Alton Convent has just emerged from its six yearly review inspection. For me, as the relatively new head of the prep department, and for my colleagues, the preparations for this has set much of our agenda over the last couple of term. In many ways this has been very positive: I for one feel I know my new school far better as a result of preparing and collating much of the paperwork that's been required, the desire to be at the top of our game for the brief period of the inspection has certainly given a sense of focus to much of the school improvement work we've been engaged in, and there is certainly a sense of the team being brought together in the face of shared adversity. On the other hand, many aspects of the agenda have been about demonstrating compliance with regulatory requirements or the independent schools inspectorate's view of 'good practice', both of which sit a little uneasily with our cherished independence; whilst I've tried hard to remain focused on longer term goals and the well being of pupils and teachers, I can't say with hand on heart that we've been unaware of the need for quick fixes and short term solutions that would impress our 'special visitors', although such fixes and solutions can be the seed of further developments; I've also not been able to blog as much as I'd like to!

The inspection of independent schools in the UK is interesting from both political and practical perspectives. The government's Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED) is responsible for inspecting the standards of education in both maintained (state funded) and independent (fee paying) schools in England. About half of the independent schools (including pretty much all of the larger ones, and my own) are members of one of the associations that make up the Independent Schools Council. These associations traditionally took responsibility for inspecting their member schools, an arrangement which was preserved when the inspection of maintained schools changed dramatically in the 1990s with the expansion of the old and much respected HMI into the OFSTED of today, although OFSTED themselves conduct the inspections of the non-association schools, and 'oversee' the work of the Independent Schools Inspectorate (ISI). ISI's inspection framework has been developed in consultation with OFSTED and the independent school associations: part of it is focused on checking that schools meet all the relevant regulatory requirements, but the rest is about forming a judgement as to the quality of education provided by the school. This is where things get more interesting, since such judgements are (perhaps inevitably) made against some, often implicit, model of good practice laden with pedagogic assumptions, whereas in theory at least, and subject to the regulatory stuff, we enjoy full autonomy in how we educate the children entrusted to us, and are directly accountable morally to the children and financially to their parents: the market would ensure that if we're not doing a good job, parents take their children elsewhere and/or we would fail to attract new registrations, with direct financial implications.

There are some interesting practical differences between the way OFSTED conduct inspections now (although I can't speak about this with any degree of authority) and the ISI model.

ISI is based on a model of peer review, thus the vast majority of ISI inspectors are serving or recently retired independent school heads or teachers, whereas OFSTED teams are usually composed of folk who have this as their sole or main occupation. This does keep costs down for independent schools, ensures that many of the team have current school (and often classroom) experience, and know of the particular context, challenges and opportunities peculiar to independent schools; furthermore it provides one way in which the wisdom and experience of retired heads and teachers is not lost to the system. However, it's possible that ISI's inspectors don't always have the same breadth of experience of school inspection that an HMI or OFSTED inspector would have, and perhaps come to their occasional inspections with assumptions based on how things are done in their own school. Concerns such as these are, to a large extent, addressed through the training process, through inspection judgements being collective ones from the whole team (prep and senior schools here had a team of nine between them), and the role of the Reporting Inspector (RI), who will typically (but not invariably) be a retired HMI or OFSTED Registered Inspector.

Whereas OFSTED inspections now take place with almost no notice (a school might receive a phone call on Thursday that the team will visit the following Monday), ISI inspections are on a fixed six yearly cycle, thus we know that, unless the system changes, our next ISI visit will be in Spring 2013! I suspect that OFSTED's approach would certainly have involved less work and less stress, and might, it could be argued, be more likely to give the report's readers a more accurate impression of a school. That said, as the point of public exams is about learning not just assessment, so inspection ought to be for school improvement rather than just measurement. I think the long lead in to ISI visits can and does give a focus to school development and improvement, not just in terms of paperwork, but also in terms of the quality of teaching and learning, something which has to be at the heart of the inspection process and the school's own development agenda. My informal survey of fellow independent school maths and IT teachers back in 2003 suggested that the paperwork stuff can take over (78% indicated that policies and schemes of work had been extensively revised, whereas only 22% felt that inspection preparation had improved their teaching), but this certainly doesn't have to be the case. This emphasis on paperwork is compounded by the large amount of documentation that the school has to submit to the RI on her or his two preliminary visits to the school.

Under present arrangements, OFSTED place great emphasis on a school's own self-evaluation, and there is a sense in which one of the main tasks of an OFSTED inspection is to validate the school's own assessment of its strengths and weaknesses. Whilst there is an optional self evaluation form within the ISI framework, its role is not nearly so central to the inspection process: yes it will help set the agenda for the inspection and point up to the RI particular areas for the inspection team to focus on, but the framework does not allow RIs the same flexibility to focus on particular issues that's found in OFSTED's system. ISI inspections are 4-day visits of a fairly sizeable team with a fairly inflexible structure that requires inspectors to form their own judgements about most aspects of the school. I suspect this may change for the next cycle of ISI inspections, and again, with school improvement as the aim of the process, the critical self-review and reflection that ought to go into the SEF seems essential if a school is to move forward as a learning organization.

