This morning I attended the Ministry of Education’s Learning Without Limits seminar in Christchurch. Around 100 principals, teachers, BOT members and other interested parties came to hear Douglas Harre and Marg McLeod from the Ministry of Education share an update on the progress being made towards the government’s plan for ultra-fast broadband in schools. The basis of the vision is:

• 97% NZ schools (99.7% of students) will have access to UFB (100megabits/second) by 2016
• 3% remote schools will have access to fast broadband (10Mbps) by other means eg.satellite or point-to-point wireless
• Crown Fibre Holdings (CFH) and Local Fibre Companies (LFCs) are connecting urban schools, MED and rural broadband providers are connecting rural schools.
• $150 million investment signalled to prepare schools for the rollout
• $1.5 billion investment overall

A key part of what the Ministry of Education is doing is through the Schools Network Upgrade Project (SNUP) which aims to make schools fibre ready over six years. Key points about the SNUP programme are:

• Provides subsidised upgrades to internal data and electrical cabling infrastructure
• 473 schools have been upgraded since 2006 ($18m)
• 100 more schools underway ($22m)
• 80 % costs for state /68% for state integrated funded by MoE
• Further 239 announced by Minister to start in Sept/Oct ($48m)
• By end of 2011 approx 1/3 of schools will have been upgraded

The presentation also canvased activity in the area of laptops for teachers, capability building and resource provision before providing an update on the development of the proposal for a National Education Network (NEN) across the country. Not a lot of detail on this as it seems that there’s still a lot to sort out – but the NEN trial is currently going ahead with an extended trial of up to 200 schools until June 2011.

All in all a useful meeting – the first of a series that will be held throughout New Zealand. I’m a fan of open information sharing, and the more we can have of this sort of thing the better – providing an opportunity for people hear details directly from those working in the area, and also to have the opportunity to ask questions and seek clarifications in an open forum.

I spent quite a bit of today working on an introductory section to a handbook that will be published shortly for New Zealand schools that are already or are interested in becoming a part of a Learning Community Online on the Virtual Learning Network. The diagram above is a summary of a section in what I’ve been writing that attempts to summarize the changes we’re experiencing in moving from traditional teaching and learning environments towards the concept of the networked school in a virtual environment. You can download a PDF version of the diagram and explanation here:  The emerging Networked School environment – I would be keen to receive feedback on the ideas before it is finalised.

I had the privilege of attending the official launch of the Greater Christchurch Schools Network website yesterday afternoon at Burnside High School – attended by around 200 principals and education leaders from Christchurch schools, plus various representatives of the local business community who have been supporting this endeavour, including enable networks and the Canterbury Development Corporation. CORE Education also got a profile for the contribution it has made to the development of the GCSN community.

Guest of honour was Minister of Education, Anne Tolley, who spoke positively about the potential of fibre connectivity to schools and the ways in which this can benefit learners and learning. All very encouraging and affirming of the work we’ve been doing in Christchurch.

The launch of a website is rather ho hum these days, with websites being started up every day – but for the GCSN it was more about the launch of the community than the website. The momentum for this initiative has been building for nearly five years now, from some informal discussions about the concept of a MUSH network in the city leading to the current situation where more than 200km of fibre has been deployed around the city, and things are on track to have all 160+ schools in the greater Christchurch region connected by the end of 2011.

While there has inevitably been a significant amount of effort put in by specific individuals and companies, the main reason for the success of this venture so far has been the level of buy-in, participation and commitment from people across all areas of the school and business community. Thus, the website that was launched yesterday  is intended to provide a focal point for that community. It is far more than a brochure site for the GCSN. While it will be the place where news, updates and features are presented, it has been designed to allow members of the community to make their own contributions, whether they be resources, links to workshops or professional learning opportunities, or programmes being offered for students in other schools.

In  particular, I am really pleased to see the development of the ‘learning centre‘ on the site, focusing on the 3 Ps – Programmes, Projects and Professional learning. In these areas teachers and schools have an opportunity to share ideas, resources and specific events that both students and teachers can participate in and benefit from. I’m looking forward to seeing how this area will grow and develop.

I had the privilege of attending the TUANZ Telecommunications day event in Wellington yesterday, along with around 250 people from a broad range of telecommunications leaders from both the industry and public service sectors. It was a great opportunity to see and hear about what is happening at a national and international level in terms of the development of IT solutions, in particular, the roll-out of ultra-fast broadband (UFB), and how this is providing benefits to the sector groups involved and creating opportunities at both a local and national level. While the event wasn’t targeted at educators, education certainly was a focus of many people’s thinking when it came to the benefits of the strategic roll-out of UFB – including Dr Taylor Reynolds from the OECD and Steven Joyce, NZ’s minister of communications.

