Ewan McIntosh | Digital Media & Learning

Where is education's "Recovery.gov"?

I believe every citizen should be able to track how every one of their dollars, euros or pounds is spent. Nowhere is this desire to know the destination of our tax dollars more heightened than in education, where we can sometimes feel, as teachers and as parents, very little creeps through into our classrooms and professional development.

Obama's administration is leading the way in showing how this could happen soon.

Last year, within days of becoming President of the USA, Barack Obama announced his intention to create a more open, collaborative and participative form of Government. Soon after, as he pushed through his response to the economic crisis, the Recovery Bill, he was keen that this $98.2bn spend was also monitorable by the people paying for it. Thus at the end of last year launched Recovery.com, a portal to keep an eye on how every dollar is spent, where it is spent and what the recipients of it manage to do with it: creating or safeguarding jobs, gaining new contracts for services.

It's not just agency bureaucracy figures, but also user-generated reports from the people and companies who have benefited from grants or investments. Heck, they even make the data available as a KML file or as text so you can have a play with it, too.

But where is Recovery.com/education? Indeed, why does such a detailed tracker not exist outside the period of crisis, for all of our public services?

Education budgets are admittedly, if we believe our politicians, often saved from cuts (just don't tell the guys in California); it's the one area alongside health that voters don't like to see shaved. Yet, in Scotland as elsewhere, 2011 will see a real cut in the amount spent in classrooms, with Local Authorities and individual school head teachers having to make tricky choices, or learn how to save money in the areas where, in the period of boom, inefficiencies had crept in unnoticed.

Therefore, as we head towards an even more "every penny counts" era than before, having meaningful access to education spend data would mean

• better decision-making;
• more transparency before those whose money is being spent
• more transparency before those who are receiving the service.

Many a costly decision in quangos, local authorities and schools would be questioned by those closest to the delivery of the service - today they're often the last to know.

Better still, Recovery.com is not just a pretty-fied spreadsheet of what money headed out according to the agencies - it's a two-way service, allowing recipients of money to demonstrate what they've done with it, show the true effect of investment and grants in their local area. If £4m is spent in my High School annually and I, as a classroom teacher, am being told that my entire professional development allocation for the year will be only £50, then having access to that data would allow me to either understand a savvy management decision or question its validity.

So, would this appeal to school leaders, Local Administrators, Heads of Education, Superintendents? The data's there already, from their petrol expenses to their Xerox accounts. I, for one, would be generous in my time to show them that Flashmeeting and Google Docs could save them... well, I don't (yet) know how much.

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• Recession 'threat' to education (news.bbc.co.uk)

Lack of broadband for all, an implicit denial of full citizenship to some

My big boss at Channel 4 (spot the new website), Chief Executive Andy Duncan, gave a speech last week in anticipation of the Digital Britain report, the first part of which is released next week. In it he makes some key points about the importance of the public service intervention we are making on the web, mobile and gaming with 4iP, but also stresses why Government needs to act rather than talk about broadband access for all.

I still hear about the digital divide as a legitimate excuse for not embracing technologies and equally a reason for blocking and banning sites with which the Establishment of our education institutions don't agree or don't understand. It's the main reason for a propagation of 'safe' social networking sites and school intranets destined for tweens and teens who spend up to six hours a night unleashed in the 'real' online world, reaping the benefits this untempered activity has to offer. Making sure all citizens have access is a key "must-change" in 2009:

...We must have universal access to broadband services.  At the moment we rank fifth of the OECD countries for access, but in terms of speed we are some considerable way behind countries like Korea and Japan.   If we are to be a fully digital society, then every citizen must be able to participate.  Anything less would be an implicit denial of full citizenship to some.   For a household to be online is becoming as essential to participation in the life of society as having a TV and a phone.   And TV and phone are probably most important to those who are most disadvantaged.   The same should be true of broadband access.   In any case, the more universal a network, the greater its value.  Google, Yahoo, You Tube, Facebook, Bebo – they know that very well.  It’s even more true in a wider social sense as a common unifying element of citizenship.  And while many people - perhaps most people - will want to top up any basic provision by paying more for hi-speed or specialist equipment or content and services, just as they do with television today, access itself should be a basic right for everyone.
Full speech (pdf)   |   Listen to the speech online   |   Pic: Informitv

Off the rails: my Scotrail Dell Hell - Sketch

OK, so Hell might be a big word here. But Scotrail really have no idea about customer service - or the law, for that matter.

It all started with a coffee yesterday morning, on the 9:15 from Edinburgh to Glasgow, Scotrail's elite train service for the hardworking, highly paid, high paying commuter clientèle (most of the passengers qualify in elements one and three only, however). The woman who serves the coffee (Marion) has a fouler mouth than I have heard in most Rangers matches in Ibrox, having earlier threatened to "run over that f... b... from first class" who had, apparently, told her buddy how to do his job (and by the end of this tale you, too, may be in a position to do so, as well).

After getting my change and supping on a coffee that definitely had a lingering taste of curry
I plugged in the iPod and blocked out the nasty world around me.

