My second 3D printer is packed up and waiting in my hall for the courier, Sold through ebay, I reckon the money I spent buying. assembling, leartning and selling these two 3D printing kits have been well worth it but it has shown me that many things are driven by media expectations rather than reality. Those who follow this blog will know I find many projects for students thin. Often a way to tick a box than communicate a deep truth, this was aptly demonstrated to me when reviewing the resources provided by an organisation that charges tens of thousands of pounds for an 'event' but leaves little lasting effect and whose resources are staggeringly inept. It seems that the opportunity to take photographs is far more important to those who sign the cheques to pay for such events than the students who should benefit most from them.
Which sort of brings me back to the 3D printers. Yes you can make anything, but not anything functional. Like a chisel, there is a range of activities it is purposeful for, unlike a chisel, this is a pretty wide range but if you were to read the media you would believe that we all need a nice 3d printer in the garage and we would never buy a dishwasher again.
All devices are tools. A computer is a tool as much as a screwdriver or a heart monitor. Used appropriately and with creativity all can do a damn fie job, but if you over inflate their potential, especially to new users, they have only one default use, displayed on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square...
Tuesday, October 22, 2013
Sunday, June 23, 2013
Gove'd
This is a comment I placed on the Guardian website in April, I thought it would be worth repeating here...
How did your day
start? Did you walk in form the car park and have to deal with an incident
before you even reached the door. Did you find you day changed because of an
issue or an extra meeting tacked on that nobody could have predicted yesterday.
Did you get a phone call from a 'client' or have to deal with a fight (physical
or verbal) between two angry immature protagonists which took out your
lunchtime. Did you have to abandon your intended task because of changes to the
day forced by a late arrival to a meeting or surly disobedience over what
should be a routine task?
Remember that day when you gave a presentation, the one
where the audience listened politely and you could flow through it even though
you were nervous? Remember how tired you were afterwards from the strain of it,
now imagine doing that five times a day, different things each time, to an
occasionally delighted and attentive but sometimes disinterested and often
sleep deprived trigger happy audience.
Maybe your day started slowly as you shifted work around so
you could linger over that first coffee of the day or soften the impact a
little, maybe change your lunch round. When is your holiday? Did you book your
dates to take advantage of that super low season offer? Those precious two
weeks at the start of July when its half price? Or the last two weeks of
September somewhere warm...
Did you worry today because 10% of your measured output
statistics slopes off every lunchtime to smoke dope in an old factory and their
'home supervisors' are ineffective, and that 10% represent the difference
between you being seen as an effective worker and a failure.
Did you open the paper momentarily and wince when someone
who has NEVER taught a lesson in their life decided to hack your working
conditions around because everyone KNOWS, like DEEP DOWN IN THEIR SOUL, that
teachers are a lazy bunch of feckless cosseted over privileged and overpaid
wingers upon whose pampered shoulders sits the blame for the ills that plague
society.
In the past 7 years as an Educational Consultant I have
constantly challenged the 'Pub Man' view of teachers as undeserving of sympathy
and praise. I have issued invitations dozens of times to take people into
schools and arrange a work experience. As a teacher for 12 years I offered to
do a job swap for a week with many many critical people. Only one ever took up
the offer because he was investigating becoming a secondary teacher. After a
week in a pretty good school with much support, just trying it out, he went
back to his safe job.
There are good sound reasons for teachers having holidays,
in reality they are , especially for primary teachers, used a lot of the time
to plan and develop the next new ideas and cope with the often 'dropped on from
on high' new initiatives that need to be shoehorned into an ever more packed,
burdened and subject to random events day. I know teachers who work every
evening and at least one day per weekend and still always feel there is more to
do.
There are people who work harder than teachers in this
country, there are people who work in more risky environments, but they are not
in the huge numbers and constant pressure to conform / change and innovate that
teachers are. Look at the present number of people leaving teaching, or even
never starting having invested large sums of their own money in retraining or
studying.
Take care Mr Gove, your legacy may be a huge shortage of
teachers. Baker gave us Baker days as a common phrase (training days). You may
leave us with the epithet for why a promising talented person has thrown in the
towel even before they properly take up their position. "Goved"
Wednesday, June 12, 2013
Too close for comfort?
Strange thing happening in the world of Technology, probably something that's been creeping up on us for the past decade but now its getting more prevalent. Being nice to sponsors. Let me elaborate briefly and then put a sting linked to education at the end as usual...
