Mr Belshaw is dead, long live Doug Belshaw!

I mean, of course, that this website has moved home. You need to update your bookmarks and RSS feed readers if you want to continue the journey:

http://dougbelshaw.com

RSS feed for dougbelshaw.com

You can subscribe to just the posts relating to education over at the blog itself.

This blog (teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk) will remain online as an archive of the thinking I’ve done and connections made over the last two years. Comments are closed and pingbacks to posts shall be rejected. The conversation has moved to dougbelshaw.com! :-)

Last year (2006), Stephen Downes went away for a while. Today Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, decided to blog less citing family reasons and the fact it’s taking him away from revenue-making activties. This post is to announce that I too will be taking a bit of a break.

The word that Downes used to describe his absence was ‘hiatus’, a remarkably apt word:

According to my Collins 21st Century Dictionary, ‘hiatus’ means:

an opening or gap; a break in something which should be continuous.

I’m not going to go into a great amount of detail as to why and when I’ll be back. Suffice to say that I’m not (long-term) ill, everything is fine with my family, and I’ll be a teacher for the foreseeable future. So keep me in your feed reader. Or not. I’ll still be blogging occasionally over at edte.ch.

I’ve just emptied my feed reader of the ‘edublogs’ and the ‘edublogs – must reads’ folders, with the idea being that I’ll rediscover the good blogs when I return in the new year.

Finally, I’m not going to be on Twitter. Well, at least not as mrbelshaw anyway… ;)

According to the Guardian, Lilian Katz, a worldwide authority on nursery education, has stated that, “It can be seriously damaging for children who see themselves as inept at reading too early.” She believes boys in particular are rushed into reading too soon and this makes them passive and receptive instead of active and assertive. Interesting. More grist to the mill and another reason why I’ll be trying to convince my wife that not sending Ben to school until 7 is a good idea… ;)

The BBC reports that the scheme in Doncaster’s Hungerhill school to track pupils by RFID tags in their school uniforms has come under increasing scrutiny. After the furore that surrounded the government’s loss (including probably our family’s) child benefit details, there is concern that privacy is being violated. Hurray for public debate! (thanks to Kristian Still for the link)

I was in Birmingham yesterday to present on Web 2.0 in education at a Leading Edge INSET day between 4 schools. Peter Lee, the guy who invited me, is a fellow History teacher and reader of this blog along with the one over at edte.ch. I had a great time and met some very interesting and inspirational people. :D

The slides from my presentation are on Slideshare here and below you can find my (audio) reflections of the day recorded during my trip home in slow-moving traffic…

(thanks goes to Pat for pointing out in the comments below that the sound is a little ‘chipmunk-like’ if you use the embedded player. Try just clicking on the Audio MP3 button or ‘Download’ instead…)

I’ve been neglecting my feed reading a bit recently. I caught up on my education news today and found that schools may get business managers (boo!), teachers want smaller schools (hurray!), plans to raise the school leaving age are still being pushed through (hmm…), ‘compulsory’ lessons shouldn’t be (great idea, if done properly), and pupils are facing too many tests (well, duh…). :D

I like quotations. Usually because the author manages to say in fewer or more descriptive words what I’ve been thinking. One of the quotations I’m going to mention stems from immediate practice whereas the other is from considered reflection. The first, then:

I’m not waving, I’m drowning!

A fellow teacher said this to me during the last week or so and I think it’s true for a great many of us. We float along swan-like sometimes, whilst our legs are paddling away furiously beneath the water! I know how many hours I put into my job and the things relating to it and I really don’t think – in fact I know from past experience – that doing any more would make me ill.

