I came across an article this week in the Datacenter Journal that explains a lot of what is happening in this space in (relatively) easy to understand terms. Titled The Datacenter of the Future – What Was Once Old Is Now New Again, the article traces the move from centralised ‘bureau’-style provision of services in the 60’s nd 70’s to the use of high powered desktops in the 80’s and 90’s and now back to a more centralised approach again, where desktop computers are now more powerful and readily available allowing a time-sharing approach to evolve into client server computing, meaning applications can now be distributed between a desk-top computer and a back-end server.

For most teachers all of this may seem a long way removed from the day to day workings of a classroom, but for those making decisions about how our schools are cabled and connected (includes BOTs, principals, ICT managers, Ministry personnel and politicians) there are some particularly big leaps of understanding (and courage) required to embrace where this is leading.

The current moves (albeit very slow, fragmented and under-resourced) to get our schools connected to an advanced network is one piece of the puzzle - although there is still some debate over the best way to achieve this. But once this is achieved we must be planning now for helping schools realise the full benefit they might achieve through thinking differently about how and where the applications and services they use are housed, who owns them, who manages them, how they are paid for etc.

Seems that in addition to the current promise of bigger investment in broadband roll-out, we’ve (as a nation) got some pretty big decisions to make about the provisioning of data centres as outlined in this article - private enterprise is sure to pick up some of this, but in the public service alone there are vast quantities of data that are stored, managed and accessed - and the systems they are currently housed on are (as I understand) all up for replacement in the next 3-5 years. With power consumption being a significant (and increasing) factor to consider, perhaps we should be looking at locating super-scale data centres on the shores of Lake Benmore (for instance) where they draw power directly from the generation source??

MMmmm - so much to contemplate. The need to think strategically about an end-to-end solution is so vital. Sadly, so much of what I see happening at the moment tends to focus only on the parts of the puzzle, and not on the picture on the box.

Sadly, the view of what these ‘basic skills’ are appears limited to the traditional 3Rs, and will be addressed through a rigorous regime of standardised testing.

The new government argues that “that the first task of our education system should be to ensure that every child from every background can read, write, and do maths at a level that allows them to participate in a modern economy.”

Quite a different view of the skills required to participate in a modern economy put forward in this latest Education Sector report titled Measuring skills for the 21st Century. The report is a response to the fact that leaders in government, business, and higher education are calling for today’s students to show a mastery of broader and more sophisticated skills like evaluating and analyzing information and thinking creatively about how to solve real-world problems. But standing in the way of incorporating such skills into teaching and learning are widespread concerns about whether or not they can be measured.

In this report, Senior Policy Analyst Elena Silva argues that they can indeed be measured accurately and can serve as common metrics of student achievement. Silva examines a number of new assessment models that do this and that demonstrate the potential to measure complex thinking skills at the same time that we measure a student’s mastery of basic skills and knowledge. These emergent models, she concludes, are critical to meeting our educational goals—to ensure that teachers and students can monitor and improve the learning process—and our accountability goals—to ensure that schools are giving all students what they need to succeed.

Starting today there is a week-long online discussion about assessment and 21st century skills which you can sign up for in the Education sector’s discussion room led by Elena Silva, Eva Baker, a professor at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, and Paul Curtis, chief academic officer of New Technology Foundation.

For comparison, here’s the approach that we can expect to see introduced into NZ schools in the near future:

(from ReadWriteWeb Weekly Wrapups)

Cloud computing continues to be one of the top “buzz words” as predicted in CORE’s Ten Trends. Released this year from Educause is a new book titled “The Tower and the Cloud, edited by Richard Katz - available as a free electronic download (2.4Mb PDF).

This volume tackles some of the questions and challenges for the education system such as   “How are ‘cloud’ technologies and applications already affecting us?” and “What does that say about how they are likely to evolve and impact us in the future?” Although the focus is primarily on higher (tertiary) education, much of what is described applies more generally to the broader framework of our education system.