However, it was when trying to buy lunch in Boots that the kind girl at the counter pointed out that I had been palmed a false £1 coin. "Return it to the place that gave it to you - it's illegal". She was right, of course. I had to find Marion and hope that she would not verbally abuse me.

This morning on the train there was no Marion (I was on an earlier service and can only presume that she was running over some more first class passengers with her trolley). Instead the lovely Jacznica (sic?) informed me first of all that there was nothing wrong with my coin, which by this point had had several shopkeepers embed their nails in its silver, not gold, surface), then that the conductor would have to deal with it. The conductor never did deal with it (too busy boiling kettles for Jacznica's trolley, no doubt) but my 'catering hostess' / trolley dolly came back with a phone number for the Operations Manager at Queen Street station and advised me to walk to the back of the station, the other side from where I need to go, leave through the doors and find the Catering Department, to see if I could get my real pound back.

I saw the Scotrail Manager's Office and reckoned I would try going to the top. But his receptionists did a great job at deflecting this particularly nasty, stingy, scamming client from the Über Railway Manager and, instead, laughed off my claim on the phone to their colleagues in the Catering Department (on the other side of the station) before returning sage-faced to the reception window to inform me that I would, indeed, have to make the 10 minute walk to reclaim my money.

Could I be bothered? By this point I had lost three kilos in persperation and was losing the will to live, too. I ended up doing the unthinkable. I passed on illegal currency to the bloke at Greggs' bakery. Well, I had lost 3 kilos and needed an apple turnover.

Google.cn - the Chinese filtering Google results

Google.cn has been launched for Chinese searches on the Internet. However, Google have struck a deal with the Chinese Government to massage the results. Google have also banned Wikipedia so Chinese language wikipedia results are limited to those posted by Chinese communities in other parts of the world.

Ethan Zuckerman has started some interesting word searching experiments with curious results. It's not that everything is returning with no results, but some searches return Chinese-only results. Interestingly it's returning fewer results in a different order to Google.co.uk for things as banal as "ewan mcintosh". Anyone got an explanation? What have I done against the Chinese state?

Using Ethan's experimental phrase: “site:wikipedia.org 太石村”, I was amazed not just that nothing was returned by that the search changed automatically from 'Search the Web':

to 'Search China only':

This means that Google cannot be used to get round the Chinese authorities' grasp on wikipedia access. Scarily close control of the internet but really clever, too. More scary, though, when you realise that the Chinese search term is in relation to Taishi village, where the first signs of a democratic rebellion against corrupt officials were stamped out quickly and ruthlessly by the authorities

Is it right that Google have signed themselves and their technology away in a manner that restricts free speech, not only for Chinese in China but for the rest of us who might want to communicate with them?

Wikipedia catches sex offender seeking school place

The much maligned Wikipedia has struggled to come out the right end of its battle to secure a place in an educators' e-satchel. This report via Andy Carvin sets out an ingenious solution to the problem of sex offenders trying to become students or get jobs in schools. Perhaps England's Education Secretary should get some high school kids onto wikipedia and save herself all that embarrassment.

File-sharing, social software and the law

FactoryJoe has been busy this past month creating a fantastic line in virtual clothing in protest against the heavy duty tactics of RIAA, the American organisation responsible for inforcing copyright, most recently in the domain of music file-sharing. Just in time for Christmas, hundreds of students at universities across the East Coast received writs from some of the world’s richest music companies after the students had been suspected of illegally sharing music.

While the US worries about music sharing, the law on filesharing in France (about which I blogged in December) looks like it might go through. The French parliament has tentatively started to push through a law to legalise peer-to-peer (P2P) filesharing, making it the first country in the world to consider this. Is Cory Doctorrow right in his take on the matter?

The French govt has been captured and is on the way to passing a terrible French copyright law that will implement the provisions in the EUCD (the Directive that was given rise to through accession to the WIPO Copyright Treaty, the same treaty that created the US DMCA). The French EUCD is really bad: bans open source, requires mandatory universal wiretapping, etc. Making matters worse, the govt called its hearings on this for Dec 22/23, when no one would be around to make a stink.

So the French Parliament has retaliated by passing this legalize-P2P bill, which still needs govt approval.

The message appears to be: if you create this dumbass copyright law, we'll respond by legalizing P2P, so just back off, all right?

Eye for an eye until everyone is blind?

In the meantime, there is also a debate (again spotted in BoingBoing, from Daniel Solove, a professor at George Washington University Law School, who writes on his blog:

Suppose the mainstream media, fed up with the buzz bloggers keep getting and with bloggers criticizing their stories, decided to exact revenge. They initiate a vigorous copyright enforcement strategy, launching a barrage of lawsuits against bloggers as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has done to music file sharers. What would happen?

