Resumption after short gap in blog

I haven't wriitten in my blog for quite some time, this is because of the overwhelming focus on producing Report 1 quickly followed by report 2 with strict deadlines to meet. I don't feel too bad about letting the journal lapse a little though, because I know the other students have done the same. This is one of the benefits of being part of an online learning community rather than isolated on other types of individual and conventional distance learning courses. One of the strange feelings immediately after the reports was that it was nice to get back to getting on with learning again, even though the reports themselves necessitated a consolidation of experience, reflection and brushing up on presentation skills, it still felt like an interruption of the term's rhythm rather than a part of it. I think next term should be less disconcerting, through familiarity.

On JellyOS after 2 months

Stengths and Weaknesses

This post in reponse to the discussion started by Jolyon Miller - Making a better JellyOS.

The strength of jellyOS lies in the ability for almost anybody to create a simple homepage, upload photos, make a guestboook and link to others. The weakness is in the functionality of discussions - having to scroll slowly through lots of old messages only to find there a re no new ones, no ability to sort for most recent, by author, or anything like that.
So I conclude that the best way to make a better jellyOS would be to keep it as it is for some purposes, but to move all the serious discussions and extended conversations onto another platform. Unless this is done pretty soonish, then a lot of the advantages of online community will be tragically missed. I'm not exectly sure how the linking will work between the jelly pages and the new discussion forums, but I hope someone is working on this right now. Who wrote jellyOS anyway? I was impressed to read that ultralab collaborated with Oracle over think.com and If I heard it was Macromedia themselves helping with jellyOS then I'd have confidence in it's future development.

peer to peer learning - new practise and observations

Since I've been exposed to all this theory about the importance of peer learning groups, I took advantage of an opportunity to try out a different approach with a class of year 5 children today. It was their first lesson with the new eMac computers and OS X desktop.
I suggested to the class teacher that instead of a demonstration by me, we would just let the children go straight in and experiment for themselves, then report back whatever they managed to find out.

I wrote up on the board ( instead of a learning objective taken from the QCA scheme) :

What can we learn from each other about the new computers?
1)
2)
3)
etc

Then I introduced the session by saying "today I am not going to show you what to do, you are going to learn from each other. "

Result: Chaos! But the lesson was sucessful in a number of ways and everybody was pleased. In particular, those children who aren't good at following instructions and usually get told off seemed to feel empowered by the liberating lack of constraint, eagerly reported back discoveries and displayed positive self esteem. The two TAs and the class teacher all learned things as well, without having to pretend they already know more than the kids.

So instead of me telling them "this is how to find your documents, this is how to find your applications" and then they go off and play with the CD eject button, they got all that out of their systems in one go and then went on to seek out the Internet Browser. Once one person found it, you could literally observe that knowlege spreading along the walls of the room in both directions, just like wild fire.

I'm quite excited writing this up, because this is the first instance really of the ideas I have come across on the degree course affecting the way I act at work and think and observe. And to top it all, I believe this is just the sort of thing these learning journals are meant to be used for.

Should a learning journal be public?

This is from my write up of activity 4, which is about setting up the blog in the first place, and my reflections on the use of blogs for Learning Journals.

"Should a learning journal be public?

Issues such as confidentiality and inhibition could mean that certain kinds of personal reflection can be included in a private LJ which couldn't in a public one. But writing for a perceived audience may improve quality or motivate to keep up to date. I find it useful to be able to share some of my writings, such as "my impression of jellyOS after a few days".

Some blogs allow others people to make comments on your writings. This turns the writer into a kind of interactive columnist, with feedback and discussions going on around the articles. Mine doesn't do that, and I suspect that this could make it harder to write in a spontaneous and uninhibited fashion. It's just a little bit too public for this specific application. Fine for internet 'celebrities' though.

Actually, I think it might be a great idea to set up a private blog with a comment facility, because this would allow me to read back over old thoughts and make comments myself, on my own past reflections, in the light of later experience. Yes, that seems very much in the spirit of the reflective practitioner philosophy. You could have a dialogue with yourself telescoping forward through time.

voice recorder

Another idea I have had is in response to the question I posed in my blog about mornings, afternoons and evenings. I decided it would be most useful to get one of those tiny digital voice recorders, so that I can 'jot down' any thoughts, information, questions, worth recording when I'm away from a computer. It may even be possible to upload the soundfiles rather than have to type in a transcript. I'm looking through eBay to see what's available."

