In this latest video from Stephen Downes he talks about the latest trends, Open Education Resources and the probability of their use.
http://downes.blip.tv/file/4295646/
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What is missing are the business models or other motivations that will drive OER development and coordination to support coherent learning progression. There are already large projects like curriki.org that provide free learning resources but mostly these suffer from lack of organisation and structure to support particular schemes of work.
I see two clear tracks here. The first is the user learning by making use of open generic tools to search for, analyse, process and present information. The second is structured guidance for learning pathways that include instructions content and organised information. Wikipedia is full of content but most of it is inaccessible to the majority of school age children. So I think it is an over-simplification to say that content can simply be fed into apps. What content? For what stage in attainment? How structured? How assessed? Even across subjects it will vary with blended learning required on and off-line in different proportions. Then there will need to be different guidance for teachers and learners. The majority of teachers are not going to switch to on-line learning for quite some time and they will need support in getting from where they are now to where they need to be. So I'm not disputing that OER are going to be the future - I have thought that for the last 10 years - the snag is making it work given the current skills and knowledge base of the work force and governments that have shown complete ineptitude in managing change. The large commercial players haven't got it to this point and to be fair the commercial models to enable them to make it all work are not that obvious.
I think there's a risk in confusing learning and teaching here - Ian may well be right that teachers aren't yet ready to make the switch to online teaching, but I think many of those whom we teach have already made the move to online learning, certainly when they look beyond the confines of their educational institutions. Wikipedia is an interesting case in point, being consulted almost as frequently by our learners as Google or YouTube, but rarely with any encouragement from teachers or lecturers. I'll just put in a plug here for simple.wikipedia.org, presented in language accessible to upper primary children, if not younger.
I spoke at ULCC's FOTE10 conference on the similarities and differences between OER work and open source software - at least in HE, where OER has been around for a while now, we have quite a cathedral like approach to OER creation, with little sense of the bazaar that is characteristic of the best open source software development - do folks think this might be different when OER takes off in the schools sector?
I agree with Mike/Ian here. Many of our students routinely access online learning resources regardless of whether we want them to or not! Rampant plagiarism aside (and we could have a very lengthy discussion on that alone!), simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page is much more accessible to them as the main Wiki articles get very technical very quickly ...
Dave
"An honest answer is like a kiss on the lips"
- Provers 24:26
Plagiarism can be addressed by looking at the good old fashioned skills of provenance and attribution. The 21st Century skills are looking at copyright and the scope of how it is used within institutions and on a wider platform. Again it comes down to an awareness of the learning arenas and the protocols that exist within/ without them.
These issues are much to the fore in the wider community as well with downloading and sharing of content and models of dissemination. What might be acceptable on an arts course with the idea of bricolage, mashups and creative re-engineering inside an institution is totally unaccpetable outside of that learning and geospatial "arena".
Being able to reflect on, re-interpret and communicate that knowledge is important and a lot of what I do with primary age pupils is to scaffold and evolve ways for them to do this peer to peer using digital and face to face tools that facilitate this. Where to pitch at what level of content is, of course, the teacher's skill.
I usually find that if something has a currency or validation or value that is of worth, then people tend to not like it being taken for free. Never mind all the legal, intellectual, licencing and other arguments.
Taking content and not reflecting on it (i.e. cut and paste) - is a far more heinous crime in my book. :)
I couldn't agree more with your last sentence but, sadly, the cut and paste culture is alive and thriving these days. Students often (but not always) cannot be bothered to "reflect, re-interpret and communicate" what they have been looking at. Fortunately, as any teacher will know, it is pretty easy to spot (suddenly more sophisticated language, american spellings, leaving the links and other formatting in, etc.) without having to resort to tools like Viper and Turn-it-in.
One technique that develops students' reflective skills in this area is to get students to teach a topic they have been studying to someone else, e.g. jigsaw method or actually deliver a lesson. Like Silberman said:
"What I hear, I forget.
What I see and hear, I remember somewhat.
What I hear, see, question, and discuss with others, I begin to understand.
