Grabs you and locks you in

Now do bear in mind that I come to Apple technology from the point of view of the Spectrum/Atari ST/Archimedes/WinTel models.  In other words my experience with computers has been very diverse and the closest thing to a single platform is that I have tended to teach on Windows machines for most of my teaching career - and therefore use them for personal computing.  A couple of years ago, having gone through hell and high-water to even attempt to get a ticket for a queue to buy an iPhone 4 in KL, I  turned on my heels and went to the nearest Maxis shop and bought an HTC Wildfire instead.  And I felt good about it because open source Android OS things are generally good in principle, and I felt like I was cocking a snoop to the Apple behemoth.  

Fast forward now, and having used iPads and subsequently a macbook and iMacs in teaching, I must say that I have gone over to the other side.  Apple devices just WORK better, FEEL better, ARE better than their PC or Android equivalent.  And much of this has to do with the ecosystem that envelopes you whenever you use an Apple device - an ecosystem that supports you and does crazy things like use iCloud across all devices, bouncing photos around photostream.  Not crazy now but the idea was two years ago.  It just works better.  Hence we now have a Macbook, an iPad 2 and 3 from work, an iPhone 4S for my Christmas present, which is so much better in so many ways than my Wildfire that I do not have the time to express how, and that gleaming white tease of an iPad mini for K.  The reason why the ecosystem is important in all of this is that it took me - Director of ICT - two full, intense, concentrated hours in the wee small hours to get my contacts off my old Android phone and onto my iPhone, involving convert address books into csv, then into vcf, then into iTunes, then up into the (google) cloud, then down onto the iPhone.  Eventually.  The process was like moving house and at one point I was seriously going to give up and manually enter them all, which of course is anathema to anybody who is in any way IT-savvy, but was an attractive proposition with three small children snapping at my heels.  So eventually I got it to work and I now realise that I never want to move house/ecosystems again.  I want to stay enveloped and secure.  As an aside, the iPad mini is just the most desirable piece of kit I think I have ever used - works absolutely perfectly, as light as the gossamer wing-tip of a silicon angel, and brings a smile to your face whenever you use it.  Apple are doing something right, aren't they?

Ownership in the cloud

An interesting read in the Guardian yesterday, concerning who exactly owns the content that users upload into cloud services such as Instagram.  This is a thorny old issue but is prompted by the changes to the Terms and Conditions of the use of Instagram, which kick in on January 13th.   From then on, the use of Instagram is conditional upon you being required to share your username, likeness and photos - and for them to be used for advertising purposes without you receiving any form of reimbursement.  This would certainly impact upon professional and semi-professional photographers, who might otherwise make some decent money from selling their photos online - if they now upload these photographs into Instagram then they could lose all rights to these.  To which one could counter - well, don't do it then.  Keep your own personal or commercial photographs - or any kind of data - away from such cloud services.  But that does not really address the issue, since a great many people are using cloud computing services and entrusting these services with potentially sensitive data.  My school has - in no small part because of me - committed to using google apps for all staff and students.  This includes gmail and google docs, plus google calendar.  There are now many hundreds of thousands of documents that we have entrusted to google to backup, restore and generally look after for us.  In google's case, they do not own the data that I have put into their services, but they do reserve the right to do whatever they like with it.  The lesson there being - if you want to use a free cloud service, be sure to know what you are signing up for.

Just who is the teacher here?

Reading all about third millennium learners and how they are that much more collaborative and social and independent in their approach to educational materials, visiting the likes of iTunes U and the Kahn Academy and taking learning into their own hands….and yes I teach in a school where I can imagine that happens a great deal.  But it was brought home to me on the evening of my ADE application when I was trying to overlay a soundtrack that I had made in Garageband into iMovie.  It is a bit of a bind if you are not familiar with sharing things via iTunes (as opposed to Save As on a Windows machine using something like Audacity).  Anyway I was searching for answers on youtube as one does, and I came across this video:

Now this exactly met my needs and it explained what I had to do perfectly.  And it was delivered by a schoolboy who is known as techkidhelp101 who could not surely have been any older than Year 9, and in fact may well be younger.  So here I am as Director of ICT in a major International School, with 13 years of teaching experience under my belt, being taught by an anonymous school child from somewheresville how to do something fairly technical.  AND notice that he has an entire channel that he posts instructional videos into.  Is he charging for this?  No.  Does he get some long term hidden benefit out of this?  Probably not.  Is he trying to monetize this as a service?  I doubt it.  He is simply sharing his knowledge across the web because he thinks it is a cool thing to do, spreading the word, and utterly empowering himself as a provider of knowledge - which is exactly what teachers used to do back when I started.  
Isn't that amazing really if you think about it?  What a modern world we are in, what a flipped world.  I know that there are plenty of children who are nowhere near anything like this level of communication and technical skill, and I don't want to make assumptions that everybody is doing this all the time.  But when I find people who do, then they become nuggets of gold in my teacher brain and it does make me think that the modern world is an amazing place, and that we as a profession need to adapt to it pretty quickly.

