Mercatrix.edublog

  For many years I have opened one of the schools computer rooms from about 7:30. The idea of all that equipment lying idle seems wasteful. Most of the early morning crowd are boys and it is not unusual to get 25 – 30 boys in by 8:15. I have always believed in an unfocussed way that it was a good thing without objectifying the notion.

This morning I thought I would set out too see what was going on. This was the list in about 10 minutes.

Social Interaction: two people playing a game on one computer, games played between people on different computers, shouted out names of site worth visiting,

Teaching/Learning: How you move up a level, how the game works, where to get (game) resources, How do I do …

Computation: Declining resources, when to replenish, distance between objects, energy levels, deflection, rate of fall, acceleration.

Fine Motor skill: parking cars, tracing routes, use of mouse, using direction keys on keyboard

Searching: search engines, keywords, complex searches, foreign language search to defeat filters, meta search engines.

Spatial: class of games – drawing, shooting (cannon, guns, arrows, missiles) racing, parking.

Strategy/Tactics: class of games, role playing, adventure, quest, creating alliances.

Problem Solving: Adventure games, puzzles, game rules are never explicit, they have to be deduced, including how to move up levels or solve mysteries.

What started out as a 10-minute discussion in my year 10 class, developed into a one hour debate on artificial intelligence taking in AL.I.C.E. (the AI chat bot) the ‘prisoners dilemma’ and the film ‘Golden Compass’A report on the net tells of the emergence in Russia of a convincing chatbot on their equivalent of MSN. The chatbot is ‘female’ and convinces men to click on to a link to ‘her’ site to see interesting pictures. When they do a Trojan is passed to their machine, which looks for credit card information to send to its host.There are some interesting issues here. To begin with it is the first public showing of a computer that can pass the Turing Test – to convince a human being that it – the computer- is also human. We can reasonable assume that if it was in Russia two weeks ago it is making a showing in the west about now.The class went on to http://www.alicebot.org/ and were asked to ask questions that would uncover it as a computer, not that difficult given it admits it very readily. What I was aiming for was empathy – the computer cannot speculate about another’s feelings. That lead us to the ‘prisoners dilemma’ of asking one guard what the other would say.This discussion took us into some interesting territory – imagine in 15 years time with computing power at about 200 times that of the moment and universal wireless broadband- having a voice activated phone/PDA with a greatly enhanced chatbot program loaded. It would be the most intimate and knowledgeable companion and mentor, access to the Semantic Web all the time and memory of every past conversation and phone call, curiously reminiscent of the Demons of ‘The Golden Compass’ or the Daemons of Aristotle.

A national meeting for school heads of the ‘Maths and Computing’ specialist schools was told that my school – Frederick Gent  in Derbyshire – was an example of excellent work in the use of a VLE. We run Moodle and we have been approached by a number of schools to help and advise on the use and integration of Moodle.

After 18 months of initial research we rolled out Moodle 18 months ago. The first year was creating content which took a lot of time. During that year and also when reflecting on the experience I began to alter the approach to teaching using Moodle. Half way through this academic year it is apparent that additional change is needed but we are undoubtedly learning our business and becoming more expert at working in the context of a secondary/high school environment.

  A new web site to try out – www.animoto.com It requires registration by students but appears financed by something like Google adsense.

Create a video up to 30 seconds long free. The number of pictures to be uploaded decides the length of the video, some images can be ’spotlighted’ and given precedence. After the images are uploaded there is a music page with some good choices. Alternatively you can upload your own, but you will be asked if you own the copywright.

The video is mashed and the rythmn appears to set some of the visual effects. The format is most probably .flv this needs www.youtubex.com to download it althoght the new ‘real music’ player is supposed to be able to download it. I have tried it with a year 9 class and it seems to take a little more than an hour to get the finished result.

Not blocked by EMBC yet!

The first time I have heard the term ‘INSET terrorisist’

At a discussion today at the Alfreton Learning Community INSET (400 teachers at the Riverside Conference Centre at Pride Park) with all or most of that groups ICT teachers we concluded that school policy for access to Web 2.0 is decided largely by network managers. Wendy Savage from Morts gave a vision of schools using Web 2.0 sites and facilities. All of the sites she mentioned are blocked either by EMBC or locally.
Something I have become aware of in the last couple of weeks is that  in 1998 when I was at Belper, we had classes for families of students to show people how to use the web, email and so on. They were all over subscribed and there was a long waiting list. As teachers we were leading the charge into the new technologies. Now that new technology in picture sharing, social networking and a great deal more is blocked. We have become censors, a reactionary force blocking change. I remember the arguments against email for students, a white list of approved websites and blocking Google, it was eventually seen as ridiculous and I suppose this will althogh I am little pessimistic at the moment.

On the upbeat side Sir John Jones a very emotional and inspiring speaker, he may have given enough people the courage to carry through the change that is needed and push aside the nay-sayers

November 15th 2007

The Derbyshire Annual ICT conference, the theme this year was Web 2.0. Keynote speakers Ewan McIntosh in the morning and Steve Beard to round off in the afternoon.  The discussions in the workshops including my own on – web 2.0 - seem to be showing common experiences. Web 2.0 technologies are blocked as standard in almost all schools. When ICT in UK schools became effectivley compulsory in 1999, the schools where teaching students things they did not know. At my school at the time we held evening classes that were oversubscribed, in which parents and their children were shown the uses of the Internet, email search engines and so on. At that time the schools were in front of the students and showing them new things. The situation is completely different at the end of 2007. Most of my students spend up to 2 hours a day on MSN chat – banned in school – on BEBO also banned. They may spend time on MIBBA a creative writing social network, but not at school because it is banned. They could use DEVIANT ART as my teenage daughter does most days, but their creative efforts would be blocked next day at school. FLICKR ? banned YOUTUBE ? blocked of course. In a hand full of years UK schools have gone from the enthusiastic adoption of new technologies to a frightened attempt to ban them from schools. For the students a different world exists, they use the developing technologies, they make judgments about the trustworthiness of sites or contacts and they are part of the force that is driving technology forwards.