Although both approaches to inspection place much reliance on inspectors' qualitative judgements, OFSTED's approach places much more emphasis on quantitative data analysis, with the RAISEOnline system allowing OFSTED to make fairly rigorous comparisons of a school against objective benchmarks, form judgements about value added and allowing the school to track progress at the level of individual pupils. There's no compulsion on independent schools to participate in QCA's assessment arrangements, and indeed many choose not to, furthermore increasing numbers are opting out of GCSEs and A levels, in favour of IGCSEs and the International Baccalaureate, which they see as more academically challenging. Without a common assessment framework, benchmarking is harder, and value-added analysis is made harder by the apparent unwillingness of the DfES and OFSTED to publicly document the models underpinning RAISEOnline and its predecessors. Thus, whilst ISI do comment on a school's outcome and progress measures, I'm not convinced that this is with the same degree of rigour that would be found in OFSTED's analysis. This is, though, not necessarily a bad thing, as there's plenty about a school that's not measured by test outcomes, or perhaps even measurable, and the more qualitative analysis of a school that ISI focus on may well be more appropriate given the heterogeneity of the independent sector.

I don't think it appropriate to comment here about how our own inspection went, and the results are tightly embargoed until the report itself goes public in a couple of months or so anyhow. I can say though that I'm proud of the way my colleagues worked so well together, and of the evident sense of pride in the school amongst staff and pupils alike. It's important, I think, to maintain the sense of progress and development now that the focus of the inspection itself is past: there was, not unexpectedly, much sense of relief at the end of the inspection period, but for me at least this is because we can now focus on the strategic and visionary stuff, as well as the fundamentals of the well-being and education of our pupils, rather than an externally imposed agenda.

HMCI Christine Gilbert's long expected report on personalised learning was published a couple of weeks back by the DfES, with a fair amount of media coverage. The vision of Ms Gilbert and her colleagues for the changes to come in schools education over the next decade and a half seems to be somewhat lacking in ambition, as she herself acknowledges:

"Many of the elements of personalised learning set out in this report will be familiar, since they are at the heart of the very best learning and teaching."

Of course, Gilbert's concerned with system wide change rather than cutting edge innovation, but her "vision" seems to hinge on learning from existing examples of good practice, which makes one wonder what these leading schools are expected to do over the 13 years which Gilbert allows for the others to catch up.

There is talk of accelerated improvement and progression, but not of the radical transformation which some have held out hope for. The understanding of personalisation here seems to be little more than adding in a tight feedback loop from assessment for learning to the existing practice of differentiation. In terms of the crucial question of "Who personalises learning", the answer in the report is very clearly the teachers, with a new role of the 'learning guide', which seems not too distant from that of house master, or indeed form tutor in many schools. Whilst Gilbert acknowledges that "few aspects of the future can be predicted with accuracy and confidence", she indicates that "taking responsibility for, and being able to manage one's own learning" will be one of the skills necessary to adapt to a changing world. Yet those who were looking for a high level of autonomy being devolved to the learners themselves, with a clear acknowledgement that it is the learners who are principally responsible for their learning, and thus a recognition of the more radical "choice and voice" form of personalisation, will, I think, be disappointed by this report.

On the one hand, Gilbert acknowledges that the skills necessary to cope with a changing world and a knowledge-based economy are given little weight in the National Curriculum, and thus sometimes neglected by teachers and undervalued by pupils, but on the other, she remains absolutely committed to a National Curriculum, described in terms which seem little removed from its present incarnation, with pupil choice being in terms of such radical, ground breaking ideas as "project work, out-of-classroom activities and ... clubs within and beyond the school day". I fail to see how one can have genuinely personalised learning when every child is required by law to be taught exactly the same body of knowledge etc as every other child. In a paragraph which reminded me of Yes Minister, Gilbert's group, tasked with making recommendation to support the delivery of their "vision", advise setting up another group to recommend how the National Curriculum and associated assessment should be changed, although the emphasis does rather seem to be on ways of tweaking the tests rather than dealing with the content.

Gilbert does identify "far greater access to, and reliance on, technology as a means of conducting daily interactions and transactions", as one of the external change forces; However she doesn't seem to recognize how technology itself is changing, and will no doubt continue to change. The opportunities for personalised learning opened up by widely distributed networks of learners, and by technologically enabled long-tail provision, seem to have largely passed her by, or been rejected.

On the plus side, I'm delighted to see that the review group haven't gone down the road of advocating individualised learning systems, with a succession of learning objects being delivered to pupils working in some degree of isolation. Although social learning doesn't receive a prominent place in the report, it's there in the detail of how they see learners becoming more engaged, through:

"dialogue between teachers and pupils, encouraging pupils to explore their ideas through talk, to ask and answer questions, to listen to their teachers and peers, to build on the ideas of others and to reflect on what they have learnt, [and through]
collaborative relationships which encourage and enable all pupils to participate and which develop pupils' skills of working ... in groups, enabling teachers and pupils to move learning forward together"

There's also a recognition that there's more to pupil voice than the school council, with at least some acknowledgement that pupils can be

"learning resources for one another, helping their peers to learn and develop, within the classroom and beyond".