What I see, hear, question, discuss, and do, I learn.
And after all this, when I teach, I master the learning."
"An honest answer is like a kiss on the lips"
- Provers 24:26
An approach I have used with Wikipedia is to start with the Wikipedia article and then disect it with the students (Higher National Certificate in this case). By walking through an article, discussing with them the meaning and interpreting the technical terms, the students were clear that all parties are familiar with the content and it would be unwise the plagarise.
To take this further, the students could then be tasked with collaberatively building a similar article on a local wiki for peer assessment.
I can see how this approach applies in technical areas of Wikipedia. Such pages are generally maintained well and the information is accurate - but most articles are probably pitched at a level beyond that of the average youngster. In that respect plagiarism is usually blindingly obvious even to those not using Wikipedia, and it's likely those reviewing essays would be familiar with the same articles: agreed.
My friend the school librarian is vary agin WIkipedia because of its lack of authority. She has taken out subscriptions to OED, Britannica and the like on our behalf. Plainly plagiarism is equally possible. But she's concerned about pupils being given the wrong steer from pages created by people with agendas. And in some parts of Wikipedia (religion, some bits of history for example) there are justifiable concerns.
We need to teach children to analyse their sources critically, to acknowledge quotations, to state arguments in their own words but referring to sources, and to put together a proper bibliography for any major work they do. The techniques required no are no different to the says when kids sat in school ot town libraries doing their reading. The medium has changed, but not the message.
Either all reachers think about this when setting and marking work, or they turn to turnitin in knee-jerk fashion.
Derek
The answer the the 'lack of authority' we apply is to create a wildly inaccurate article on a local topic in Wikipedia and then get our students to research it. The point behind it being, that they should never take it for granted that Wikipedia is correct and should always cross check their results.
I guess it would be impossible to do this on a relatively static work such as Encyclopedia Britanica.
(We do remove the articles afterwards unless someone has already spotted it and removed it for us!)
Ian
(The Foxdale shipyard was not one of ours but still very entertaining!)
The very fact that Wikipedia's authority is routinely questioned is one of its greatest strengths from an educational perspective. I'd be worried if children were brought up to assume that everything on Britannica, Encarta (remember that?), The Times or the DfE websites was true, simply because it couldn't be edited by the end user. Engaging criticially and discerningly with text should be something we teach children to do, whether the text is wikified or not.
I've not checked, but I suspect there is more up-to-date information and fewer errors on the relevant set of wikipedia pages than a randomly selected A-level or GCSE text book. To many eyes, all bugs are shallow.
Wikipedia and wikis in general are ideal for covering some aspects of the ICT National Curriculum (such as it is):
KS2, 1c: "[Pupils should be taught] to interpret information, to check it is relevant and reasonable and to think about what might happen if there were any errors or omissions."
KS3, 2.1.d "[Pupils should be able to] analyse and evaluate information, judging its value, accuracy, plausibility and bias."
KS4, 2.1.c "[Students should be able to] select appropriate information from a wide range of sources, showing discrimination in their choices and judging the value, accuracy, plausibility and bias of information"
Another thing worth mentioning, there's no reason why pupils shouldn't be adding content to simple.wikipedia.org (or exceptionally, en.wikipedia.org), giving a genuine sense of writing for a purpose and an audience. I've often wondered about the possibilities and practicalities of setting up a wikipedia by and for children: the former are wonderfully appealing, the latter prohibitive, IMHO.
The point we should be defending is that while Wikipedia raises issues of authenticity and authority that is not solely a feature of Wikipedia but a universal set of problems that do not disappear when we use the CIA factbook which was on release to schools not long ago, or any other sources.
I totally agree with you - getting students to put together a presentation or teach someone else is one of the main ways I would take this forwards. It may seem longer and more cumbersome but needn't be. And this is something I would call "deep learning" in the current parlance :)
Perhaps the pedagogy and the learning can be fused in that transactions in the bazaar are a little more transparent for all concerned.
These tools can often tend more towards the processes of collaboration, co-constuction, transparency of learning and reflection.