I use a lot of Technology, known for it, and I tended to use specific review sites which started up as people like me, buying stuff, checking it out, and being honest (sometimes brutally) about its shortcomings back in the mid 'Noughties'. Now though the sites I see seem commercialised to such a degree that products are rarely panned if bad and often artfully praised.
There are a few distinct ways this happens which usually accompany a certain scenario such as:
In the past manufacturers and PR firms had to really listen to users. One user with a blog had enormous power to influence key decision makers to buy. This was often highlighted as a great democratisation of the internet and how the buying public would have an influence on the quality of goods. Unfortunately the PR machine is far cleverer and organised than individuals, and companies such as Future Publishing have bought up many of what you thought were independent blogs and review sites which they regularly publish with fawning editorials and distinctly artfully worded reviews. When the lead story is that phone maker X has released Y in a NEW COLOUR, you know someone's snout is, or will be, in the trough somewhere. When information becomes a commodity then the PR gatekeepers have the power to affect what is said and done.
So what has this got to do with education, with reports and strange swings in approach and marking with English GCSE's? Nothing Mr Gove, or at least that's what your advisers and closely allied educational 'organisations' will tell you. And like the review sites, if that's all you use to form your opinions, objective criticism will be the first casualty.
I use a lot of Technology, known for it, and I tended to use specific review sites which started up as people like me, buying stuff, checking it out, and being honest (sometimes brutally) about its shortcomings back in the mid 'Noughties'. Now though the sites I see seem commercialised to such a degree that products are rarely panned if bad and often artfully praised.
There are a few distinct ways this happens which usually accompany a certain scenario such as:
- We've just come back from (Insert expensive overseas destination) to test (Product that doesn't need to be reviewed there)
- This exciting new range (exciting is interchangeable with new, doesn't necessarily mean good)
- Exclusively showed us (under a tight leash about whats reported)
- Available in (unspecified dates) the autumn /winter etc
- Great for (Insert group which will want a specific trumpeted feature but rest of product is a dog)
- A great new range of (insert product that has nothing to do with the review sites focus but it was a free junket)
In the past manufacturers and PR firms had to really listen to users. One user with a blog had enormous power to influence key decision makers to buy. This was often highlighted as a great democratisation of the internet and how the buying public would have an influence on the quality of goods. Unfortunately the PR machine is far cleverer and organised than individuals, and companies such as Future Publishing have bought up many of what you thought were independent blogs and review sites which they regularly publish with fawning editorials and distinctly artfully worded reviews. When the lead story is that phone maker X has released Y in a NEW COLOUR, you know someone's snout is, or will be, in the trough somewhere. When information becomes a commodity then the PR gatekeepers have the power to affect what is said and done.
So what has this got to do with education, with reports and strange swings in approach and marking with English GCSE's? Nothing Mr Gove, or at least that's what your advisers and closely allied educational 'organisations' will tell you. And like the review sites, if that's all you use to form your opinions, objective criticism will be the first casualty.
Wednesday, June 05, 2013
The previous post was about my decision to work mainly in ICT now rather than Technology Education and how the landscape has changed. This one is about what and where Technology Education is heading.
Technology education is in danger of disappearing into the 'black box syndrome'. We carry, interact and experience amazingly well designed tech. Reviews are mostly quibbles about how slow or tricky a feature is but generally we are satisfied with our technology. Same for cars, TV's, buildings etc.
But these are to most people opaque black boxes. We have no real idea of how they work or are made, we only touch the switches.
Design in schools is necessarily limited by students ability, time and equipment available and though we see some great stuff promoted, most projects are nothing like the items we buy in shops. This is accelerating with every year bringing in goods that are wonderful but to most of society, unfathomable. We have already passed Arthur C Clarke's 'Magic' definition when we interact with a monolithic metal and glass slab to see what the weather is like in Mongolia right now.
Schools will never win this arms race. The solution is to develop thinking skills allied with practical abilities. Lego Robots and construction kits, solving small scale problems. Reducing the difficulty of making and focussing on interacting. Programming already has this issue. The tools and projects companies work on are so far above what is affordable and possible in schools that a coding club will always be limited in what it can achieve, so instead innovate.