The trouble is that the people who make important decisions don’t see this. They see Ofsted inspection-planned lessons, schemes of work that have seen many burned candles and smiles from teachers who want to make it quickly up the career ladder. I think we need to reflect on whether more means better. It’s the same for students: so what if they’ve got 15 GCSEs instead of 9? Does it necessarily make them any more employable or develop their personality? The problem, of course, is league tables – but let’s not get into that… :o

The second quotation I’ve come across this week that has put into coherent sentences what I’ve been thinking I read on Cin Barnsley’s blog, Thinking 2.0. It’s a quotation from Michael Wesch about the false digital natives/immigrants dichotomy I’ve discussed before (here and here):

The great myth is that these “digital natives� know more about this new information environment than we do. But here’s the reality: they may be experts in entertaining themselves online, but they know almost nothing about educating themselves online. They may be learning about this digital information environment despite us, but they are not reaching the levels of understanding that are necessary as this digital information environment becomes increasingly pervasive in all of our lives. All of the classic skills we learned in relation to a print-based information universe are important, and must now be augmented by a critical understanding of the workings of digital information.

On the one hand, the ‘traditional’ notion of school needs to go. But we also need to be wary of going too far in the other direction; our pupils are not born knowing how to educate themselves through the resources they have at their fingertips. It’s a bit like the teachers as lifeguards analogy that I’ve used before – our role is to explain and inform, let them loose in the waters of knowledge, and rescue them when they get into difficulties… :)

I noticed in my RSS reader this morning that Paul Stamatiou – someone who you must read if you’re interested in tech stuff – had blogged about a paper he has written on RFID tags. This struck a chord with me as earlier this month, over at edte.ch, I blogged about a trial using them in uniforms in a school near to me (Doncaster, England). I am concerned about the privacy and ‘Big Brother’ implications for such devices in our society. :o

‘Stammy’ (as he is universally known) makes some great points – in fact his paper got an ‘A’ at Georgia Tech where, as a 21 year-old, he is studying. In what follows, I’m just going to quote Stammy’s paper and join up the dots with my own thoughts…

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a maturing wireless technology with widespread uses, many of which individuals interact with on a daily basis, whether they are aware of it or not. RFID tags can make businesses more efficient through rapid inventory management, provide consumers with a faster method of checking out at their local convenience store, ensure that people are properly administered the medicine they need, and more (Bhuptani, 2005, p. 5).

Wikipedia has, perhaps, a more succinct definition:

An RFID tag is an object that can be applied to or incorporated into a product, animal, or person for the purpose of identification using radiowaves. Some tags can be read from several meters away and beyond the line of sight of the reader.

Stammy goes on to talk about more of the applications of RFID:

Low-cost RFID tags have penetrated the marketplace due to their sheer benefits over traditional barcodes, which hold several limitations. RFID tags fortify the primary draw of bar codes – the ability for ordinary items to be machine-readable at a trivial cost. Where as bar codes store an infinitesimal amount of data, ranging from 8 numeric characters to 2000 ASCII characters, RFID tags may hold up to 128 kilobytes (Hunt, 2006, p. 21). However, it is the wireless capabilities of RFID tags that make their uses obvious over bar codes. Many tags may be read at once and tags need not be within line-of-sight. Their technical implementation also ensures tags are difficult to replicate (Hunt, 2006, p. 22). Even though RFID tags compete with bar codes, tags are far from being limited to similar uses. The wireless ability of RFID tags has opened the door to previously impossible applications.

Some of these ‘previously impossible applications’, however, are worrying:

The canonical doomsday scenario for RFID tags does not deal with cracking encrypted RFID tags used for payment so much as creating a global consumer database from tags in consumer purchases. RFID tags were intended, like most technology, to offer the end user a cheaper, more efficient, and convenient product in the long run. But with RFID tags, how much convenience is too much? Perhaps when it can be used to track people with any degree of accuracy. This is where item-level tagging should be used with caution. Item-level tagging is the term for the embedding RFID tags in individual products as opposed to pallets of bulk products in a warehouse. Item-level tagging is not yet prevalent but at the current pace it is expected between 2010 and 2020 (Bhuptani, 2005, p. 182).

The problem isn’t necessarily with individual RFID tags, but when the combined data from them is aggregated:

MIT Professor Jerry Saltzer once stated that privacy is a database correlation issue. Suppose several separate entities have their own databases of information from someone. Entity A might have their name and address, Entity B their name, SSN [Social Security Number] and list of recent purchases, Entity C their name, date of birth, mother’s maiden name and so on. All it takes is a malicious person with access to these databases (that may just mean access to the Internet in some cases) to cross-reference a shared term such as that person’s name and they will have a great deal of information about that person. This might sound Orwellian, but it is a real concern that should be heeded.