Which, in ICT terms is at least a step towards a collaborative, constructivist learning environment, away from simple resource/activity presentation platforms. That said, Gilbert seems to see the impact of ICT in very traditional, Web 1.0, terms: administration, creation and delivery of lesson materials, and handheld technology - she does acknowledge a place for collaboration and informal learning, but it does not seem to be a priority. She states that:

"It will be important that decisions on the use of the new technologies be taken in the context of a clear vision for personalising learning and be informed by comprehensive objective advice in order to present good value for money"

Which is fair enough. However her suggestion that Becta has a key role in providing such advice seems, perhaps, optimistic, given the way the way we've seen Becta transform the notion of a 'personal online spaces' into institutional learning platforms and advocate procurement of expensive commercial platforms rather than supporting schools in the deployment of open source software without any licence costs.

Whilst assessment for learning is nothing new, I'm pleased to see it getting recognition as a powerful force for change in this report. We've been exploring this here at Alton over the last term, and I think the focus on 'feeding forward' rather than merely 'feeding back' is an effective one, encouraging teachers to see the time inevitably spent marking as an intrinsic part of the teaching process itself. Moodle's portfolio of assessment tools are important here: it's great to see how the immediacy of feedback which online marking provides can really encourage pupils to learn from mistakes, and peer review and assessment tools such as wikis, forums and workshops have much to commend them. Gilbert sees teachers' use of data to inform teaching one of the weakest areas in practice, but I suspect that's as much because many of the existing MIS systems (or indeed a number of VLEs) haven't really be designed with teachers needs in mind as anything else (qv NFER).

The emphasis on the role of parents is an interesting one. I'm quite certain that parents' active involvement in and support of a child's education is a key factor in raising attainment, however, I'm not as sure that it's invariably going to lead to more autonomous, independent learners, and there's the potential here to widen cultural divides, even if Gilbert is concerned not to extend the digital divide.  It's curious that Gilbert et al suggest making lesson plans, assessment results and learning materials available to parents who want access to them, without explicitly granting the same rights to the learners themselves.

I detect, I think, the hand of Professor David Hargreaves in the discussion of knowledge creation, capture and transfer that forms part of the group's vision for CPD. The emphasis on making opportunity for teachers' professional reflection is encouraging, particularly for us edubloggers, a network which has evolved without government intervention or particularly encouragement and which might yet provide something of the "system for innovation in learning and teaching to direct the complex processes of knowledge creation, capture and transfer" that Prof Hargreaves, Ms Gilbert et al are looking for.

Despite the relative lack of emphasis on pupil autonomy, there is an acknowledgement of the need for more professional autonomy for teachers:

"Teachers need to be able to choose the practices they change and the techniques they use... Giving teachers the choice about the specific changes they make will mean that they are more likely to take responsibility for them, while allowing for collective and consistent strategies to be developed school-wide"

and

"A system-wide strategy to help the teaching profession to innovate, to do things differently in order to do them better, is key to transforming pupils' learning and achievement'

Which, if this is the right thing to do for teachers, rather begs the question about why not for the pupils too? 

I have perhaps been too critical here of a report which, undoubtedly, moves the debate forward and which has certainly raised the profile or personalisation. I'd have to agree that "better outcomes will be achieved if users become participants and share a sense of collective responsibility and achievement". I think my sense of disappointment comes from comparing the relatively conservative approach here, to some of the more ambitious work in the field, such as that of Charles Leadbeater for Demos, and the Learners' Charter which formed part of Futurelab's report on personalisation, both of which I'm sure the Gilbert group must have seen. Still, perhaps for system wide change, this gentler approach may be the best way of getting things done. As Gilbert has it,

"Making small, incremental changes is more likely to result in sustainable change."

The Saturday at BETT is often a lot quieter than the first three days, which gives those teachers and techies who are willing to give up their weekend more of a chance to chat with the folks on the stands, despite everyone packing up early.

I had good intentions of making my way round the show, keeping an eye open for new products, and more importantly ideas, but in fact much of my time was spent chatting to old and new friends, which was far more fun! I was particularly pleased to meet folk face to face that I'd only known online previously, (the edugeek and moodle stands were great places for this) and indeed to be accosted by a couple of folk I'd never met before but who claimed to be regular readers of this blog. It was, though, sad to hear more of the difficulties faced by those seeking to experiment with social technology and open source software in (at least some parts of) the maintained sector.

A few more Moodle bits and bobs caught my attention - great to see Sean Keogh of pteppic.net on the Moodle.com stand, which from all accounts seems to have been a great success. I spent a little longer chatting with the folk on the Atomwide stand, and was pleased to hear how well there Moodle and Elgg based solution had done in the technical aspects of Becta's Learning Platform framework evaluation - scoring 100% on the technical side of things, even though Atomwide didn't make it through to the final list of accredited suppliers. Still, I hope that the fact that they got as far as they did would encourage schools to not give up hope of using Moodle and Elgg as their learning platform - I hear that Atomwide might well be used as subcontractors by at least one of the big name players if a school specifies open source in its statement of requirements. Good for them. I also caught up with Gareth Davies of advisorymatters (and Naace) at the end of the afternoon, who'd taken Ian's idea of Moodle on a Stick and turned this into a product - I'm now the proud possessor of a 1GB USB stick that will plug into a WinXP machine, power up Apache etc and launch a browser with a local copy of Moodle ready and waiting for course prototyping or experimentation, all (if Gareth had charged me) for not much more than PC World charge for an empty stick. OK, not quite the same as developing courses in a collaborative way over the net, but it's an easy (and risk free) way into learning Moodle administration, and could well be useful for teachers (or even students) who don't have broadband connectivity at home or on holiday.