What is interesting is the social use and the different and changing arenas of use.
There is the informal , where use of tools is outside the remit of the teacher and the institution at students' homes and the more formal, narrower scope of use within the school bound by all the familar hyperlocal cultural and social constraints.
Use/access /communciation is often not commutative between the two for a myriad of reasons but mainly underpinned by e-safety concerns which often acts as a bar to access. Where it is able to pass between "worlds" is in the mobile device which is often banned. These devices are persoanl and immediate and can offer up a whole world of distraction from as well as focus on educational use. These are going to become more ubiquitous and have more diverese OS's and more complexity in that they will do similar things with many different UI's. Some people are able to deal with this, others are bewildered. They will not go away but increase in number and the use of them will increase and become more ubiquitous and embedded.
However the process of making the pedagogy and learning part of co-teaching strategies that are modelled for and by pupils with suitable facilitation/intervention and validation on the teacher's part are possible.
Obviously there needs to be a shift in the way a culture of learning happens - more, in my opinion, to the informal learning stategies created by personal devices and harnessing those for moving learning on in a more collaborative and transparent way in institutions.
Those teaching/learning strategies would need to be remodelled for everyone in an institution. Of course the content is diverse but if a proper foundation of learning strategies facilitated by open source and OER software is imaginatively put in place then it would be easier to have a toolbox of ways in which we can learn, make that transparent to others, and be able to be communicated more effectively to each other as a matter of course.
Peer to peer learning, reflection, collaboration, presentation and many other strategies can be scaffolded for teachers. I am a great believer that some learning strategies will be co-constructed so the same for both learner and teacher. This is going on in ad hoc patchy ways at home obviously in some families and not at all in others. Being shown how to use and apply these tools in a highly social context is the key. This may run counter to school culture and so wil be disruptive in the short term. I guess I'm saying nothing new here.
Now within that context "content" can be addressed. Proof of attainment, assessment, and how that is structured and modelled will emerge with the new technolgies and tools and the social usage around them and yes it will be blended and come in all variety of solutions.
I think the channels, the ways in which we do this will come more and more from alliegances of interested parties, stakeholders and from the ground up but with top down facilitation.
Some firms are beginning to understand this relationship. Purple Mash by 2 Simple is one I think. There will be others but I would suspect that how we create channels of communication for different stakeholders in different arenas will be the key in the years to come.
I agree Leon, particularly where he states the need for a change in culture. I work as an education consultant particulary in the area of ICT strategy and I have been a teacher for 13 years - I hope I understand the issues raised by the 'threat', as it is perceived in some schools, of the use of technologies not entirely in the control of the teacher or indeed the school.
Control of technologies was a prerequisite of using IT in schools for many years. It was the domain of the technical staff and they exerted control over who used IT and how it was used. Initially, there was an imbalance of power until gradually teaching and learning began to gain its rightful position as teachers began to understand how technology might aid learning and their busy working lives. Whilst this slow process was going on, however, the world was moving at a much faster pace.
IPSOS MORI identified in their survey in 2005 that there was a significant divergence between how young people use IT and how teachers use IT. The survey was a contribution to the Harnessing Technology Strategy. Here we are five years later still discussing essentially the same issues which seems to revolve around one issue which is control of the technology but this time in the name of e-safety.
I suspect that for younger teachers coming into teaching having grown-up with the idea that technology is something they 'have a right to use' there will be a growing sense of frustration that technologies in schools under such control and their use is so regimented. This status quo may suit some but it will not suit the many in the years to come.
It's time for IT systems in schools to become more sophisticated in the use of their technologies to aid e-safety while, at the same time, ensure appropriate access to technologies both inside and outside the institution that support learning and teaching. It is possible to ensure that students can use their own devices in their school safely, equally teachers should be able to utilise whatever appropriate tools they need to support their students learning.
I wonder how many schools still ban access to YouTube, how many have banned the use of Twitter, how many have abandoned the idea that learning is a social activity that we all enjoy outside the school context. Leon is correct, cultural change is required otherwise what suspicions will be raised about Open Education Resources when they appear to be 'out of control'.