So, what can be done? Well, consumers could remove the tags themselves. However, some RFID tags can be smaller than a grain of salt! Another way that Stammy mentions is to apply the ‘Faraday cage’ principle and to shield the area with tin foil or wire mesh. This is not a fooproof method, unfortunately. Perhaps we need some type of standard?

Before RFID proliferation reaches the tipping point, consumers should know their RFID rights and corporations should follow them. Privacy expert Simson Garfinkel proposed the RFID Bill of Rights to serve this purpose. They include the rights to: know whether products contain RFID tags, have tags removed or disabled once tagged items have been purchased, use RFID- enabled services without tags, access the data stored on an RFID tag and know when, where, and why tags are being read (Garfinkel, 2002, p. 35). Similar to how a pack of M&M’s states they were manufactured in a plant that processes peanuts, future items containing RFID tags should make it easy for the ordinary consumer to know whether the item is tagged.

Overall, a great paper from Stammy and well worth his ‘A’. I recommend you go and read the ten-and-a-half pages for yourself and follow up some of the links in the bibliography.

Finally, then, what are we going to do as educators about this? It’s a similar problem to school libraries having the fingerprints of every pupil in the school on file. It wouldn’t be difficult for a government to build an instant fingerprint database (‘in the interests of national security’) without explicit consent. I see no practical reason why we should be tracking children using RFID at all.

What are your thoughts? :D

I feel like having a right old moan about how much I’ve got to do, how little time I’ve got to do it… but I won’t. It doesn’t do anyone any good; we know that teachers (and students, for that matter) are tired at this time of year. That’s why it’s better to focus on how to make things better. :p

First, though, some observations. These are gleaned from working in a number of schools including my current one. I’m sure most places are fairly similar, really. We’re all human beings after all!

Observations

1. It seems to me evident that the school system is built around this particular half-term before Christmas. It’s the worst in terms of staff absence, I’m sure. Therefore, the system has to be able to cope in terms of student behaviour, having enough qualified adult bodies to cover lessons and *gasp!* allow some actual learning to take place.
2. The weather and amount of light around affects people a lot. At the start of the Life in a Day video a couple of weeks back I showed how I’ve got a light which gradually brightens to wake me up. It helps. I’m not saying that everyone’s got Seasonal Affective Disorder, but we are not automatons insensitive to environmental changes. Everyone’s a lot mardier and snappier around this time of year.
3. This term is ‘dead time’ up until Christmas. Staff are usually preparing GCSE and AS/A2 students for mock exams so KS3 students can be neglected somewhat. As the next thing they’re looking forward to is Christmas (snow and presents!) they’re not overly focused on school/homework.

Possible solutions

1. Build in ‘redundancy’. Give teachers more non-contact time. One of the great things about my current school is that, compared to other schools, we’re ‘overstaffed’. This means that students who have a cover teacher are more likely to end up with one whom they know. It also means that if there are less absences, more staff get free time. It’s a virtuous circle!
2. Recognise that human beings have different needs at different times of the year. Why should the school day be uniform year-round? What about having standardised terms (as some local authorities are experimenting with) to stop having the ‘long-slog-until-Christmas’. It’s crazy that we usually have a 9-week Spring term but a 15-week Autumn term… :s
3. Abolish Christmas! No, not really. :) Engage KS3 students with some cross-curricular project work instead. Futurelab’s Enquiring Minds project is perfect for this, as is something like the Cabot Competency Curriculum, based on the RSA’s Opening Minds curriculum.

What do you think? What structural problems do you face when teaching? How could they be overcome? :D

This report claims that some schools in America are ‘ditching chairs for exercise balls’. Although at first it made me laugh (check out the picture!) but the article claims that it: assists in improving posture, enhances attention and concentration, improves balance and coordination, and adjusts for a customized fit. Sounds like a plan – although they’d have to reinforce them for my classes. Either that, or I’d have to ban scissors in my classroom… ;)