Chalkface Blog

I’m not quite finished with BECTA’s matrices yet. There is another aspect of their philosopy that worries me even more than their apparent obsession with corporate VLEs. Consider this from the Learning Platforms Matrix…

Level 4: Tools provided facilitate the development of interactive schemes and units of work for pupils to work through at their own rate or access individual materials as required. Pupils’ responses and submissions are fed back into the Management Information System (MIS).

…and ask yourself who is supposed to develop these interactive schemes of work? And then, from the same source, read…

Level 4: Staff create electronic materials and allocate to pupils. Pupils access and use specific electronic materials that have been allocated to them according to individual or group needs.

…at which point the other shoe drops. Yes, staff create materials. That would be you, dear reader, would it not? But it gets worse…

Level 4: Pupils design their own learning programmes with support from teachers.

…you are now committed to producing individual materials, for individual students to their own specification! Oh Ted Wragg, where is your caustic tongue in our hour of need?

How long is it going to take you to write a complete set of learning materials for each student? A lot longer than your contracted hours I fear.

Now here’s the heart of it.
Individualised learning + VLEs = no time left to teach.

The sorry truth is that BECTA just has not done its arithmetic. As a result, we are about to watch a re-run of the “human becomes slave to the machine” tragedy that we thought we’d left behind with the end of the 20th Century.

There is another way, but as the old joke goes, you don’t start from here. Instead, start by posing the question “What tools would leave teachers more time to actually teach?” I have strong views on this which I have exercised elsewhere, but for now I shall leave you to speculate on your own answer to that question.

In separate conversations with Steve Margetts and James Farmer last night, the question of wikis came up again, with very differing views expressed.

Steve, brimming with enthusiasm*

Again your blog compels me to put fingers to keyboard… my favourite idea for it to date is a Wiki type site. I had a lengthy discussion with a friend of mine on Saturday about how it could be achieved. We arrived at the same conclusion as you did to be honest – you need someone to edit and keep it up to date. I think my next site will be a Wiki type site…

James, more cautious

Wikis as a whole aren’t the greatest things…I think that getting a bit of wikiness into many different things can be very good but they’re not communication tools and in the end it’s all about communication…

They enable communities in the same way as town squares do, good for protests & focussed groups but not much point for our everyday lives…

James documented his experience last year in a piece he called also referenced a thought-provoking article by Heather James entitled My Brilliant Failure: Wikis in Classrooms. Well worth a read if you are thinking about using wikis in school.

Personally, I still love ’em, and for pragmatic reasons. We’ve built a fabuluous encyclopedia of ICT for our GCSE in Applied ICT course with so much less work that was required for the equivalent GCSE in Applied Business, which used a static site for the encyclopedia.

If, after reading James’ reservations you still want to play with wikis in the classroom, drop me a line and I’ll try to sort you out some free hosting on our education-tweaked Zwiki server.

*in fairness, Steve only has one mode.

Update: Thanks James for pointing out the mis-attribution of My Brilliant Failure.

The ever-informative Ian Usher from Bucks LEA points me to BECTA‘s view of learning platforms (aka VLEs, MLEs or LMSs), and in particular their Learning Platform Matrix.

I’d not come across these matrices before. They are designed to help you understand where your school is at on a scale of readiness for various initiatives. I don’t run a school, but I nonetheless found them to be extremely revealing of BECTA’s criteria – more so in fact than their formal documentation.

In addition to Learning Platforms, I also spent an hour or so on the Assessment for Learning Matrix. If anything, this was even more revealing of BECTA’s criteria around online learning.

Monolithic

Ian’s complaint against BECTA is that they don’t take his preferred VLE, Moodle, seriously. They see it, he complains, as “boys playing in garden sheds”. Ouch. Reading the matrices, I can see why that would be:

Level 4: The MIS is incorporated into the learning environment so that all users can access data as needed for formative and summative assessment.

Level 4: The use of a personal smart card provides pupils with access to a range of facilities and builds a personal data profile within the MIS. Parents can access the data related to their child(ren) online at any time. Data for governors and the Local Authority can be generated into reports.

There is plenty more in the same vein. BECTA clearly imagine a single monolithic piece of software that basically runs the school. A sort of SAP for education.

Moodle, an open source project, is about as far from SAP as you can get. It was, after all, built up from classroom teachers’ needs, rather than down from Tony Blair’s vision.

Which brings us neatly to the question of where I stand on the matter. Frankly, I’m disappointed in BECTA. Their vision might work in an authoritarian, centralised school system, but British schools just aren’t like that. Decision-making here is highly devolved. Different teachers, different departments will choose different teaching tools. Any attempt to enforce a single solution across a school, or God help us, an LEA, will be meet with subterfuge if not downright sabotage.

And it’s not necessary. A standard already exists that will allow many niche services (both pedagogical and administrative) to share data successfully. It’s called
SIF, the Schools Interoperability Framework.

SIF is no easy option; it is complex and technically challenging. It is, however, the correct option. It retains the undoubted management benefits of elearning whilst returning to teachers the freedom to choose the teaching resources that suit them best.

So, if your school is deciding on a learning platform/VLE at the moment (it probably is), you have a choice:

• accept whatever is handed down to you and hope you can teach with it
• campaign for insistence on SIF support, because this keeps your future options open as you become more familiar with the new tools and find out for yourself what they can/can’t do in practise.

Disclaimer: just for once I’m not banging by own drum here. Yacapaca isn’t a learning platform/VLE and has no ambition to become one. It’s a formative assessment system, nothing more. We’d love to make it SIF-compliant but frankly it’s not worth the investment until SIF takes off in the UK.

A quick roundup of Yacapaca events in May:

• The freebie for June is a suite of World Cup quizzes, of course!
• To celebrate, I have changed the default avatar to George, the footballer (so called because George Best, the footballing hero of my generation of schoolboys, died on the day we launched that particular avatar. Doesn’t look a bit like him).
• We’re now up to 4,000 registered teachers (as well as the previously announced 100,000 students).
• The ePortfolio beta test is going really well, with lots of teachers finding interesting ways to use it. More on that later.
• We are rolling out test authoring privileges to all teachers. Free, of course.
• We’ve improved the free membership; you now get your credits topped up to 100 free tests at the start of every month. The idea is to give you enough room to experiment before deciding it is worth it.