Martha’s session was well received as it would be considering no one could disagree with the sentiments of her presentation in working to end digital exclusion in the UK.
It is apparent that she has influence when it comes to lobbying parliament re: Digital Inclusion but is finding the process frustrating as far as ‘pushing’ initiatives through in her aim to create better education, health, governmental and social opportunities for the most socially excluded people in the UK.
Martha explained that Race Online 2012 aims to bring people and organisations together to improve the life chances of those 4 million people who have never been online or cannot get access.
Her talk focused on the Race Online priorities in asking for our support in challenging the government, industry and the third sector on programme development and delivery.
She asked for the support of the NAACE delegation in using Race Online 2012 to highlight and promote partner to provide an intelligent hub of information and resources and asked all those involved in ICT / online delivery to join in to leverage new and existing activities in ensuring ‘face to face’ support is available to all socially and digitally excluded adults.
Rethinking Educational Futures: Challenges and opportunities over the coming decade
Keri Facer, Professor of Education, Education and Social Research Institute
Starting point of presentation for discussion? How old will you be in 2025? How old will the child entering school in September be in 2025? What do you think the world will be like in 2025?
What are you basing your assumptions about the future on?
Going with the theme of the conference this speaker concentrated on the future and education. Keri examined current consensus and the critical uncertainties in the research field around the social and technological developments over the next decade. Different futures for education were explored taking into account social and technological developments.
‘Shift Happens’ orthodoxy Massive increases in computer processing speeds Massive increases in digitised information Massive population increases in China and India Demand for highly flexible workforce able to adapt to new economic circumstances
What does this come to mean for education?
Compete or die at the scale of the nation and the scale of the individual … The function of schools has to be changed to support individuals and nations to compete economically.
Lord Puttnam's presentation hinged on a thought provoking opening film showing that increasing global problems mean that if we don't create a 21st century curriculum quickly - there may be no need for five A*- Cs because there'll be no world to live in.
This presentation was inspirational but also shocking and left me with a ‘what can I do about this’ feeling. Thoughts around the delegation seem to be pretty much in agreement that the global dimension is almost totally lacking in the average classroom. In its place we have restrictions to learning via locked-down systems etc. Latest OFSTED themed review re: e-safety highlighted by the delegation.
“How can children become the "people we need" when even their teachers can't show them the benefits technology can bring”?
The situation was most positive in primary schools but a pretty damming report for Secondary schools.
A quite vociferous and ‘hostile’ delegation during question time in which some very pointed questions were posed from members of NAACE who seem to have become disenchanted with Ofsted.
There are more reactions about this in the OFSTED section within this document.
Tony Richardson, Interim Executive Director, Children's Services and Local Government
Terry Piggott, Executive Director, Strategy & Communications, Becta
Tony introduced as having responsibilities within his role that included the RBCs?
Becta making the case for the vital role that technology can play in empowering and not overpowering learning. They drew on the evidence of progress and impact re: Rose review and primary curriculum. Talked about the important role local authorities and children services can play in Harnessing technology ECM etc. Questions focused on what support is needed at national and local level in harnessing technology, improving and enriching learning as well as delivering efficiencies.
Jane Hart, Social Learning Consultant, Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies
Apparently a social learning environment integrates a range of social media technologies and provides a place for personal, group and formal learning to take place. This session was not what I thought it was going to be. Clue was in the title really as Jane went through all the available online tools you could use to create a social learning environment.
I thought she might have referenced to case study materials etc on how these tools are improving learning, perhaps it’s too early to know yet!
Simon Shaw, Senior Manager – Parental engagement and online reporting, Becta
Simon talked about 21st Century Parents, 21st Century Schools and exploiting ICT to engage parents. This was mainly predictable stuff with a little reflection on how technology has accelerated over the past 20 years and a look into the future. The main focus of the presentation though was the potential impact of parental engagement, usual stuff with how technology can address the problem of hard to reach parents etc. There was some discussion on what parents want from schools in the way of communication and how parent’s needs are changing. Majority of the presentation spent on Becta’s priorities re: online reporting / timescales etc and Becta’s Next Generation Learning.
The presentation consisted of 53 very busy slides, too much information to take in at once but some good case study material examples from schools.
Thought and opinions from the NAACE membership generated by the Ofsted keynote:
‘What inspection tells us about the current state of ICT in schools and some questions about what future provision might be like.’
To counter the volatile audience and their ‘shoot the messenger approach’ which I found uncomfortable I got the impression that Ofsted are concerned about the quality of the learning in ICT lessons as experienced by too many children and young people. David Anstead wants to raise the expectations of teachers and a rational debate rather than the emotional reaction experienced within the conference room would have been a better way forward.
One of the more constructive discussions coming from the post presentation questions referred to teachers having to be more than just technology ‘users’. The argument sorry discussion hinged around as to whether you just need to be a user or you actually need to understand how things work. To be a "high quality" user and for transfer of skills and knowledge as technology changes you do need to know something about how things work. Ofsted quoted evidence from learners themselves that this was what they wanted.
There is a global shift that has and is continuing to move off the desktop to the web and from proprietary to open standards. If you really don't understand these fundamentals, how can you make decisions about selection of tools? - and the tools matter.
