When I read the front page from the TES last Friday, I initially didn’t know which part of the story to take issue with first and would call into question the credibility of the reporting.

"The program, also known as spyware, has been installed on computers in schools up and down the country to keep tabs on what pupils are looking at online."

Really, spyware? This e-safety software is installed to protect the students and spyware is traditionally used to refer to maliciously installed software. Like many others I applaud schools and LAs who take the issue of e-safety seriously.

“A lot of teachers bring their work laptops home, but they have no idea that they are being monitored,” the source said. “More often than not these laptops are being used by the whole family, and a teenage son or daughter could be viewing all sorts of sites that are being monitored.”

Where to begin. On the one hand we have professionalism, as allowing a family member access to equipment that potentially contains data about students is absolutely reprehensible and should not be condoned in any way.

The other angle is that of the economy. In my family we have a number of teachers and associated educators and not one of them uses a school laptop for the social computing needs of their family. Given the tough economic situation that will be facing Directors of Children’s Services over the next few months, the notion of the public purse providing for the home computing needs of teachers is an anachronism.

Whilst NQTs earn less than the national average, a teacher in their third year is in line with the median (average salary source: ONS), therefore it does not seem inappropriate that they might be able to commit a few hundred pounds to purchasing a netbook in order to fulfil their Facebook needs. This would bring them into line with a large chunk of the  rest of society.

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There may well be a social networking site growth equivalent of Moore’s law, but if there is I am not aware of it. That said, new sites are popping up with increasing frequency and trying to keep them all in sync is becoming hard work.

I have accounts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google for things like Wave – probably not untypical of many other people.

The difficulty for me has been keeping this various services up-to-date with the current state of my address book as I gain new contacts.

In order to do this, and keep both my work and home Exchange calendars in sync, I make use of Plaxo, Yahoo and Soocial. The diagram documents the relationship between them, with a Plaxo agent running for each Exchange account I have, and Plaxo ‘cloud’ talking to Yahoo and keeping that in sync.

Yahoo is then simply used as a conduit to feed the other services, as for some reason each of them has really good interoperability with it but not Google. Google is a bit more of a pain and has to go via Soocial to receive updates.

Periodically looking for people in the various services is now much easier with no exporting to CSV. The downside: Plaxo costs money but in my opinion it is worth the annual fee.

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As I wrote during January on the sch.ools.it site, I am exited about the Home Access programme and the whole nature of making inroads into closing the digital divide by providing low income families with equipment to support education at home.

Becta announced details of the latest 4 Home Access suppliers yesterday, taking to 10 the number of companies able to supply equipment under the scheme.

Having met with parents at St. Nicholas Priory Junior on Tuesday I know that there is genuine desire to access this equipment to support their child’s learning, and even the most cynical person cannot fail to be moved when hearing some of the success stories from earlier schemes. Back in September, Sprowston High School working of the Local Authority, provided a few EAL and Traveller students with laptops under the Home Access to Targeted Groups scheme (HATG) and they are making excellent use of them.

St. Nicholas has just completed the installation of a school wide wireless system to support the Home Access laptops (possibly up to 130 given Free School Meal indicators), as well as an additional 100 Dell Mini 10v that the Governors have approved the purchase of. Conversations with parents have been based around highlighting the benefit to the child if they use their Home Access money to purchase a laptop, as it can move between home and school.

The Uruguayan model

In October 2009, the BBC reported that the government of Uruguay was intent on providing every child with a One Laptop per Child (OLPC) device.

“The laptops have an open source Linux operating system with a user interface called Sugar. It has attracted some criticism from detractors for not being mainstream.”

This is perhaps the approach that Becta and UKgov should have taken. Far from scaling back the project as has happened (age range more limited than pilot, FSM eligibility outstrips available money and consequently devices), this would have been an ideal opportunity to work with a provider such as Canonical (Ubuntu) in order to put an Open Source operating system onto every machine. Costs would have reduced and more youngsters would have had access to a machine.

As schools, and UKgov, move to provide more and more services that are browser driven, then choice of operating system will become much less of an issue as the need to install software locally fades into distant memory. In fact, Google Docs can already provide offline access to edit documents, presentations and spreadsheets such provision is maintained at home even in a rural county such as Norfolk.

If you are reading this and interested in how Open Source software fits into education then I recommend looking at the Open Source Schools website.

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Ok, well maybe it wasn’t GParted but the evidence is reasonably conclusive.