What do you think?

report 1

I haven't written an entry in this blog for a few days or more, and this is mainly because I have been chanelling my creative writing energies into my "report 1". This has to be submitted by this sunday, so I have only two weekday evenings and then saturday and sunday mornings left. What a fuss!

Action researcher

I discovered someone who works at my school sometimes who is familiar with the concept of action research and reflective practice, having studied and used it for many years. She may be willing to give some useful advice and feedback, perhaps in exchange for technical support with her projects, although she does always seem to be very busy. She left me with the suggestion that the essence of good teaching IS action research, and I think I understand why.
It has always seemed to be to be a bit of a waste that after an ICT lesson has taken place in the suite, with both myself and a class teacher present, there's should be a possibility to discuss afterwards, how did it go, what worked and what didn't work.

Mornings, afternoons and evenings

I often have my clearest thoughts in the mornings, perhaps when I'm travelling to work on the train but it isn't usually until the afternoon, when I'm feeling tired and take a break that I get around to recording them, if at all.
In the evening I like to catch up with lighter conversations and entertainment, but I have to get some things done then as well and often stay up late.
Given this understand of the pattern of my day, how can I make more out of it?

A hard week

Events have conspired to make this last week particularly difficult, and I've been tired and tetchy some of the time. At this point, I'm wary that my ultraversity activities are having a detrimental effect even though I understand why that shouldn't be the case.
I have told people who are interested that I'm doing a degree course but it isn't really recognised on any formal basis. Communication is getting harder rather than easier, and the situation with upgrading the computers has got unnecessarily awkward.
Late nights and stressful travel have compounded the general frustrations and the endless questions about printer queues and lost files occasionally solicit a terse reply, which hasn't gone unnoticed.

course

I received a letter from EiC Action Zone about attending a training course for evaluating software for the Curriculum Online content. Although I am sceptical about the whole concept of curriculum content software, preferring the contructivist approach, I suppose I had better register an interest so that I can take advantage of the opportunity. I'll also do some research about "schoolzone" the company behind this, 'creating success' 'creative tools' and 'Lewisham Education in Cities Action Zone' who work from an office upstairs in this school.

Back to work

I've had a good week getting on with the course activities and exploring jellyOS, and I feel glad that I now know a lot more about the course, what I'm expected to do and how it will shape up in practice. It all seemed a bit formless and abstract.
Meanwhile back at work, I'm still having to deal with the installation of a the new computers in the ICT suite. I had a terse phone conversation with the suppliers this morning and then the Head, which resulted in a plan to close the suite for 1 week and do it all in one go, rather than the phased transition which I had envisaged. Oh well, at least there is some communication going on rather than none at all.

Tuesday reflection

Just a short blog, as I really want to get on with putting my research together. All going well AFAICS, with positive feedback from facilitator and appreciative messages from students. I'm learning bits and pieces about research, about technology, about other people's roles and getting a better understanding of the tasks I'm supposed to be doing. This is enjoyable, and I'm hoping to stick at it most of the week, with a couple of days break at the end perhaps.
The only slight reservations I have are that I should have paid more attention to the required learning outcomes, and planned more activities to do at work, but hopefully this is just because of the situation I'm in, catching up on activities I would have done during the first half term during the break.

getting stuck in, and choosing HTML for presenting coursework

Yesterday was the first day of half term and I had decided to stay in and rest, so I ended up spending quite a few hours on the computer, mostly dealing with Ultraversity stuff. JellyOS is a terrible time waster, although it feels rewarding when you do manage some kind of communication after lots of repeated faffing about. I've built a page of links to links and links to current discussions which should help with slightly more direct access. The discussion which I created and linked to from the learning support page is starting to pick up, and I created a quality new piece of jellyART work.

That's all very well, but i can't afford to spend all my time messing about there when there is coursework to be done!