Jeremy e-learning 4 schools
I think technologists have lost the battle. All schools ban porn sites, they may ban Youtube, twitter, facebook, myspace or whatever - but kids have 3G devices, and therefore schools need to be careful: they may say to parents "Looks how much care we take to avoid inappropriate content" but simply drive such activity underground. Education is the key, not blanket bans.
Youtube contains lots of crap, but many gems. Many of our teachers use it in class and we embed youtube clips in our intranet pages. Personally I'd rather use vimeo because it contains less dross - and links less aggressively to what might be dross, but that's just a detail. Embrace technology. And yes kids use youtube [we're a boarding school so we have leisure time use to consider as well]. We schok kids and staff how to connect their iPhones and Blackberries to our systems, and we're heading towards our campus being a big starbucks-style wifi patch.
The lady responsible for child safety in school here reckons teachers shouldn't use facebook in a way which makes them identifiable as teachers, they shouldn't make pupils their friends. Too many dangers of inappropriate comments or false accusations. All very true if you're primarily wearing a Health and Safety hat, but I refrained from pointing out the two teachers who were already successfully using such sites to distribute work and encourage collaborative projects. She hasn't worked out that's happening yet.
The need for control comes from IT staff who are often underfunded and dealing with technology which is more complex than simple business would use; it also comes from Senior staff whose 'here be dragons' attitude is to ban what they don't understand. I suggest it is VERY important that teachers educate both parties. i.e. I suggest we are reversing what has been the norm until recently. Luckily our IT manager is very flexible and on the ball.
What sorts of restrictions might be reasonable? The sorts parents would enforce if they had a clue what their kids were up to? Restricted access to sites? Getting kids to go to bed by turning some sites off? Turning power off? By looking at usage when mobile phone bills come in? I'd be interested to know how light or heavy a touch others think schols need?
Derek
Personally I think that the advice relating to facebook is spot on. Teachers would be well advised to be very careful with that one. Twitter a bit less so. I think schools should generally try to keep things on their own infrastructure, so spin up an elgg.org for internal social networking and use Moodle for work distribution. That way students can make their social networking errors and learn from them in a safe environment where the retention and disposition rules are in the control of the school, not defined by an organisation that wants to data mine and monetise them.
In my experience it only takes one "e-safety" "incident" to occur for activity to be shut down no matter what the safeguards. This is where communication and digital literacy and AUPs have to be more than just lip service.
I guess the problem often (but not always) starts when inappropriate behaviour starts at home and comes in under the school's remit. Having a policy written from the ground up by staff and pupils and parents about behaviour and safety helps but getting senior management to take that on board is another matter as you have pointed out - they are busy and if the only times it comes their way is crisis management you aren't going to get a very sympathetic ear :)
Strong leadership and knowledge of the area is vital for the SMT otherwise there is a cut and run mentality at the first breach of agreements. If the school has a number of communication channels digital or otherwise in place then it is stronger as a community for it but it is not a trivial undertaking and requires almost gantt chart attention to detail at first to succeed. I would say that it will be a vital part of any successful school's remit to create those channels - introduce that CPD to SMT and others and to widen the remit to contain and involve different stakeholders. It is the way it is going in general - you just cannot lock out the wider world forever and you surely can't filter out the things you don't want intruding so there has to be a civilised and realistic middle way.
Whether the school as an institution allows this to happen within the current frameworks is another matter but as to practical ways forwards I would start with getting everyone together to agree terms and rules of engagement. SMT have to have a realistic strategic policy for comms in their institutions (or devolve that to someone with the power to enforce and be independent in this area) and follow through in tough times when it is challenged and the borders of what is acceptable pushed - and they will be - even in the most well behaved communities. This is a new area of management and has yet to be fully explored because of the chicken and egg situation with comms and access I guess. At present you get individuals making ad hoc and isolated decisions that could be entirely eccentric or uninformed or lacking in scope. That's a recipe for disaster.