The blogosphere would be in for some tough times I bet. Bloggers frequently copy large chunks of mainstream media articles and some of us copy pictures we find on the Web. Bloggers don't have a team of photographers and artists, so they snag images from the Internet. As for mainstream media articles, bloggers often quote very liberally because the mainstream media is notorious for creating dead URLs -- articles often just disappear after a week or two. In other instances, articles get archived and can only be retrieved for a fee. The result is that a post discussing a mainstream media article with just a link or a small quote can become hard to understand when the article being referred to becomes unavailable.

[The blogosphere’s] norms about the use of copyrighted material are probably at odds with existing copyright law. Although the music and movie industries have been on the copyright offensive, beyond them, the enforcement of copyright on the Internet has been rather laid back. But this article from the WSJ strikes a bit of fear in my bones (...)

The article that he is referring to points to Corbis and GettyImages, professional providers of photographs to the press, who are now using hitech systems to find any websites unlawfully using their images. One can only imagine that they plan to take legal action against those (including bloggers) who use their images without paying the high prices that go with them.

In the classroom...
More than ever we must make sure that in creating podcasts and blog posts that our students respect copyright. Flickr remains a source of top quality creative commons imagery - Local Authorities must open up access to this site to allow students to legally use images on their work.

Am I being paranoid or is it important to set students up with these attitudes of respecting copyright? What happens if we don't? Will we create a generation of copyright-bashing youth, or do they really know better?

.fr finally .freed

Amazed to see that the French are only now going to release the .fr domain to members of the general public. According to M. Dupont vous fait part de la naissance de dupont.fr in today's Libération the domain will be released in early 2006, just a few weeks after the same freeing up of the .eu domain was announced.

Is it normal to be so late in freeing up domain names, or are the French authorities being a little too controlling of the situation?

Learning Modern Languages better for you than Maths?

In an article from the Times Educational Supplement we learn that those studying a foreign language are more likely to meet with success in national examinations than in other subjects ("They speak in tongues", September 16 2005).

The percentage of pupils gaining A or B passes in 2005 shows a huge advantage in language learning over other subjects in the search for good results:

Spanish = 66%
French = 64%
German = 60%

Physics = 52%
Maths = 44%
English = 34 %

The article also shows that the number learning a foreign language is overall on the up from 2001, compared to the huge slump in uptake south of the border. Is this down to the greater variety in courses suited to different abilities or a particularly vibrant MFL community shouting from the rafters? Is the rise in positive results related to this somehow as well?

Higher French = 4272 up to 4515
Higher German = 2015 down to 1703
Higher Spanish = 831 up to 1162

Standard Grade French = 38,736 down to 34,270
Standard Grade German = 15,748 down to 11,276
Standard Grade Spanish = 2,846 down (just) to 2,823

Int 2 French = 944 up to 2245
Int 2 German = 479 up to 624
Int 2 Spanish = 342 up to 732

Int 1 French = 61 up to 1136
Int 1 German = 47 up to 151
Int 1 Spanish = 398 up to 672

Acc 3 French = 1295 up to 1736
Acc 3 German = 481 up to 587
Acc 3 Spanish = 123 up to 391

Don't tell the "cry baby" in your class to "go top yourself"

A word of warning from the Guardian after the surprising dismissal of a French teacher who told a pupil to go and "top himself":

"A teacher has been suspended after claims from a pupil that she told him to "top himself" when he was too shy to speak in French in front of his class.

"...The same teacher, who has not been named, sneered ... when a colleague apologised for flaring up and calling a boy "fatso" after he disrupted a maths lesson.

"The inquiry was triggered when the boy ... came home and told his mother Sharon: "I've had a hell of a day."

"Mrs Jenkins, 35, said: "She asked him to stand up and say what his hobbies were (in French). He hasn't got much confidence and he didn't. She told him, 'I don't like nobodies. Go and top yourself.' I'm absolutely disgusted with her. She shouldn't be working with kids."

Next... Top Yourself II: The Parents' Evening

European Parliament not opposed to blogs - "but we won't be having one"

The European Parliament has relaunched its website to make it even more democratic (a little easier to navigate, as far as we're concerned). In an interview with the Parliament President, Josep Borrell Fontelles (pictured), he says a curious thing about blogs. They are not against comment facilities in principle, but the reason they can't have one is because of the language dilemma - how could a blog cater for 20 languages?

Well, call me dumb, but I have seen many blogs with translations that are not too bad. And what about all those translators in the EU? Surely all their material is electronic already and could be posted in multilingual blogs. And the comments? Well, what a great reason for more of us to learn foreign languages. The reality is that many of us can communicate in several languages and those who can't have merely been denied a democratic right (the same four freedoms granted in the Treaty of Rome/Amsterdam, etc...etc...) to take part in their European Union.

And in the classroom... Almost...
Now tell me that modern foreign languages are a minority subject. If the Parliament bit the bullet and put a multilingual blog on its site it would offer a wonderfully democratic means of engaging the population in European politics. It would also give a very practical example of why language-learning is so important. By admitting there is a problem in language-learning and doing nothing about it the EU is less proactive than I thought.

The other curious phrase that he used was in his statement on the importance attached by the Parliament to "Control Media". Blogs ain't any kind of control media.

Maybe they just don't get blogs...