Imagine a watering system for a plant. Up till now we would have preferred a computer controlled or electronic timer version which students built and put in a box. Innovation was the big thing but now Arduino and other platforms allow you to buy the sensors ready made and just plug it together, and the core Arduino boards are so complex, you couldn't solder a reasonable one in schools if you wanted to. PIC systems work well but need expensive sensors and gizmo's to work and the final solution is a black box with often crudely trailing wires. It's a proof of skill, not a product or desirable outcome.
Now imagine the project WITHOUT electronics. Imagine a student version of those watering spikes that reuse a coke bottle as a reservoir. Students can redesign the pipes and fittings for specific uses, experiment with different spike designs, make them nestable using 3D graphics and create them with 2D and low cost 3D tools. The focus shifts from learning about the electronics to learning broad tools that can be applied to a variety of uses quickly. Those tools can be combined with electronics or other systems later when students choose that career path. These are not stupid dumbed down projects, but intelligent useful outcomes applicable to a wide range of learning scenarios. The outcomes are usable and understandable by wider society rather than black boxes.
We probably have to shift the high tech upstream a bit, ensure our students understand how to use a restricted but effective set of tools that create real outcomes. We did this in the past when the choice was limited to chisels planes and marking gauges, we need the modern equivalent now because otherwise, in trying to do everything, we have too little time to do much at all.
Technology education is in danger of disappearing into the 'black box syndrome'. We carry, interact and experience amazingly well designed tech. Reviews are mostly quibbles about how slow or tricky a feature is but generally we are satisfied with our technology. Same for cars, TV's, buildings etc.
But these are to most people opaque black boxes. We have no real idea of how they work or are made, we only touch the switches.
Design in schools is necessarily limited by students ability, time and equipment available and though we see some great stuff promoted, most projects are nothing like the items we buy in shops. This is accelerating with every year bringing in goods that are wonderful but to most of society, unfathomable. We have already passed Arthur C Clarke's 'Magic' definition when we interact with a monolithic metal and glass slab to see what the weather is like in Mongolia right now.
Schools will never win this arms race. The solution is to develop thinking skills allied with practical abilities. Lego Robots and construction kits, solving small scale problems. Reducing the difficulty of making and focussing on interacting. Programming already has this issue. The tools and projects companies work on are so far above what is affordable and possible in schools that a coding club will always be limited in what it can achieve, so instead innovate.
Imagine a watering system for a plant. Up till now we would have preferred a computer controlled or electronic timer version which students built and put in a box. Innovation was the big thing but now Arduino and other platforms allow you to buy the sensors ready made and just plug it together, and the core Arduino boards are so complex, you couldn't solder a reasonable one in schools if you wanted to. PIC systems work well but need expensive sensors and gizmo's to work and the final solution is a black box with often crudely trailing wires. It's a proof of skill, not a product or desirable outcome.
Now imagine the project WITHOUT electronics. Imagine a student version of those watering spikes that reuse a coke bottle as a reservoir. Students can redesign the pipes and fittings for specific uses, experiment with different spike designs, make them nestable using 3D graphics and create them with 2D and low cost 3D tools. The focus shifts from learning about the electronics to learning broad tools that can be applied to a variety of uses quickly. Those tools can be combined with electronics or other systems later when students choose that career path. These are not stupid dumbed down projects, but intelligent useful outcomes applicable to a wide range of learning scenarios. The outcomes are usable and understandable by wider society rather than black boxes.
We probably have to shift the high tech upstream a bit, ensure our students understand how to use a restricted but effective set of tools that create real outcomes. We did this in the past when the choice was limited to chisels planes and marking gauges, we need the modern equivalent now because otherwise, in trying to do everything, we have too little time to do much at all.
Status Change
To those who have followed this Blog assiduously, time for a change for the moment. I have been an Educational Consultant for 8 years, changing from Teacher to Consultant was a big deal and though generally I have loved it over this time, the work has diminished enormously in the past 12 months. I start a post linked to ICT in the next few weeks, and will relegate mostof my consultancy to occasional projects as required. It is hard to know whether to feel sad or relieved as the work has been dipping over the past two years, but especially has become much harder to find, and taking longer to get paid for.
So this post is a history of design education since I went to school, very brief, don't worry I 'll try to keep it zippy, and the post after this will be about the future of technology education as I see it.
