Our careers have developed in parallel each with a computers in education theme.

1980 - In my first year of teaching in Enfield, my students raised money for a Sinclair ZX81 through a sponsored sunflower growing competition and later they raised money for Sinclair Spectrums. At home we had a Sinclair Spectrum. This required the use of the TV, a tape machine and the computer being connected – I found my three year old son fixing all this up one morning so he could play an early computer game. Not surprisingly perhaps, he now has an international business providing events and entertainment information via the internet and mobile phone (www.my247.mobi) .

1984 - Within a few years, the BBC computer initiative brought an influx of computers into schools – well four anyway to start with, and then a roomful all working individually and with a rapid succession of word processing programmes Wordwise and Edword for example. To change programmes, you had to open up the computer and change the chips.

This introduction of computers was coupled with the introduction of the Technical Vocational Education Initiative (TVEI) which I coordinated in the school. Schools were linked up via computer and we were able to access an early version of what we now have on the internet today – TTNS it was called – The Times Network for Schools. We could also send messages to the other six schools who were connected up with us. I saw computer use motivate young people who were turned off education.

1986 – the next years saw the introduction of the Amstrads, the BBC Archimedes and RM Nimbus as well as early Apples and schools were having to opt for one system or another. There was no compatibility between the systems. Marvellous resources were built up but sharing was difficult as was coordinated development.

I moved to work as an advisory teacher at the LEA and when I asked for a computer I was told this would come at the cost of, for example, funds for the salary of a nursery nurse. Was my need for a computer more important? I was asked.

1989 – I was by now a research officer on a Department for Education and Science (DES) project at Cambridge University and I found the Education department was installing BBC networks when it seemed to me that Apple was a clear leader.

1994 – 2008: The early work in school with e-connections between the schools began my interest in how the internet can be used for education and particularly professional development which led to my work as founder member of Teachernet (www.teachernet.gov.uk )with Richard Millwood, Norbert Pachler, Darren Leafe and others including Christina Preston (and the support of lots of companies now funded by the DCSF).

In 1995, European SchoolNet (www.eun.org) funded by the European Union.

In 2004 the Teacher Training Resource Bank (www.ttrb.ac.uk ), funded by Training and Development Agency (TDA) and in 2006 Online Communities of Practice for local government (www.communities.idea.gov.uk ), funded by the Improvement and Development Agency for local government, IDeA.

In between, there have been various projects in Zambia, Mexico, Hong Kong, Australia as well as many European Countries. Being part of the MirandaNet community has provided a useful thread of connection with like minded people. I feel I have been surfing the crest of the wave of innovation since the early 1980s and it has been a lot of fun. What will be the next big innovation?

Lessons learnt

I am sure the way to get there is to allow lots of space for people and students to be creative with what technology we have now.

As part of this strategy they sent everyone who was studying Maths and/or Physics A level on a computer course at the Flintshire Technical College, now Deeside College, which had close links with the steel and aviation industries, and was famous locally for having a flight simulator. Flintshire County Council’s computer was located there, filling a huge room, which we were allowed to tiptoe into, to gaze reverently upon such a powerful machine. We went back to a classroom where an enthusiastic lecturer showed us how to work out the approximation of a square root in Fortran. The lecturer found this really exciting, and was probably disappointed that we weren’t more responsive to his enthusiasm.

The maths group went on to do some more Fortran and we physicists did some programming in COBOL, the essence of which appeared to be to move things round from place to place and remember to put full stops at the end of each line of code. Our programs had to be typed onto punch cards by typists at the college and if they made a mistake the programs did not run. They were not used to typing Cobol and tended to miss out the full stops. So we were loaned a machine for punching holes in the cards manually, which we took back to school to try out. In fact we found this much more interesting, looking at the key for putting the holes for the different letters.