Chatted briefly with the folk at the Smoothwall stand, which I'd not previously realized was the commercial offshoot from Dan's Guardian, a venerable, and effective, content filtering system for the (Linux based) squid proxy server - pretty cool that what started as an open source project has now got a very polished commercial presence at BETT. [Edit, following comment below: Actually, it's not quite as simple as this, for details see http://dansguardian.org/?page=smoothwall]

I did briefly pop over to the Becta stand to ask about progress with shibboleth authentication - my concern is who's going to deal with authentication for pupils in the independent sector: a few of us could set up our own identity provision service, but given shibboleth's federated model, I'm not clear as to whether we fall under the remit of the LAs, the RBCs or whether the Independent Schools' Council ought to be dealing with this. I'm waiting to hear back from Becta on this, but it's early days yet. Actually, it's interesting to see how folks are finding there own way around authentication issues, with IntuitiveMedia following think.com's earlier approach of having teachers vouch for their pupils in a shared environment, Moodle's ever increasing array of authentication options, and OpenID providing a very web2.0 approach to the problem.

Interesting GIS stuff on the Ordnance Survey stand, as well as MemoryMap, who have packaged up the wonderful OS 1:50000 maps for PDA based GPS trackers. I'd been chatting with one of the BCS people on Thursday about GIS/GPS, the importance that this can play in learning about environmental issues, and the exciting work being done by the folk in the OpenStreetMap project, which it would be lovely to see a few school geography departments take up.

As to the traditional quest for BETT show freebies, OUP were giving away free access to premium content such as the ODNB and OED up until the end of February - great, high quality research tools. Edubuntu, Ubuntu, and KUbuntu disks will always come in handy - given the high quality of these distros now, and the impressive range of software that's on them, the fact that these are free anyhow shouldn't detract from their value. Epson were happy to print any photo off a memory stick, so I headed home with an A2 enlargement of one of my holiday snaps, which now has pride of place in our kitchen.

For me, it was really interesting contrasting the enthusiasm for Web 2.0 and social learning that was evident amongst the audience at my presentation with Terry Freedman, and elsewhere on the seminar programme, with the relative absence of wikis, blogs and other social technology from the exhibition space, although, to be fair, there was some evidence of podcasting. I wonder why this is. Possibilities here are that:

• those who can afford the stand space at BETT are still in the business of selling hardware, commercial software and professional content - web 2.0 tools are very much on the periphery of this market;
• there's no demand - that those who control the purse strings, which are a somewhat different group from classroom teachers and techies, have been so put off by bebo and myspace horror stories that they haven't yet seen the place for these tools in schools - we have digital natives in the schools workforce now, but not in senior management or policy making positions;
• with all these tools available for free, either hosted or as open source software, a commercial show like BETT has relatively little to do with this - that BETT is about an old way of doing ICT with purchasing and procurement, whereas web2.0 is about collaboration and creativity, both in terms of the content and the tools themselves; or
• the ed-tech industry is lagging behind the teachers here, or at least some of them - the cutting edge, innovative stuff is actually happening away from the big firms, in SMEs, open source projects, startups and schools. I believe John Davitt touched on this in his BCS seminar slot.

I suspect it's a combination of all these factors. I'm sure the chances of seeing more of the genuinely innovative and cutting edge at BETT would be increased by opening up more of the stand space to those working in education, like last year's HUGTOB effort and this year's edugeek prescence. An open-source / open-content village would be no bad thing for us in schools, although the commercial sector may beg to differ. Wouldn't it be great if there was a lounge, hall or set of stands where teachers, schools and colleges could show off the work they've been doing, so that BETT could become a place where those using educational technology could come to learn from one another.

Post BETT, Clare and I made it to Covent Garden to meet up with an old college friend and see the final performance of this season's Nutcracker. An absolutely wonderful evening - we'd taken my nephew and niece to other productions the last couple of years, but these weren't a patch on the Royal Ballet one, which was quite magical all the way through. Clever choreography, drawing much more out of the story than other versions we've seen, and even one of Clare's former pupils in the company.

Excellent programme on Radio 4 last night on business models for open source software, still available as a podcast on their site. Interesting the contrast that they drew between how acceptable Open Source is in the US and continental Europe, and the relatively limited extent of its take-up in the UK, particularly in the public sector.

One of the examples they cited of an Open Source business was Open Xchange, which I experimented with back when it was SLOX, as the groupware idea seemed to be what I was looking for as a knowledge management and collaboration tool for schools, this of course in the days before I discovered Moodle!

Also, some interesting stuff on mash-ups, and how the provision of APIs by Google and their ilk are lowering the threshold for developers; been interesting to read some of the talk about opening up a SIMS API on the Moodle forums of late (eg), but I think there's some way to go yet before we see anything that resembles a Moodle-SIMS mashup. I wonder why?

Well, a lot of folk in the prep school world seem to be fairly skeptical about this year's BETT show - missing the wow factor, as well as bemoaning the quality of the freebies this time round. I'm not so sure. I didn't get much time to look round on Thursday, but I must say I came away feeling fairly positive about the show.