I was one of the first cohort to do 'Design'. My O'level practical in woodwork was to come up with a mechanism that created a two tone chime for a student radio station and there had never been an exam like it before, baffling many teachers. My grammar focussed school did not offer A'Level Design, I am not sure whether anyone did then, but I did Technical Drawing and came top of the class in the final exams which mixed in questions about design.
After 5 years or so in the design industry, getting paid to think fast and work even faster, I retrained as a teacher and immediately found that all schools were not created equal. Some had barely moved on from the idea of 'workshop' and I remember the granddad of one pupil bringing in his metal trowel to show it was identical to the one his grandchild had just made with me 50 years later.
It was the 1980's and design was big, but flashy and really about surface for the most part. You could design a nice pattern but nice products were difficult with hand drawing and workshop tools. Colourful 3D items tended to be wildly impractical in the main but a redesign of the curriculum around the early 90's brought in thoughtful design, the concept of thinking through a problem and realising a solution through trial and error. Further reforms slowly migrated to this design for function approach and the availability of computers did much to enable students to experiment before making.
By 2000 when I took a gap in full time teaching to be a house husband, Technology in schools was still a little confused. Many schools still did basic projects but at least students got to work in all disciplines, not just boys in woodwork and girls in sewing. I was fortunate to return to teaching at a school which had recently gained technology status, along with considerable funding to make it work, and took it very seriously. I thrived for much of the time though having more ideas than organisational skill then was a bit of a downer. There were still schools around which stuck to dull lifeless projects but they became fewer in number each year. I felt like I knew what was cutting edge and useful, built on the shoulders of yesterday successes and misses in education.
When I became a Consultant in 2005, Technology and prosperity were seen as hand in hand. Many many projects were funded by Government to promote Technology education and skill the students and teachers in schools. I was involved in setting up an Engineering centre where we hoped to develop and promote innovative creation applications of engineering. Across the education sector many companies put their name to projects and competitions but in the main, then as now, it was Government funded. It may have been called the green grass of home bolt initiative or something equally funky but trace the funding back through local regional arts and creativity organisations (all taking a cut of the funding available) and you eventually got back to Whitehall.
It has always been the case that outside funding has driven innovation in Technology Education where it has been successful in passing from school to school. Teachers given time to visit others, regional excellence hubs, consultants and professional organisations all played a part but they were overwhelmingly dependent on the Government for their funding. That funding has either dried up or been 'un ring-fenced' which means schools can use it for other more pressing needs. Government political focus on core curriculum and other initiatives have further relegated Technology and other subjects to the sidelines. Long gestating curriculum reforms haven't helped either. The Internet has been one bright spark, helping people like me reach people like you, but at the end of the day someone has to pay for things to be developed and communicated and people trained. Even if you use a current teacher, it will cost you to send them to another school by covering their time away. Compared to a network consultant, I am cheap as chips, but I still cost...
A recent project was a fixed bid at 3 days. I knew I could do it in this time, probably as 6 half days with a few meetings with staff. That project has now taken 11 days because it is so hard to talk to staff. They are keen, they are motivated but they are constantly pulled around by monthly and weekly targets and even daily changes to their intended progress. The additional 8 days have been unpaid and will continue to do so until the project is paid off. I was offered some new work but would be unlikely to complete it before October because of school holidays and staff free time restrictions which means getting paid in December.
Most of the consultants have gone, or repeat the same narrow band of projects over and over. Many were older than me and semi retired heads or department heads so it wasn't a big change for them. I have developed and delivered 200+ projects since 2000, some of them being used internationally, but someone has to pay for my time. That funding is now in seriously short supply so I am working in ICT instead for most of my week for a while.
Don't think I am being bitter, but I am being pointed. Most of my work was through outside agencies or organisations. Making change is slow at first but accelerates later. Long term relationships with school staff is best and that is not affordable at times of decreasing budgets and (wildly) fluctuating curriculum reforms. Only yesterday Gove announced the idea of replacing core GCSE's with a new exam. This creates uncertainty and dependence upon political whims. The organisations with money have shrunk. In a way the internet allows them to show a big public face with zippy ideas and lists of people, but many are now unpaid advisor's or school staff moonlighting.
With the Technology curriculum still in discussion, and I would advise those who think they see the new direction clearly to review what happened between the initial proposals and the final draft in the LAST curriculum review, there are fewer takers for developing projects and training staff in new technology when the payback is measured in years use of the project. The ground has shifted, and so therefore, must I.
