UK National Curriculum: A Level Playing-Field?

Just over a year ago, I reported on a remarkable speech by the UK Education Secretary Michael Gove that contained the following words:

On Open Enterprise blog.

California To Commission 50 Open Textbooks For 2013; Finnish Teachers Write One In A Weekend

Techdirt has been following open textbooks for some time now, and 2012 looks to be a bumper year for them. Here, for example, is a major initiative in the US: 

On Techdirt.

Beyond the BBC Micro

Recently, an interesting report entitled "The legacy of the BBC Micro" appeared (freely available online). For those of you too young to remember this trail-blazing UK computing project from the dawn of microcomputers, here's some background from the report:

On The H Open.

Polish Government Funding 'Full Set Of Educational Materials' Available Under CC-BY

One of the fields that is ripe for disruption by open digital technologies and business models based on abundance is education. That's already starting to happening with growing successes in the areas of open access and free textbooks. Now here's a major win for open educational resources in Poland (via Slashdot): 

On Techdirt.

How The Runaway Success Of A Tiny $25 Computer Could Become A Big Problem For Oppressive Regimes

The Raspberry Pi is a $25 credit-card sized computer that has succeeded in making GNU/Linux not just newsworthy, but downright desirable. The initial batch of boards sold out in minutes, and eager customers crashed the server where it was being sold. The original vision of the Raspberry Pi was to promote amateur programming and to re-invigorate the teaching of computing in the UK (and elsewhere) by providing a very low-cost and easily hackable system. Naturally, though, its open source code allows it to be applied in many different situations. Here, for example, is a plan to create a secure chat system for activists that can be used in countries where communications are routinely under surveillance, using a program called Cryptocat: 

On Techdirt.

Computing in Schools: The Great Ctrl-Alt-Del

After years of unforgivable inaction, the education world is finally addressing the continuing disgrace that is computer teaching in this country. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the UK Education Secretary Michael Gove's comments on this area, and now we have the Royal Society's report on computing in schools.

On Open Enterprise blog.

"An Open-Source World"? Where's The Open Source?

If we are to believe the early signs, 2012 may well be the year that British schools finally start to address the continuing shame that is ICT teaching. As I and many others have noted, the current approach essentially consists of sitting people in front of Microsoft Word and Excel and making them learn a couple of commands on the menus. It seems that the message has finally got through to the powers-that-be:

On Open Enterprise blog.

Germany To Put Special Monitoring Software On School Computers To Search For Infringement

Just under a month ago, the "Chaos Computer Club" (CCC), which styles itself as "the largest European hacker club", had some disturbing news for Germans:

The largest European hacker club, "Chaos Computer Club" (CCC), has reverse engineered and analyzed a "lawful interception" malware program used by German police forces. It has been found in the wild and submitted to the CCC anonymously. The malware can not only siphon away intimate data but also offers a remote control or backdoor functionality for uploading and executing arbitrary other programs. Significant design and implementation flaws make all of the functionality available to anyone on the internet.

On Techdirt.

Democratising OpenCourseWare

OpenCourseWare - putting texts and videos of educational lectures online for anyone to download, use and often build on - is a great idea.  But it's still a case of knowledge being handed down from on high by the university priesthood.  What about if anyone could upload lectures they have attended?

Enter LectureLeaks.org:

Welcome to LectureLeaks.org, your personal OpenCourseWare repository. You can now record, save, and upload your college lectures directly from your iPhone or Android device. You can also browse our library of recordings and learn any time, anywhere.

We believe that higher education should be available to all, for the good of society. Anybody who wants to learn should be able to, so we're trying to develop technology which allows that.


Begin recording by pressing Record during all of your lectures, then upload them to us so we can share them with the rest of the world.


Before sharing any recordings, we encourage you to ask your instructor's permission. We are affirmative for open access education, but we also maintain full compliance with the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.


All recordings are released under the Creative-Commons Attribution license, and our server doesn't record any personally identifying information like IP addresses.
LectureLeaks is a 100% Free and Open Source Project, and uses technology produced by the OpenWatch Project.


