate data and resources around what you want (or indeed influenced by what you already have).

Ask.com has positioned itself as a find engine although I think it misses the point somewhat - it’s still a general search engine - and the term works much better in a specific domain. It’s a need that fits well into a vertical marketplace such as education or music where peer review, editorial recommendation and folksonomy help enormously.

Ultimately ode has a major battle on it’s hands on two fronts: convincing content owners to change the way they sell their content and educators to recognise how wonderful this might be for them and their students. Still, nothing good comes easy, right?

This is an excellent idea. Simple, intriguing, addictive, educational and worthwhile. Click the logo below to join in.

No explanation needed - go along, increase your vocabulary and help end poverty too.

The irony of the thing is, any place but a movie theatre, that’s a joke, but if you sit in a theatre and hear ‘In a world‘, you don’t hear laughter.”

Don Lafontaine, the gravel voiced man who has voiced over 3,500 trailers, who wrote his own scripts and popularised the term “In a World…

There are hundreds of books, thousands of blogs and plenty of companies dedicated to marketing but promoting a new software platform into the nascent digital education market is not so well understood, or at least proven.

Web 2.0, blogs, Wikis and RSS are in schools (mainly with the students!) but are still only representative of a small percentage of the communication channels used by the majority of educators. We appreciate that.

Hence schools are still bombarded with old school calls to action: leaflets, Rep visits, catalogues, email newsletters, cold calls and conference requests to name a few. The noise must be deafening. It might not please (or surprise) the more traditional marketeers in our industry but the vast majority of these pleas for attention end up in the bin or ignored. A 1% response rate to a flyer is considered a huge victory. 1%! Think of the trees if nothing else. Just because you can measure it doesn’t mean it’s effective.

The newest generation of educators is no longer passive, but thoroughly proactive when sourcing educational content thanks to the internet. Does this make “marketing” as we understand it obsolete?

So every time the ode team is asked what our marketing strategy is we can only reply “whatever you are used to, we probably won’t do it”. This might lead you to think we’re all about stealth marketing or viral marketing or gaming Digg. But not really, that sounds like the sort of thing that would wind Bill Hicks right up and his genius is unassailable so we’ll give them a miss I think.

You can’t hide from your customers anymore behind corporate speak, business jargon or be overly manipulative. Your mistakes are amplified and your methods transparent to the world. You can no longer control the message.

We don’t want to patronise our users by pretending we’re not in a 2 way conversation with them. This is how really effective marketing has changed since the advent of the internet - you have to try harder to be relevant, be more personable and honest. Just be more exciting. One easy way to understand how using old style marketing cannot really deliver to new style consumers is the modern art of the film trailer.

The 1977 Star Wars trailer:

The 1999 Phantom Menace trailer:

The original 1977 Star Wars trailer makes the film look drab, cheap and unengaging. In fact nothing like the the actual film itself. The Phantom Menace trailer on the other hand makes the film look thrilling, mysterious, epic and heart stopping. In fact everything the film is not. A clear case of the marketing being better than the product, which happens all the time these days. What a let down, eh?

What seems to work best these days is concentrating on involving and talking to your users, getting them passionate about your offering and making the best product you can.

It’s not “If you build it they will come” it’s “If you build it and it’s awesome they will not only come but bring their friends too”.

Your product is the message.

“(Our) reason for starting ode (was) to make a difference, to create something awesome, to celebrate what technology can do in the modern classroom for the modern student and, of course, for the modern teacher.”

I spoke to a very happy Mr B the other day and hence I’m not surprised by the heartfelt entry that he posted last week (even though he’s supposed to be on paternity leave). Not being a daddy myself, I guess I don’t really have quite the same perspective on why we’re doing ode but I definitely agree with the quote above from his previous post.

Why the teddy bear picture? Well, I was recently in Munich where I purchased a little Steiff (creators of some of the first teddy bears) teddy for the newly arrived Little Miss B. It occurred to be that when she gets it, this bear will be not just a new little friend to chew on…it will be one of the first teaching aids in her young life.