The delegation was in agreement that teachers and advisers/consultants etc needed to be motivated to learn new contemporary technologies that affect all children's immediate lives and implement them in the curriculum. A change of culture is required where it is seen as not acceptable for an IT education professional to declare they need no technical knowledge because they are simply IT users.
Like many, I am concerned that so many members of the teaching profession have become disenchanted with Ofsted.
A lot has changed since the days when HMI visits were the vehicle for monitoring the work of schools; the respect that they commanded, and the great skill that they had of promoting change by asking perceptive questions.Some of this decline is to do with changes that have been made in recent times, but not effectively communicated to schools.
Ofsted has admitted that it has raised its expectations. It has also altered the way that it uses data. It hasn’t really justified this so far beyond a couple of articles in the press. I think there should be more of a debate on these issues so that people don’t think that the principles of school inspection are being made up on the hoof.
As a fundamental consideration, inspection without any accompanying development implies that the sole reason for inspection is accountability, whereas I would argue that the main purpose should be improvement.I like the suggestion that Ofsted should make their evidence base more available as a resource for school development.
Another thought:
Clearly Ofsted is still counting that which can be counted and nit-picking over whether data-logging is being 'delivered' or not.
In the meantime the world's children are disengaging from education en masse. (If they need datalogging they can pick it up in an hour - and probably most do when they buy some technical Lego or a similar toy).
The debate about the use of the Twitterfall brought some interesting comments and observations to surface.
The comments and observations in general ranged from:
I've always believed that those in the Naace community, whatever the jobs we do, can only understand how to 'advance education through ICT' is we model practice. After all this is fundamental to the learning business. Unless we explore advances in technologies, how can we form a view on how they might be used to better those we teach?
With regard to Twitter at conferences, Naace is probably on the same 'learning curve' as others organising such events and we are not the only ones discussing such issues. There has definitely been a trend over the last six of so months at events in which tensions arise until we all learn how to manage the disruptive nature of technology. So for example, speakers, even those in tune and well versed in adopting technology feel threatened by the power of the back channel.
Twitter came of age this year. Real chatter going on throughout the conference. However, we need to look at what that chatter was, and not just criticise or dismiss it. That's would be "block" reflex so beloved of educators and not typical of Naace. OK, so it's new. So it won't be perfect yet. And yes, a couple of comments were inappropriate - but I don't honestly believe they did anyone any harm. No worse than the comments we might pass to the person next to us; it's just that they were public!
In Twitters absence, I believe we are a 20th century audience, listening passively. But with it, we are participating in an active manner.
To:
It seems to me that this is yet another proliferation of the 'sound bite' - I guess this is a criticism of Twitter generally. A presentation is usually a reflective summary of some piece of more extensive work. To then comment publicly - without reflection - seems to me is almost a kind of heckling. As one who was brought up to listen attentively (and it is after all what we expect of students in class), making notes and interacting at the end of a presentation seems intuitively more constructive.
Just because technology makes it possible it doesn't mean that it's useful or desirable. To make a terrible rehash of a well known saying: A paragraph, reflected upon, must be worth a thousand tweets!
I found the twitter wall a bit of a distraction rather than adding to the conference. After all, those wanting to read the twitter feeds could do on their personal device or away from conference (where it was probably of more use?).
I felt that the whole experience of chattering whilst the speaker was presenting was rude and childish. - Rather like passing notes round in class on the assumption that the teacher is not aware of what is going on! None of the tweets that I saw actually helped my understanding of what was being presented.
Yes, the tweets were great fun during the Gala Dinner but far too distracting for me during the conference sessions!
Types of Tweets sent during Keynotes and breakout presentations
Description of what was happening type: e.g. "just waiting for X to start", and "the speaker is now saying this".
Comment/reaction/opinion type of tweet. e.g. "I really agree/disagree with what the speaker is saying" and "I do not believe that the speaker is correct here" (to which someone else might respond).
Flippant type such as "so that's learning gone, then".
The main conference hall had two large presentation screens set up at the front. One screen for the presenter and the other screen used for the Twitterfall. No-one was compelled to read the Twitterfall, I personally found it compelling and therefore sometimes a distraction from the main presentation. Others may not have experienced this. The speaker couldn’t see the Twitterfall which was an issue in my opinion as responses and murmurs / titters were going around the audience in response to the Twitterfall and not the presenter.
I think that if there is going to be a live twitter feed that can be seen by the audience it needs to be managed so that the speaker can be given the opportunity to respond to what is being said. If the speaker knows the source the presenter can choose to ignore it join or respond as appropriate.
For me this shows that both speakers and particularly the conference organisers still need to think carefully about how to make best use of this technology. Some speakers responded well to the Twitterfall some didn’t and some were outwardly critical. Perhaps the speakers should have been given the choice of having the feed visible to the audience or not. Although this was obviously an experiment at Naace into the use of the technology I think if you are to 'add value' to the event by using it then it needs to be used appropriately.
Chris Smith (@shamblesguru) describes it well and identifies a number of tools, some of which may be far better than Twitter for the purpose.
Carol Rainbow (@carolrb) uses a backchannel in the Internet Safety Courses she and Nick Speller described in the NAACE Teachmeet session. The Teachmeet session was hosted by Drew Buddie and Leon Cych
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The following is an overview of the Keynote and breakout sessions attended at 