So this post is a history of design education since I went to school, very brief, don't worry I 'll try to keep it zippy, and the post after this will be about the future of technology education as I see it.
I was one of the first cohort to do 'Design'. My O'level practical in woodwork was to come up with a mechanism that created a two tone chime for a student radio station and there had never been an exam like it before, baffling many teachers. My grammar focussed school did not offer A'Level Design, I am not sure whether anyone did then, but I did Technical Drawing and came top of the class in the final exams which mixed in questions about design.
After 5 years or so in the design industry, getting paid to think fast and work even faster, I retrained as a teacher and immediately found that all schools were not created equal. Some had barely moved on from the idea of 'workshop' and I remember the granddad of one pupil bringing in his metal trowel to show it was identical to the one his grandchild had just made with me 50 years later.
It was the 1980's and design was big, but flashy and really about surface for the most part. You could design a nice pattern but nice products were difficult with hand drawing and workshop tools. Colourful 3D items tended to be wildly impractical in the main but a redesign of the curriculum around the early 90's brought in thoughtful design, the concept of thinking through a problem and realising a solution through trial and error. Further reforms slowly migrated to this design for function approach and the availability of computers did much to enable students to experiment before making.
By 2000 when I took a gap in full time teaching to be a house husband, Technology in schools was still a little confused. Many schools still did basic projects but at least students got to work in all disciplines, not just boys in woodwork and girls in sewing. I was fortunate to return to teaching at a school which had recently gained technology status, along with considerable funding to make it work, and took it very seriously. I thrived for much of the time though having more ideas than organisational skill then was a bit of a downer. There were still schools around which stuck to dull lifeless projects but they became fewer in number each year. I felt like I knew what was cutting edge and useful, built on the shoulders of yesterday successes and misses in education.
When I became a Consultant in 2005, Technology and prosperity were seen as hand in hand. Many many projects were funded by Government to promote Technology education and skill the students and teachers in schools. I was involved in setting up an Engineering centre where we hoped to develop and promote innovative creation applications of engineering. Across the education sector many companies put their name to projects and competitions but in the main, then as now, it was Government funded. It may have been called the green grass of home bolt initiative or something equally funky but trace the funding back through local regional arts and creativity organisations (all taking a cut of the funding available) and you eventually got back to Whitehall.
It has always been the case that outside funding has driven innovation in Technology Education where it has been successful in passing from school to school. Teachers given time to visit others, regional excellence hubs, consultants and professional organisations all played a part but they were overwhelmingly dependent on the Government for their funding. That funding has either dried up or been 'un ring-fenced' which means schools can use it for other more pressing needs. Government political focus on core curriculum and other initiatives have further relegated Technology and other subjects to the sidelines. Long gestating curriculum reforms haven't helped either. The Internet has been one bright spark, helping people like me reach people like you, but at the end of the day someone has to pay for things to be developed and communicated and people trained. Even if you use a current teacher, it will cost you to send them to another school by covering their time away. Compared to a network consultant, I am cheap as chips, but I still cost...
A recent project was a fixed bid at 3 days. I knew I could do it in this time, probably as 6 half days with a few meetings with staff. That project has now taken 11 days because it is so hard to talk to staff. They are keen, they are motivated but they are constantly pulled around by monthly and weekly targets and even daily changes to their intended progress. The additional 8 days have been unpaid and will continue to do so until the project is paid off. I was offered some new work but would be unlikely to complete it before October because of school holidays and staff free time restrictions which means getting paid in December.
Most of the consultants have gone, or repeat the same narrow band of projects over and over. Many were older than me and semi retired heads or department heads so it wasn't a big change for them. I have developed and delivered 200+ projects since 2000, some of them being used internationally, but someone has to pay for my time. That funding is now in seriously short supply so I am working in ICT instead for most of my week for a while.
Don't think I am being bitter, but I am being pointed. Most of my work was through outside agencies or organisations. Making change is slow at first but accelerates later. Long term relationships with school staff is best and that is not affordable at times of decreasing budgets and (wildly) fluctuating curriculum reforms. Only yesterday Gove announced the idea of replacing core GCSE's with a new exam. This creates uncertainty and dependence upon political whims. The organisations with money have shrunk. In a way the internet allows them to show a big public face with zippy ideas and lists of people, but many are now unpaid advisor's or school staff moonlighting.