The swing tag on the teddy says:

“Babies discover the world every day anew and the Steiff baby articles help them to do this….By touching, feeling, probing everything in reach…babies are also learning to “grasp” the world…The toys are made of easily cleaned, robust materials…allowing each growing child to make some of its early discoveries in safety.”

That got me to thinking…Knowing her dad and also the age we’re living in, she’ll have her first Internet connected device before too long. I’ll be interested to see in the years (or weeks!) to come how soon technology starts to influence Izzy’s education.

At the moment, the humble teddy bear provides the type of development that a digital resource cannot provide. Will educational technology ever provide a replacement for the teddy bear? My natural reaction was, “No way” but then I recalled the “Shift Happens” video that was going around a while back and that you can see below…

Here’s the link to the US version

Figures such as, an estimated 40 exabytes (4.0 x 10¹⁹) worth of information was produced in 2006, which is more than in the preceding 5000 years combined and that we currently have the technology to transmit “10 trillion bits per second”…That’s 10,000,000,000,000 bites per second or 1,164 gigabytes per second, down a single optical fibre strand, taken at face value are amazing.

Meanwhile back in 2007, whenever I come across anyone who doesn’t “get” ode…and that is less and less frequent these days…I tend not to worry too much. Safe in the knowledge that what we’re doing now is only the tip of the iceberg as far as educational technology is concerned. While we’re not quite up to 10 trillion bits per second bandwidth for each user, it is getting better all the time. Wireless and handheld technologies are becoming more widespread and educationally relevant too.

Hopefully, in a flattened world ode will develop alongside the convergence of fast data transmission, cheap storage and other effects of the commoditisation of IT. Further to the premise of the Shift Happens presentation, the service that we launch in 2008 will be barely recognisable in 2013. Maybe, when Izzy has children of her own, maybe they will have their own digital, teddy replacements…perhaps some type of electronic environment that stimulates their developing senses that she downloads from ode??? Or maybe they’ll use their mother’s handed down Steiff teddy!?

Hey, that’s the end of my first odeworld blog post in quite some time! Did I make sense?

Wesley Fryer from the Infinite Thinking Machine edublog in the US has followed that critical motto of any successful blogger: don’t be afraid to be controversial. In fact, embrace it.

He is calling for the immediate halt to all textbook purchasing in the US.

“The day of the paper-based textbook is over. The era of digital curriculum has dawned, and it is fiscally irresponsible for school district leaders to continue to purchase paper-based curriculum materials in light of the digital curriculum resources now available and continuing to become available via electronic means. Digital, web-based curriculum materials are vastly superior to static, analog/paper based curriculum materials”

Wesley Fryer, Infinite Thinking Machine, Call for textbook purchasing moratorium

An over reliance on, frankly, out dated content delivery methods does the next generation of learners no good. Everything a 21st student does outside the classroom (and more pertinently, later on in the workplace) works in direct contrast to what happens in most classrooms who rely on textbook and pencil/paper learning.

In these revolutionary times can you truly consider yourself a good educator if these are the main tools in your arsenal? Essentially Wesley is saying tough luck if you don’t agree, times have moved on, either make the shift or get out of the way.

What qualities define a good teacher? Empathy? Patience? Expertise? Confidence? Can I suggest that to be considered a good modern teacher you should add “passion for technology“? A good teacher will always be a good teacher if they have the former qualities but what defines a successful teacher now will have to include the latter.

“Free digital curriculum materials are now available which would boggle the mind of anyone living in the 19th or 18th centuries. Those free curriculum sources are not sufficient for learning, however. In my view, there are still valid needs for commercial curriculum tools, but the proliferation of free curriculum materials will continue to challenge commercial providers to further differentiate their “value add” in the marketplace of content and digital assessment tools available online.”

