Cleveratom

Reading University

Hal

I had the great privilege of talking to this year’s PGCE graduates at Reading University today, sharing my thoughts on education and ICT. I was invited to talk by the head of Education, Leslie Honour, who had read my CV and thought that I had something to offer.

I talked for just over an hour as a keynote speaker, covering a number of different aspects to education and ICT. Central points I touched on included my background as a teacher, and experience with computers (remember that first time with a mouse…?) plus a brief tour of what I am doing these days with Cleveratom. From there I went through the Digital Creativity work where I showed some of the stellar pieces we have had from children over the years, the use of online spaces for learning (lingering over Notschool, somewhat, as well as the power of virtual learning environments), the technology we could use as well as a brief thought about where the future might go.

As ever the focus is on the students and what we are doing/could be doing to provide better opportunities for learning. A common cry from any audience is “That’s all very well, Hal, but how do I do this as well as fit in everything else?” Of course, the answer isn’t to try to cram ever more things into the school day, but to use the technology wisely to replace things you normally do, working smarter with it all. How does this fit with the national initiatives? I think I could reasonably easily show how this kind of clever use of technology incorporates  the key skills demanded, and I’m pretty confident that I can offer greater opportunities to students through the use of ICT than without it.

One comment from today went along the lines of the extensive reliance on ICT to provide communities and social groups for learning would inevitably lead to the destruction of social groups as more and more people receed to an online existence. This is a pretty bleak picture, of course, but perfectly valid as a point, and achallenge to all of us to ensure there is an appropriate blend of activities, not all based on ICT.

In fact, it is important to remember that from time to time ICT should NOT be used – particularly when there is no real benefit.

And all of this needs to be in the context of the changes in society, the different needs of the learners coming through the system and the expectations of what they will do when they leave school and take their place in work. Additionally, the global context increasingly shows the shift in emphasis from the UK being the centre of the universe, to a far bigger distribution elsewhere on the planet. Did you know, for example, that China has well over 1 million schools (England and Wales has 24,000), and that by any measure the number of gifted and talented pupils in China exceeds the number of children we have got in schools in total? What are the implications of this for the future, do you think?

And if the average teenager spends around 6.5 hours out of school in media based activities (YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Television) what are we doing to capture the learning that is happening and how would we begin to assess it if we could? Should assessment criteria begin to expect a child to run a group in Facebook, or upload content into YouTube and have it critiqued by an audience?

Or do we do what we have always done, and accept that we will end up with what we have always had… which quite frankly is not going to move us up the world rankings given the shifts happening!

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them” – Albert Einstein

New iMacs for the company

Hal

So the time has come to think about the macs we have got at Cleveratom and how we want to plan for the future. Our trusty G4’s are reaching the point where we no longer use them – even video editing (so long the staple job of these machines) is faster on my Macbook Pro, easier to do and portable, too.

So what to do? We have a rather nice 1.25GHz dual processor G4 (Mirror drive drawer) which has been sat quietly for a month or two now, a 733MHz single processor ‘quicksilver’ machine from the same era, and another highly upgraded G4, running as a dual 1.2GHz (upgrade card) with two SATA drives as a raid array, additional firewire ports and USB2 ports added on. Any offers?

In their place we have just bought some shiny new iMacs which are now taking on the role of office machines, general purpose desktop kit. They look excellent – we used them at BETT on the stand and they were worthy enough to draw a few people over just because they look so good! Wireless keyboards, wireless mouse (although I personally don’t like the bluetooth connection struggling each time the machine boots), these are smart pieces of equipment.

So it appears to be crunch time for ‘Jolly Roger’, ‘Birdseye’ and ‘Jumbo’… is there a nice home for them to go to?

BETT 2008 Review, January 9th – 12th at Olympia

Hal

For the first time ever, Cleveratom became an exhibitor in their own right at the BETT show in Olympia during the week of 9th January 2008. This involved renting the space ( a shell scheme area 4m x 4m on the main hall gallery outside the organisers’ office), creating a stand and buying the graphics and frames needed, and renting the remainder of the equipment. It was a small fortune to do, but overall very worthwhile.

