Learning Versus Qualifications

I work in a place where giving out qualifications is a big deal. Huge ceremony, fancy clothes, lots of fuss - a grand day out for everyone. However very few of the academic staff here seem to think that giving out qualifications is our main business. We help people make sense of their world, learn lots of useful stuff and go out having gone through a good deal of personal and professional growth. The qualification is our acknowledgement of the growth and learning our student have achieved.  It's an exciting business to be in.

Somehow, this is not what young people perceive education is all about as they go through school and college. Visit a "good" college and you will be told about A-level results until you are sick of it. Sounds good until your willing offspring pick up the idea that nobody is much interested in whether they develop any deep understanding, or whether they grow and develop through being there. All that matters is the grades. This really comes home when you see bring students being forced to undertake mind numbingly unchallenging Computing A2 projects because the college has figured out the mark scheme and knows that a pathetic little project with a beautiful write up gets an 'A' more easily than a complex and difficult project.  No wonder so many university computer science departments have much interest in A-level computing.

Other sciences are the same. I went to an open day at a "top" sixth form and some very enthusiastic students showed me a chemistry experiment. It was big and complicated and had a long chemical formula above it that read something link blah + blah = blah + H2O. I'm not a chemist, but know that H2O is water. However, these bring young people would not even guess what the clear liquid dripping out of the tube at the end was. I bet they both got 'A' grades. Conversations with other students were similarly disappointing.

If you know any really smart kids who hate school or college, perhaps the the qualification fixation explains it a bit. Educators who believe that qualifications are more important than learning should quit. Today. They betray our young people, their parents and our society.

Use of Technology in Teaching

I read a frightening article in The Chronicle of Higher Education today. If you don't want to read in, just look at the chart!

There are those who claim that academics who don't make the most of technology to enhance the learning experience of their students are in some sense guilty of malpractice. On the other hand, there are plenty that teach in a very traditional way and get good student feedback and great learning outcomes.

The question this raises for me is about what our institutional priorities should be for e-learning. We have lots of good (and expensive) tools: Blackboard, streaming media, Wimba, PDP, clickers and more. Furthermore, there is lots of good feedback from staff who use these things. However, I have dark moments when I wonder how much teaching is really enhanced by technology. Everyone uses the VLE, but is it really much more than a convenient repository of documents for most students? How much learning is really enhanced by facilitated online discussions? Do students engage with their lecturers electronically?

In contrast, adoption of technology that helps students learning individually or together is rapid and requires little encouragement by the University. Put a sofa somewhere where there's wireless and power and students will instantly discover it. Create a space where students can congregate with a few laptops and perhaps some coffee and it's always busy. We're running Google Mail for our students and have (fairly quietly) just turned on Google Docs. Early evidence suggests that about 10% of students are already using it to share and collaborate. Interestingly, this has led to a stream of requests from academics for Google accounts.

The default model for rolling out e-learning technology is for the centre to provide tools and training to academic staff who then use it (or not) in their teaching. Maybe we should focus a little more on pushing the latest and greatest tools (like Google Wave) directly at students and let them create a learning environment that they feel they really own and which they can suck their lecturers into.

Billion 7800 / 7800N Router

I don't really do hardware reviews, but I wanted to say something nice about Billion's new ADSL router. My network is a little complex, I have a /27 routed subnet, I tunnel IPv6 over IPv4 and I have lots of firewall rules. I don't have NAT, and I need stageful packet inspection. Also, my phone line ls quite long.

Consumer routers tend to be cheap miserable little things. Vigor are pretty good, but don't have a Broadcom chipsets and therefore achieve poor speeds on long lines. Cisco are expensive and complex (but nice kit). I've tried OpenWRT in a clever setup with two routers, but although I'm demanding I don't want to make my router my hobby!

My 7800 is on an Andrews and Arnold BE line. It was quick and easy to setup and immediately achieved twice the speed of my old Speedtouch. My IPv6 tunnel runs just fine and the iptables based firewall does exactly what I need.

You can access the 7800 via telnet and do clever Linux things, but you don't really need to. The web interface is very comprehensive and snappy to use and it works well on Safari and Firefox.

I've never been so pleased with a router at this price point.