I've re-read the brief for activity one and realised that I have a problem finishing it off, since I'm required to interview a line manager and now it's half term I won't be able to do that for ages, if at all. So I came up with two other ways of researching the Coordinator Role. I posted a short question to the newsgroup uk.education.schools-it and within 20 minutes had a useful reply from an ICT Coordinator in a primary school. That may even break out into a more lengthy discussion, as can easily happen in an unregulated environment using simple and well established technology.
In addition, I was looking at fellow student Denise Binks website and realised that as a technician who takes a lot under her wing, she still works with a Coord, so I asked a question in Denise's guestbook and soon there was a new section in her activity one coursework about the two roles. This is useful to both of us.

I've now got rather a lot of gathered material for activity one, but that's OK because it is a substantial activity compared to some of the later ones. I looked at the work in progress 'simpletext' document I'd brought home on my pen drive and found it hard to work with in a Windows environment, and appleworks documents are unreadable so what format should I use to write up my coursework?

I had previously discounted the idea of presenting it as a website, for two reasons - it seems a bit OTT, takes a bit longer to load up a big package like dreamweaver than a text editor, and I don't feel I want to be writing for a world-wide audience "hullo this is me, here's my picture, here's my cat " sort of thing.

But when it comes down to it, HTML is the best tool I have for the job. It is afterall, a
(hypertext) Markup Language, which is quick and easy to create headings, subheadings, lists and bullet points. it's platform independent, universally deployed and I'll be able to incorporate multimedia elements later if I really have to. I don't have to put it online if I don't want to, I can transport it on my keyring pen drive, and email pages to my facilitator as attachments.

So that's the decision made, I've made a good start, and I'm happy that I know what I'm doing at last. Now I should be able to concentrate more on getting on with it, and finding it enjoyable. By the end of half term I'll be well up to date.

Online Inset

Yesterday, I discovered that the NGFL had organised an 'online Inset' for ICT coordinators that began the day before. I had enough time to read the transcript of the opening speech, which I saved because it gives another point of view of what ICT Coodinators are supposed to do.

The video link didn't work, even after installing the free version of RealPLayer One which the government site recommended. With luck, I'll have time to look at this in more depth over the half term.

Drains

Yesterday I sorted out two problems.

At work, I was called down to the office where they had installed a new laser printer on the network, but they couldn't print to it from the other office PC. Despite never having dirtied my hands with windows 2000 before, after messing about for half an hour I managed to get them talking.

At home, my downstairs toilet, when flushed, was filling up but not draining away. I emptied the sump directly outside but this didn't help, then I opened up a manhole cover halfway down the garden and cleared a smelly blockage there. Still no joy at the toilet end. Not knowing exactly what I was doing, but suspecting some sort of air-lock, I pushed a plastic bag down the toilet bowl and swooshed it back and fore a couple of times. With a glug glug glug, the bowl emptied and is now functioning perfectly.

Out of the two problem solving excercises the second was by far the most satisfying!

On JellyOS, after a few days

Last night I spent more than an hour or two looking around the community for new contributions and adding a couple of pages into "my stuff" At the end, I felt that a lot of time and effort had passed with little acheived really. So now I have a page of 'useful' links and a new piece of jellyART ;-)
I'm still not exactly sure who is in 'my group' and who isn't, but that's not so important.

There are several fundamental problems with the use of Flash for a web board and community like this, but the process which seems to be happening now is that people who are getting very frustrated with the poor functionality of the discussion boards and the page editing, are finding out work arounds and requesting short cuts which can make them happy in the short term, simply because the problem is then not quite so bad as it appeared to be.

I shall list the problems as I see it in two categories

1. Problems of the specific

a) Speed of typing, editing and browsing discussions is unacceptably slow.
b) Lack of a functions, eg 'your recent discussions' 'view unread messages' 'go to latest discussions' , that sort of thing.
c) Need to use the mouse too much, and too heavily.
d) When editing a page, there are some intermittant faults, such as the disappearing pallette, text boxes zooming off to the right hand side and strange things happening with the scaled vector graphics when you make a large object and rotate it.
e) Double clicking on a discussion icon sometimes brings up the page requested, but sometimes doesn't.
f) You can't tell how many pages or how many posts there are in any particular discussion without paging and scrolling all the way through. ( see b)

2. Problems of the Fundamental

1) JellyOS appears to have been specialy commissioned by ultralab, and the decision to build it on Macromedia Flash means that it doesn't build on any existing tried and tested community software. Everything has be designed and programmed in from scratch, so what we have now is an extremely immature system, lacking even the basic functionality which an internet discussion taking place in 1985 would have had.