I’d been invited to share a perspective on what all this means for education, and my presentation and notes appear below…

I used the metaphor of a ‘cloudy’ future for education because of the way it represents the future ‘boundary-less’ nature of education, both technically and pedagogically. The physical structure and location of a school will become less important, with emphasis shifting to how that school ‘fits’ within the network of educational service provision. Students may continue to turn up at a physical school for all or part of their school day, but as far as their learning is concerned they will consider themselves a part of a learning network.

This may sound a rather outlandish vision to some, but the drivers and vision for this have been with us for more than 20 years – it’s just that now the enablers are catching up to where we can begin to see how it can be achieved.

From a technical perspective I referred to the overwhelming issues schools are facing in terms of the total cost of ownership of IT – everything from the investment in hardware, software and infrastructure, to the cost of support, updates and licensing etc. This is not to mention the ever changing nature of the investment itself – including the demand for support of internet capable mobile technologies (as opposed to location-bound desktops) and the future of a network of things, the implications of which have yet to be considered for schools.

The cloud (and I used the term very loosely to embrace everything from the concept of virtualisation, co-location and global cloud provision – anything that enables schools to move the IT off-site really) provides potential for the following solutions…

• Desktop virtualsiation
• Software as a service
• Server co-location
• Online support
• Ubiquitous access – any time, anywhere, any device
• Backup and fail-over
• Disaster recovery
• Data security

From a pedagogical perspective, schools are facing increasing pressure in terms of catering for the diverse needs of students. It is no longer acceptable to treat groups of students as a heterogeneous cohort – defined by age. Face with the demands from students to provide access to the breadth of subject choices they want, and to personalise the learning experience for each individual, the existing structures of schools are being challenged – and to try and resolve this with a traditional mindset ends up seeing demands for more staff (a scarce resource anyway), more buildings (requiring more physical space and more dollars), and more resources (at significant cost, often for a very small group of learners, and which may become out of date very quickly.) On top of this are the demands for individualised assessment through the learning process (not just at the end), and the desire to maintain a record of an individual student’s learning through their learning lifetime.

I introduced the concept of disintermediation, a concept developed in the world of economics and business, but now finding its way into education as we consider the potential benefits of separating out the various components of the educational process (planning, teaching, resources, assessment, support etc) and enabling access to source for each. (Bill St Arnaud commented on this yesterday following a post in the New York times about disintermediation in the tertiary environment.)

I referred to ‘cloud’ solutions for education – including the use of video conferencing and virtual schooling to enable access to curriculum choices and to subject matter experts, while remaining in the geographic location of choice. I referred to the NZ instance of the virtual learning network as an example of this happening already on a growing scale.

I spoke about the development of local schools “loops”, referring to the development of a National Education Network in NZ, and to the London Grid for Learning as an example of this internationally. In my view, these will provide the ‘tipping point’ for a transformation of our educational service provision in the future.

I also spoke of how a network of UFB will enable a smart use of data – something that will enable us to start thinking about futures data modelling in the education system, allowing us to be more precise in planning for new school buildings (where appropriate), anticipating staffing needs, providing a more timely response in terms of funding etc. It also has huge implications in terms of our assessment processes – causing us to rely less on end of year assessments, and focusing more on formative processes that are data-driven, informed by national means and cohort referencing, and pointing to next steps of development (instead of simply labelling the learner and leaving it to them or their teacher to think about what next).

It was a lot to squeeze into 25 minutes – but I did get there and managed to end with a reference to what I believe is the major stumbling block we face – and that isn’t the hardware or infrastructure – or even funding. It’s in our minds. We need to make sure we avoid the notion of horseless carriage thinking (thanks William Horton) as we strategically plan for and adopt these new technologies. We have to make sure that our adoption of the new doesn’t simply become a ‘tack-on’ to what we’ve known in the past. We are talking about true transformation here, not a tinkering with what we currently have – and we have to be prepared to embrace the futures that emerge before us as the implications unfold – just as they did when the first motorcars were invented!

ADDENDUM: Telecommunications Review have published their ‘top ten from telco day‘ summary of the day.

Today I presented CORE’s ten trends for 2010 to an audience of around 400 delegates at the Learning@School conference in Rotorua. The ten trends are a collection of themes and issues that have been identified by CORE staff as trends in education that we imagine will impact on the work of teachers and leaders in early childhood centres, schools, and tertiary institutions in NZ in the coming year. While our focus is on the bigger picture of education, there is a focus on trends associated with the use of ICTs in education, reflecting the fact that we are living in a world where nearly everything we do has a digital dimension.