I have been playing around with various Linux distros recently, namely Jolicloud and Ubuntu Netbook Remix, wiping and reinstalling as necessary. All of this is on a Dell Mini 10v with a 160Gb drive, with 60Gb given over to Windows 7 and the rest to Linux.

A couple of weeks ago - having made a change using GParted - I rebooted, only to find that Grub was refusing to play ball any more. No big deal I thought, I will just boot from a recovery CD and sort things out. And there it was, my 160Gb drive was now a 60Gb drive with the drive geometry reporting to the Dell BIOS the new size - exactly the same as the NTFS partition.

After a bit of research I stumbled upon HDAT2 and download the bootable image. Having booted from this I was able to turn off the HPA and the full drive size was visible again.

The moral of this story? Not sure if there is one, but maybe I should stop messing around with partitions and use VirtualBox or some of the other options available.

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This year Kate and I have decided to make an electronic card.

The money we would have spent on cards and postage has been donated to the BBC Radio 4 Christmas appeal.

Wherever you are in the world, have a restful and enjoyable few days.

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We are just in the process of rolling out the SIMS Learning Gateway to the parents of 1700 students. If you assume the nuclear family as an average (some single, some triple reporting scenarios) then that is in the realm of 3500 parental logins that the school has to manage in order to comply with a DCSF September 2010 requirement. Given staffing levels it could end up being a challenge.

That sounds negative, but it isn’t intended to be as I think that giving parents ‘warts and all’ access to their child’s data will be a wakeup call to many and will, in the longer term, be part of a cultural change in the way that schools ‘inform’ parents – although I suspect that for many years schools will continue to produce reams of paper ‘just in case’.

What concerns me is that having each school handle the parental authentication seems to be slightly at odds with potential efficiency savings. In addition it is one more username and password to write on a piece of paper next to the computer, mainly due to the complexities of trying to remember so many of these in our digital age.

Stick with me whilst I lay out some key pieces of information;

• All students have Unique Pupil Number (UPN), and now a Unique Learner Number (ULN) *
• All adults have a National Insurance (NI) number – also unique
• The UK Government operates a Government Gateway service for individuals to access UK Government’s services

My solution to the problem would look something like this;

A parent would get a Government Gateway login (assuming they don’t already have one) which can be used for other UK Government online services. This would benefit not only the school in terms of reduced administration, but would drive the uptake of e-gov services in the UK.

DCSF (or whomever) would hold centrally a record of which NI (parent/guardian/carer) records are associated with a given UPN. Find a way of cascading that information down to a school MIS in an automated way and you have a solution to automatically cope with changes to legal relationships e.g. as a result of court proceedings. This central record would also hold the establishment number associated with a specific UPN.

When a parent logs into the Gateway they are presented with the information for all of the students they are ‘related’ to, irrespective of which school that child attends or which MIS system the school uses.

Of course, all of this is largely a utopian dream as big government IT projects invariably fail and even getting to where we are today with The Systems Interoperability Framework (SIF) has been a challenge, but I don’t want to rehearse those arguments here.

Many be possible one day though.

* why we can’t just give children an NI number at birth and be done with all of the others forms of uniqueness is beyond me.

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Just got myself a 3 MiFi unit to replace the older USB 3G dongle I have been using. I am not going to make this a fully fledged review as there are plenty of those available online, but I did just want to say a few words to sum up my initial experience with the unit.

The basics

The MiFi is a rebadged Huawei E5830 3G and wireless access point in one. The unit is charged through the USB mini socket, either with the supplied charger or when connected to a PC (although I understand from reading in a forum that it won’t charge whilst working) – it is also possible to change settings when tethered. Wireless SSID and WEP etc keys can also be changed when connected to a Windows PC (drawback for Linux/Mac(?) users), as can settings related to IP ranges and the like.

On the right of the unit are switches to control on/off, wireless and network connection. Pop a SIM card in and press those buttons in the right order and you are online. On the left is a MicroSD slot, although I have not actually read the manual yet (!?!) I suspect that when connected via USB it can be used as a storage device.

Cost is £69 on a PAYG deal, but ‘as a loyal customer’ I was able to get it for £2/month on top of my existing £5/month plan with a 12 month contract, which I thought was pretty reasonable.

In use

As someone who regularly flits between various operating systems and devices, often when out and about, the appeal of this device is a given. Although I have not used it extensively as yet, I can say that it worked well (or as well as 3UK does) on the train between Norwich and London the other evening, enabling a phone and laptop to share the same connection. Not having remember the 3G settings when installing a new Linux distro will be helpful, and the fact that this device operates in infrastructure mode (as opposed to ad-hoc on JoikuSpot for the Nokia phone) gives a better degree of compatibility with the iPod apparently.