With the Technology curriculum still in discussion, and I would advise those who think they see the new direction clearly to review what happened between the initial proposals and the final draft in the LAST curriculum review, there are fewer takers for developing projects and training staff in new technology when the payback is measured in years use of the project. The ground has shifted, and so therefore, must I.
Thursday, May 30, 2013
Red dot theory
This might seem a bit off subject to start with, but bear with me, you might just get the creeps by the end.
Imagine if you bought some new kind of shoe. A one off by some talented but anonymous designer that every time you stepped on the ground, it left a big red dot. You go about your daily business and eventually someone else, someone who works out its a shoe doing this by the length of stride and dot patterns, decides to find out who you are, presumably to charge you for cleaning off all these red dots everywhere.
The easiest way to do this is to follow the dots to a house rather than a shop, and see which house is used the most. In the meantime you got wind of this strange person stalking you and decided to only use your red dot shoes when you went shopping. You did this to retain your anonymity.
A scan of all the red dots tells your tracker some interesting things, that you mostly go into men's clothing shops and you stop and wait outside shops with guitars and phones and gadgets in the window.
Your tracker quickly builds up a picture of who you are, and the more red dot trails, the more they can reduce the numbers of people likely to be you down to one. Perhaps you go to a football ground to play once a week. By analysing when the dots were created, you can narrow the numbers of people in a city down from a million to maybe thirty. By combining the location data such as your football match, with buying data such as where and when you bought some sports socks, it would not be that long before your tracker could stand outside the football pitch and point with precision to who you were.
All this data is PAST data, it's already happened, it's supposedly anonymous but still a trail of breadcrumbs that leads to you as you create ever more clues. So what's this got to do with education? Most students create vast breadcrumb trails every day, most put their real name and photo on their Facebook pages and their hobbies and interests are easy for others to see. Many schools generate similar sophisticated tracking data they are giving away to their sponsor or host or website when they use a specific education package or free app online. "Right students, write me a piece on this online word processor of what you did on your summer holidays". It is most unlikely the data retains the students name on it as such, but its not difficult to marry up the different strands in the future and identify them. All that data is worth something to somebody. A very tiny something because there is so much of it.
At the same time your students are giving away information about themselves by using sites online, even ones specifically claiming to be morally correct with that data, that could later be used to reconstruct their movements and identify them by cross referencing with other supposedly anonymous data. Again, it may not have their name on it but if they live in Huddersfield, read a lot of judo websites and were not online on some sites on the day of a big judo competition, it is possible to work out who they are.
As a school or college or even university, you would be prosecuted if you tried to keep such immense amounts of data linked to a students name, but because the companies do not specifically link the name, it is allowed, its only when the data is analysed, or mined, that the patterns come through. That mining used to be very expensive, impossible even when people did it by hand but now computers can do it with ease, and at the point the mining becomes easy, the data used is not just that going forward in time, it includes the past, sometimes decades of it.
There is an old navy saying used much in the Eighteenth century as a toast when drinking together. "To wives and lovers, may they never meet". In this day and age the data , like wives and lovers, can combine and tell you much about the man...
So what can we do about this? I haven't a clue...
I explained this to someone last year and they told me they didn't use the internet so were never tracked, they were anonymous. I asked them how long they had owned a credit card or debit card for. 20 years. Every item tracked dated and geo located... When you add to this peoples opinions posted online, we and our students, are not anonymous any more.
As far as I know, there is not a global policy to delete all data gathered from students when they reach a certain age. Its too valuable, and therefore not so anonymous as we think. In 2012 an online company went bust, no money, no real buildings, computers or office furniture as presumably it was all rented, nothing but a file of data on its customers. Almost purely on the value of that data, the company sold for over $100,000 . How much will your students data be worth in the future? Should we allow it to have a value in the economy at all?
Imagine if you bought some new kind of shoe. A one off by some talented but anonymous designer that every time you stepped on the ground, it left a big red dot. You go about your daily business and eventually someone else, someone who works out its a shoe doing this by the length of stride and dot patterns, decides to find out who you are, presumably to charge you for cleaning off all these red dots everywhere.
The easiest way to do this is to follow the dots to a house rather than a shop, and see which house is used the most. In the meantime you got wind of this strange person stalking you and decided to only use your red dot shoes when you went shopping. You did this to retain your anonymity.