Only you can spread knowledge from the privileged few to curious minds everywhere, one lecture at a time.

Fab idea.

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As British as Raspberry Pi?

There's been a lot of chatter about Apple possibly switching to ARM chips for its laptops and even its desktops. Whether or not that is true, it's certainly the case that the ARM architecture is a major success, as a glance at the huge list of major manufacturers employing it for their products confirms: as well many Android phones, the Apple iPhone and iPod touch are to be found there.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Opening up Computer Studies in the UK

One of the biggest disgraces in this country is the way that computing is taught - or rather, the way it is not taught. I know as a parent from years of interaction with the school system at various levels that what passes for computer teaching is in fact little more than rote learning of where the Open command is on the menu in Word and Excel. That is, instead of teaching pupils how to use computers as a generic tool to solve their particular problems, it becomes instead a dull exercise in committing to memory various ritual Microsoft sequences to achieve one specific task.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Mahara: Who'd Have Thought?

One of the things that warms the cockles of my heart is the widening ripple of open source. Starting, as it did, with core system software, it is now moving ever further into more specialised areas. Take Mahara, for example:

an open source e-portfolio system with a flexible display framework. Mahara, meaning 'think' or 'thought' in Te Reo Māori, is user centred environment with a permissions framework that enables different views of an e-portfolio to be easily managed. Mahara also features a weblog, resume builder and social networking system, connecting users and creating online learner communities.

This is part of the power of free software: however good it is today, it will be *even* better tomorrow, because old programs are never discontinued (even if they are no longer actively supported).

Don't you just love monotonicity?

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Dual-Screen Tablets: the Next Hot Form-Factor?

As new technologies arrive, and the cost of hardware components fall, innovative designs become possible Here's one that looks promising: a dual-screen Android tablet.

The two screens of the enTourage eDGe interact so that users can open hyperlinks that are included in an e-book text and view the content on the LCD screen, or ‘attach’ Web pages to passages in an e-book to be referenced at a later point. Additionally, as the enTourage eDGe uses E-Ink technology for easy digital reading, images will appear in gray-scale on the e-paper side of the device; however, users can load these in color on the LCD side, ideal for viewing colored charts and graphs from course materials.

Is this really useful, or am I just easily impressed by shiny?

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Goodbye Becta – and Good Riddance

Not quite on the scale of cancelling the ID cards project, the news that Becta would be shut down was nonetheless further evidence of the coalition government's new broom whooshing into action. Although there seems to be a wide range of views on whether this is a good or bad thing – see this post and its comments for a representative selection – for me Becta was pretty much an unmitigated disaster for free software in this country, and I'm glad to see it go.

On Open Enterprise blog.

How Hard Can it Be? DIY OCW

One of the miracles of free software is that it always begins with one or two people saying: “hey, how hard can it be?” The miracle is that they say that even when “it” is an operating system like GNU, or a kernel like Linux, or a graphic image manipulation package like the GIMP. Despite the manifest impossibility of one person writing something that usually requires vast, hierarchical teams, and months of planning, they just start and the miracle continues: others join in and the thing grows until one day, with the help of a few hundred friends, they achieve that impossibility.

I was told this story dozens of times when I was writing Rebel Code, and I'm always heartened when I hear it today in other contexts. Like this one - the Khan Academy, which is:

a 2009 Tech Award winning site with 12+ million views and 1200+ 10-minute "videos on YouTube covering everything from basic arithmetic and algebra to differential equations, physics, chemistry, biology and finance".

The interview linked to above probes how Sal Khan managed to create an entire open courseware site on his own, without worrying about the basic impossibility of doing so. One reason for his success, he believes, is the following:

The simple answer is to put stuff out there and iterate, and not have a bureaucratic team that are better at shooting down each other's ideas and constraining teachers. I understand the need to constrain teachers, because you want to have quality control and make sure everyone is being reached. But the negative side is that you're also constraining very good teachers, and you're taking a lot of the humanity out of the lesson.