I’m sure real technology historians can correct me here, but it was something like putting a hole in place 1 and 2 for a letter A, then 1 and 3 for a letter B and so on. But you couldn’t put the letters close enough together using the manual punch, and the software needed to interpret cards with more widely spaces holes didn’t work, so as far as I remember nobody actually got any programs running. The lecturer was very enthusiastic about how wonderful it would have been if it had worked, but that was completely lost on us.

Lessons learnt

The fact was that it hadn’t. And from that I learned a valuable lesson which was useful many years later when I became a teacher and researcher promoting ICT in education. Your demonstrations have got to work. Don’t expect anybody to be impressed by applications which don’t do what you say they will. If I’m teaching something that I’m not sure how it will work out (a recent example is a student e-mail system that I didn’t have an account to try out) then I try to bring the students along with me as fellow experimenters, so that it becomes a positive thing for them to find a flaw and suggest a solution. I apologise to the lecturer in 1970 if this is what he was trying to do, because he met only a bunch of unimpressed schoolchildren.

The course at Deeside did go beyond programming. There was a trip to the ICL factory in Bellvue, Manchester, where we saw book-sized circuit boards being soldered by hundreds of women. We also tried a business game, competing in teams to see who made the most money, the computer providing the feedback. I was in the girls group. We beat one group of boys but lost to another. We wanted to know how the computer made its decisions so we could cheat.

It’s only since getting involved with National Archive of Educational Computing (NAEC) that I realised how pioneering this was, predating government initiatives to bring computing into schools. Sadly though, I avoided having anything to do with computers until the 1980s, even at university where they were very keen on Basic, and at work in the pharmaceutical industry where my friends had PETs and ZX81s. I thought of them in terms of programs that didn’t work in practice, or devices for delivering boring, linear education applications. I was wrong.

On 1st April 1989 a new Higher Education Institution was formed, combining two sites fifty miles apart at Cambridge and Chelmsford. It is today known as Anglia Ruskin University and is where I had worked for many years.

A year earlier, in 1988,  I was at a meeting of the Educational Television Association which was convened at several different sites of the LIVENET videoconferencing network. This linked many of the London University Colleges and Medical Schools together. By the end of the day I was convinced that my institution was going to need this technology if it was to operate effectively and become an integrated learning community of students and staff.

I wrote a paper to the Directorate which was enthusiastically received in principle, but in 1988 the cost of two video conferencing systems plus the installation of a dedicated network to link them over 45 miles was around £1million.

The next couple of years were spent researching and monitoring a rapidly developing technology and by 1992 the roll-out of ISDN2 (Integrated Services Digital Nework) by British Telecom and the halving of the cost of the video codecs (compression / decompression) meant that we were able to install our first two systems ready for the start of the 92/3 Academic year.

In order to ensure that all levels of staff were aware of the potential applications of the technology my department designed posters and leaflets for circulation around both campuses and we organised 70 staff development sessions which were carried out over the link. These linked theoretical discussion with practical use of the equipment and after 90 minutes, most colleagues felt confident to try booking a conference for real. From day one we offered the service in the same manner of other media services so that all staff needed to do was to book their slot, turn up on time, walk into the room and start conferencing at each end. Although this involved technical staff time at both ends it paid huge dividends in giving colleagues confidence in using the technology. There were occasional problems revolving around the diary system for conferences and the network links between the sites but we constantly struggled to resolve these and the benefits of the conferences that succeeded far outweighed the negative effect of conferences that failed.

In 1994 we purchased a smaller unit to link in a third campus at Brentwood and immediately started to use this to teach Music BA(Ed) modules between Cambridge and Brentwood. The Law School were using it for individual tutorials and Social Sciences were using it for PhD methodology training. By 1996 a whole Postgraduate Diploma Programme in Mental Health Innovation was being delivered between Chelmsford and Cambridge.

In 1997 Ultralab, the learning technology centre at the university, joined the network with the gift of a codec from Larry Ellison of Oracle and in 1998 the original codecs were replaced with the next generation and ISDN6 was installed to improve the quality.

