I remember being a pioneer of computing in schools in the early 80s...trying to do educational things with Sinclair Spectrums, BBC Microcomputers and of course cassette tape drives! - fun days. There was a huge demand for 'night school' lessons for adults around 1984/5 and I offered the first class of its type in Fife. From one advert we had 93 people turn up! This resulted in me running classes 4 nights a week all year! They came in with their computers, Spectrums, Dragons, Commodores, etc etc and TVs of course and I somehow turned my limited knowledge of BASIC into a lesson for all these dialects <nostalgic sighs>. I went on to head up the Computing Studies Department in a large Secondary school, pioneering O-Grade (as was) Standard Grade and Higher. I was also at that time (1989) doing an M.Ed at a local university. This resulted in the need for a dissertation, so I undertook an investigation into the courses and provision on offer across the whole county (Fife) at that time.
Kevin Thompson, May 2008
]]>In developing the computer network we used a server located in London and linked to the Internet (not the World Wide Web as that had not emerged). To access this server users had to dial in using a standard land line telephone - for those in the UK this was perhaps more straightforward (and cheaper) than for those overseas. Once in the system users had access to a number of text based forums into which messages were typed by programme members and (ideally) responded to by tutors. There was no media available other than text and nor was file sharing possible. The users of the system, called HELP (Henley Extended Learning Platform but more ususally used as an expression of panic by the users themselves), were predominantly those working in the IT sector, including the academics. Getting into the system was a major technical effort. Very few users had personal computers at that time and so mostly work-based machines were used. On the plus side, company firewalls were either fairly weak or non-existent at that time. The College provided no 'help desk', in the common sense of the word, and most users made one or two attempts before abandoning the system altogether.
The motivation to move towards what we now call 'e-learning', as a means of supporting a distance education programme came out of the College's well developed learning principle of group learning, represented by what was called the Syndicate Method. In initiating HELP, the College was seeking to extend the notion of collaborative group working into a distance education programme.
The problems encountered in setting up HELP undoubtedly informed subsequent developments in the use of learning technology within the College. Key lessons around technical barrriers to access, diversity and richness of materials being offered and the need to re-educate academic facilitators began with this very early experience of e-learning. HELP was the first experience the College had of the potential impact technology might have on taking the 'distance' out of distance learning and it undoubtedly shaped our approach towards how subsequent developments around the use of technology were progressed leading to the current situation where technology is seen as a 'given' in terms of the high-level connectedness between institution, learners and tutors.
]]>Autumn 1995
Castle Community School, Deal, Kent
With the internet just beginning to get started and used in schools, I decided that instead of making a class project that went into a folder, we would create a set of web pages about renewable energy and publish it on the internet. I then publicised the site on usenet and asked people to visit. I later had the article published in 1996 - I still think this was one of the first projects to try this in the UK. Of course in 2008, with blogs, wikis, youtube and much much more, this seems very tame but back in 1996 it was very exciting indeed.
Normally - we did a project and printed it out and put it in a folder. With hindsight, I became aware of a number of drawbacks with presenting the project as a booklet. Many of the students used a computer painting package to produce some great pictures, but these lost their impact when printed on our black and white printer. The other limitation was that, even one year on, very few people have actually seen the book. So I wanted to repeat the activity, but to find another medium for presenting all their hard work.
I had recently become involved with the Internet and was interested in the potential of the WWW. It seemed like a logical step to take the files that the students had written on the computer and turn them into a series of web pages. I passed round a questionnaire asking the students how they felt when I first told them about the project going on to the Internet. Comments I received included; 'I was amazed that we were going to be on the Internet', quite a few were 'excited', one was 'delighted', one girl wrote 'I felt happy and excited because the whole world could see our work', and one commented 'I felt surprised that our work would be good enough!'. The general opinion was one of interest because most of them had heard about this thing called the Internet, but most had never had anything to do with it. I felt that this provided a very good motivator to many of the students.
Over the next six lessons the project began to take shape. The students were given free reign as to the content of their specific section. I provided some guidance if they were stuck for things to write, but on the whole everything was up to them. By the end of our sessions in the computer room each student had produced at least one piece of text or a picture. I then encoded the pages into HTML using Notepad. The document was divided into seven pages; one page per energy source plus an introduction page. The introduction page described the rationale behind the project and gave the names of all the students involved. A special link was included that let the viewer send a message to the students by e-mail. The six energy sources that we looked at were: Solar, Nuclear, Tidal/Wave, Geothermal, Wind and Hydroelectric. Each page consisted of information about the given energy source, plus a number of computer-drawn pictures.
The end result was put on to the school pages just before the Christmas holidays and the site was advertised on many of the Usenet education newsgroups. I was overwhelmed with the response it produced. In the first three weeks over 200 people had visited the site and many of these sent me e-mail messages to say how good they found it. The site has been used by some teachers as a source of information for their classes tackling the subject of energy. I have even heard from a teacher in Italy, who was using it to help her students to learn English (this was one use that had not occurred to me when I started out). Messages came from as far away as Palm Springs, Sydney and Seattle. Not bad for a small school stuck in the far south east of England! I passed on these messages to the students, many of whom were amazed that somebody in Australia or America would be interested in their work. One lad has asked me for a copy of the messages so that he can show his mum!
I asked the students to evaluate the project for themselves. I asked them if they enjoyed working on the project and all but two said that they did. When asked what they liked about it, most said that they enjoyed working on the computers. I felt that this was important because often many students do not get enough practice at using IT. Quite a few enjoyed using the painting programme, and many were quite adept at using it. One student told me he enjoyed researching in the library, and another thought it was good to be able to work as a group. Dislikes were few, one student said she did not enjoy the topic she had been asked to do. Every student was pleased with the way the project looked; 'better than I thought' said one. All the students thought it was a good idea that the project could be seen by people around the world. One said that it was good 'because other people could use our project to learn' showing that a few were realising that they were doing something worthwhile and that they had something to offer other people.
On the whole I was very pleased with the way the project was received. I had no idea when I started that so many people would respond so positively to it. I will certainly try to repeat the process with a different group and another topic. There is not that much that I would alter, if I could do it again. I think it may help to give the students more guidance at the start so that they know what sort of information they could be providing, but then again the fact that the whole direction of the project was left up to them lends the project more of a student-centered feel; it becomes less like a text book.
(based on my article in the ASE journal "Education in Science" Nov 1996)
]]>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.
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.
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.
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