2) Running in the Flash Player plugin within a Browser page and attempting to simulate a windowing operating system seems to place places a massive processing burden on the client computer, which is one element of the slow response problem. The other aspects may be caused by using Flash actionscript to communicate with the host server, or problems with the contention ratio at the server itself, it's difficult to say from here.

3) For the users, learning to use JellyOS is a heavy investment, since we cannot use existing techniques we already know from existing similar technologies, and the knowlege we gain is virtually untransferrable to anything else.

4) It could also be said that jellyOS breaks the existing internet protocols and flies in the face of carefully contructed conventions. This can only lead to a fragmentation and weakening of the wider community.

And now for some positive points :-)

1) Being a closed private community, the atmosphere is more open and trusting than out in the wild world. This means people are happy to talk about themselves, their jobs, families and hobbies and so on, and will even upload photos. ( This would happen anyway, within a community isolated through login mechanisms and hidden from search engines no matter what technology was used. A private newsserver, linked to web based email and a simple online webpage builder would do the trick for a fraction of the cost with a massive increase in efficiency and functionality)

2) It's fairly easy to upload files. This last one was pointed out by Denise Binks, whose webpage holds many useful tips and links as well as providing a model for displaying the coursework
http://www.denisebinks.com/

2 books for the train

I have two technical books which I'm reading on the train to help me get up to speed with the new operating system, mac OS X and X server.

Mac OSX v10.2 Jaguar
Little Black Book
paraglyph press
isbn 1-932111-72-7

The Mac OS X.2 Power User's Book
paraglyph press
isbn 1-932111-80-8

Although there are chunks in each book which aren't strictly relevent, I am picking up a few concepts and tips here and there which will help me in my attempt to configure and maintain a sophisticated industrial strength network system with no training.

I tried out JellyOS from the MACs at work, to see how it goes.

Internet Explorer 5 on MacOS 9 - doesn't work - shockwave incompatible
Safari on MacOS X - doesn't work
Internet Explorer 5.2 on mac OS X - This works so I am typing now on one of the new eMacs.

I managed to extract the post I made last night about initial impressions of the technology, since this sort of stuff is meant to go in my learning Journal, here it is...

=================
Only just managed to get through, so this is my first post - Hi all.

email has several advantages

* you don't have to actively check for new additions to a discussion, they just arrive in your inbox
*You can choose which email program you want to use to read them with.
* You can sort emails by author, date sent, subject or threaded.
* you can reply to the whole group or privately to the author.
* Spellchecker!
*Quoted replies

Disadvantages

* Spam!

Jellyos, my first impressions:

It is interesting, since it tries to be amorpeous with lots of cross linking, although it must still be centrally controlled.
It's slow, typing into the flash text input boxes is unacceptable for editing.
Mouse heavy - you have to double click things, and you can't use the keyboard to scroll down or anything. This will stop me using it extensively, I don't want RSI thanks.

Has anybody suggested an ultraversity meetup yet? It's always good to put faces to names, and then the community gets going faster.
=========
end quote

I was pleased to receive a circular email from my learning mentor ( Hi Lydia ) this morning. From this, I gathered that the jellyOS community was actually up and running and had been for some time, although I had failed to access it properly.
Worried that I was getting left behind, I replied straight away, bringing Lydia up to date on my activities, and asking how the online community works.
When I came home tonight, there was a reply with full instructions which I managed to follow.

So in one session this evening I managed to:

Visit facilitators pages and leave a message.
learn how to create a home page, add a photo and text box.
Join in a discussion about the JellyOS software itself, and post a list of advantages of email by comparison.
Suggest a meet up.
Renew aquaintance with fellow student Maureen Slack, (we exchanged emails in September)

I still need to learn:

How to include links to http addresses
How to include a link to a guestbook/discussion area of my own.
If I can access the community from work ( Flash player may need updating on old macs )

I've been investigating the education minister's speech at labour party conference announcing "e-skills passports".