Pre-ADE jitters

So here I am on a Sunday afternoon, having just made Christmas paper chains with the kids and watching a battering tropical storm assault our balcony for the second time today - which even for KL, is a little unusual.

My head is swimming with items to complete for my ADE application, including tidying up a few links to my iTunes U courses, looking through transparency text boxes in wordpress for an idea I have for a parental portal for GIS, and, erm, shooting the actual video for the ADE application.  I have at least storyboarded it but when I read other ADE applicants who had posted online at just how much time it takes up, I did wonder whether it was them being a bit like a Fresher student, or whether or not it really did eat into you soul.  And my soul has been gorged upon like an, er,  half-bitten apple.  Or something.
The ultimate purpose of applying for ADE status has been self-improvement, and I know a huge amount more about iTunes U Course Manager, iMovie themes and transitions, iBooks author and Garageband as a result of going for this.  So I guess even if I fail to make the (gr)ADE then at least I can be satisfied that I have learned plenty of techie things that otherwise would have been placed in the file marked 'non essential so put them off awhile'.
Failing that I could try instead to create a Christmas decorations app and spread the decoration love over the festive season...nope too late...

A bygone era

In the midst of completing my iTunes U course about 3rd millennium technology I came across the following book that was buried in a dusty old box from our previous office.  I kept it for posterity because, well sometimes that's what you do with books.  Do people keep apps or iBooks for posterity? For purely sentimental reason because the smell and the feel and the patina of the artifact evokes something within you that takes you back to a bygone era?  This is the reason why I rescued this book from pulverization and I share a couple of pictures below:

It took an act of enormous self-discipline to stop myself from uploading another 20 pictures from this book, and equally to resist spending an hour looking up hardware from the era such as the Sinclair ZX-81 - referred to in the book if you look carefully as the Timex Sinclair 1000.
Sigh.

Earcos 2012 thoughts - education is evolving

Nice tube map here - inspired by Greg Whitby at Earcos - showing trending technology, all the way back in 2007.  I searched for it and think it may be this one but I also really like this one related to 2012.

Mobiles and time management

My beloved Diga

I have been using a very basic mobile phone for the last couple of weeks - the snazzily entitled Samsung GTE1080i (why an i?) due to an unfortunate incident involving my HTC Wildfire and a jacuzzi (well when in condos…)

It has taken me two weeks to get to the point that I can text at a decent speed because it has no predictive text and of course no onscreen keyboard.  This got me thinking to back in the day when I had my first phone and how far technology has come since this halcyon days.  That model was a Philips Diga on the BT CellNet network. back in 1997..

DynaTac.  Wow.

and whilst it was not quite on the size level as the Motorola DynaTac then it certainly was a large beast.  It was the first era of pay as you go mobile phones, and my wife and I bought one for each other for our birthdays.  I cannot describe the sheer excitement in 1997 of owning a mobile phone that enabled any person in the street to telephone any other person  - not at home, not through having to queue at a telephone box - but to contact another person who was also in the street or on the bus and generally out and about.  It is no over exaggeration to state that it utterly revolutionised communication, and with it the expectations that people had in terms of meeting up and organizing themselves.  Technology suddenly allowed people to be slightly less planned when arranging a meeting - all of a sudden if you were running late, you were able to telephone the other person to alert them to this.  Prior to this you either were on time to an engagement, or you were not.  The other person either waited for you, or they did not.  No communication mid transit.  

Samsung GTE1080i

Of course the other aspect to the early analogue mobile phones were the SMS capabilities of that era.  These are the self same capabilities that I using right now on my Samsung - terribly exciting in 1997 but needing a certain discipline.  As I am rediscovering, it takes a certain amount of time and concentration to compose even a simple text message, and this has made me think a little more before sending them.  I cannot tweet or Facebook on this phone, and that is at least two less distractions removed from me immediately.  This phone does not even feature Tetris or Snake - unlike my BT Cellnet which had the stunning Snake II - so there are very few distractions.  It does what it is supposed to.  The other day somebody texted me and my phone told me that I had too many messages saved in its memory, which is something that I have not heard for a long time - the maximum number it can handle is 50

This got me thinking of an old article I remember reading in the 00s about time saving tips with technology - so that if you need to delete your text messages you should do so whilst waiting for a bus or in the toilet or in some other situation in which you have unavoidable idle minutes.  But now whilst waiting for a bus people are tweeting or playing Angry Birds Star Wars.

