Here is a paragraph from a July Report from Futurelab that those who are interested in Open Source may like:
Cottenham Village College in Cambridge now runs its entire online teaching, learning and home community – 1,500-1,600 users - on an open source system currently costing just £6 a month for server space. Yes, the technology will have to be ramped up as demand increases, but in the course of just one year, it has saved around £40,000 on hardware, software licences and other e-mail costs alone by using Google Apps for communications and collaborative work.
Couple this with the Formal/Informal ideas being tossed around then add the ways some people are creatively incorporating new technologies in learning and I think we live in very interesting times!
Keywords: formal informal learning open source
Comments
Agreed Doug so here's some more! (My apologies - I seem to have removed your message! No idea how it happened)
A Canadian success story with OS?
Canadian Open Source Education and Research
A list of schools worldwide trying OS . .
A list of schools using OS in the UK . . . fair amount of details included
A Board that is using OS for security within administrating . . . . - not new - will try to find out more.
The software involved in the above.
A wider look at other ideas being pursued:
How about a different government approach for Secondary schools?Partnering with local busine$$ and indu$trie$?
Or maybe teach for International Grades? Well, maybe start with Canadian grades first.
Yes - exciting and interesting times indeed.
No problem, Geoff. It wouldn't be the first time I was censored!
Thanks for providing the followup links. It will provide some interesting followups.
Why is the UK so far ahead in this area?
I should point out for those who have not met me I did start my career in the UK in central London – conditions were FAR from ideal so I came to Canada for a “couple of years” – I stayed for the rest of my career and recently I found out that I could not have appeared on these shores at a better time – there was an openness to creative teaching in it’s widest sense; something that I feel may be more difficult today (just an opinion!) I do feel that MANY Canadians are doing really neat and creative things but more in spite of the system, not because of it.
In terms of the UK system these things may be factors that help them:
· they have one national curriculum so that may increases the likelihood of an idea being developed by a sizeable group hence ideas have support and maybe a more focussed goal.
· there are more of them in the UK (60mi) than us (33mil)
· they often like tinkering (the concept of the inventive amateur?)
Our curriculum seems to be getting more prescriptive in a “pseudo-scientific way” where we spend rather a lot of time “measuring” things. That different focus side-tracks other initiatives that could occur IMO. Ironically in the UK there are pressures to move away from a lot of testing so we may follow later – historically it is not unusual for us to do that!
If we could develop a more national (how about global?) curriculum at least we would reduce duplication, but can we agree on what is needed? Actually it is odd that we are one country and are teaching children to live and work together but we can’t seem to agree on how it should be done. Our words may say one thing (all the right things?) but what do our actions say?
Ironically as we are now more global we have ways of organizing to develop ideas really well, as in the global grades site I posted, but as long as the curriculum gets tighter and tighter in an attempt to be “accountable” a role for the creative teacher to demonstrate different ways of doing things becomes more difficult at a time when governments ask for more creative approaches to things. Modelling creativity for students by using new technologies for example does not seem to be a well supported or even an acceptable goal in some cases.
To get a sense of how education is viewed and/or driven, Google the following and see what differences appear:
· education news Ontario
· education news Canada
· education news UK
Note the first hits and their content. Who’s involved in discussing things? What are they discussing? How wide is the scope of the discussions?
For fun add ICT to the search and do it again then ask the same questions.
Hope this provides more food for thought.
I do find that, being actively in education, that I have to work hard to try to be objective. The comparison of the results that you point out are interesting.
My sense also is that the BBC takes a much higher profile than the media in Canada in creating resources for education.
This has the makings for a good round table discussion at an appropriate forum.
The reality is that our perpectives are always coloured by subjectivity I think, so it is tough to be truly objective. That is the problem that I see with the current desire to measure and as objectively as possible - possible?
Edward de Bono once said that "Over 90% of life's real problems cannot be solved by logic alone" He went on to talk about perception and as we all know, perception is reality; but do we all see the world the same way? A real human dilemma yet do we teach this to our students?Inquiry focuses on being right I think.
Oops - another topic.
I agree re. the media and the BBC - they have the topic of education as an item next to politics (?????) - but many newspapers also have regular columns and articles too.
I hereby volunteer if there is space around that table for an
ageingolderexperienced, but still-interested educator and if that perspective could help!