My talk with Terry Freedman for the BCS on "Social technologies and learning in your classroom: blogs, wikis, podcasts and more", had attracted a big audience - we'd been booked for the biggest of the seminar theatres and apparently the tickets had all gone well in advance, with a long queue outside (past the Moodle stand!) for standing room at the back. Alas, 45' really wasn't enough time to do our subject justice, but it seemed well received, and we both got some great feedback afterwards. I've uploaded the slides, and emap are going to make the audio available as a podcast. I was delighted to see fellow Moodler Ulrike Montgomery in the audience, over from Germany with a number of colleagues especially for the show, and also enjoyed meeting Peter Levy of Curriki, who's doing some very exciting work with open content at school level over in the states.

Talking of Moodle stands, this year's official presence is under the auspices of the four UK moodle.com partners, and has, as you'd expect, a far more professional feel than our humble hugtob efforts of a year ago. I'm told that they've been fairly busy. Atomwide are also showing some Moodle stuff, as the host for both Bucks and West Sussex, and Edugeek have a real life Moodle "evangelist" shipped over from the states, in the shape of Art Lader, who I was delighted to finally meet yesterday.

Open source generally seems to have a higher profile this time round. Open Forum Europe have a jolly busy little stand up in the software village, playing host to a number of open source SMEs, including Richard Rothwell's new venture, M6-IT, as well as Ubuntu, whose representative has been blogging about the show. Even more impressive was the Blue Loop Internet Cafe, only here as, allegedly, Becta/Microsoft pulled out of the cybercafe space just before the show started. Blue Loop are running a 20 seat cyber cafe with just three computers, using some nifty desktop sharing thing on SuSE enterprise with powered USB hubs and 3 or 4 dual head graphics cards per computer. For me, something of the wow factor. Now, what about the chances of ndiyo next year?

The Becta approved learning platform providers are there with varying degrees of prominence. Fronter have clearly invested a lot in their stand space, and interestingly are promoting their product as the "Fronter Open Learning Platform", which, aside from the notion that "Open" is now a selling point in the world of VLEs, led to an interesting conversation with their people. I asked what they meant by "Open".

• Fronter Person #1 explained that it was built with "Open Source Technology", explaining that it was a hosted solution that ran on Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP.
• Fronter Person #2 went on to say that the scripts themselves were open source. I asked if I could have a copy of them. He said all I had to do was to write to head office and they'd let me have them, but nobody had asked for them yet. I asked what licence they were releasing them under. He said we'd have to ask Fronter Person #3. Fronter Person #2 had been at our presentation. I liked Fronter Person #2.
• Fronter Person #3 said that Fronter Person #2 had got it wrong. The scripts were only available to the paying customers. But if you buy in to the managed, hosted service, you're welcome to a copy of the scripts, which you can modify. I asked about the licence. He looked confused. He didn't think there was a licence.

The blurb says

"Fronter's core philosophy is based on openness. Open source code, standard API, support for industry standards and integration towards administrative systems
Fronter believes in openness and sharing!
Our value lies in the relationship with our customers and in our knowledge of their requirements, not in our source code. That is why Fronter is Open Source."

Anne Fox has some experience of Fronter.

Although these days I should probably be singing the praises of Maxima, I was delighted to see Mathematica at the BETT show for the first time - OK, relatively limited use to a prep school head, but there's enough mathematician left in me to delight in seeing this software in action. Version 6 is promised for the summer, and looks very cool indeed, with a far more interactive interface that will perhaps find it a place in a few more schools. £160 for a teacher's edition.. very tempting... There's also some nice web integration, which could, I think, make it relatively easy to embed mathematica code inside a VLE.

Glutton for punishment that I am, I'm back to the show tomorrow.

Fellow fans of The West Wing will be familiar with the notion of 'Take out the trash day", on which public announcements are made at such a time that they get lost in the midst of other events and thus perhaps miss the media scrutiny they deserve, not dissimilar from Jo Moore's notorious "A good day to bury bad news".

On the Friday just before Christmas, Becta made public the names of the ten companies that are the approved suppliers under the LP framework agreements. They are:

• Azzurri Communications Ltd
• Etech Group
• Fronter
• Netmedia Education
• Pearson Education Limited
• Ramesys
• Research Machines plc
• Serco Ltd
• UniServity
• Viglen Limited

It comes as no surprise, although still a disappointment, to see that these are pretty much the usual suspects, with, as far as I'm aware, no open source suppliers on this list - thus schools, teachers and pupils are going to end up with learning platforms that lack the flexibility to adapt to a their own way of working. Interesting that some of the big names like Blackboard, MS and Capita aren't there either though: I suspect that in the case of BB and MS the hoops really didn't seem worth jumping through.

The fears expressed in EDM 179 seem entirely well founded now, and this short sighted approach to procurement is likely to do little for SMEs, or provide best value.

Becta's Stephen Lucey claims that

"purchasers can be confident they are buying robust and sustainable technology and services which give value for money",

which I suspect will be far from the case considering that the market might well not be able to sustain ten competing suppliers, particularly alongside popular and effective free alternatives, and the amount that will have to be spent on licence fees. Yet again we see the implicit assumption that these are products to be purchased!

Becta also claim that there was a rigorous, comprehensive (!) and

"intensive evaluation programme covering technical, commercial, value-for-money and quality assurance elements"

- such a shame that they didn't bother to look at the impact that these products would actually have on learning and teaching. And indeed that their notion of comprehensive effectively excluded open source software and SMEs.