Wesley Fryer, Infinite Thinking Machine, Call for textbook purchasing moratorium

One of the comments said: “I am a Spanish teacher in England, who is genuinely committed to not using textbooks. The look on a pupil’s face when you say to them to open to a certain page destroys any hope of either longterm learning or, that mecca of our current educational systems (especially for languages!) MOTIVATION!!“

It’s been a while since I’ve been at school but I well remember that particular heart sinking feeling and that was before widespread technology in classrooms…

Eylan Ezekiel in his post ” Wither Content? eLearning industry assumptions Blown Apart” asks:

“Why we are so obsessed with conventions such as SCORM and the whole VLE infrastructure debate?”

Apart from a great use of the word “wither” the basis of his argument is that huge curriculum spanning VLEs with huge curriculum spanning content packs are really no good for the type of learning he argues educators should (want to?) embrace - where the learner is at the centre of everything.

To achieve this state it’s essential to have the ability to tailor your resources to a high degree and that publishers spending time and money worrying too much about VLEs is simply a macguffin.

If I’m understanding him right he’s suggesting everything else in life seems to be moving into a pick and mix model so why does education seem to be dragging it’s tail? Are VLEs holding back education? That’s a big question and not a debate for this post but as to why there’s so much time and effort spent on VLEs:

1. Becta has committed to delivering all students with “a personalised learning space with the potential to support e-portfolios available to every school by 2007-08″ (”Planning for personalised online learning” - Barry Kruger, Head of Content, Becta). Of course, the immediate market solution to this is a VLE. And there’s loads to choose from.
2. SCORM is an attempt at a universal standard for placing content into context and VLE’s can read SCORM. THIS bit of content is aimed at THIS key stage in THIS subject for THIS type of learning.

I’m not convinced there’s anything wrong with the idea of a VLE per se but that the content plugged into them, pushed by persuasive sales teams often to top level purchasing groups (LA, SMTs, Consortia etc) is simply fashioned from old style thinking: here’s a big ol’ collection of words, pictures and such like that follows a pattern we have laid down for you. To gain from this content you have to go section to section in order.

For us it’s not necessarily how you view and manipulate the content, that’s up to you - ode is not a VLE . We don’t want to challenge that thinking but bypass it all together by placing content selection and re-aggregation back into the hands of the educator.

It’s what content you choose and how you find it that counts. And even better, how you share that thinking with others.

There are countless millions of potential content objects out there (SCORM compliant or not), of vastly differing degrees of quality and validity. Both user generated and commercially made for the classroom.

Decisions are made at all levels in the school as to what content is appropriate for what need. Big committee led decisions will lead to big committee designed solutions, such as whole classroom programmes that proscribe to the Nth degree how to teach your students.

Whereas at the chalkface individual educators will cherry pick low priced or free objects to supplement those big solutions, that are often foisted upon them, to give them some degree of personalisation, of invested ownership. Not personalised learning, but personalised teaching.

So how do you personalise teaching?

In the same article Eylan pointed me to Mark Berthelemy’s post “The King is Dead, long Live the King“. In this extremely well constructed post Mark suggests that for digital content to rightfully fulfil it’s potential we need to “(keep) the learner at the centre of our thinking when designing content and configuring delivery systems” and to do that content makers essentially need to move to a brave new world where they “accept the limitation’s of the rapid/disposable approach“.

This is exactly right. By “learner” we might perhaps substitute “content user”. The content user “…needs to be able to take the bits that are relevant to them and remix it into their own content collections“. But this is only possible when you have liberated the content in the first place from it’s original fixed setting.

But that only applies to backlist - stuff that exists already.

The real key is frontlist - stuff that is not yet published, that still may only be at conception stage, a niggling idea at the back of a publishers mind. Designing content from the ground up for disaggregated delivery. Imagine digital content that…

• …is only designed to exist for a few minutes for a specific purpose.
• …is flexible enough to be moved from a mobile phone to an interactive whiteboard. And then into a Second Life classroom.
• …is malleable enough to not exist in the same state twice, depending on the use the educator is putting it to.
• …pays no attention to curriculum mapping at all.
• …remembers who used it last and what they did with it.
• …allows every user to improve it slightly and pass it on. Cumulative improvement. Forever.
• …openly licensed for anything the user wants to do with it.