What do other people here do - I guess we are talking about building open or rather transparent social systems here rather than open source?
The reason why I said there are two strands is because the first is clearly about learning and already in existence. It is simply competing with entrenched lock-in. The second is more a combination of teaching and learning. Many children are learning to some extent using collaborative technologies outside school - but they learnt like that well before the internet. I learnt a lot from messing about on the local beach, doing the lobster pots with the fishermen, climbing the cliffs etc. The thing is that organising learning to optimise progress is still important. That, I think is teaching. Teaching covers a whole range of stuff from lecturing from the front to providing direction to on-line guidance to support individual progress. Teaching in terms of guiding learners one way or another is still important.
Neither can we see this separately from society's formally stated priorities. Qualifications are going to determine what is valued in terms of learning for some time to come. If it leads to a GCSE, A level, NVQ or a place at college, it is going to be valued and so we are not really doing learners any favours if we simply say go off and do whatever you like.
Neither of course is sticking with the status quo. The whole system needs to change, not just bits of it and indeed changing bits in isolation could do more harm than good. It's why I have been so critical of the e-strategy. It isn't a strategy, its an aspiration to an outcome without providing a clear means of getting from a to b. Some of the change required is simply a matter of emphasis - plagiarism has always been unacceptable - if the context is changed by digital technologies refocus the priority to tackle the things it affects, don't just block it because that is easier for the organisation. We can save resources to do this by using the technology to reduce other areas of overhead such as paper based administration, cost of purchasing resources etc.
But in the end, the reason why FOSS is disruptive to commercially licensed software is because of the global economies of scale that allow giving a brick to be coordinated into a house at very low cost. Nevertheless, the large projects are sustained from more than simply volunteers hacking code. Mozilla, Canonical et al all make money to sustain development. OER isn't going to just happen like Wikipedia, it is more complex and even Wikipedia struggles constantly because it has no commercial supporting model. Government funding could have been a way of doing things better but that isn't likely now the opportunity has been squandered with the mismanagement of curriculum on-line. Advertising is more difficult in school environments so what is the means of generating the income to support structured guidance for learning pathways that include instructions content and organised information?
Ian writes:
"Qualifications are going to determine what is valued in terms of learning for some time to come. If it leads to a GCSE, A level, NVQ or a place at college, it is going to be valued and so we are not really doing learners any favours if we simply say go off and do whatever you like."
And yet, I wonder. I think we're now past the point where A-levels alone aren't sufficient for a place on many university courses, nor are degrees sufficient for employment or post graduate qualifications, suggesting that actually we've already come to value something more to learning that that which qualifications measure. The portfolio of work, the wider experience, the projects themselves and the people with whom one has worked have always been important, but the ease with which these can be viewed via Google and the Web is transformative. Looking to appoint a software engineer, do you offer the post to the candidate with the computer science degree or the one maintaining her own open source project, alongside a distributed community of co-developers and users? Not that these are incompatible.
I don't think we'd be doing learners any favours if we simply say you should only learn the stuff you need for your qualifications.
Hi Miles,
"And yet, I wonder. I think we're now past the point where A-levels alone aren't sufficient for a place on many university courses"
Try getting into a university without A levels or a UCAS pointed Level 3 VRQ ;-) While it is probably true that it's A levels + to at least some extent (and always was) I can't see too many people with 4 As getting refused a place except perhaps by Oxbridge.
As for the value of portfolios on the web - that is exactly what we have been trying to establish with the INGOTs and the Schools ITQ we even host the facilities and provide them for fre for everyone. Nevertheless, the biggest problem is the reluctance to change from "traditional methods" like taking screen shots and printing them! Bad practice, bad for the environment etc. Traditional academic quals like GCSE are not going to suddenly go away. We can provide significant cost savings, and a lot less bureaucracy for teachers, free resources etc but its still not easy to get people to change their habits. Since we are focused on the IT specialists, if anything it is likely to be more difficult with other subject areas. So all the evidence seems to be that qualifications still largely determine what is taught in secondary schools and to a large extent how it is taught. Can you see that changing with the Coalition in power? I can't and the current opposition showed no sign of changing things either.
