Yacapaca

Stephen Downs is a respected thinker in the world of e-learning, and he’s been around it long enough to see an awful lot of money get wasted. Today he gave a talk to the Australian College of Educators and the Australian Council of Educational Leaders in which he challenged the value of wrapping up digital content inside proprietary MLEs.

And if the sales representative comes to you and tries to sell you an LMS [UK translation: MLE] or (worse) an LCMS, ask them why you have to pay them so much money for something the web and web browsers do for free.

If the sales representative tries to sell you online course and lessons, ask them whether it supports random access so students can use it when they want, even if they’re not at school, or ask them where you can access the dynamic feed with daily updated content, or how easy it is to place images from the course content in your blog.

Well, Paperless School is a proprietary MLE, so at first I felt a bit defensive. But then I actually ran a check against the tests that he proposes

why you have to pay them so much money for something the web and web browsers do for free

The Paperless School system is free. What we actually charge for is certain services within it, such as auto-marking. We charge for those on a per-student basis.

ask them whether it supports random access so students can use it when they want, even if they’re not at school

Absolutely yes. It’s hosted on our global server; anywhere you can access the internet, you can access Paperless School.

ask them where you can access the dynamic feed with daily updated content

Here’s the RSS feed for our ICT Encyclopedia, used in our GCSE Applied ICT course and soon to be used in other ICT courses.

how easy it is to place images from the course content in your blog

There’s no dastardly copy protection in Paperless School. Just copy and paste.

It’s worth reading the whole speech.

Szexiong blogged this speech by Singapore’s Minister for Education

We are making changes in our education system from a position of strength. The fact that our students by and large work hard and strive to do their best in school is a happy situation. In the UK, for instance, the situation is the reverse. A recent survey in north-eastern England revealed that nearly a third of the 15 year-olds said that they had been picked on by other students for doing well at school. Those who were hardworking, and who were considered by their teachers to be “normal”, were called “freaks” by their peers. The school culture has become so averse to hard-work and good results that teenagers deliberately fail their GCSE exams in order to be accepted by their peer groups. We should never let ourselves get into this sad state of affairs.

sigh…

The start of the academic year is by tradition the time to promise yourself that your lessons will be more inspiring, more generative and more fun than they were last year.

To help you along, here’s a challenge. Take just one item that grabs your fancy from this list of Marshall McLuhanisms and construct a lesson around it. What a tool for opening young minds!

Chatango is an embedable instant messaging (IM) client, written in Flash. As I’ve written before, I’m convinced that IM is of enormous, but as yet unexplored, significance to schools. Until now it’s required either standalone application or a dodgy Java applet. I’ve been dreaming for months of creating one in Flash, but whilst I’ve been dreaming, Chatango have been doing. I’m wildly excited by the result, or rather by its potential, and I’ve just got to play with it.

Where better to play than here? Below, I’ve embedded a Chatango client that links direct to me. If I’m online, why not say ‘hello’? (Thanks Joi Ito for the link).