Digitalkatie's blog

Bye Standard Grade, hello Digital Media Computing

I finally managed to get together my funding bid for almost everything I thing I'll need to start teaching the new NC Digital Media. I'm hoping to blog about the process of changing so that other schools can learn what we're doing (and do it better!).

I'll blog about my shopping list later, but today I'll explain what we're changing to and why.

I hate Standard Grade Computing. It is pretty much the course I did when I was a kid. I imagine in the late 80's and early 90's it was an incredible course and kids loved finding out about robotics and virtual reality and expert systems. I certainly loved it. However as a teacher I find it very difficult to explain the relevance of this stuff to kids lives.

I started researching alternative courses in 2006/7. I found out about the English course, called DIDA, which looked promising, and industry certification, but I was told I had to offer SQA courses for the school stats.

The SQA have now developed a National Certificate in Digital Media Computing at three levels: Intermediate 1, Intermediate 2 and Higher. An NC is equivalent to first year in college and would hopefuly mean pupils could then get accepted into a wide range of HNC and HND courses (direct entry into second year).

The NC consists of a set of six core units and six optional units from a choice of almost 60 units. The units to choose from include animation, games design, web design, graphics, audio and video editing, etc.

Sets of three units group to give you additional awards, called National Progress Awards. There are NPAs in Web Design and Digital Literacy etc. There are lots more sitting temptingly on a list with a release date of Dec08 and Jan09 but I don't know what's happening to them. These are in Games Design, animation, still image, sound and video, etc. I REALLY want to do these, so if anyone in the SQA knows about these please let me know! The SQA call centre weren't particulary useful and everyone else has their answering machines permanently turned on!

It looks like teaching different levels of units at the same time will work, and only half of the units need to be at the level of the NC (eg you only need 6 units at Int2 level to get an Int 2 NC) which helps students progress and advance.

I'm going to have to think carefully about which units to teach when. Some units will work well across the whole time. for example there is a blogging unit, so pupils could blog throughout their course (and be reading blogs too).

My plan is to do three units in S3 and three units in S4. Three of the units over the two years will combine for an National Progression Award. If they choose to stay on in fifth year, and I hope this will be a good incentive to stay on, they can complete the other six units. Of those, two can be completed in other departments, the literacy and numeracy units. That leaves four to complete in S5 Computing time. Actually I'm hoping to do more than three a year in S3/4, but we'll see how it goes. We won't have to deal with prelims and revision which should help. It's going to be very different not having to cram content and facts into kids as quick as I can. I need to remember to take it easy and have time to explore and have fun learning!

TeachMeet08 @ the Scottish Learning Festival

Next week is the Scottish Learning Festival (previously known at SETT) at the SECC in Glasgow. Hopefully all the Digital family will be going along.  In preparation I've been working on a presentation about the science class I helped with in New York. 

Louis now has Moo cards to hand out when he's networking, and a couple of snazzy handpainted t-shirts with educational slogans on them.  On the back of one is an advert for TeachMeet:

Hopefully Louis will attract lots of attention during the day and then lots of teachers will come along for the free drink to see the presentations and chat to other educators ;-)

Barcamp Scotland: Virtual Fishing

"Living on Virtual Fish" by Tim Howgego (tim@capsu.org)

Talking about the revenue surrounding websites on World of Warcraft. Millions of dollars of affiliate advertising revenue.

Don't apologise for having advertising on a site. Adverts that are most successful are those that look most like the site content (is this tricking users?). Better to have ads down the side rather than at the header.

Most affiliate sites only pay out when you reach $100 so best not to go for too many different affiliates. Vary advertising though for repeat visits. Not sustainable, as the MPOG won't go on for long.

Nothing physical in the chain as buying knowledge to use in an online game. Similar to buying virtual gifts in Hot or Not or Facebook.

Twittering away

I'm finding I'm not blogging as much recently and I think one of the reasons is because I'm twittering things that I used to blog. 

If you would like to stay in touch over the next few weeks of excitement, then go to twitter.com and create an account.  Then click on "Add Device" to set up your mobile phone.  This lets you get text messages straight away instead of looking on the website, and lets you update what you are up to using a text message.  You will be given a code to text to using your mobile.

Next to add friends. Go to twitter.com/digitalkatie and then on the button that says "Follow".  Select whether you want notifications sent to you (otherwise it just appears on the website list of friends updates).  Now do the same for Digitalsean and Sproglet. 

Now you're all set to get those boring messages we send like "the midwife says we have 12 more hours of pushing to go" ;-)

Fun educational games

Sean came across this cool version of Tetris called Stateris.  This would be great for Geography teachers.  I was amazed how difficult even the easy version of Europe Stateris is to play!

Another cool game is Free Rice, which tests your knowledge of word definitions.  For every word you get right, 20 grains of rice get donated through the United Nations to help end world hunger.

Plain English

I am very pro-plain English.  I don't see the point in trying to baffle people with legalese or try and be superior by using longer words.  So I was really please when I found a Terms of Service in plain English on Jiglu's website.  So pleased I actually read it!

"We are very conscious that most people are asked to click on terms of service without ever being given a clear idea of what it is that they are allowed to do, or not, unless they have practiced law for some significant period of time.

This strikes as a little unfair, and so what we intend to do here is to set out what you can and can't do with our service, and what we are allowed to do.

Don't get this wrong, just because this is written in friendly language doesn't mean that we are going to allow you to do anything at all with the service. In fact, quite the opposite. We are rather proud of it, and don't want anyone trashing it, thank you very much.

Ok, so here goes.