Will this ever happen? Absolutely. I’m 100% convinced that once the right delivery platform arrives that provides incentives for the content creators to think laterally, and I believe ode is that platform, then they will embrace a totally new type of learning object, finally serving the needs of the digital native.

“If a picture is worth a thousand words, then Google Image Search is now worth 1 trillion, 187 billion, 63 million words. Yes, that’s right, math majors; we’ve updated our image index, and now offer users precisely 1.18763 billion newly updated images….

“http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/02/get-picture.html

In my previous blogpost “Who’s Counting” I put forward the case that beyond a certain threshold numbers are pretty useless in describing value. I would like to add a caveat: except when it comes to marketing when bigger = better.

It seems that internet marketing and ROI is all based around seriously massive figures that are so high as to become abstract. That’s a natural consequence of operating on a global scale but our relationship with any website is by definition always 1-to-1, so to me it all seems a bit hard to comprehend. After all, imagining millions of unique visitors is not the same as actually seeing them all from space.

Kumbh Mela gathering (Photo: spaceimaging.com)

So, just for fun, I racked my brain to think of a way to get to a ludicrous number for ode. And then it hit me - everyone mentions time saving as a potentially massive benefit. So how much time could ode save every UK teacher?

Our teacher users, so far, reckon they spend on average 3 hours per week sourcing digital content across the internet from Google, Blogs, Flickr, resource banks, home brew websites, online subscriptions and so on. Sometimes this is at home, but mostly at work. And they all resent it to some degree as, frankly, it’s a drag.

3 hours per week per teacher (some spend up to 10 hours per week!). That’s 12 hours per month spent looking for content. Or 144 hours per year. On average, give or take.

There are roughly 500,000 teachers employed in the UK, across Primary, Secondary and College/FE sectors.

144 x 500,000 = 72,000,000 hours in total spent by teachers every year trawling a variety of sources for digital content to plug into their lessons. And time = money as we all know.

If the average teacher salary for a classroom teacher who’s been in post for 3 years is £25,000 per annum (very rough estimate) then this works out at about £14.29 per hour.

So therefore…72,000,000 hrs x £14.29 = £1,028,880,000 of teacher’s time on this common task.

If ode, as a one stop shop for all your educational digital content needs halves that time (and we think we can do even better than that) and then we reduce that figure even more to say that 50% of that time is unpaid working from home time and shouldn’t be included so we halve it again we’re left with £257,220,000. Deduct that from the original total annual cost and ode could save the government £771,660,000 per year.

How’s that for a stupid meaningless figure?

Caroline Horn reports in the Children’s Bookseller this month on the rise of digital books and content in education in an article entitled “On the crest of a digital wave” (pages 9+10 - seems to only be available in the off line magazine, sorry).

Whilst the majority of the article concerns e-books she looks beyond that at different media types:

“The introduction of whiteboards and broadband to schools makes the education market a significant potential user of digital resources…the education market is one of the least exploited markets in terms of digital content and resources“

Hey, this sounds like my sort of thinking.

Her thread opens up the necessary debate that we shouldn’t attempt to replicate in ICT how we used to be taught before the internet and the rise of technology, but that we should embrace a new way of thinking about how we use content.

A book by necessity of it’s physical structure places certain constraints on the educator and learner.

What we are seeing is a move away from pre built and ‘closed’ material to a provision of ‘atomised assets’ that can be manipulated, reused and published in an online environment”.

Dr Martyn Farrows, Simulacra

Dr Farrow has commercial interests in pushing this point of view (and so do we, therefore I’m all for this particular debate) but that doesn’t invalidate the premise that more and more ICT thinking is looking at the manipulation of content as the end goal as opposed to simply the delivery of that content under a structure.

For example “As a Teacher I have X numbers of digital assets - I want to farm a set of MFL MP3s out to my class’s mobile phones, upload my lesson plans to my PDA and display my video clips inside PowerPoints I have built…” and so on.