Of course, as the DfES have acknowledge elsewhere, there's nothing to stop a school or local authority running its own procurement process, or using Moodle in house - the decision as to which VLE to use will, I believe, rest with headteachers, at least until BSF rolls out.

Amongst the Christmas post was the letter from Leicester University, confirming that I've now got my MBA in Educational Management (with distinction!). I must say I really enjoyed the course - the distance learning approach suited me very well, and I really miss Athens access now that my studies are complete, although I'm keeping up to some extent through my IoE reader's ticket, and the British Library when I'm in town. There were times when writing the assignments up was a bit of a chore, but in retrospect, the writing to length and to a standard was a good discipline to acquire. The academic perspective that the course provided has been, for me, far more valuable the more practical approach that NPQH seems to adopt. Alas, the course is now closed to new enrolments, but they're now offering an MSc which covers similar territory.

The dissertation, of course, focussed on the implementation of a VLE (Moodle) in primary education, and I've now uploaded a copy here. Of course, most of the research was conducted in a very specific context, but I do hope it will add to the discussion about how to implement and use learning platforms in schools. Here's the abstract:

Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), understood here as online systems supporting interactions between and amongst learners and teachers as well as access to resources and activities, have long been held to provide a range of benefits in further and higher education. For 2008, UK Government policy is far all pupils to have access to an online learning space, for many provided through a learning platform such as a VLE. This technology is presently little used in primary education and there are few objective case studies evaluating the appropriateness and effectiveness of VLEs in this context. The author has addressed potential impact of VLEs on school effectiveness through three interrelated areas.

The contribution of VLEs to institutional knowledge management is considered. Knowledge management has received little attention in education, and a small scale, self-selecting sample online survey was used to identify the contribution of VLEs to this area. Responses confirmed little use of knowledge management in schools, and mixed use of VLE tools to codify teachers tacit knowledge; VLEs were however used to share data, information and resources within the school, and supported a culture of collaboration within, and in some cases beyond, the school, such a culture being important for VLE effectiveness in this area. Schools rarely analysed VLE data to support decision making.
The other two areas were addressed through a small scale action research project, introducing the Moodle open source VLE to support the Year 5 and Year 6 mathematics curriculum at the author’s school.

Evidence from a review of the relevant literature suggested that VLEs were particularly supportive of social constructivist pedagogy, and the author used a variety of qualitative and quantitative techniques, including the COLLES survey instrument, to identify the extent to which introducing the VLE had promoted this approach to learning amongst the pilot study cohorts. Within this particular context, there did seem evidence that the VLE had promoted knowledge construction amongst pupils, an awareness of multiple perspectives, stronger sense of ownership and voice, and a greater sense of learning as a social experience. Pupils seemed to be more aware of their development as learners and coped well with multiple modes of representation. They perceived that computer-based activities were more relevant.

By keeping the curriculum and testing regimes unchanged from previous years, the author was able to use a quasi-experimental method to compare progress during the pilot study with that of previous cohorts, factoring out differences in prior attainment. Evidence for improved attainment through the introduction of the VLE was inconclusive, with only a small, statistically insignificant gain. Data mining techniques suggested that pupils using the VLE in a more strategic manner received the greatest benefit.

The author concludes by making a number of recommendations to those seeking to implement VLEs in other schools: including the need to choose a VLE suited to the school’s vision and context, consideration of total cost of ownership, developing a collaborative culture within and beyond the school, integration with other information systems, and embedding the system within the school’s culture.

The Open Schools Alliance campaign in support of John Pugh's Early Day Motion in Parliament to promote school's right to choose open source software continues to gather support, with some 92 MPs (c 20% of backbenchers) now having signed up.

I'm pleased that my own MP, Jeremy Hunt, has added his signature. He writes:

"As I have said on many occasions, I believe that head teachers and principals should be able to make decisions about the goods and services that best suit the needs of their institutions. It is important, then, that they have the option to choose from free and open source software.

I also agree that by allowing free and open source products to compete in the market, not only will choice be improved, but also the standard of material available. This is crucial in an era where competent information technology skills are paramount in the workplace.

This is an important issue that will affect every educational institution. I am very happy to support the campaign and will sign the EDM."

The responses I've seen from the DfES acknowledge school's right to choose; Lord Adonis writes:

"I believe that schools and colleges must be able to make an informed choice about the software they need... and to be aware of the total cost of ownership of that software ... Institutions are not mandated to purchase from within [the procurement] frameworks"

And yet they singularly fail to recognize how inappropriate a large scale, nationally procured integrated service is to meeting the needs of learners and teachers. Moodle, Elgg and other open source projects are as good as they are because they're built by those in education, to meet the needs of teachers and learners, not by corporate software houses trying to fulfil the requirements of central or local government.

The following was written for the new edition of Terry Freedman's "Coming of Age: an introduction to the new World Wide Web".