"We are creating an 'e-skills passport' to enable every student to improve their computer skills at their own pace."

'e-skills passport' is terminology used by e-skills UK the Sector Skills Council for IT, Telecoms and Contact Centres in the UK -

eskills.com

e-skills UK is uniting employers, educators and government on a common, employer-led agenda for skills-improvement action, and delivering programmes designed to improve productivity and business performance in the UK.

So the implication is that ICT teaching in schools is to become firmly led by business requirements rather than education objectives, right from an early age.

here's the full text of the speech
speech

see also
>e-skills passport

Subscribed to uk.comp.sys.mac newsgroup and bookmarked
href=http://www.macosxhints.com
and
macupdate.com

( test post using lofi interface)

Visiting Engineer

Matt from Toucan arrived and spent the day setting up the new mac OSX server, transferring users and data across from the old one and configuring clients.

It was exhausting and I only learned a fraction of what he was doing, and not yet enough even to be able to administer the new system yet.

The colourful upgrade management plan which I had drawn up was completely ignored, as he pushed ahead to try and get everything up and working on the new server in one day.

At the end of the day, we have the old iMacs running OS9 and Mac Manager 2 to log in to the new osX server, some users and passwords have been changed and shared directories work a bit differently. So it's business as usual tomorrow, fingers crossed. The one new eMac ( osX )is also configured to log in to the server and should share the same user data, but this doesn't seem quite right at the moment.

At least I have Matt's email address and I asked for another visit to be booked soon.

While it's nice to have a decent operating system underneath it all ( osX is based on FreeBSD, in turn a flavour of UNIX ), which is great having that sort of power and reliability back again, I feel that extremely technical work is something that necessarily belongs to my past and I much prefer to concentrate on the education side of things at this point in my life.

I came across this article about ICT teaching in Primary schools
http://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/story/0,5500,505751,00.html

I started up, (or rather piggybacked onto), a thread in the MAC LEARNING COMMUNITY email list about converting from OS9 to OSX SERVER. Through this I've made contact with another ICT coordinator in London who is going through the same process, so we can compare notes.

I've learned that there are serious problems with the Workgroup Manager program in OSX, which is what I need to use to replace Mac Manager which runs under the old system.

I shall try to write a plan for managing the whole conversion on Monday, with some sort of critical path analysis.

Now I'm going out for a walk to make the most of the lovely autumn sunshine.

I created this weblog today, and I'll access it from home and from school for recording my learing Journal.

After a while, I'll assess the system and decide whether to carry on with "Blogger" or migrate all the posts to another system, possibly my son's own one at frankieroberto.com if he ever gets around to sorting it out!

This Weblog is not listed in the Blogger index, so it's relatively private in that people will only be able to read it if I tell them about it, (probably).

29/09/03 - START OF OFSTED WEEK

event:
Interview with chief OFSTED inspector.

I was asked what I had achieved in my time at Monson school, then specific questions about assessment, control + monitoring equipment, planning, cross curricular planning and individual learning. I answered without notes and referred to my folders.

I explained that I was new to the job of ICT coordinator, ( 3 weeks) that this was my first OFSTED inspection and I didn?t really know what to expect, so he would have to tell me what he wants me to do or explain.

I asked to be given feedback after each day?s ICT lesson observations, and this was agreed.

I learned
That I need to be involved with Teachers medium term planning, assessing individuls progress and willing to make quantitative judgements about Teachers? lessons.

I felt that the interview was short, that the Inspector didn?t really ask me to show him very much but that he was suportive and amenable.

On reflection I wondered if it had been appropriate to ask me about my year in the role of ICT technician under another Coordinator when this was meant to be a coordinators interview, but I suppose it was his way of finding out what had been going on over the previous year and how I fit in to the school and the ICT lessons.

Also it seems that I was meant to hand over the portfolio of work covered and the ICT Coordinators files, but I hadn?t done that because he didn?t ask me for them. He did mention later that he couldn?t find any evidence of year 6 using powerpoint but I explained that we don?t use that particular program in this school, we use Appleworks and Kar2ouche instead.