The next leap forward came in 2000 with the advent of videoconferencing over internet protocols (IP) and Professor Tony Powell, the Deputy Vice Chancellor, who had been championing this innovation from the very start, released funds to purchase over 20 desktop systems to trial links between cross-campus Faculties and Departments. We evaluated several different systems but settled on the PolyCom Via Video. This initiative was undertaken in close co-operation with Communication & Information Technology Systems (C&ITS) because of the convergence between computers, video codecs and networking. This built on working relationships already established with the network team.

Within three years there were over 80 Via Video systems installed across the University and individual departments with substantial cross site travelling and responsibilities were purchasing their own room systems within overall advice and specification by the Media Production Department and C&ITS.

Lessons learnt

Today video conferencing is a natural part of the culture and communication processes of the University enabling it to reduce the stress, danger and carbon footprint of travelling on the M11 motorway. Equally importantly it enables Anglia Ruskin to be more nimble and responsive to external opportunities and threats as it competes with single campus universities in the global higher education community.

I got a job working in a company who had a large mainframe (ICT1301), starting as an operator then training to be a programmer using MPLII and then up to an ICL 1901 using COBOL, Fortran and B3500 assembly code. We were writing all of the first bespoke packages for the industry which was fun and very creative but set us apart a bit from my ex classmates who began to look upon me as a bit of a mad scientist or early long haired hippy geeks. We were the original Y2K bug programmers.

I left the commercial world after 6 good years of program creation to train as an Art Teacher (I know,poles apart, but by then we had written most of the good stuff and were reduced to program maintenance, a boring occupation and painting was my other passion). After teaching Computing as a second subject on a TP I began to revive an interest. In my first real teaching job as an Art teacher in 1978/9 the government saw fit to giving an RM380Z to every school that could provide a member of staff to look after it, as it were. The canny Headmaster of the school I was at remembered my CV and proceeded to bribe me out of the Art room with a scale post if I created an IT course and learned how to program and teach with the 380Z (a really good little system).

Gradually Computing took over completely, and I've been Head of Computing, Head of IT, Head of ICT, ICT Coordinator, ICT Consultant from large Secondary/comprehensive/Grammar/Private schools in the UK and abroad and I have been setting up educational networks, teaching Computing, Computer Science, IT, ICT, ICDL at all levels in England and, for the last 20 years, here in the Middle East. In a way computers have chased me wherever I have been, I am still planning on going back to my Art but that will be another day. So from the vague idea, that a computer course would benefit us poor A Level maths students, of a Head of Maths in the late 60's came a career both in industry and education that has lasted over 40 years and still going.

As teachers we can make a difference to our students, one of my ex pupils sent me an e-mail a few years back that told of his new job and his first appraisal. He was asked who has had the most influence upon him regarding this job, and he told me he had to say my name, his job? Working for Microsoft in Silicon Valley, U.S. not sure that it was exactly a complement though.. working for Microsoft..hmmmm- smile.

Crucially, and starting in 1979, for various small chunks of time I was seconded to the then Council for Educational Technology (the predecessor to Becta). It changed my life! As well as access over the years to the latest in gadgetry, the latest in initiatives (and thus starting an historic collection of acronyms) and the latest in thinking, I discovered the wisdom of Geoffrey Hubbard's (then CET's CEO) definition of educational technology as relating to a systematic approach to teaching and learning. Not just toys.

This exposure transformed my own teaching (and learning) each time I returned to the classroom but also informed the ed tech work I did over later years at FEU, FEDA and LSDA - on learning centres, student tracking, staff development etcera (extensively so!). I retired from from FE when I reached 60 and continued part-time consultancy in the sector.

Now in 2010, coincidentally, when I'm 64 and as this awful government vandalises the nation, Becta is being sacrificed on the altar of the bankers' bonuses. Time for me to go, to mourn what is being lost, but also to celebrate the influence on people like me and on the whole education system of NCET/CET/Becta.