So… our politicians have come up with yet another proposal to address perceived issues in our education system – and a radical one at that!!!

I was fascinated to view a TV news item on TV1 this evening reporting on the  launch of a report titled ‘Free to learn.’(PDF download), the product of an Inter-Party Working Group (IPWG) on School Choice , chaired by ACT MP, and Associate Minister of Education Heather Roy.

Free to learn claims to be  “A report on policy options relating to the funding and regulation of schools that will increase parental choice and school autonomy in New Zealand.” Now that’s something that caught my attention – I’ve been arguing that for over a decade. Free to Learn recommends policies that:

• create an environment where new education providers will readily enter the compulsory education sector
  
• enable successful schools and organisations to expand and franchise to meet parental demand
• increase the opportunities and remove the impediments to the establishment of special character schools
• enable schools and providers to specialise
• permit schools to lease or licence their premises to alternative providers.

Now these are certainly ambitious goals, but they certainly aren’t new ideas. This sort of thinking was certainly radical in the days of  Plato in The Republic,  and possibly still considered radical in the  1970s when John Holt wrote “How children fail“. But I can hardly call the thinking in this report radical in 2010 – particularly when most of it is simply an update of what was begun in the previous century but failed to be acted on (at a systemic level). Further, it can hardly be labelled radical when the solutions that appear to be promoted (or at least interpreted) all reflect last century thinking.

Note these responses  from the TV news report…

“Some kids find it difficult enough to get to one provider and have a stable day let alone moving around the city,”

“My main concern is that it’d require a massive bureaucracy to underpin it.”

“Quite clearly we’d need more money for buildings and facilities to cater for more students under this proposal,”

“I suppose it’s all right but it’s a lot more travelling for the kids between schools. I figure it would to easy to have them at the same school,”

Note the common theme? All of these responses (plus the responses from the teacher unions and several other educators reported on radio and other newspapers in the follow-up to this item) reflect an assumption that the solution lies in the making structural changes to the physical entities we currently call schools. The focus is on issues of location, presence, attendance, structures – all characteristics of our current schools system. That’s not radical – that’s yesterday’s thinking!

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not knocking the report. In fact, I openly welcome the challenges that it invites the education community to engage with (yet again). It’s about time we had this sort of thinking on the reform agenda again. But please – let’s be truly radical about the thinking we bring to the solutions we explore.

The report – or at least the solutions that could be implemented as a result of engagement with it – might be considered (at least moderately) radical if we were to consider how things look in a quite a different dimension for the solution. I’m talking here about the world of virtual schooling – or at least a blend of virtual and physical schooling. Where students have a physical place to be for the important social development and learning, but where they can access their learning from a range of places and in a range of styles and modes in the virtual world. Thus they have the best of both worlds – and aren’t required to spend un-productive time travelling between venues, and we aren’t required to thinking about building new buildings and facilities to accommodate them.

And this isn’t really new thinking either! The Correspondence School (which I note had input into this report) has been serving NZ schools in this way for more than 50 of its 100+ years! When I worked there in the early part of this century just on a half of the 20,000 enrolments we had were students who were already in a face-to-face school but relying on the Correspondence School to access subjects not available to them where they were located. That’s 10, 000 students – the equivalent of our four largest secondary schools combined! (Incidentally, one of those students was my daughter who took Correspondence School Spanish through most of her secondary schooling and learned to speak and write the language sufficiently to survive six months in Central America in a volunteer programme where everyone around her spoke only Spanish.)

But that was correspondence ( a technology of the early 20th century). Now we have extensive use of online technologies, and in the background in NZ there has been a growing movement of schools that have been providing for the academic and curriculum needs of their students by exchanging courses in the ‘virtual world’. The Virtual Learning Network (VLN) has been operating for eight years now, and this year already has over 1500 students in remote and rural secondary schools on its roll.

This situation is set to gain momentum as the speed and reliability of our national network improves. The government is currently investing $1.5 billion dollars in rolling out high speed broadband around all of New Zealand, that includes the goal of reaching 93% of rural schools with fibre, enabling speeds of at least 100Mbps, with the remaining 7% to achieve speeds of at least 10Mbps. Initial research into the benefits to schools of having this level of connectivity showed promising results, including a case study of senior level music being taught successfully via video conference.

