Yacapaca

Examination scandals, usually reserved for announcement of results, have come early this year. The problem this time is that Edexcel deliver the exam papers to centres ahead of time to offset the risk of delays in the post. Enterprising young North London tealeaves exploit this window of vulnerability to help themselves and their classmates to higher marks than they might otherwise have got.

All three exam boards are well aware of the potential to solve this problem with electronic delivery of exam papers, because each question needn’t leave the exam board until the very moment the first student needs to read it. Whilst they are experimenting with electronic delivery, they are taking it very slowly. The reason: they fear even greater scandals if it goes wrong. No exam board wants to be the first to suffer headlines claiming that their computer error had ruined the lives of thousands of young people. When I first presented Paperless School to the boards, almost three years ago, a panel member from one board put it to me thus:

“We will move to electronic delivery when and only when we judge the probability of a scandal to be lower through electronic delivery than it is through paper delivery.”

Chalkface now has considerable experience of delivering mixed-mode assessments (i.e. not just multiple-choice) through the web, so it might be useful to look at our experience of what can go wrong.

• Peaky system loads. It’s quite normal for the load on Paperless School’s servers to fluctuate by 2000% in the space of 5 minutes because so many schools have the same class times. It’s the actual process of students logging on that puts the biggest loads on the server.
• Hosting vulnerabilities. Every hosting company claims to be invulnerable; none are. Inside the data centre itself they may have reduced the probability of a fatal error to something very small, but what about their connection to the outside world? At some point there’s a cable that’s very, very vulnerable to a drunk with a JCB. Our solution has been to look at the physical location of the data centre and to try to find one with the shortest route to a major exchange from which your data can flow in multiple directions. An exam board would do well to go further, and have duplicate systems running in two different data centres.
• Local difficulties. How good is the centre’s network and connection to the outside world? There are frequently teething problems caused by rogue proxy servers or over-zealous security software. Using a proven delivery system is vital; I’d recommend several full-scale rehearsals in each centre.
• Terminal failures. Individual candidates’ computers will sometimes crash in the middle of an assessment. This needn’t be a huge problem, provided the software is designed to save the candidate’s work to the server as often as possible, and there’s a procedure in place to allow a little extra time to the candidate in compensation.

Mitigate these risks and you are on track for successful, electronically-delivered exams. You’ve probably achieved a good tradeoff between the risks of paper and electronic delivery.

I would like to see the exam boards go much further and embrace the potential of electronic delivery by moving from synchronous to asynchronous delivery. But more on that in a future post.

I’ve quoted Berthold Weidmann on students using mobile phones to access lessons before, and will doubtless do so again, because I’m intrigued by this largely-ignored scenario.

Now, this excellent overview from Reuters puts a little flesh on the bones. It explains why we’ve not got there already with 3G, and covers the technical choices that Europe now faces.

This introductory paragraph could not fail to set me thinking:

Third-generation mobile phone services are finally here after a mammoth effort that cost the industry at least $123 billion, but new systems that operate much faster already threaten to consign 3G to history.

$123 Bn!!! What could we have achieved if we’d decided that it was an economic imperative to invest an extra $123Bn into educating Europe’s children?

When you think about where that money actually went, you discover this need not be an idle daydream. Most of the cost was the operating licenses auctioned by governments across Europe. Our governments. Effectively, that $123Bn is a tax on phone calls that mobile users will be paying off for the next decade.

And what are taxes for? That’s right. Education.

Most schoolkids have access to dictionaries and encyclopedias, both on- and off-line. The problem with them is that they generally present only a single definition of a term, which the student may or may not truly grasp.

To get a more complete understanding, wouldn’t it be great if a student could look a term up in multiple dictionaries simultaneously – preferably dictionaries designed for completely different functions and written in completely different styles.

Well, now they can, through a little-known Google search term; ‘define’. Here are some examples. Try them:

• profit
• bullying
• stamen
• programming language
• heredity
• hereditary

As you’ll see from the examples above, the form is

• define:word or
• define:”phrase”

I’d be fascinated to hear if your students take to it.

Things Korean seem to please readers of this blog, so I thought I’d share this curious titbit. PR Korea are running a campaign to ask educational publishers to change our geography textbooks to remove what they see as anti-Korean bias.

What’s interesting is that they are trying to do it as a student project. For each publisher, they’ve put a form on their website with pre-written email. The least the student must do is sign it; those with good English can edit or rewrite it. Here’s ours.

Now, how do you feel about this?

• Is it a valid educational project for the students? After all, it involves practising a foreign language in context, history, citizenship, business studies and using the internet in a very innovative way.
• Is it cynical political manipulation of young people inappropriate in a modern democracy?
• Is it an attempt to right an historical wrong?
• Is it a service to students in this country, potentially helping their knowledge of geography and world cultures?

No Korean student has actually written to me yet – perhaps they are waiting for the Chalkface killer resource on South-East Asia to be published.

If you’re interested, here’s the core of the standard letter.

Dear Chalkface Project
(Textbook publishing company person in charge)

I am a student and a member of VANK living in South Korea.
VANK is a non-governmental organization and also a voluntary organization.
VANK consists of elementary, middle and high school students who provide correct information about Korea to international textbook publishing companies and publishers.

Korea has 5,000 years history, well-matched cultural heritage and has accomplished high-speed economic growth,
but these facts have not been introduced well yet in textbooks and publications all over the world.
Especially, Korea’s developed image was introduced to the world through mass communications,
hosting the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games, 2002 FIFA Korea/Japan World Cup very successfully
but Korean information introduced in international textbooks is still insufficient or incorrect.

First of all most Korean information in international textbooks has been delivered to the world through Japan
or China not directly from Korea. Good examples are describing the ‘East Sea’ as the ‘Sea of Japan’, world 13th economic board of trade Korea as a farming country that is underdeveloped,
5,000 years of Korean history as 2,000 years history and describing Korea as the tributary country of Japan and China.

These inaccuracies regarding Korea in international textbooks were reflected from the contents in Japanese textbooks
without any verification, which were delivered to the world by Japanese scholars after Japanese colonial rule
of Korea from 1910 to 1945.