The event itself is huge. Now easily filling both the Grand hall and the National hall, plus both galleries, there are probably a thousand companies hawking their wares and services. In addition, the feature stand in the main hall showcases a number of different approaches to education – this year the message was ‘Learner Voice’. Headed up by Stephen Heppell, the feature stand involved a number of different consultants and practitioners giving talks and presentations, but also hosted some groups of children making use of hardware to do some tasks such as film making with a sony PSP (yep – a PSP.. just add a camera!), using interactive whiteboards and the fabulous Asus EeePC. I was delighted to be a presenter on that stand on each day of the show.

The Cleveratom stand had a large number of visitors despite not being in a particularly busy area. Friends from previous projects appeared over the four days and we were reminded of just how busy the company has been. Older friends from Ultralab days were welcomed, too and we hope more people are now aware of just what it is we can do to hep them integrate learning and ICT more effectively.

We were showcasing a single product on our stand – PLiP – in conjunction with Edison Schools. The PLiP tool (Personalised Learning in Practice) is the software we created to support the process which Edison professionals deliver in schools. We were delighted to have Kevin, Tim, Deborah, Sue and Julie supporting us on the stand and helping to promote the process.

My overriding memory of the week is that there is a lot still to do to encourage people to engage with personalisation of learning and not make it become a buzz phrase – learner voice is equally important and we have to guard against tokenistic approaches to this, too. many companies are developing virtual learning solutions but to many are still trying to build a walled garden for the learner, replicating the functionality of the social spaces that children gravitate towards and therefore introducing a layer of complexity that doesn’t necessarily need to be there. There are some chinks of light in the forest of VLE, though. Notable is Dan Sivak and his company ‘CDSM’ with the ‘My Learning Space’ product, and ‘LP+’ which appears to have risen from almost nowhere to prominence in a very short time.

As the coming weeks unfold, more reflection on the show will appear and perhaps more sense will be made of what was a very hectic time. On a more personal level I want to remember to use soft soles on my shoes in future, and add insoles to those, too! Also, a big thank you to Matt Eaves, Alex Blanc, Nick Platts and Hais Deakin for working so hard throughout the week. Additionally, I’d like to thank Jack and colleagues from Skyline Whitespace who helped us make sense of the frames we used for the stand, and to Skyline for helping us achieve a very special look and feel to the space. 

Cleveratom Website

Hal

The move to a new version of the web site is running… there may be some issues as we change settings here and there, please bear with us. It should iron itself out over time, as we spend more time ‘fine tuning’ it all.

WordPress bug, format.php, invalid wordpress html code

Hal

It may come as a surprise to some (but not many) folk to know that there has apparently been a long running bug in wordpress from about version 2.1 which will cause your website to fail validation. It only happens in certain situations, such as when you try and add a plugin to capture form based information from your site users. When the form code is passed to the browser, a spurious ‘p’ tag gets added in to the ‘div’ tags and therefore the code is not valid… Keep in mind that the ‘doc type’ declaration is important here too, and that in my case I was using XHTML 1.0 transitional.

So what to do? Well, on the wordpress.org website there are several threads about it, including this one where I posted a response earlier today. It seems that the issue is at least ten months old, and various solutions have been speculated. Indeed, some of these solutions seem to work for some folk, but they sure as heck didn’t work for me. Largely, they involve editing one of the core wordpress files – ‘format.php’ and either adding in a new line, or taking some away. The new line is supposed to be inserted as line 67 and reads:

$pee = preg_replace( '|(</div[>]*>\s*)</p>|', "</p>$1", $pee );

This did nothing for me at all. Other solutions included commenting out lines 66 through to 68… still nothing. However, when I asked my colleague Alex Blanc to look at the code he very quickly spotted that there was a simple fix – in his words ‘a bit of a sledgehammer approach…’ but it seemed to work.

Add this as line 91:

$pee = preg_replace( '|</p></form>\s*</p></div>|', "</form></div>", $pee );

(one line only, folks, no carriage returns…)
The placing within the function in ‘format.php’ is important – put it at the bottom of the function!

Now, it may be that you don’t need this, or that it doesn’t actually work for you – it worked for me today though. The point is that this is a known issue in wordpress and has been around for nearly a whole year, and survived several updates of the software. It really ought to have been sorted out properly by now… but hey – this is open source, right? 🙂