To be honest, my gut reaction when I read the policy backgrounder in the Free to Learn report was to think “at last, a set of policy recommendations that could lay the long needed policy framework required for the VLN to expand fully to become an integral part of our nation’s education system. Then I waited to read or hear reference to the VLN. Silence. Instead, the incessant droning of tired politicians and educators speaking about cars, buildings and bureaucracy.

Surely it’s time for some truly radical thinking. Something that is truly ‘out of the box’ and more likely to succeed. Something that builds on an already succeeding model that exists in our own back yard?

Several years ago, following a PPTA symposium on this topic, I wrote my own list of the things that needed to be on a policy agenda. I’m re-posting that list here in the hope that it might inspire some action this time.

Issues to be addressed before the use of distance/eLearning methodologies can become truly systemic in NZ include:
Policy issues

• How can student funding be shared between schools?
• How can staffing, including management units, be shared among schools
• What evidence needs to be gathered to demonstrate the worth of this?

Technology issues

• Connectivity and interoperability – who sets the standards?
• Networks – VPNs or MUSH etc
• Bridging – what is required? What technologies must be supported?
• Scheduling – enable direct access and school level control?

Curriculum issues

• assessment – developing consistency in approach
• reporting – enabling a unified student report from several ‘schools’ etc
• modularisation – a different view of ‘course’
• RPL – includes recognising the value of informal learning

Staffing issues

• Creating more flexibility in recognising teacher roles: e-teachers, m-teachers, c-teachers,
• How to involve those with real subject expertise as mentors, hotseats etc

Pedagogical issues

• “personalisation” – what does it mean? How do we make it happen?
• staff training – how to train a large group of the teaching force in these new approaches?

Leadership and coordination issues

• where does the leadership come from?
• What form should leadership take?
• What coordination is required nationally, locally etc?

Learning Resource issues

• How best to provide resources for learning to support teachers in this environment
• learning objects, repositories, search tools – who provides them, who manages them etc?
• how to cater for user-generated resources?
• Copyright and IP issues – how are these to be managed?

Quality issues

• What is best practice?
• What are quality indicators?

Interesting report from KY3 News in Springfield, Missouri on the challenges and opportunities of working with social networking in schools. Emphasis appears to be on the communications capacity of these networks, and the assuption that because they’re common place in students lives now that schools need to be exploring how they can appropriate them within the role they have.

Some interesting quotes from a couple of the people interviewed..

“I’m preaching the gospel of using social media as another public relations tool,” said social media expert Evelyn McCormack.

“We are on Facebook and Twitter to get that transparency,” said Josey McPhail of the Springfield district.

Also interesting to note that issues of privacy and online safety, and the development of policies around the use of social networking tools in schools is being considered, but nothing yet developed.

Ulearn is over for another year, and apart from spending most of the weekend resting to recover, I’ve been pondering a lot on the usefulness of this event in the lives of the nearly 2000 educators from around NZ and other parts of the world who attended. I’d wanted to publish my reflections yesterday – but it looks like Tony Ryan has beaten me to it with many of the things he’s reflected on in his very masterfully written blog entry.

So I thought I’d simply confine myself to a single thought that has come up repeatedly for me over the period leading up to, during and after the conference, and that is, what is the value of a conference as a professional development activity?

Here are some of the things that come to mind when I think of what I gain from attending a conference..

• you gain exposure to ideas
• you get to meet and greet people you may have “talked to” online.
• sometimes, you’ll meet people who have shaped or influenced your use of technology.
• you can make alliances with people who share similar interests, or find the opportunity to explore new and evolving interests.
• you have the opportunity to find out about initiatives that are not always shared either online or in print.
• you may get the idea to present your own work, which means you are becoming a thought leader.
• you develop new friendships that can last and make important links for you.
• you most certainly leave better equipped to shape the future of what is happening in your class, your school or the education system more broadly.

While all of these things are certainly big motivators for attending a conference, they are principally focused on change and development at the individual level. But what about from a whole school, or even whole of (education) system point of view?? With the focus on whole school review and development now being emphasised more, what is the role of conferences in this? Our own Ministry of Education is struggling with this issue also it seems. Recent communications suggest that, from a policy point of view, investment in conferences is not regarded as an effective way of building capability in the sector – which probably explains why only three people from the MoE’s ICT unit were allowed to attend.

