Into 'Flow' but not going with the flow

We recently had a visit by Stewart Von Itzstein, Computer Science lecturer from Uni SA. He talked to the students regarding some myths around the IT industry and options for courses and careers. He then launched into a mini lecture so that students could get a feel of what the learning might be like, the subject, game design.

Very enjoyable but the concept of 'Flow' has stuck in my mind. Game designers want gamers to get into a state of flow. I want students to get into a state of flow. I easily get into a state of flow and find it hard to emerge from it.

Basically flow is where you are totally absorbed in an activity, to a point that outside stimuli is often ignored. It's a fantastic place to be and I'm going to research this a little more and use it as another of my coaching tools along with 'The Shark and the Sponge Story' and 'The Learning Curve Story'.

PAGES liked FOSS

Today I spoke with the PAGES group which is a group of Employment Service organisations in our community.

The seed for this came from Penny Richardson of 'Employment Access' here in Mount Gambier. She attended our regional Software Freedom Day event in Penola. Penny felt that FOSS might be of interest to clients of the various Employment Services.

My presentation took all of 15 minutes and I gave each of the attendees a copy of the OpenDisc. Some people wondered what the catch was. My approach was to talk about removing the blocks to learning and to talk about access and equity. We have been doing this at Grant High School for the past 6 or more years where each enrolment gets a copy of FOSS software and we also ensure that this software is installed on all computers in the school. General consensus seemed to be that FOSS was of use to the Employment Services clients.

I posed the question of whether we should approach the City Library to perhaps have copies of the OpenDisc available for loan. Helen Strickland indicated that she would take the disc to the council with the view of them distributing it to citizens for free. She felt that it would be consistent with the council vision of building a 'learning community'.

On the new libary page of the City Council website is this quote - "The Council’s Strategic Plan 2007 – 2012 incorporates a ‘Lifelong Community Learning’ strategy"

Software Freedom Day report

Last year we held Software Freedom Day at my school, Grant High School. This year we held it at Penola High School - another FOSS oriented school in our region about 50km away.

I think that many of the SFD events across the globe happen in capital cities. Ours is regional and in a country where we have some large distances.

WE had about 50 visitors with a good percentage of those travelling 30km or more. Of those there were a number that travelled 100 km or more. I think that maybe the biggest might have been from Kingston which is about 130km.

This provides evidence to the success of the emails that Jason from Penola (Event team leader for 2008) sent out to schools and also to the work that Robert did in drumming up interest in the radio and paper news media. Nice work.

Schools can be regarded as societies agent for conformity. They are also societies change agent where we want people to conform to new directions or values. Making schools aware of the choices that they have regarding FOSS is really important in that context.

A feature of the event was the number of school teachers who came and travelled some distances for. When I talk to teachers about FOSS I invariably get HUGE agreement on the philosophical reasons why we want students to have access to this stuff. They are BIG on access and equity and invariably ask why so much money is paid for other software when there is this stuff available that they can just give to the kids. People from the broader community ask the same question but often in the context of why so much public money is spent on software that may not be necessary, as they look around the computer lab classroom that then event is run in.

I think that there will be a number of new schools who will be giving away the OpenEducation Disc to students soon as a consequence of our work on the day.

I did notice that none of the ICT coaches in the region showed up and so perhaps we need to target these sorts of people who carry some regional influence next time with special invitations.

The people who came, often also asked "Why haven't I heard about this before?". They sounded almost like they had been cheated out of something. This was a question asked by teachers as much as other visitors. In response I generally asked them the question "how do you find out about what you can put on a computer?" Many came to the conclusion that it was through sales people and so they were able to draw conclusions from their answer fairly easily.

From some I got the question 'So what is in it for you?'. Being a teacher I could rant about the access and equity thing for students and how I wanted to create an environment where students could continue with their learning outside of school unencumbered. They invariably saw the sense in that and felt comfortable with the explanation.

The other thing that I heard a lot was thankyou. I felt that these words were very geniune and sincere. Thanks for putting on this event and thanks for showing me this stuff. Thanks for giving me these options.

Last year, being the event organiser, I did not get to feel and observe these things as I was too wrapped up with making the event happen. My sincere thanks to Jason for being the event organiser this year.

Software Freedom Day - 08

I am on the SFI board that organises “Software Freedom Day”, a global event that supports local communities to celebrate and educate how Free Open Source Software can benefit people in their area. This year it is on September 20^th.

