Creative ICT News

The fuss about SCORM

A blog post of two halves.

Anybody getting into the world of Virtual/Managed Learning Environments/Platforms will rapidly become aware of the "standard" that is SCORM. It's presented as a means to allow content providers to put their content into a learning platform in a format that is platform agnostic, i.e. it should work in any platform. More than that, it is used to provide feedback to the learning platform itself as to who has accessed the content and (sometimes) how long they spent on the task and whether they got to the end. It tells you nothing about the learning that took place.

I'll be the first to admit that I'd never really considered the limitations of SCORM - especially the way in which it is packaged up for learners to access, so was very pleased to read Ian Usher's blog post on the subject. It's somewhat technical for some, but it makes very interesting/essential reading for anyone interested in subscribing to or buying content for their learning platform. I draw two conclusions:

1. Only buy content where the package allows you to break it up into chunks so that the teacher can present the learner with the precise piece of learning that they need for the task without having to go through loads of navigation.
2. Review the actual content thoroughly - just because the piece is SCORM "compliant" doesn't make it good content (or even interactive). Ian demonstrates how simple it is to convert a PowerPoint into a piece of SCORM content. Now, there are good PowerPoints and bad PowerPoints, but the bottom line is, it's still a slideshow, it's not interactive content.

It's the usual case of "buyer beware", all content needs evaluating from the point of view of the learner.

Another blog post from Mark Berthelemy on SCORM

An object lesson for bullies

Ian's obvious point in his blogpost was to make sure that people needed to be aware of the limitations of SCORM, and to ask the relevant questions when considering what content to buy. As an example he used some freely available sample content from JSH Education to show how a PowerPoint could easily be converted to SCORM content (see conclusion 2 above). His regular readers will have read the article and drawn the necessary lessons from it. Enter JSH Education. Via a comment on his blog they demanded that their content be removed (without stating any reason why). Ian has 1030 followers on Twitter, and all it took was one tweet to the effect that a content provider had made a "take down" demand for conversations to erupt all over Twitter. I imagine there was a huge spike in readership on his blog, too. The result is that JSH Education look very foolish indeed and have turned what was a well written post aimed at informing into yet another Twitter cause celebre. The question is, when will corporates "get" the web? They can no longer control their brands in the way they used to and using old style bully boy tactics will lead to them being outed for what they are. 

Engage with the conversation, don't try to silence it.  

QR Codes

This is a QR code. It's atype of bar code and this one contains the URL of a website. It was generated using the brilliant Kaywa.com. Also available on the site are QR code readers for mobile phones (Symbian i.e. Nokia phones and Java based phones - the website will tell you if your phone is supported). How could you use this in education?

The ICT Suite is Dead, Long Live the ICT Suite

Steve Moss, who I know from his days as ICT leader in Manchester, apparently was steering schools away from the notion of building ICT suites in schools in his presentation at the Naace conference. Indeed, I know several schools (my wife's included) that are actively considering other uses for the space. This move has been accelerated somewhat by the rapidly growing popularity of the "netbook" style of computer. Much smaller, and more robust than a traditional laptop, they seem to fit the needs of schools extremely well. However, before you chuck out the baby with the bathwater there are some points that need careful consideration.

1. How well is your existing ICT suite utilised? Is there a clamour for any available time slot? Or are the doors locked, as they were in the school I visited last week. If it's well utilised, it's worth stopping for a moment and considering why? It's often down to reliability, nothing switches teachers off to the benefits of ICT faster than clunky and unreliable kit, and the converse is equally  true. Teachers build trust in a well set up ICT room where the computers are available for log in throughout the school day. Come in, sit down and the lesson starts.
2. What are you replacing the ICT suite with? A bank of netbooks or laptops in a lapsafe? Or, a device per child for the whole school? I would suggest that there aren't many schools yet in a position to afford the latter. Assuming it's the former, ask yourself how good are your staff at managing resources? Will they routinely ensure that machines are placed back in the safe and on charge at the end of a session? There is nothing worse than starting a lesson only to find a bunch of machines crashing through lack of power. Is the building designed for the manouevre of a laptop trolley  around? Or are there steps? How long do you expect the batteries in the machines to last? After about a year of heavy use laptop/netbook batteries lose a lot of their efficiency and their use time between charges falls off rapidly. Have you budgeted to replace the batteries in the machines?
3. What are you expecting children to use these netbooks for? They are simply nothing like as powerful as pcs or higher spec laptops and therefore are not suitable for multimedia work such as video editing. As you might expect, with the name of "netbook" they are good at browsing the web and using basic tools such as word processors, sound recording etc.  
4. What is the state of your wireless network? Designing a wireless network is a difficult task, if you have a wireless router on top of your lapsafe, don't expect 30 children to watch videos at the same time via a single access point. The crucial issue here is bandwidth. A single wireless router plugged into a 100mbps network point has to share the capacity of that point between every wireless device that is accessing it. Compare that with an ICT suite where each machine has its own 100mbps socket (note: massive oversimplification here as network design also depends heavily on switch configuration, speed of uplinks etc.). It is fair to say, however that a hard-wired network will generally give better performance to the desktop than a wireless one.

What do I conclude from this? Firstly, I don't buy the argument "Let's bring the learning to the kids, rather than the kids to the learning." We don't usually do PE or games in the classroom, and why do we go on trips? A well set up and reliable ICT suite can bring enormous benefits in terms of access and confidence building, whereas an under speced wireless network will do nothing but waste time in failed logins, slow downloads etc. There are many creative applications that are simply not viable using netbooks and an efficient mobile bank of devices requires a lot of careful management.

So, don't make a snap decision to abandon your ICT suite. Talk to staff about their feelings on the issue. Think carefully about what you expect a mobile device network might reasonably achieve and how it will be managed. It may be that a mixed environment might suit you best. Having said all that, we also need to think about technological change. I think we can confidently expect netbooks to get much more efficient in terms of power consumption (and more powerful). I think we can certainly expect them to have much more efficient operating systems - many schools are installing a bloated Windows XP on netbooks to make management of them on existing school networks easier - this results in higher purchase cost, and higher power consumption as the processor will be working flat out. Also, wireless networks will only get faster. My own view, for what it's worth, is that today there is still a role for the ICT suite. In five years time, I may not be so sure - an important consideration if you have a new build coming up.

Google Time

Did you know that if you type the word 'time' into Google followed by a place name or country, the first result returned will be the time for that place or country? No, I didn't either.

Well now you do. Thank you to ReadWriteWeb, my favourite techie blog for bringing us that useful nugget