Having said all that, I don't buy the argument that qualifications and "the other stuff" are necessarily mutually exclusive. Sure if you teach towards a tight knowledge based SAT, GCSE or A level syllabus controlled by a traditionally minded Awarding Body you are probably going to be severely constrained and like using closed source software it is perceived to be safe. The reason I went for the ITQ not GCSE IT is not because we couldn't get accredited for GCSE, we could and we are accredited for Functional Skills, it's because the ITQ provides exactly the flexibility you are saying is essential for a change to better education. It enables us to promote open systems and open standards and to allow learners freedom to develop interests, from computer programming to blogging. If it was really all going to change so simply to OER I'd be a millionaire by now and all learners would be developing free e-portfolios drawing on their interests across the curriculum ;-).
>Having said all that, I don't buy the argument that qualifications and "the other stuff"
>are necessarily mutually exclusive. Sure if you teach towards a tight knowledge based
>SAT, GCSE or A level syllabus controlled by a traditionally minded Awarding Body
>you are probably going to be severely constrained and like using closed source software
>it is perceived to be safe.
ICT A-level is not well-respected by universities and good calibre pupils would be better off doing Maths and Physics - or English or Art or a Language depending on their intended future IT career; and those who pick it up as ther last subject, whether to provide 'balance' or because they think that's their least weak option, often find it quite difficult.
When Awarding bodies like OCR, AQA set coursework, they pretty much intend it to be done using MS Office. Schools using open office run the risk of meeting an incompetent examiner - and there are many people marking ICT scripts who have less knowledge than pupils.
The exam boards will claim (at least in part correctly) their hands are tied - because of the National Qualification framework and those who control it.
SMT in most schools have little idea of the situation, though they must have clues all is not well from other subjects. And Schools' IT services generally feel safer with MS or Mac based systems because of familiarity and perceived availability of support skills. So the schools, the boards, the system goes lumbering on.
I suspect there are considereable numbers of teachers and HoDs who would be VERY amenable to software like OpenOffice or even software which is completely open - but look at the factors weighed against them.
What to do? Chip away at both ends. Teachers need to educate their SMT. They also need to hassle the exam boards about wording of questions and mark schemes for examiners.
Personally I question the need for formal qualifications in ICT - as soon as you teach towards a qualification you have to adopt a syllabus and constrain your ability to teach what others in your school want children to know. I'm not sure ITQ is that different in this regard given each of its modules has effectively a syllabus to follow. I question it because schools rarely provide enough time to complete a course reflectively or to teach beyond the topics listed. But I'm in a situation where few pupils are aiming directly at the workplace and that biases my opinions.
Derek
So we are in the transitional stage where the skilset and the agency of examiners is entirely unfit for purpose and ill-fitted in both the medium in which they are examining and the outcomes and metrics/ evidence etc that could be produced in the exam in some cases. We have a situation where cartel driven proprietorial tech excludes diversity.
Then my immediate thinking on this would be :
How do we get this message across simply and without blame?
How do we suggest solutions?
How do we market that?
Sir Humphrey Appleby was asked by the PM about how they measured the impact of legislation. Sir Humphrey replied that "provided the result of the legislation was not precisely the opposite of what was intended it should be counted as a success.".
Hence the National Curriculum and the fact that, having worked through all its versions, no one in the DFES, DFE, DFEE, DCSF DFE again, has ever said "Oops we got that a bit wrong". However (possibly unfortunately) it (the NC legislation) did not have completely the opposite of what was intended so it is counted as a success.
BTW Leon, do keep plugging away, I am am just in too cynical a mood at the moment but I value your contributions hugely.
Brian Lockwood
Sorry, clicked twice!
Brian Lockwood
All I can say is that our qualifications are guaranteed to be achievable using FOSS. Generally the guidance in the handbook draws on FOSS apps like Inkscape. Audacity, OOo etc. But if students use MSO as many do we don't discriminate. In fact I want the most closed MS shops to take up what we offer because then there is a chance of educating them rather than simply preaching to the converted.
