Great teachers spend less time marking and more time teaching
I’ve mentioned Danah Boyd before as one of the people I turn to when I want to understand how young people perceive the online world.
Here she is (video, needs broadband) talking off-the-cuff to a group of students. Most interesting to me is the home truths she has to tell about the historical function of formal education. Her context is the USA; I will leave it to you to decide how much that parallels the British experience.
Like most publishing companies, Chalkface has long been nurtured by a diaspora of authors, editors and illustrators whom we rarely if ever actually meet.
Over the past few years, we steadily extended this principle, until only two members of staff were working permanently from our office in Milton Keynes. What kept them there was the need to answer the phones, and to work with our venerable pre-Internet corporate database.
But the phone calls themselves have declined as teachers turned to email for communication, and the web for information. The old database is increasingly an adjunct to the website, where most orders are now placed. The workload has fallen considerably – but it’s impossible to cover the phones with fewer than two people.
Over the summer break, I decided it was time to contract out the customer service work and close the office altogether. Financially, it was an easy decision, but emotionally I found it very difficult. Not only would I be handing out redundancy notices, but I’d be letting go one of the symbols of company-hood; the corporate headquarters.
I found solace in a new label; we are now a “virtual corporation” with no particular geographic location. If you phone us (and thank heavens we invested in a transferrable 0800 number), it will actually be answered in Corby; some emails will be answered in Kharkov. But it no longer matters; we are here for you – wherever ‘here’ happens to be at the time.
There have been teething troubles; we still don’t have the procedures in place to make sure the phone is answered exactly as we would like it, for example. But overall, it’s working. And it’s holding costs down enough that we can keep book prices pegged for another year, and Yacapaca completely free.
Sometime over the weekend Yacapaca passed 150,000 registered students. I’ve got my fingers crossed for quarter of a million by the end of term. Time to buy some more servers, I think!
Yep, it’s true. No more charges for using any part of Yacapaca. Not even the brand-new ePortfolios.
Over the summer, I decided it would be fairer and more logical to charge for the bit that really costs us money. That’s training and support. Early-adopting users tend to just muck in and work Yacapaca out for themselves, but as schools are starting to use Yacapaca school-wide, that’s changing.
So, we’re introducing a training and support package and what I think is a fantastic price – £295.00 per year for the whole school. It includes:
But – I want to emphasise that everyone has full access to the system with or without a training & support contract.
Yahoo News reports that Thailand has committed to the $100 One Laptop per Child Project.
BANGKOK, Thailand – Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has announced that an ambitious project to provide low-cost laptop computers to all of Thailand’s millions of elementary school students will begin in October.
OLPC themselves downplayed this slightly…
Thailand: Prime Minister Taksin Shinawatra used an extraordinarily long
segment of his Saturday morning, weekly, one-hour broadcast to describe
OLPC, its purpose and its timing.
…so this may only be the symbolic beginning. Nonetheless, think about the consequences. If a country like Thailand (not impoverished, but still deemed ‘third world’) can put the internet in front of every child, they raise their access to textbooks and subject-expert teachers to 1st World levels at a stroke.
Yacapaca 