This happens at the textbook level as well, and the state standards. I think to some degree there are so many cooks in the kitchen that the final product that the student gets is extremely diluted. There's something to be said for fewer cooks in the kitchen - and if they're good cooks, the food will be a lot more fun to eat. (laughter)

That's my best answer. Several states apparently have had efforts along the same lines. The idea isn't mind-blowing: get your best teachers in the state, or in the country, and put a camera in the room - I don't use a camera, but you could put a camera in the room, or use a format like me - and have them teach. And put those videos online, and make them free for the world.

The expense is almost ridiculously low to do something like that. But time and time again, some of these states have contacted me and said "well, you know, it's getting stuck in meetings..." - and they really haven't produced any videos.

The best way to think about it is that it becomes very corporate. There is this view that it has to be very polished, and have computer graphics, and that the teacher has to have a script so that they don't say "um" or make any mistakes. And I think what that does is it takes all of the humanity out of it, and the humanity is what people connect with.

In other words, release early, and don't worry too much about the quality provided it's good enough to be useful.

The interview is quite long, but it's well-worth reading. I predict that this could turn into a very important project, because it's doing everything right - just as those other people who said
"how hard can it be?" did.

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Bill Gates (Hearts) Openness a Bit More

Here's an interesting project: the Open Course Library. These are its goals:

* design 81 high enrollment courses for face-to-face, hybrid and/or online delivery
* lower textbook costs for students
* provide new resources for faculty to use in their courses
* our college system fully engages the global open educational resources discussion.
* improve course completion rates

Here's some background on the project:

All of the information about the project is online on a wiki. A big part of this project is for our system to figure out what it means to share our digital educational resources. What does it mean to work with publishers in new ways and get them to reconfigure their content into affordable and modular formats? What does it mean to go out and find open textbooks and evaluate them and modify them? What does it mean to understand the different types of Creative Commons licenses vs. copyright? And what do we have to understand re: the legality around how those licenses mesh or don’t mesh? And then how does that affect the final digital thing that we release at the end, and put out in Rice University’s Connexions [repository]?

We’ve been trying to be very open about the process, so we’ve got this wiki online with all the [project] information. You’ll see the project budget up there with the goals and the timeline for the project. We’ve been having town hall meetings this fall—not only going out to the colleges and meeting directly with faculty face to face, but we’ve just finished our third online town hall meeting. We use Elluminate and anybody in the world is welcome to come [to these meetings which] are archived and put up on the wiki as well. As questions [and] concerns come in, we address those and put the answers up on the wiki.

As you can read, there's an awful lot of open goodness in there. That's great news, of course, but it's also rather remarkable because of the following little fact [.pdf]:

The Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC) proposes a partnership between the Washington State Community and Technical College System (CTC) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to improve access to and completion of higher education for low income young adults in Washington State.

...

The SBCTC requests $5.295 million to implement the Washington State Student Completion Initiative (WSSC). This initiative includes four multi-college student completion projects that will yield long term results by breaking down key barriers to completion throughout the Washington community and technical college system.

One of those projects is the Open Course Library. So good to see Bill supporting all that openness...

Free Software for All Russian Schools in Jeopardy

I've written before about Russia's ambitious plan to install free software throughout its education system. Worrying news suggests that things are not going smoothly:

Президент РФ Дмитрий Медведев поручил разобраться с ситуацией с поставками в российские школы свободного программного обеспечения (СПО). С просьбой об этом к нему обратился глава IT-компании "Армада" Алексей Кузовкин, который считает, что программа поставок Linux в школы находится под угрозой срыва.

[Via Google Translate: President Dmitry Medvedev instructed to deal with the situation with supplies in Russia's school of free software (ACT). The request for this approached by the head of IT-companies "Armada" Alexei Kuzovkin, who believes that the program supplies Linux to schools is in jeopardy.]

Part of the problem is money:

В 2009 году планировалось установить СПО во всех школах страны, а с 1 января 2011 года — отказаться от закупок коммерческого ПО для школ за счет федерального бюджета. Но с начала года финансирование проекта было урезано в три раза, говорится в письме "Армады", а конкурс на внедрение СПО во все школы до сих пор не объявлен. 13 июля Министерство образования и науки приняло решение о разделе работ по проекту 2009 года на три лота. В письме "Армады" говорится, что это "неизбежно приведет к провалу всего проекта в результате размытия ответственности среди исполнителей".