“Schools will become more confident in exploring internet-based resources beyond their defined VLE…making more use of “device-independent, browser-based, Web 2.0 style interactivity”, including social networks, self publishing and browser based toolkits.”

ode will provide a massive amount of VLE content from many publishers portfolios but we will not restrict them to VLE display only - each asset will be playable within ODE itself as and when they need to by constructing playlists. Some of our users (and I won’t name names) rarely use their VLE due to it’s complexity and heavy handed nature.

“Prior to having this Kaleidos installed, we have also had Moodle installation. I set this up, primarily for a single online A-level ICT course, so we could be as flexible with our students as possible. This hosted externally on a dedicated server. In essence, give or take 4-5 months, both were installed at the same time. This was 18 months ago.

At present in a staff of 80, 2 occasionally use Kaleidos. No others do…(Moodle) is used by 80% of our staff regulary and by about 90% of our 1100 students.”

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=54293&parent=263053 (you may have to log in as guest).

So it may depend on how the VLE is perceived in the school as to how well it’s used.

Ultimately it may be the publishers job to give educators access to content and platforms to allow them to personalise the learners experience using that content and stand well back.

“…the business model is more about transaction-based micropayments or licensing of individual digital assets on demand, rather than consumption of pre-built resources.”

Dr Martyn Farrows

There’s an interesting article on the BBC site that debates with itself about the impact of having an abundance of technology in the classroom. One side argues for the need to change the way we educate to accommodate the modern digital native and the other claims that all this electronic wizardry is expensive, unreliable, truculent and, frankly, not as productive as we all think it should be.

“There’s always this awful thing when you have planned that lesson on the IWB (Interactive White Board) and something goes wrong because there is something wrong with the system. You either have to be extremely organised and plan two lessons - one on paper and one on the white board - or you have to depend on all your resourcefulness as a teacher to pull something out of your hat.”

I imagine this happens more often than we think. Now an IWB is not going to increase the quality of learning any more than a blackboard. Or even an empty book. It’s the vitality of the content that makes it come alive.

She says if the students were doing a project on spiders - they would have a picture of thousands of spiders running across the board. What they really should be doing is going outside and putting their hands in the dirt.

Yes they should. The dirt option should not be ignored, but the 1000’s of spiders running across the board has only recently been available as a teaching aid, as a piece of digital content, literally in the last few years.

What should be happening is a combination. Let’s be honest, unless you’re a fly, or have been bitten and now have a head swollen like a balloon, spiders are pretty static and dull most of the time.

But if you can augment the reality of hunting round the school playground for a real one with the BBC Archive clip of a Trapdoor spider pouncing on it’s prey or a time lapse video of a spider building it’s intricate web…well, you’ve enhanced the experience for the learner.

ode will place these elements well within reach of the teacher so they can build enhanced learning experiences around the bits where you get your hands dirty.

PS: Don’t watch this if you don’t like MASSIVE HAIRY SPIDERS.

Apparently the BBC are going to launch a virtual world for 7-12 year olds called “CBBC World” in the Summer.

“Users would be able to build an online presence, known as an avatar, then create and share content.”

There are already many MMORGs around that some 7-12 year olds (especially boys I imagine due to their commonly used fantasy themes) know all about or use. And this generation will already be comfortable splitting their personality across avatars/profiles all over the Internet, so that’s an easy sell.

Traditionally kids of this age cannot participate in these virtual worlds due to their payment schemes and you need to hold a credit card e.g. World of Warcraft to pay for access, or they’re simply too adult (read: too boring) to be of any interest to a 10 year old e.g. Second Life.

Admittedly you can sometimes buy vouchers for subscription credits and Guild Wars is one example that is free to use and pretty successful (but has age restrictions that require parental consent if aged between 16-18).

“Those building CBBC World said the emphasis would be on safety and responsibility, with no chatrooms or facilities for building new parts of the virtual world.”

Surely the emphasis should be on learning through immersion? I would argue that as it will be part of the CBBC brand safety and responsibility will be built right in. If there’s one thing a parent knows about CBBC is that they’re a known and trusted service - it goes without saying that they’ll deliver on that aspect.