I deal with Ofqual on a regular basis and the national frameworks do not require any closed source applications - indeed I have found Ofqual very open to new ideas and the use of open systems. They, like the big Awarding Bodies and Schools suffer from lack of expertise which is why I adopted a strategy of education first. If we can't, as educators, see the need for education before change, there is not much hope ;-).
They also need to hassle the exam boards about wording of questions and mark schemes for examiners.
They could also adopt an exam board that was set up to support qualifications in Open Systems ;-)
Seriously, the one thing that would grab the attention of OCR, Edexcel or AQA is if they started losing market share to a new start up. The big three are like a supermarket cartel and certainly in some ways much more powerful than the regulators.
I'm not sure ITQ is that different in this regard given each of its modules has effectively a syllabus to follow.
With respect, that is the problem, you don't understand the ITQ. There is no "syllabus" as such. There are units with broad learning objectives and generic assessment criteria. QCF qualifications are competence based and start from that premise. GCSEs and A levels are still primarily syllabus content based. With the ITQ you are entirely free to define the context that you think is important (or more importantly is of interest to the learner). You could use the Specialist Software Unit to teach Javascript programming or setting up and configuring Wordpress. You could use Improving Productivity Using ICT to assess planning executing and evaluating any IT based project and you can negotiate with us any valid assessment methods to provide the evidence that the learners meet the assessment criteria. The simplest is direct criteria matching but you can devise a controlled test or task if you want to. Of course flexibility provides opportunities for bad practice as well as good, but no-one forces an individual teacher to adopt bad practice.
If we are in the business of recognising and rewarding learning why do we not certificate childrens' achievements except as a stepping stone to employment or going to university? Why has recognition (a very well evidenced motivator) not got an intrinsic value in its own right? For that educational reason alone I can see no really good argument for not providing certificates for children in KS1, 2 and 3 as well as 4. Cost perhaps, but we can use the technology to make it very low cost so that does not stand up either. This might actually provide a focus for OERs and a revenue stream to sustain them.
Yes Miles - I think that is part of the point I was trying (and failing as usual) to make. It is because of Digital Identities, different arenas of activity and the fact that there is persistence of reputation on and offline now that we have to reconsider much more than end stopped exams.
Ian I quite agree that the "stuff" of learning is important and some of that "stuff" remains pretty timeless and underpins a lot of what we do. But it is how we use it I have issue with and what is agreed in how it fits in with how we move forward as a nation.
Knowing where the institution stops and the informal interest starts is a 21st century skill I think that needs to be developed. How to balance and maintain that would be a good measure of what I'd call (cough) "standards" ;)
Although this is a drift off topic I felt I just had to comment on the sweeping generalisation about ICT, universities and the status of Maths and Physics.
Whilst the content of ICT A-level has its issues in that it tends (IMHO) to be a bit wooly. As an A-level it is at least as difficult as many other subjects seen by people (who usually do not teach them) as second tier.
Certainly Maths and Physics carry a great deal of credibility and we encourage students to take them if they are interested in them. The universities are also aware of how much weaker the Physics content is than used to be the case. Hence the requirement from some universities for top up courses prior to undergraduate study.
Maths has gained some ground in content recently, the removal of coursework at GCSE being a sensible step. The content of further maths is more challenging, as it should be. The way that modular courses work has made some of the further maths modules more popular. This is another good step.
ICT meanwhile is getting tougher and we recently sent someone with an A in applied ICT to Oxford (obviously not to study Maths or Physics). The point is, that students are far far better taking A-levels they are interested in. As a large sixth form we have a fair amount trouble with students who are pressured into maths and physics by reputation as opposed to interest. This is regardless of their ability. Thankfully a good tutor can spot the issue early and transfer them on to something more suited to their interests.
Then again I have taught A-level in all three subjects (Maths, Physics and ICT) and so have lived through the ups and downs of all three for 25 years.
Brian Lockwood
I can't resist just one more, then I'll stop.