I see a real benefit of technology like this as being when small groups are working together in a remote location and need to share an internet connection. Examples in education could be field trips where learners are out using wifi enabled devices during the day and need to upload files to their learning platform at the end of the day. Lots of devices recording offline geo-tagged video footage with qik.com will inspire some and strike fear into the hearts of others!

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I had intended to just post a tweet saying how great my recent experience was with both John Lewis and Amazon, but actually the whole notion of what was happening got me thinking for a moment.

I placed an Amazon order on Saturday, a John Lewis order on Sunday afternoon, and both were delivered on Monday. Pretty fast.

So this has started me thinking about whether or not this enhanced experience is a combination of the infrastructure to make it possible aligned with suppliers keen to differentiate themselves in the wake of the economic downturn or something else.

As consumers we have an ever increasing brand affinity and the barriers to entry for an online retailer to sell those branded products are lowering as time progresses, therefore enhanced customer service seems to be the way to go for established retailers. With these rapid delivery times it will be harder for local retailers and niche online, often untested, retailers to compete.

The next step for me would be for the online retailers to get together and look at some form of delivery aggregation service, aimed at getting multi-supplier products to addresses in a single drop. There are possible savings for the carriers and definite improvements for the end user. 20 years ago I would have done all of my shopping in person - at my convenience, but now I have to wait for the delivery companies to arrive at a time to suit them.

They call that progress I think!

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A couple of months ago I wrote about using Jolicloud with a Dell Mini 10v and the very positive experience that I had had with the technology. Two months on it is worth sharing a couple of pieces of news related to this.

Firstly, although Jolicloud is a closed alpha I have some invitations to give away so if you are interested in using it send an email to james at jameswwright dot com asking for an invite and I will send one your way – I only have ten so be quick. Would appreciate a Google Wave invite if anyone has a spare.

Secondly, either I have got used to the touchpad or the recent BIOS update has fixed something, but the Dell is now much easier to control without the external mouse.

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In The Bag was a specialist club night at the Norwich Waterfront, and from the outset was, for many, a return to the halcyon days of the Madchester scene of the late Eighties and early Nineties, with hit tunes from the Stone Roses, Inspiral Carpets, Happy Mondays, Charlatans, Flowered Up and many more. I have been meaning for a while to write a brief history about the club and that is exactly what follows.

History

In the autumn of 1996 during a Wilde Club event at Norwich Arts Centre, friends James Wright, Fraser McKay and Vince Yallop developed the idea of having a Madchester revival club in Norwich.

This came on the heals of the Britpop phenomenon that had engulfed the country for the previous couple of years and the time felt right to remind people where it all started.

The first club night was on January 11th 1997 and the estimated turnout was in excess of 200. Building on the initial success, further dates were booked to occur approximately every 6 weeks with the club eventually filling the bi-monthly first Saturday of the month slot. 

Logo

The initial flyer had no logo, but by the second event in March 1997 the club had gained a logo based on the Madchester Rave On EP from the Happy Mondays. Friend of the DJs Matthew Willis was responsible for making an electronic version that later went on to be used on the club’s original website.

Set list

With a fairly short lived genre to work with the set list for In The Bag was always going to be fairly specific. Nevertheless by reaching out from Manchester into Bolton, Burnley, London, Liverpool, Glasgow and beyond the featured artists ended up including 808 State, Blur, Candy Flipp, Charlatans, Farm, Flowered Up, Happy Mondays, High, Inspiral Carpets, James, LA's, MC Tunes, Milltown Brothers, Mock Turtles, Neds Atomic Dustbin, Northside, Paris Angels, Primal Scream, PWEI, Ride, Stone Roses and World of Twist

The end

At 17.32 on 24th May 2007 came the news from Paul Ingleby that the club night had been axed. “We are having a bit of a jiggle with studio clubs and Meltdown. Given the numbers have been monitored for the last year or so we have come to the conclusion that In The Bag just isn’t working well enough any more and its impetus has gone. Therefore I’m sorry to say we are dropping the night. The next date on June 2nd will therefore be the last one.”

This news was a disappointment to us and the information about the numbers didn’t seem to fit in with what we had seen ourselves, and we therefore presumed it to be down to bar sales.

With that in mind James and Fraser vowed that June 2nd would be a night to remember and gathered together as many regulars as possible. At 1.52am on June 3rd, I am the Resurrection began playing for the final time and at 2am the 10 year unbroken run came to an end.

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