“The bottom up organization, where distributed, self-motivated individuals creatively collaborate and work together on shared problems, has relevance both in terms of the creation of digital technologies we use for education and as an approach that could be adopted as part of the teaching and learning process” (Bacon & Dillon 2006)

Open source software has its origins back in academic computer science in the 1960s, where writing code was more about intellectual creativity and contributing something to the common good than about commercial gain, and where the respect of ones peers was often reward enough. I hope that the parallels with web 2.0 already start to become apparent, as these are amongst the reasons why folks are only too happy to spend time blogging, adding to wikipedia or posting photos up onto flickr. Although much of the Internet is underpinned by open source code such as Apache, BIND and SendMail, and the Linux operating system has a high reputation for reliability and efficiency, open source has until quite recently been at the educational margins, with its principal appeal being free licensing, and thus savings in total cost of ownership (Becta 2005).

Whilst most of Web 2.0 is free too, in the sense of ‘free beer’, the ‘free’ aspect of open source code is more about free speech and other freedoms and just as much as not having to pay licence fees. The Free Software Foundation describe the four freedoms that using open source software brings:

• The freedom to use the software how you want;
• The freedom to change the software to suit your needs – this is the essential idea behind ‘open source’ – that the users have access to the program’s source code too, and can thus change any aspect of the program;
• The freedom to distribute the software and thus help your neighbours; and
• The freedom to distribute altered versions of the software and thus actively contribute to the development of the software through a distributed community.

Such freedoms have much in common with the sense of liberation felt by many as they experience Web 2.0: that suddenly the web isn’t about content and commerce, it becomes a place in which they’re free to share their ideas and creations, that their writing, recordings, images, etc become something valued by others, which enrich the common good, and which others can take, adapt, re-use and improve. Nowhere is this clearer than in Wikipedia, where the model of commons based peer production (Philips 2005) that is central to the development of open source code has been applied to writing an encyclopaedia. Comparing the way Wikipedia is written to the way a large open source application gets coded is a great illustration of the way Web 2.0 has made an experience similar to that of participation in open source development available to pretty much anyone.

• For a start, Wikipedia is free in both senses – there’s no charge for accessing it, and under its Creative Commons licence, anyone can adapt and redistribute what’s there.
• The motivation for writing or editing Wikipedia comes through factors such as recognition and a wish to contribute to the public good rather than financial reward, as with open source coding.
• Development is distributed, self-organizing and split into fine-grained chunks, so that anyone who wants to contribute can find something they can do.
• Each contributor’s unique skills and insights can be used well – with Wikipedia, some will have expertise in one particular area, some will take on responsibility for editing, others for organization; similarly open source projects will have folk working on aspects of the core code, tracking bugs, supplying artwork, taking a role in advocacy etc.
• Distributed open source development has only been possible due to the efficiency of global communication that email provides, similarly Wikipedia has recognised that there needs to be a place (the discussion tab) where the text can be talked through as well as authored or edited.
• Large open source projects have needed fine grained version control systems (such as CVS and subversion), which can track the changes being made by a distributed team of authors, and allow a roll-back to an earlier version if errors are introduced, which is mirrored by Wikipedia’s History tab, essential for maintaining the integrity of the text, as well as recognizing individuals’ contributions.

The sort of personalisation which Web 2.0 fosters, in which users go far beyond the realms of choice from pre-determined lists or limited customizations into a dimension of active participation and action (Leadbeater 2004), is also very evident in the world of open source software, where end-users not only have the freedom to adapt the code to suit their own needs, but through involvement in the development of the code have an opportunity to contribute their own unique talents and insights for the common good.

This is not to say that Web 2.0 and Open Source are equivalent. There are key differences, which have particular relevance for those seeking to explore Web 2.0 in educational settings. Although Web 2.0 and Open Source are, by and large, free for the end users, there’s far greater freedom to adapt and tailor applications if schools host the open source implementations of Web 2.0 functionality themselves rather than signing up to the hosted services out there on the Internet which, configuration options apart, are provided as is. Given that schools are rarely the target market for Web 2.0 applications, not all functionality will be appropriate to the classroom. A school hosting its own Web 2.0 applications also won’t fall prey to vendor lock-in as and when the present penchant for beta-programmes draws to a close and continued hosting starts to require subscriptions. Alternative Web 2.0 business models, such as revenue through targeted advertising, might worry some schools, or indeed parents, especially where the school has no control over the adverts being displayed. Schools take seriously their duty to protect the children in their care, and the data pertaining to them, and thus it might not always be appropriate to entrust profile and usage data to third parties, who are unlikely to have cleared all their staff with the CRB.

Most importantly, hosting Web 2.0 open source applications in-house gives schools the control they need over the make-up of the social network with which their pupils will engage online, and of the content to which their pupils will be exposed. Not every photo on Flickr or post on Blogger is one which would be appropriate to access at school, and whilst many schools appear to take the line that this means the whole site needs blocking, far better surely is to provide the equivalent functionality within the school’s safe, nurturing ‘walled garden’. Whilst a school’s hosted Elgg might not provide quite the same sense of excitement as MySpace or Bebo, there surely is a place for learning how to use social networking and blogging safely in a controlled and monitored environment – digital cycling proficiency, I guess; furthermore in-house hosting like this allows the school to focus the use of these powerful tools on educational aims and objectives, supporting the broad curriculum of the school. I know many see part of the appeal of Web 2.0 as allowing children’s work to receive a wider audience, but Shibboleth authentication makes it possible to allow access to the walled garden for pupils at other schools, and there’s nothing to stop schools moving some of the private content out onto the public web for a wider audience without exposing individual pupil identities in this way.