[In 2009, planned to be installed in all ACT schools across the country, and from January 1st 2011 - refuse to purchase commercial software for schools at the expense of the federal budget. But from the beginning of the year funding for the project was pared down to three times, the letter says "Armada", a competition for the introduction of ACT in all the schools have not yet been announced. July 13 The Ministry of Education and Science has decided on the topic of the project in 2009 to three lot. The letter "Armada" states that it "will inevitably lead to failure of the project as a result of spreading responsibility among the performers.]

Another factor seems to be problems with the free software discs that were sent out:

Но опыт рассылки пакетов с СПО в этом году не удался (выполнял IBS), вспоминает один из участников рынка: "Данный пакет был разослан, но с ошибками, которые возникли при записи ПО на диски". Быстрый отказ от платного ПО вряд ли возможен, считает аналитик ИК "Финам" Татьяна Менькова. По ее мнению, прежде всего школьникам нужен будет достаточный объем различного прикладного софта, причем простого и понятного, а с этим у производителей СПО традиционно есть проблемы. Кроме того, скорее всего, придется платить за обновление операционной системы, за апдейт того же прикладного софта. "Достаточно много ресурсов потребуется на переобучение учителей, большинство из которых привыкли к Windows. Конечно, в перспективе нескольких лет это все равно будет в разы дешевле закупки решений от Microsoft, но есть и издержки для экономики. Так, на Linux приходится всего около 1% пользовательских ОС, то есть стране все-таки нужны специалисты, знающие Windows",— указывает Татьяна Менькова.

[But the experience of sending packets from the ACT this year was a failure (served IBS), recalls one of the market participants: "This package was sent, but with errors that occurred when recording to disk. Quick refusal to pay software is hardly possible, says analyst IK "Finam" Tatiana Menkova. In her opinion, first of all students will need an adequate amount of different software applications, with simple and understandable, and with that the producers ACT traditionally have problems. In addition, most likely have to pay for upgrading the operating system update for the same application software. "Quite a number of resources needed for retraining of teachers, most of whom are accustomed to Windows. Of course, in future years it will still be many times cheaper to purchase solutions from Microsoft, but there are costs to the economy. So, on Linux there are only about 1% custom operating system, that is, the country still in need of professionals who are familiar with Windows ", - points Tatiana Menkova.]

Finally, Microsoft has been up to its old tricks of offering special deals for its software: $30 per computer (it's not clear whether that's just for Windows XP, or includes Microsoft Office too):

Контракт на поставку лицензионного программного обеспечения в школы в течение 2007-2009 годов получил системный интегратор "Компьюлинк". Конкурс Рособразования под номером НП-17 подразумевал поставку в 60 тыс. российских школ (650-700 тыс. компьютеров) пакета лицензионного ПО в 2007-2009 годах. В пакет вошли: ОС Windows XP, Microsoft Office, словарь Abbyy Lingvo 12, антивирусное ПО Kaspersky Work Space Security, Adobe Photoshop CS3 и другие. Источник в Рособразовании знает, что Microsoft согласилась лицензировать ОС Windows на всех ПК примерно за $20 млн (около $30 за компьютер).

[The contract for the supply of licensed software in schools during 2007-2009 was the system integrator "Compulink". Competition Rosobrazovanie numbered NP-17 meant the supply of 60 thousand Russian schools (650-700 thousand computers) license software package in 2007-2009. The package includes: operating system Windows XP, Microsoft Office, dictionary Abbyy Lingvo 12, anti-virus software Kaspersky Work Space Security, Adobe Photoshop CS3 and more. A source at the Federal Agency of Education knows that Microsoft has agreed to license the Windows on all PCs for about $ 20 million (about $ 30 per computer).]

So has free software lost its big chance to form the minds of a generation? And has Russia condemned itself to years more dependence on Microsoft's products? Stay tuned for further instalments of this exciting Russian epic...