In her forward to the book, Diana Oblinger comments;

“While not offering a crystal ball, [the book] does provide a series of reasoned, analytical perspectives on how current trends may unfold, altering our institutions and the higher education landscape in a future that may arrive faster than we expect. In reading it, we are all challenged to move beyond acknowledging the pace of technological change to envisioning all that the tower can be if we embrace the cloud.”

The metaphor of the “tower” (the tradition, silo-ed, autonomous institution) and the “cloud” (the concept of ubiquity, sharing, collaboration etc.) is well explored in each of the contributed chapters, exposing the obvious tensions and paradox, and providing both food for thought and some practical ideas on how things may unfold.

I was particularly pleased to note Katz’s comment that “It is still all about empowerment” - a theme that emerges several times in the book, raising the question; “What is the role of the institution in a world where individuals are empowered to seek solutions anywhere in the network cloud?”

I’ve found this volume of particular interest in light of the work I am currently doing with a school that is aggressively pursuing a vision of positioning itself “in the cloud”, and considering my own organisation where we’ve recently moved some of what we do into the same space. Ideas in the book that particuarly challenge me include the concept of a ‘cloud academy’ (p.22), new models of governance and scholarship (p.108) and the raft of issues around open source and open content (chapter 5) - all of which present huge challenges at a systemic level within our education system.

The figure included at the bottom of page 76 of the book, titled “Towards a Strategically Unified Information Future” (below) bears an uncanny resemblance to the eLearning Framework I helped develop here in NZ five years ago, and also underpins the thinking behind the eFramework development initiated by JISC and partners.

It is when thinking like this that the enormity of the task really impresses itself on our thinking. Adapting to the cloud is not a technical problem, it is a behavioural one - and the fact is that the technology is now enabling the more rapid change in the behaviour of individuals, while being resisted by larger organisations and institutions, be they univeristies, local governments, businesses or government departments.

Now there’s something for everyone in the education system to think seriously about - from the BOT of the smallest rural school, through to the CIOs in our education agencies!

As expected, the predicted technological advances focus on the user interface experience, and will require lots more bandwidth! There are optimistic thoughts about personalisation and the development of the semantic web. Security and privacy issues are mentioned, as are business models and revenue - and education gets a good plug in the ‘hard problems in the real world” section.

A very useful post for those interested in scanning the horizon and thinking about what’s coming next - some great links to follow also!

I found the prospect of using Twitter as a ‘back-chat’ channel at the ULearn conference very interesting. it had been used at the 2007 conference by a handful of early adopters, but this year, with the provision of a more powerful wireless network throughout the venues, the uptake was huge - so much so that the usage of Twitter by delgates on the first day rocketed ULearn to the number one position on Twitscoop.

Beyond the euphoria of being able to do this, however, comes the question “how does this actually add to or enhance the conference experience?” Obviously it may provide non-conference attendees with the opportunity to ‘participate’ in what is going on through the running commentary of their twitter friends, plus it may provide an opportunity for delegates to exchange ideas and questions that occur to them while they’re listening to a speaker. Of course, such use assumes a certain level of intelligence and digital literacy on the part of the users.

Sadly, this was lacking in much of what I saw being exchanged in the many of the messages. This is not to say that what some individuals chose to share may not have had some validity for them, but one would have to question the usefulness of simply sharing a stream of consciousness of unformed (and un-informed?) thoughts as a presentation was being made - particularly where the thoughts being expressed are negative.

What was more significant to me was the way in which one person’s thinking appeared to ‘flavour’ the contributions of others, resulting in a lot of ‘imitative’ comments - what I’ve referred to in my title as Digital Lemmings! I spoke to one of the delegates that I’d seen active in the Twitter exchange - someone I have regard and respect for as a digital innovator and thinker. This person was relatively new to Twitter and the whole back-channel idea, but had decided to ‘give it a go’ in the context of the conference. He spoke with me about how even he’d found himself being dragged into the ’spiral’ of negative comment at one stage, and had to consciously direct his thoughts in positive directions.

In his book “The Wisdom of the Crowds“, James Surowiecki argues why many are smarter than a few - but he does point to a number of failures of crowd intelligence which I believe I saw emerging in the Twitter back-channels. These include the fact that the crowds themselves can be too homogeneous, too imitative and too emotional.

