Sliced Bread

After last weekends Federal COAG ICT largesse, its reassuring embattled Premier Rees has wasted no time in calling for new DET NSW technology supply tenders.

As part of the Federal edrev, DET NSW have on their wish list the lure of a sub $500 “compact learning devices (CLD’s)” for all 197,000 Year 9 to 12 students and wireless connectivity for 571 DET schools to be installed by February 2010. Tick, good. Very.

Guess the other 1500 DET sites, mainly primary schools, with students K to 8 don’t yet qualify for CLD’s or wireless connectivity and will fall further behind other systems, for a while longer. Cross, very. Maybe DET Primary Schools should just apply for an XO ala OLPC. Seems about how valued they are by DET NSW, currently.

The $1245 per student increase is also welcome news and may indicate Rudd is genuine in his bid for transparency in his new style of federalism. Lets hope so because Australians were promised a new approach to the passe blame game during the last election campaign.

Hopefully this rapid tender announcement reflects a state government committed to delivering the long promised technology improvements for Public Education students in NSW. But as Simon Job said, lets hope Netbook specs don’t fill the tender, we’d be better off with these, or similiar. 

Celebratory restraint me thinks, until we see the actual laptop specs and roll out begin, the wireless functionality and most importantly the vital TPL to support teachers. Will teachers as learners receive one? I wonder?

Almost makes me want to celebrate and yell “Yippee-kay-yea”, almost. But Hans has still not left the building. John McClane has work to do yet.

picture credit: DoctorWho’s at flickr

ZDNet reports Oracle says at least one Federal government minister gets it, web2.0 that is.

Lindsay Tanner yesterday admitted that government agencies lagged the rest of the world when it came to the use of information technology. He also flagged the government’s intention to trial web 2.0 technologies next year (my edit ahem? THAT’S 2009 and it’s only a trial?) — such as allowing staff to post blogs — to adapt policy-making to today’s technologies.

The Australian Government could and should be leading the way in adapting our old processes of consultation, engagement, policymaking and regulation to the connected world. Yet we lag behind other nations in both the scale and pace of reform,” he said.

Is stating the bleeding obvious reassuring or alarming? At least one government minister is publically talking about catching up. Wow.

Maybe, just maybe, if governments on all levels “got it”, like Lindsay is suggesting, then we would see government bureaucracies adopt 21st century read write (web2.0) designs and layouts.

The NSW DET portal is last century in both design and function. It is hard to navigate, search and access, let alone the NSW government recognising that all staff need access to fully networked laptops first. Selective IRM is vital, but to adopt a blanket policy on portals, especially DET’s where participants want to collaborate across systems, is learning folly.

Queensland, Victoria and WA DET, although not yet fully read/write, all have far more user friendly interfaces that at least look 21st century and are far easier to find eresources, share information and navigate.

I’m glad our regional Learning Systems recently launched a user friendly read/write page. Alas, I can’t share with all learners because its locked behind DET NSW’s walled garden, but that’s another pet peeve about sharing openly.

Now that DET’s CCP rollout is gathering momentum and is now goût du mois for the mainstreamers, I’m thinking how can teachers best utilise this flattening ICT to best effect for PD?

Darcy suggested sharing ideas on Year 7 teaming. Troy and Tony replied, “Yep, why not?”

What other action research would schools like to collaborate on via VC?

DET schools already connected have a data base of other DET VC contacts, but lets broaden the base of potential learning via VC sharing, to lets say, the rest of the world. Now that sounds web two oh 21st century to me.

Stephen Heppell presented the trend chart below over 2 years ago and it still raises many reflective questions on how learning is rapidly changing. His RSA speech is also equally valid for those yet to hear his 2016 vision.

What are the trends that we can see around the world in learning as we move further into the 21st century?

The changes below are all easily observed, but for different schools, communities, countries and cultures the movement may be more or less pronounced and the rate of progress slight or may be rather greater.

I recently asked “What did you learn at work today?”. I’m curious as to how we can better reflect on current QTL practices so they become more meaningful, not because there are dire problems. Learners should strive to integrate improvements lest we get left behind in our exponential times.

I’m up for sharing, not only through static blog pages, tweets and skypes, but via our newest toys the CCP’s.

Heppell states

Today teachers want, and seek, a place to exchange their insights as to what constitutes effective practice. As they move to become more reflective they also need a place to archive their action research.

The video conference component of DET NSW CCP will assist in the archiving and transference of such collective knowledge beyond the traditional school districts we work within. Modelling VC PD collaboration, that should also involve the student voice, can now happen.

Which NSW DET schools with CCP are up for it? I know Darcy and Troy will, why not join us?

NSW to Censor student laptops reports ZDnet from last weeks AIIA symposium.

The proposal has outraged long standing e-business consultant and civil rights advocate, Roger Clarke. 

“What credibility can a government organisation and educational bureaucracy have with the people they’re trying to communicate with when the students, through all of their own devices and through friend’s devices, have access to the world,”

Stephen Wilson DET CIO, rightly argues for theft minimisation, but isn’t DET NSW’s solution enforcing a crushing sledgehammer approach when a gently persuasive ball peen would do? Overkill? absolutely.

It’s very noble that DET NSW doesn’t want to flood the pub black market with Rudd’s edrev hand me downs, but to nobble poor old pricepoint laptop so it is useless to all who may desire it, borders on learning terrorism. Big Brother is still alive and well in DET land.

This issue highlights another reason why explicitly teaching digital citizenship is far more important than externally imposed filters, which only ”protect” DET, not the student anyway. They’ll resume unrestricted browsing on their personal mdevices in their own time anyway.

If the political squabbling ceases and the laptop promise is eventually delivered, my concern is what will NSW’s 21st century connected learners actually be able to achieve with them? Looks like notepad is safe.

Is this weeks NSW DET announcement regarding the configuration of Rudd’s laptops an example of censorship, filtering, common sense or prudency? I dare say we’ll be mlearning like this or this before students even receive the Ruddy laptops anyway. What do you think?

Today’s talk fest hosted by AIIA and attended by some of DET NSW head honchos might have been fascinating. I wouldn’t know, I was busy learning elsewhere.

But according to ZDNet who did attend, Stephen Wilson DET’s chief info guru, said all NSW public school students will not only get gmail accounts this month BUT

the department (DETNSW) plans to equip students with web 2.0 tools, such as wikis, blogs, and beyond the six gigabytes of storage that comes with Gmail, a further four gigabytes of storage hosted by the department.

This is hopefully the ebackpack, tools and cloud computing update that Tim Anderson hinted at back in April. As Big Kev used to say,”I’m Excited”.

This may mean NSW public school students can enter the read/write world in some sort of controlled DET acceptable filtered safe house.

I sincerely hope these announcments really are an example of progress with genuine 21st century ‘connected learning’ for students. 

It won’t be beneficial to genuine advances in learning if all this announcement means is a portal/walled garden version where students can only communicate with other password protected DET NSW student’s. We shall see.