I do have some sympathy with this view. I have attended conferences in the past that were regarded by those who attended as a ‘junket’ – an excuse to take a trip away, listen to some speakers and spend the rest of the time playing golf. This style of conference certainly does little to develop the capability of the professionals attending (apart from their golf perhaps )

But as I think more about it, ULearn isn’t, and never has been, anything like this. Nor has it been a conference that simply focuses on individual P.D. As I had an opportunity to speak to a number of principals and senior staff I know from around the country who were attending the conference, I got the distinct impression that, far from being an isolated event in the calendar that just a few got to attend, many schools are now regarding ULearn (and I suspect other conferences in the education space as well) as more than one-off events. They see them as a significant part of their school’s annual professional development plan.

What makes me say this? Well, here are some of the things I gleaned from the conversations…

• One school principal I spoke with had brought his whole staff to the conferences – it was their choice to spend their PD money in this way in order to experience the event together and to then be able to return to their school to ‘unpack’ and implement what they had learned
• Several staff from another school who attended had met with their whole staff prior to coming and had strategically planned what workshops they’d be attending so they could focus specifically on the things that were a part of their school’s development plan – so that, on their return they could feed this into the school development process with their colleagues.
• I met several principals who have strategically planned to make sure their whole staff have had the experience of attending the ULearn conference over successive years, telling me that “it helped develop a culture of a shared experience that becomes a point of reflection in ongoing school development.
• Several workshop presenters at ULearn were there as the culmination of many months of mentoring and preparation in their own school or cluster, with peer support and encouragement to grow professionally as they shared the results of their own investigations and work with learners with a wider audience.
• A large number of teachers who follow each other on Twitter used ULearn as an opportunity to meet face-to-face, arranging to link up for a meal and also sharing several times together during the conference to build the sense of professional community that was started online. Many of these people are already or are becoming leaders in their professional learning networks in their schools and/or nationally.

These are just a few of the examples that come to mind – but each serves to illustrate that ULearn, with the sense of ongoing purpose it provides, can play a significant role in the professional learning of teachers in our schools/centres, and in the ongoing development of schools/centres as a part of the ongoing, strategically planned cycle of professional development in schools and centres.

Truth is that attending a conference does cost – in terms of money and time, and this sort of investment must be measured against the outcomes at both a personal and organisational level. To dismiss conferences as a ‘low yield’ opportunity is to miss the considerable amount of strategic planning and thinking that goes into leveraging the benefits of attendance back in each school or early childhood centres. Large conferences such as ULearn do indeed provide opportunities for growth that simply don’t exist in other settings – but they must be seen as a part of an overall personal/school development strategy and not just a ‘one-off’.

New Zealand’s broadband is only meeting the needs of today’s application threshold according to a new study just released. The global study of broadband quality sponsored by Cisco ranks countries on a broadband quality score (BQS) derived on research based on 24 million speed tests done in 66 countries via speedtest.net. The test focused on download speeds, upload speeds and latency – the delay that happens as information is routed around the net.

According to this test New Zealand ranks 35th out of the countries tested – meeting the needs of today’s application threshold, with just nine countries in the category of “ready for tomorrow” (an increase on only Japan in that category in 2008). The UK is only slightly ahead of NZ at 31 – although this ranking is adjusted to 25th after researchers combined these results with the broadband penetration in individual countries to create its broadband leadership index (BLI). On that scale New Zealand ranked 32nd.

The report provides ample evidence as to why it is important that the government progresses its rural broadband plan announced earlier this week. The rural broadband discussion document is available as a download (pdf), with responses due by the end of October.

The summary pages and appendix of the Cisco report provides informative reading for those interested in what’s happening in the broadband world – You can download the summary report and its appendix and the full study.

I had the opportunity last week to attend the launch of Christchurch’s new network company, Enable Networks. I  had hoped to be able to have blogged earlier about this rather exciting event, but have had to wait until today to find the first public news release about it in the local media. (I’m sure if there was a negative slant to the story it would have made the headlines ) Unfortunately neither the Enable website or CDC’s website had any press releases available either

Today’s story in the National Business Review confirms what we heard announced last week, however! Christchurch, through Enable Networks, has received a $30M+ boost from the City Council to expand the city wide fibre network beyond the existing 100km of fibre it already has around the city. The good news is that schools will be a key target of this roll-out, with all 160-odd schools in the Christchurch metro area expected to have fibre at their gate in three years (there are currently 70 that do!)

This, combined with the budget news of a $34M boost for school access to high-speed broadband has made me a very happy  person! Now the real work begins – to ensure that all parts of this jigsaw are properly aligned, and that the vision of a network developed with the philosophy of an ‘open’ architecture can be realised, and that our school leaders will step up and take leadership in terms of determining the nature of the services that can be developed to ensure this network is used in new and exciting ways to enahnce the education of kids in our schools, and ensure they are well prepared for life in an increasingly connected world!