Grumbledook Blogs

Being a miserly old humbug I have not been sending out cards to anyone except close family but I would like to just show the following video that was made for EduGeek members by the wonderful SysMan_MK (Via JibJab).

Enjoy.

Interesting conversation today whilst looking at the development of ICT for an Academy. Like many, it is being taken over whilst in the existing schools (all through) but the obvious ICT audit is required to see what they already have in place. This will make sure that the vision for the school and how technology will move it forward is actually possible withthe existing and planned resources.

Common sense? I thought so too but it seems that a major failing that occurs is that although school may have the flashiest desktops and lots of laptops there are still a number of examples where the infrastructure and backend (cables, swithces, servers, power requirements, storage, backup systems) is underfunded … usually because senior manglement only invest at the desk.

Wouldn’t it be nice if when you planned your desktop expenditure you also put on a ‘backend’ overhead so that it is included in the costing or at least put to one side to allow for backend / infrastructure investment every other year or so.

I know it will vary from set up to set up and the technology used (eg thin client, MS based, Mac based, etc) but what figure would you stick on there? 2%, 5%, 10%, 15%? How did you get that figure?

I got a DM (Direct Message) on twitter at the end of the week from @advisorymatters (Gareth Davies, the past chair of NAACE to those not submerged in the Twitterverse) with a link to a Wordle generated from all the tweets at that recent Strategic conference. Then it struck me that I just don’t make enough use of tag clouds, word clouds and so on. I have a few documents that I am working on at the moment that bring up interesting word clouds but try it yourself. http://www.wordle.net/

Oh well .. here is the wordle in question anyway.

Oh, and the other thing you can do if you are running office 2000-2003 is to add the bullfighter plug-in … it does some very interesting analysis of words used and language.

Off for breakfast at McDonald’s tomorrow with the illustrious Mr Ford (we have good meetings in alternative places) to discuss a few things.

First we have our project at a local primary, and the ideas are starting to come out how we can get the kids fired up to be contributors to the world instead of just suckers for information. Looking at things like the use of mobile devices (PSPs, etc) in providing access to materials but also what they are going to create and what difference it will make to some of the targets the school has put out there. The mains targets are reading with boys and writing. A look at the work of folks like Tim Rylands opens up just some of the ideas we can run with, but fitting them into how others are working with the school will be fun.

Next we have a look at what is an ICT Vision. We have all seen those bland, buzzword full documents, with a heap of rhetoric and few examples … well, we want to try and see what a truly generic document looks like and then almost wikify it for people to fill in the blanks with examples. Sounds easy? In that case thank you for volounteering to add items to the wiki when it is available!

Finally we have the toys. ICTiS need to continue to look at emerging technologies, or new ways to use existing technologies … but we don’t really have much time for ‘play’ or coming up with ideas. Time to change that. As part of the primary school project we are going to get a few bits of kit for people to try out and come up with ideas. We are not saying that we are going to write huge schemes of work for schools, but come up with ways (and examples) about how staff can learn to make use of ‘different’ things. How many people use IWBs to advance a slideshow rather than annotating work or resources .. which can subsequently be saved and uploaded to a VLE for students to look at and comment on … or even add to?

So … yes … a few fun hours will be spent just throwing ideas around.

When he has spent his holiday as a painter and decorator.

Admittedly, this has given me time to catch up on some podcasts and this week I have mainly been listening to EdTechRoudUp (#etru is the hashtag on twitter now), Digital Planet, JISC Podcasts, The Art Of Service (good old ITIL), The IT Training Podcast, Whitelist – The BCS Security Podcsat, a few MS Technet podscats on the use of MS tools for increaing productivity … as revisiting the Irish and Celtic Music Podcast (Marc Gunn is a genius!)

I have considered doing my own podcast, but at the moment I am happy to listen, or pop my head into ETRU occasionally (finally made it a fortnight ago!) to give some of my views, experience or ideas.

I will be looking out for Sharepoint specific podcasts shortly, as well as a few eSafety podscats too. Any pointers appreciated.

We have all read them at one point or another. That 6 page document that is meant to explain everything about how wonderful things will be in the future of project X or Y. The next stage of reading a few is to try and translate them based on examples of application of technologies to reach the lofty (and often wordy) goals. Then to see if there are common applications / technologies … and use this to formulate a generic vision document.

I mist also dig out BullFighter again. It is a little add-on to Office 2000 / XP that will check your documents against a dictionary of certain words that I tend to call ‘Manglement speak’. It can be very enlightening. Unfortunately it has not been kept going for Office 2003 or 2007.

My colleague (the illustrious Mr Ford) has dug out a multitude of possible resources over the last week whilst I have been digging out schools or contacts. I would point people at http://future.ncsl.org.uk/ (thank you Mr Ford) as well as http://emergingtechnologies.becta.org.uk/

More later … must go and update my other blog (talking about sharepoint).

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