...We won't tolerate nasty people, though. There are not too many nasty people out there, but those that are tend to be racists, liars, homophobes, illegal pornographers, abusers of trade marks (really very very nasty people), spammers, stalkers, weirdoes, propagators of viruses and really people who fall outside of what you might classify as "nice". Naturally we tolerate free speech (although it's what we decide it is...), and look forward to wide ranging debates. You only have to look at some of the spaces we operate to see that we have people of widely varying views already.

...Children - we have children of our own, and are particularly keen to ensure they are protected. If we find anyone trying to harm children in any way using our spaces, we will go out of our way to hunt you down. We make sure that we retain certain data about people who use the service - just let it be said that we will use it to find you...."

Very cool :-)  More websites and organisations should do this!

TV Festival: Vint Cerf

Nov 22nd 1977 - first time Arpanet, radio and satellite networks all communicated together.

1997 50 million users, today 1114 million users. =argest is Asia with 398.7 mill. Africa has 33.3 million and greatest potential for expansion.

Vint Cerf was the person who decided in 1976 that 32 bits was fine for address space for the purpose of the experiment they din't know would work. These will run out in 2011. IPv6 should solve this.

Socio-economic effects of internet:
Consumers are now producers. The barrier to contributing has dropped to 0.
Social Networking - people organising the web around themselves and their friends
Gameplaying in Second Life and WoW etc
New business models such as eBay and Amazon that are not possible without internet.
Internet can transport and display print, video, audio media
Internet permits group interaction (not only mass one-way medium)

Cerf bought 10 million bits of storage in 1979, and was very excited about it. Cerf bought a terrabyte recently for 1000 dollars. He calculated a terrabyte would have cost 100 million dollars.

Arpanet backbone ran at 50 KB per second, now internet backbone is gigabits per second.

Discusses possibility of downloading ancillary information with video, captions, audio, etc. You could pause video then click object or parts of the video to get more information. You could have adverts based on user location - pause a cooking show, click on the bottle of wine and get information on where to buy it nearby.

Mobiles are not just telephones anymore. Text can be used to control entertainment systems or for payment systems (especially in places whre people don't have bank accounts but have mobiles). Tiny screens (suitable if you're three inches tall :-) but are now often have navigation systems inside. Queries are now in real-time. We can do google queries when we need to and don't have to plan beforehand.

We can't print copies as backup anymore as information is often 3d interactive objects. Now we need to worry about "Bit Rot". Preserving interpretive programs (trying to use Powerpoint 1997 on Windows 3000) and the operating system, and hardware that runs the OS, for thousands of years. In a thousand years information that might have been useful we might not have access to.

Billions of devices on the internet soon. One guy has created an internet enabled surfboard so he doesn't get bored waiting for the next wave.

InterPlaNetary Internet (Cerf working with NASA). We have rovers landing on Mars sending information back. They want to standardise the devices in deep space so that devices can pass information between each other. Rovers on Mars passed info to Mars satellites then onto Earth. "The distance between the planets is literally astronomical"

TCP IP doesn't work with a 45 minute delay and when the planets turn around inconveniently. A new protocol being developed.

Innovation happens when people can experiment without needing permission to try things. Google engineers get 20 percent innovation time. Opportunity to try things out without having anyone interfere. They share details so everyone is free to contribute. (note - do we allow kids to innovate in this way?!)

Bob Metcalf predicted in 1997 that the internet would have a 'gigalapse' and collapse. When it didn't happen he took the editorial he wrote, put them in a blender and ate them!

When asked about video being restricted to particular countries, Cerf believes internet should be a global communications medium. There needs to be inter-government cooperation to deal with problems of fraud etc.

Wi-fi arrest

This is worrying.  A man has been arrested for using someone else's wi-fi internet connection without permission.  The article does say that "Wireless networks must usually be protected with a password to block unauthorised users" but it's not clear whether the man hacked into an encrypted wifi network or was just using an open unsecure one. 

I feel there is an unwritten cultural rule that if you leave your wifi access unsecured then you are happy for others to use it.  Also if you are using someone else's wifi, even in a cafe, you don't generally run wifi intensive applications like Second Life or download films as it's selfish.  I wonder if the law reflects this?

Strangely today I realised that I know quite a lot about American child protection laws (COPA and COPPA) and recent changes to those laws, but I have no clue about UK laws for this.

Tuesday Meeting No. 2 - Linden Lab

This afternoon we met up with Claudia at Linden Lab. We chatted about the work we had been doing in SL and RL, and about the projects happening on the teen grid at the moment. We also met Frank and another Linden who had a cool (SL) name but I've forgotten it. It was good to hear about some of the plans and projects soon to happen in the teen grid. It was fantastic to meet Claudia too. I love meeting SL people in RL! :-)

Tuesday Meeting No. 1 - YouthNoise

Today we met up with Erin and Trey from YouthNoise. We had initially met Erin at the Online Communities Meetup, and she contacted us wanting to find out more about the mobile phone project at Forthill.

We met them at their office which is on the 11th floor so has great views of the city. We then all headed to a very nice Mexican restaurant for lunch.

YouthNoise are about to be encouraging kids to take a part in reforming education. They are going to be taking ideas for projects from kids then funding about 25 of them for a substantial amount of money. In a similar way to Global Kids, they are encouraging kids to be active citizens and take a leadership role in their community.

Trey was involved in a one-to-one laptop project in Maine. Aparently they now have 38,000 laptops being used by kids in that State (although I want to read up more about this to check my recall of that figure).

One interesting thing that I really do want to learn more about is that aparently a few weeks ago the online child protection act, which prevents companies like MySpace and Linden Lab being used by children under 13, was judged unconstitutional. I can imagine protest groups of 12 year olds campaigning outside MySpace etc until they act on the changes!