The irony for me was that, as the messages I’m alluding to were being posted, the speakers on stage were making some extremely valid points about the nature of public sharing, and how, in the digital world, what we share becomes a record that cannot be erased - thus requiring some different ways of thinking about what is and isn’t appropriate for sharing in public online forums.

Perhaps we’ve still got a way to go to fully appreciate and understand the affordances of these technologies, and the literacies that are going to be important for us to focus on and develop in our students - and for ourselves.

Here’s something that I’ve been waiting to see - and now available as a full MacOS X application to boot! Release notes follow…

The OpenOffice.org Community is today announcing the general availability of OpenOffice.org Version 3. Right from the opening screen, OpenOffice.org 3 has a fresh new look, with a new start screen, new splash screen, new icons, and a host of usability improvements.

The Writer word processor has a cool new slider control for zooming, allows multi-page display while editing, has powerful new multilingual support, and boasts improved notes capabilities. As well as conventional office documents, Writer can now edit wiki documents for the web.

The Calc spreadsheet has been given another increase in capacity - now up to 1024 columns per sheet. It also has a powerful new equation solver, and a great new collaboration feature for multiple users.

Draw can now cope with poster-size graphics (up to 3sq metres), and Impress supports multiple monitors for presentations. Chart now produces much more clean looking graphics by default, and has a range of additional features requested by power users.

The popular built-in PDF export facility has been further enhanced with PDF/A support and a range of new user-selectable options.

OpenOffice.org 3 is now also available for the first time as a full Mac OS X application, bringing the power of the world’s leading open-source office suite to a whole new group of users. And it’s even easier than ever to persuade MS-Office users to upgrade to OpenOffice.org, with new support for MS-Access 2007 ‘accdb’ files, improved support for VBA macros, and a new ability to read MS-Office Open XML files (Microsoft Office 2007 and Office 2008 documents)

OpenOffice.org’s support for extensions is really coming of age with OpenOffice.org 3. A rapidly expanding number of additional features are available from different developers to add great features such as an Impress presenter console, support for business analytics, PDF import, and a whole new way of supporting additional languages.

Links
Official Press Release: http://www.prweb.com/releases/OOo/3/prweb1459364.htm
Download: http://download.openoffice.org
Guide to new features: http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/features/3.0
Technical release notes: http://development.openoffice.org/releases/3.0.0.html
Availability of localised versions and ports: http://download.openoffice.org/other.html

Mel Gibb, Iain Cook-Bonney, David, Fiona Grant, Allanah King, Sarah Jones, Toni Twiss, Simon Evans.

There are also lots of great photos of ULearn08 on Flickr - scroll through to find the ones of the amazing dinner on Thursday evening which was themed as “Rouge” with entertainment from the Moulin Rouge genre.

I had the privilege of chairing the final keynote presentation, consisting of a panel of presenters from the early childhood, primary and secondary sectors. Tania and Beverly from Mania Kindergarten shared examples of what their young charges are doing everyday with a variety of technologies, including using blogs to maintain a record of their learning. Carolyn from Tawa Intermediate provided an overview of her work in the school since taking over as principal a couple of years ago, focusing on the importance of developing a shared vision among staff. Linda who has been principal of Lincoln High School for more than 10 years put success in her school down to developing teams of staff and supporting them in pursuing their own ideas, giving them permission to try things out, make mistakes and learn from them - all working towards identifying the things of real value that can be embraced and implemented on a wider and more sustainable scale.

The purpose of having this group share was to expose some of the practical ideas and advice that may be of use by others in the audience as they returned to their own schools. I summed up with a quote from James Allen:

You will be as small as your controlling desire
or as great as your 
dominant ambition.

No matter what our experience of a conference such as ULearn, we will end up changed in some way - the challenge is what our response will be when we return to our “day jobs”. My key message was for school leaders - for regardless of how inspired individual teachers may be, it is the collective change in our whole school system that is important. It’s not enough just to desire this to happen - we need more educators who are set alight with ambition, determined to see it happen!