FOSS fits well with the ideal 'Free and Open Education' by being able to give the learning tools to students so that they can use, share and build upon them. Collaboration and sharing fits well with this ideal and FOSS.

One of our objectives for 2008 is to better support schools to host Software Freedom Day events. For schools already making use of FOSS, it is a great way to help their community understand what and why they are doing this and to involve their FOSS communities in the process.

I would like to start some conversations about this so that we can better understand how to help schools participate and to share stories, resources and experience. If you want, you could put these ideas straight onto the SFD wiki

http://softwarefreedomday.org/Resources_to_support_schools

Schools give communities options

Reflecting on the parent teacher night last night I am filled with satisfaction. Having predominantly taught at year 11 and 12 levels, I was given a year 9 class this year. I was filled with fear at this and that fact that it was all boys. It is now the class that I would fight to keep. Their enthusiasm and curiosity fills me with joy.

Last night I explained to parents that the course is structured around various activities that last about a fortnight. The entire content is on my Moodle site (www.watiwara.org) and so there is flexibility for students to spend more time on topics of interest to them and dig deeper and to also work through topics of less interest quickly. I explained that I have chosen, in all cases, to use software that is free for students to take home and continue with their learning there.

Parents were thrilled with this and each had a story of something that their son had taken home and was almost obsessed with. In one case the student had hooked his mother into the activity and she spent time talking about how much she loved it.

One parent asked 'How does one find out about these things?' and then proceeded to answer her question with “I suppose that's why we go to school”. Schools have a responsibility to show students and our community options.

LinkBlip ur Yakkle - chat, VoIP, file and screen sharing

The following Yakkle link makes use of LinkBlip. It sends me an email when someone clicks on it. If that is a problem for you then use the full URL link at the bottom. I am thinking that LinkBlip might be a method that I could use to test the effectiveness of the communication of the resources I share with staff at my school.

Yakkle is a tool that allows you to chat, make VoIP calls, send files and receive, and has a built in screen sharing facility. Its free. I wonder how many people we can simultaneously communicate with or is it 1:1. The FAQ states that it integrates with Google Chat and Jabber. This seems to be worth a look.

http://www.yakkle.com/whatsyakkle.html

Google Apps for schools demo

A search for videos using the criteria 'google apps in schools' produced some interesting results. One was the Google@school - Google Apps Technical Q&A but the more engaging and informative for me was Chris Iremonger speaks at Google@school - Google Apps Demo


Chris Iremonger is a very skilled presenter and comes across as confidently representing Google Inc. I felt that he could be trusted. I was encouraged by the many and consistent references to the importance of open standards. It was more than clear that Google wants to make open the possibility for people to integrate their solutions with them and so open standards are central.

This particular video was posted 2 years ago and has had only 673 views. This video needs to be viewed by every education technology strategist/coordinator/CEO/? within education sectors. There are surely more than 673 of them. As we are thinking about the future and options for our schools, this would have to be one of the options we explore.

There are lots of questions and considerations for us to consider but some of the questions that could be asked include

• Is it technically feasible to offer this to the staff and students in our schools?

• What would the transition look like?

• What are the pros and cons?

• Could offering the basic apps in this way allow us to make use of lower spec machines for longer?

• Are there security or privacy issues that need to be considered?

• Would administering this be easier than edumail, ms office, ..........?

I appreciated the fact that the Google Apps solution provided options and choice and it was clear that the developers had a grip on the needs of educational institutions and the protection of their students.

I was hit with the notion - what if they decided that education had to pay sometime down the track? Provide the service for free for now to produce 'lockin'. Hmm. The whole time that education had made use of the free service they were also eliminating the alternatives from growing. Students should not be presented with hurdles (legal and/or financial) to continuing with their learning outside of the school and we need to approach this with vision so that we can achieve this in the short and long term. I guess that the use of open standards throughout the Google Apps means that 'lockin' is less likely to be an issue.

I like the way that collaboration is built into all aspects of the suite of Google apps. This was very evident in the video and begged the question, why would a school pay for Groove?

The video runs for about 60 minutes and at the 51 minute mark Chris talks about the upgrade process. He states that when they update software it allows the user to continue with their operations. When they log out and then log back on they then take advantage of the upgrade. Seamless, nice.