“Knowing that the BBC reads every message it receives on it’s children’s message boards…and looking at the volume of use they get, you can deduce (without me breaking any confidentially clauses) that the BBC has a huge moderation budget that the rest of the industry would be envious of.”

Benmetcalfe Blog

So is a virtual world, an educational virtual world, a sanitised uncommunicative risk free educational virtual world, a good thing? Or indeed a fun thing? What else is there when you’re 9 years old?

Without communication between players can it even work as a virtual construct? I guess “no chatrooms” doesn’t necessarily imply “no chat” between players but any chat between players is still chat, and I assume the reason for blocking that function is the same thing.

But aside from that the possibilities for content delivery in a world like this are endless. That’s what has to be right. Sure, kids could share content they’ve made themselves but how cool would it be to teach in a virtual world without your students knowing they’re being taught?

Each type of content could be presented in a virtual space. Consider:

• A virtual movie theatre where you can key word search movie clips and buy them to carry around with your avatar. And watch them too of course.
• A virtual exam building where 100’s of test exampapers are stored for you to browse and use a study aid.
• A virtual adventure course where you have to hunt down 3D Maths activities and games that you have to complete before finishing the course. And there would have to be hidden games, accessible only to the most determined players on top of virtual mountains, deep in virtual forests or at the bottom of the virtual ocean.
• Resource badges - collect and complete literacy and numeracy activities to earn enough badges for the right to enter a Virtual Tournament to win big prizes for your school.

…and so on.

I could see a whole product range of virtual constructs that contain content from many different publishers and developers being plugged into this world on a regular basis.

All it would need was an inclusive development, solid overarching quality control system and a decent API and the world could grow organically, presenting fresh educational experiences around every corner.

Former Director of GLOW John Connell blogs about the Long Tail …

“The simplistic view would be to see the long tail in curricular terms: the interactive Web means that, in theory, every learner should be able to learn what they want when they want, without having to worry about the structural constraints that are inherent in any formal system of education. But this doesn’t work – as yet – in reality. Why not?”

Wow, that practically is ode. The man’s a visionary. The liberation of content will set in motion the idea of the continuously changing curriculum, that is all about reacting to learning demands minute by minute (rather than government by government ho ho).

By the way Chris Anderson’s book is a great read and is one of the most exciting Internet economy theories I’ve ever read. The original article will tell you everything you need to know.

The content you stream or download from ode will be packaged to be useful across many different media players.

Primarily all content will be SCORM 1.2  or 2004 compliant so you can plug it into your VLE, theoretically it doesn’t matter which one. You will also be able to display content from your ode content library from your laptop to an Interactive whiteboard or across your network.

And then there’s mobile phones, ipods and so on.

Or you can start getting really clever.

Dik, our Senior Content Guru, recently got a Nintendo Wii (none of us are even remotely jealous) and wondered what it would be like to use Educational content with the wonderful Wii remote, which supports Flash 7 in Wii’s Opera browser downloaded through WiFi.

Well wonder no more. When you isolate content and have hardware that can show it (Iphone? PSP? Gameboy DS?) you can really start to have some fun. Just look at her face as she learns with a console! A text book just can’t compete.

This blog has gone up early, well before product or even beta release and for good reason. We’re as interested in discussing technology in Education as we are in building ode. We think the two go hand in hand.

We also want to bring people round to the whole idea of ode and “on demand” personalised teaching, what it might mean for your students and you as an educator.

I was unable to get a chance to speak to anyone on the Heppell.net stand at BETT (not important enough yet I guess! Too intimidated by all the big educational brains swarming around it) but I have been reading up on his thinking and there was an article recently in the Education Guardian Link section (which is new I think) where he says:

“Freedom, space and expectation allowed tiny technology companies to change the world. Now we need that same freedom, space and expectation to transform learning” – Professor Stephen Heppell in the Education Guardian, Jan 9th, 2007 (www.Heppell.net, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Heppell and http://rubble.heppell.net/weblog/bett/)

That’s where we want to be. We want to be that small but disruptive force that powers a new way of educating. People talk about fresh thinking but we aim for fresh action. There is a difference.