Smartphones of today do everything that PCs of ten years ago did - it is an incredible amount of power in one incredibly small device, and there are numerous benefits to this.  But there are also numerous distractions and I do wonder if, in the days of on screen keyboards and now of course even Siri/Iris style voice recognition - are we lacking the discipline that defined our 1990s use of mobiles?  This also makes me think that technology is both enabling and constraining us - I do not need to be as composed and disciplined in my SMS or Whatsapp or BBM messages any more because I can let fly with another one an instant later.

Razr V3...sigh...

Am I saying that this is a good thing or a bad thing? I think it is simply an evolution of how we are communicating, and of how we manage our time, and of how our device manage our time for us, and take the legwork out of it in many cases.  I think that might be a good thing, but I am not fully convinced yet.

As an aside, my favourite ever mobile phone was this lovely Motorola Razr that cost me $1000 in Singapore in 2004 - hued from sheer metal rolled on the thighs of the gods and crushed to smithereens by the elephantine stomping of my baby son three years later :(  It warms me to note that Motorola still make the Razr, for all its faults, and I can see why people nowadays have similar aesthetic feelings about their iPhones.

It's a connected world

A couple of recent online postings caught my interest this week. Firstly I joined a twitter group for The Headteachers Roundtable, the purpose of which is to help create education policy which is centered upon what is best for the learning of all children.  And who wouldn't want that?

The second occurred a couple of days ago where I followed a Guardian link to a ICT curriculum proposal from Bill Mitchell of the BCS.

The google doc is here, open until 19th November, and by the way it is open to students too.

Quite matter of factly I have been leaving my 2 pennorth worth via tweets, and in the comments section of the google doc, and I am still old enough to be struck by just how amazing it is that I am able to have a say in such groups.  It made me feel that I am part of the democratisation of the internet.  Now making me feel that way, and me actually being that way are two different things.  But when I think of being a schoolboy in Rochdale who was studying Computer Science in 1986, programming the code that would create the space station in Elite via logo (yes really)…I would have been stunned to think that I could have even the tiniest say in shaping a draft educational policy that would then be presented in a matter of days to the DfE.

So here we are, in the Third Millennium of knowledge democratisation and able to make that smallest element of difference.  Who would have thought it?

earcos expanded

So here I am once more trying to pull together some coherence to what I picked up at earcos.

Somewhat delayed by a variety of projects, including the potentially huge logistical headache of gmail migration across the entire school, continuing with the e-portfolios that we have launched via google sites, buying and rolling out a robust wifi solution for the school, same with iPads, oh and also trying to get my head around applying for the Asia ADE that has just sprung forth from apple.

In fact it is not so much the number of projects, but the sheer volume of information that I have come across in the last few weeks or so.  I have now re-visited this blog for example after a year out, but I have also gone back to my twitter account @Steve-T_Online and I am liking it a whole lot more than Facebook.  Something about 140 characters that condenses the mind.  I am also being pulled aside by iTunes U - in the midst of developing a course about Systems Life Cycle (yes I know) for my Year 11 students, but I am also distracted by several courses about Philosophy and induction/causality - of which my favourite is this one.   Peter Millican is everything that my best Philosophy lecturers were back in the day 20 years ago - a gentle, musing style masking a vast brain.

I also had some time to reflect with SLT colleagues at earcos and I am also conscious that, more than at any time I have encountered in the last 20 years, we are standing at a crossroads in terms of education, and what on earth happens to it in the future.  So let's go...

Earcos musings

So let me sum up the last year in brief:

1. A new baby, adding to the clan and upping the noise stakes yet further. Hence why I am up so early now :) 
2. (2) Consolidation of my job as Director of ICT, in the middle of lots of projects, of which more later 
3. (3) Just returned from Earcos and it has been a fine conference. I am now bursting with ideas and looking to the future of schooling. You know the future, that thing which creeps up on us and then suddenly taps us on the shoulder and we realise that things are slightly different. The conference was interesting - lots of very respected and intelligent speakers, including Alan November and David Warlick.

There is plenty for me to process so I have put my thoughts together here, from which I will pick out the most salient points again soon.