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Checks Are Indeed Needed - on Reality

Here's an unbelievably shameless attempt by Sir Roger Singleton to shout down the justified concern in the face of the insane UK government vetting scheme, which he heads. Let's consider some of his comments.

It is not about interfering with the sensible arrangements which parents make with each other to take their children to schools and clubs.

Well, except for the fact that if I regularly take other people's children to a club, I have to register. So Sir Roger seems to be re-defining "sensible" to exclude this hitherto mundane activity.

It is not about subjecting a quarter of the population to intensive scrutiny of their personal lives

No, it's worse: it's allowing a quarter of the population to be at the mercy of *unsubstantiated* rumours, without any controls on calumnies, however misinformed, that may be circulating about them.

it is not about creating mistrust between adults and children

Er, apart from the fact that the line now being pushed by proponents of the scheme is that if you don't register you clearly have something to hide, and cannot therefore be trusted with children. Which means that children are now expected to distrust everyone who has not been vetted - a mere three-quarters of the population.

it is not about ... discouraging volunteering

Well, Sir Roger, I agree it's not *about* discouraging volunteering - this is about instilling yet more fear to make people more sheep-like and compliant - but it will certainly be the inevitable knock-on consequence. I, for one, will not be volunteering for anything in future, because I refuse to allow a faceless and largely unaccountable bureaucracy - one that has time and again proven itself to be utterly incompetent with sensitive, personal information - to make judgments about my trustworthiness.

So, all-in-all, your statements are a total disgrace, because you simply dismiss all the deeply-felt concerns of parents up and down the country without addressing them in the slightest. You have simply re-stated your own indifference to what the public thinks - a public you are supposed to serve.

If you had any decency, you would resign; but then, if you had any decency you wouldn't be running this divisive, authoritarian scheme that will continue to blight families, education and British society in general until such time as it is consigned to the political dustbin, which can't be soon enough.

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Microsoft Teaches Pupils About Lock-in

I'm amazed Microsoft hasn't done this before:

Microsoft's Education Labs launched a new project this afternoon and it's better on trees and the environment. The group just announced a new Math Worksheet Generator where teachers can generate math problems and email them in paperless Word format to their students. In addition to Math Worksheet Generator, the group also announced plans for two additional projects to be released in the Fall.

Hard-pressed teachers will love this - and won't even notice that they are being turned into a vector for lock-in to Word (not that they aren't already). I predict we'll be seeing much more of this content-driven approach, whereby Microsoft makes people offers they can't refuse...provide they take King Billy's shilling.

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(Open) Learning from Open Source

As regular readers of this blog will know, I am intrigued by the way that ideas from free software are moving across to different disciplines. Of course, applying them is no simple matter: there may not be an obvious one-to-one mapping of the act of coding to activities in the new domain, or there may be significant cultural differences that place obstacles in the way of sharing.

Here's a fascinating post that explores some of the issues around the application of open source ideas to open educational resources (OER):

For all my fascination with all things open-source, I'm finding that the notion of open source software (OSS) is one that's used far too broadly, to cover more categories than it can rightfully manage. Specifically, the use of this term to describe collaborative open education resource (OER) projects seems problematic. The notion of OSS points to a series of characteristics and truths that do not apply, for better or worse, to the features of collaborative learning environments developed for opening up education.

While in general, open educational resources are developed to adhere to the letter of the OSS movement, what they miss is what we might call the spirit of OSS, which for my money encompasses the following:

* A reliance on people's willingness to donate labor--for love, and not for money.

* An embrace of the "failure for free" model identified by Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody.

* A loose collaboration across fields, disciplines, and interest levels.

Open educational resources are not, in general, developed by volunteers; they are more often the product of extensive funding mechanisms that include paying participants for their labor.

Unusually, the post does not simply lament this problem, but goes on to explore a possible solution:

an alternate term for OERs designed in keeping with the open source ideals: community source software (CSS)

Worth reading in its entirety, particularly for the light it sheds on things we take for granted in open source.

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