There is, though, a downside to this. It’s only fair to admit that it’s far easier to sign up for an account on myspace or flickr than setting up webservers, databases, scripts etc for oneself. That said, this is easier now than it used to be, with Ubuntu making a Linux webserver within the reach of most school techies, and projects like openacademic.org all set to take most of the hassle out of configuration and integration. Aggregating hosting across a cluster of schools, or indeed across a whole local authority, as in Buckinghamshire, makes things easier still, and goes a long way to providing a more vibrant social network and wider audience. Technician time to look after a webserver and setup the applications isn’t significant, but neither is it free, nor indeed is the hardware to run all this, although this doesn’t have to be anything very special, and thus an in-house open-source version of Web 2.0 is actually more expensive than free, hosted third party applications, although the gains through adaptability and child/data protection make this modest cost one worth paying.

Whilst not every cool new Web 2.0 application has its open source equivalent that can be hosted on the school network in this way, many do, including some of the most important ones.

• Jabber (http://www.jabber.org/) provides a way for schools to host their own instant messaging system, providing similar functionality to MSN messenger or AOL-IM, also allowing voice over IP.
• SquirrelMail (http://www.squirrelmail.org/) is just one of a number of web-based email clients, that with a mailserver ticking away in the background, can provide a service similar to GoogleMail. There are plug-ins available for spam and virus filtering.
• MediaWiki (http://www.mediawiki.org) is the software on which Wikipedia (and a whole host of other wikis) runs, allowing schools or local authorities to set up their own wikis, perhaps as a child friendly encyclopaedia or, at staff level, for policy documents and collaborative lesson planning.
• Scuttle (http://scuttle.org/) allows a school to host its own social bookmark collection like del.ico.us, and even replicates del.icio.us’s API so that browser plugins will work seamlessly with this too.
• Gallery2 (http://gallery.menalto.com/) at it’s simplest lets a school host its digital photo collection online, but it also allows users to upload their own photos and comment on others photographs, providing much the same functionality as flickr, but letting the school retain full control of its images.
• Elgg (http://elgg.org) provides a whole host of key web 2.0 technologies, like blogging, e-portfolio space, RSS aggregation, folksonomy tagging, podcast hosting and feeds, and social networking.
• Although Moodle (http://moodle.org) doesn’t feel very Web 2.0, with teachers remaining firmly in control of course content, a number of modules provide Web 2.0 functionality within the integrated VLE, so for example there’s support for podcasts, RSS, wikis, blogs and folksonomy tagging, and Moodle’s Workshop module provides an effective way of managing peer assessment of students’ work.

In fact, Moodle’s underpinning social constructionist pedagogy, the view that learning is most effective when learners actively engage together to create knowledge artefacts embodying their shared understanding, has much in common with not only Web 2.0’s provision for groups of users sharing insights and ideas, but also the collaborative co-production of software that is at the heart of open source. Back in 1993, Cunningham, Duffy and Knuth, writing about ‘The Textbook Of The Future’, listed some of the characteristics of a learning environment that would promote social constructivism, and I think it’s quite clear that these are characteristic of open source development too:

• experience in knowledge construction, as not only open source programmers gain, but also those users who contribute to bug reporting, support forums, documentation wikis etc,
• appreciation of multiple perspectives, as the community based approach to development and support provides,
• realistic and relevant contexts, as open source programmers gain through solving real world problems,
• ownership and voice, again contributions, however minor, to code and user support provide such an opportunity in open source projects,
• a social experience, which because the code is open and developed through the active participation of a community, typically characterizes open source coding and testing,
• the use of different modes of representation, the same project has many facets, such as the coding, porting to other operating systems, the interface design, documentation, support, website, advocacy, etc.
• self awareness, as open source projects have captured people's imagination, provided the recognition of a peer group, and met the needs of a wider group rather than merely serving a corporate bottom-line.

If these are things which we’d like to see in our classrooms, then certainly Web 2.0 can go a long way to providing them, but how much better is it to use software which has itself been developed through, and to some extent has come to embody, just such values and aspirations.

References:

Bacon, S & Dillon, T (2006), The potential of open source approaches for education, Bristol, Futurelab

Becta (2005), Open source software in schools: a study of the spectrum of use and related ICT infrastructure costs, Coventry, Becta

Cunningham, D, Duffy, T, & Knuth, R (1993), Textbook of the future, in McKnight, C (Ed), Hypertext: a psychological perspective, London, Ellis Horwood

Leadbeater, C (2004), Personalisation through Participation, London, DEMOS

Philips, S (2005), Modelling Open Source Software, paper presented at FLOSSIE 05, Bolton

This is going the rounds on a number of open source lists... 

John Pugh MP has tabled an Early Day Motion in the House of Commons
entitled Software in Education, number 179.  Please write to, or email,
your MP within the next week with a request that he or she add their
name to this motion.

"That this House congratulates the Open University and other schools, colleges and universities for utilising free and open source software to deliver cost-effective educational benefit not just for their own institutions but also the wider community; and expresses concern that Becta and the Department for Education and Skills, through the use of outdated purchasing frameworks, are effectively denying schools the option of benefiting from both free and open source and the value and experience small and medium ICT companies could bring to the schools market."