> Although this is a drift off topic I felt I just had to comment on the sweeping generalisation about ICT,
> universities and the status of Maths and Physics.
This from admissions officers or professors at B******, R******, B***, C********, albeit a couple of years ago, and I'm mentioning things they wouldn't be prepared to confirm publicly. They prefer students to have other qualifications. And my ex dir-of-studies got similar comments elsewhere. Why, I asked? Because of its perceived status as a 'studies' subject. Because they'd far rather have Maths Physics French than Maths Physics IT or pretty much any other combination including IT. And I hate saying it, because they still perceive IT as something they can teach far better than schools. They thought Computing only marginally better.
So not a wide sample, but not entirely unfounded. However I will not be able to produce evidence to back it up; nothing in writing.
> ICT meanwhile is getting tougher
A change in policy and chief examiner at OCR caught an enormous number of teachers on the hop this Summer. I was quoted an large proportion of schools referred for loosely undue help, because they'd used similar templated solutions to previous years, and an even larger numbers of schools with work marked down, with some hints that appeals were going through successfully because of board practice and marking standards. And allegedly the chief examiner has left - don't know if true, or why. It seems a mess, but it's the people with problems who'll make the most noise, so I can;t see the whole picture.
This sort of suggests some teachers are working far too closely to the syllabus without appreciation of the processes involved. My opinion is teachers need to be IT practitioners - kids who are mentored by experienced teachers who have themselves implemented systems tend to do quite well. Some teachers are bemused by the mark scheme and conditions for practical work.
This has a tangential bearing on open source and its marketing - if teachers are uncertain what they need to do to keep boards happy, perhaps the OS community can help support them through exemplar materials based across a range of platforms. I could probably chuck in anonymised write-ups from old ICT projects but they wouldn't meet current marking criteria.
This wasn't a dig at any one subject - it's a reflection of what some universities think, perhaps unfairly. My own background excludes Physics, but I have taught Maths, Computing, ICT, Business Studies over too many years to want to mention. Apologies for raising boood pressures.
I'd ask one simple question. Why do we accept a situation that allows children to go through 2 years of learning and then get told on a technical misunderstanding that their work is lower value than it should have been? There really is no need for this. New technology enables CPD to be integrated with the delivery of the course leading to the qualification. Seems to me like complaining about closed source software when there are less well known alternatives that can solve the problem ;-)
Well I will happily have the last word then. There is more than one thing going on here. To be honest, there is no real dispute here, we are talking of different things). The Universities may well teach coding better than schools, the IT Industry meanwhile complains that graduates are effectively useless regardless of quality of degree.
Meanwhile in the schools, the drive from coding to ICT was driven by the universities' view that coding was taught badly. (Which may often be true but then many other subjects are taught badly in lots of places).
Now the Computing At School group is trying to remedy the inevitable outcome that the supply of children interested in coding has all but dried up. (http://computingatschool.org.uk) This is supported by a range of bodies including BCS and Universities.
Returning briefly to ICT at A-level I hope that the universities B***, R****, B*** & C***** you mention can find a plentiful supply of students to matriculate but that does not have to be at the expense of the many students who end up with poor grades at Maths and Physics due to receiving bad advice. Whether that bad grade is due to lack of interest, lack of ability or the poor teaching that too many Universities find it convenient to blame when they witness lack of progress in their undergraduates.
While we are on the topic, the state sector has to churn out several million students year in year out, on a fraction of the funds that have benefitted a large portion of the matriculants of B******, R******, B***, C********.
Rant over. :-)
Brian Lockwood
I have taught A level maths and physics but not A level ICT. If the answer is simply more hard sums, the universities simply need to say "we only accept Maths, FM and Physics at grade A". See how many IT/CS departments would close on that policy. Probably Oxbridge would survive but not many others. Quite apart from what interests the learner, there is a finite population and a limit to the number of students that will be capable of/motivated to attain good A level grades in maths and they are in big demand from a whole range of courses. We can of course regress back to the days when a tiny minority went to uni. and swell the ranks of the unemployed ;-)