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.