My ISP, Andrews and Arnold are worth a mention. They don"t block anything, they don't do packet filtering and they give me 32 IP addresses. They also let me do things like tweak the target SNR margin on the DSLAM via a web control panel.

iPad Update

I've had an iPad for a couple of weeks now and it's been interesting. It's a bit early to say how it's going to evolve. It's become the "thing I carry around all day". I love being in a meeting with it (once we're past the "ooh, an iPad" bit) because I can have all the papers in it (and other relevant documents) and have shed the whole business of printing and filing documents - I'm almost entirely paperless now. When I'm on the hoof, it's much better than a smartphone for email, which means I get to reply to lots of these in odd moments. I'm very attached to Evernote and this is great on the iPad. Right now, I have a laptop, smartphone and iPad.

This is overkill, but I'm allowing myself the luxury of figuring out what's best for what and how the iPad fits into the ecosystem. With time, I can see many busy people moving to a desktop/iPad/dumbphone setup.

Not everyone is going to go for this, but I find I can read books on it. In cold financial terms, it pays for itself in around two years if I don't print papers for meetings.

My team have another reason to have a few of these around - lots of our students are going to have them and while I'm not going to instigate a big project to make everything work in iPad, we're including it in the list of platforms we check new and updated things on.

...and oh, yes - I love it!

Ah hoc learning and teaching?

My organisation is in the business of education and we turn out several thousand wonderful graduates every year. In all of this, my job is all about the technology, business processes and project management stuff that we need. We think we have a fairly good understanding of how my bits work, with ITSM, Prince 2 project management and a wonderful bunch of analysts, programmers, technicians et al. In my view, you can run the administrative side of a university like Vodafone or GE - it's all business process, money, planning, scheduling - nothing very magic.

The academic side is different though - very strange and subtle. Our students learning in complex ways. They seem to very much benefit from lots of face to face contact with academics (and each other) but pretty much all of them use technology in ways that are alien to most people over 30.

Life gets interesting when we think about how we're going to use technology in teaching. I'm not talking about digital projectors, IT suites etc - this is all part of the plumbing and should be almost invisible. The challenges come with software that works with the learning process - WebCT, Wimba, Google Apps, Facebook (yes), Second Life, interactive websites of all sorts.

The university has to have a cautious attitude to risk, we set ourselves high standards and we're audited, as is right and proper where there is public money involved and qualification that need to be of unquestionable value and meaning.

At the other end, we have creative academics who are very much digital natives. They twitter, they want to use Google Wave and generally want to put all sorts of resources out there in the cloud and engage their students in imaginative ways that often make then very popular with their classes. The University has a will to look at all of this good stuff, have committees which deliberate on how it all fits into the curriculum. The trouble is that by the time we're done things have moved on again.

Does anyone have a cunning answers to this?

Out with the M2400, in with the MacBook Pro

Well, I finally gave up with the M2400. The hardware was pretty much OK, but I made the fatal mistake of borrowing a MacBook for a week (and then two weeks and then a bit longer until I finally had to give it back).

I now have a Unibody Macbook Pro 15". It sleeps, it wakes up. Mac applications are beautiful and work together beautifully. I'm stuck with running Vista in VMware Fusion for this and that for our corporate applications, but don't think I'll every go back.

Oh yes, and I also have an iPhone 3GS, which connects to the MacBook in cunning ways.

Three Months with the Precision M2400 (E-Series)

Well it still works, sort of. As long as you don't get any ambitious ideas about getting it to sleep (the easy) bit and then wake up (the hard bit.) I've been watching this one carefully and about once a week I open the lid to be greeted by a black screen. Nothing brings it back except a power cycle. One of these was in a meeting when I was depending on this thing to deliver a presentation. Dell have clearly been trying to fix this - the BIOS has been through ELEVEN versions and the video drivers have been updated.

It generally wakes up during the night to do backups and various other Vista things. It mostly goes back to sleep again, but not always.

Docking and undocking is mostly works, but sometimes it takes minutes to sort itself out after being docked and every now and then it moans that the docking station power adapter is the wrong sort. Sometime it "goes weird" (Vista technical term) and needs a reboot after a dock or undock.

The wireless connects like lightning but every now and then hangs so that you have to turn it off and off again using the switch. It then remains unreliable until a reboot (oh, so many reboots.)

Having said that, when it's up and running (which is most of the time) it's powerful and well built. The trouble is, it has Vista on it!

To be fair, I don't think these problems are specific to the new Dell E-Series, it's just that Vista can't handle all this sleeping and waking stuff and finds docking all rather stressful.

I rather envy my wife's MacBook. Open the lid and it wakes - instantly and every time. Close the lid and it sleeps - always. Updates come rarely and always work (and it's all nicely automated - no emails telling you to download things.) The MacBook never "goes funny", needing a reboot and it's not traumatised by having things plugged into it!