A scan of all the red dots tells your tracker some interesting things, that you mostly go into men's clothing shops and you stop and wait outside shops with guitars and phones and gadgets in the window.
Your tracker quickly builds up a picture of who you are, and the more red dot trails, the more they can reduce the numbers of people likely to be you down to one. Perhaps you go to a football ground to play once a week. By analysing when the dots were created, you can narrow the numbers of people in a city down from a million to maybe thirty. By combining the location data such as your football match, with buying data such as where and when you bought some sports socks, it would not be that long before your tracker could stand outside the football pitch and point with precision to who you were.
All this data is PAST data, it's already happened, it's supposedly anonymous but still a trail of breadcrumbs that leads to you as you create ever more clues. So what's this got to do with education? Most students create vast breadcrumb trails every day, most put their real name and photo on their Facebook pages and their hobbies and interests are easy for others to see. Many schools generate similar sophisticated tracking data they are giving away to their sponsor or host or website when they use a specific education package or free app online. "Right students, write me a piece on this online word processor of what you did on your summer holidays". It is most unlikely the data retains the students name on it as such, but its not difficult to marry up the different strands in the future and identify them. All that data is worth something to somebody. A very tiny something because there is so much of it.
At the same time your students are giving away information about themselves by using sites online, even ones specifically claiming to be morally correct with that data, that could later be used to reconstruct their movements and identify them by cross referencing with other supposedly anonymous data. Again, it may not have their name on it but if they live in Huddersfield, read a lot of judo websites and were not online on some sites on the day of a big judo competition, it is possible to work out who they are.
As a school or college or even university, you would be prosecuted if you tried to keep such immense amounts of data linked to a students name, but because the companies do not specifically link the name, it is allowed, its only when the data is analysed, or mined, that the patterns come through. That mining used to be very expensive, impossible even when people did it by hand but now computers can do it with ease, and at the point the mining becomes easy, the data used is not just that going forward in time, it includes the past, sometimes decades of it.
There is an old navy saying used much in the Eighteenth century as a toast when drinking together. "To wives and lovers, may they never meet". In this day and age the data , like wives and lovers, can combine and tell you much about the man...
So what can we do about this? I haven't a clue...
I explained this to someone last year and they told me they didn't use the internet so were never tracked, they were anonymous. I asked them how long they had owned a credit card or debit card for. 20 years. Every item tracked dated and geo located... When you add to this peoples opinions posted online, we and our students, are not anonymous any more.
As far as I know, there is not a global policy to delete all data gathered from students when they reach a certain age. Its too valuable, and therefore not so anonymous as we think. In 2012 an online company went bust, no money, no real buildings, computers or office furniture as presumably it was all rented, nothing but a file of data on its customers. Almost purely on the value of that data, the company sold for over $100,000 . How much will your students data be worth in the future? Should we allow it to have a value in the economy at all?
Wednesday, May 22, 2013
Not cricket
Just deleted a game, 'running with friends' from my ipad. Free to play but with a deeply cynical in app payment system that you have to buy more and more gems otherwise you cannot beat others. There is no offline version so you are always competing against another person and therefore need more gems than you can win by playing well.
Too many aspects of education and life are now the equivalent of these in app purchases. Years ago I convinced my then boss to invest in three subscriptions to 'real robots' which through weekly magazines built up into a real programmable expandable robot. After 18 issues and with three partly built but non functioning robots later, it was clear the publishers were being economical with the truth and in fact it would need another 12 issues to complete and then another subscription to add the features we were told were included within the initial 18 issues. Ate humble pie, apologised to my boss and we scrapped the lot.
Many schools are part of larger organisations that often 'prefer' their own curriculum model. These are cited as being better than the stamndard and come with shiny books or acres of presentations. Unlike a bike or a robot, it's devastating to scrap a curriculum half way through, especially if the philosophy it's based on is very strong. Beware if you a signed up to one of these 'all in one' versions. Government policy or the law or student rights may change swift,y and leave you having to pay more for the update than it would have cost you to write or pay someone to write your own. A good point to consider is whether the 'color' of your curriculum matches your local circumstances. If jimmy plays baseball, and his maths worksheet is based on it, james may flunk a test based on the worksheets teaching, and that's just not cricket....
Too many aspects of education and life are now the equivalent of these in app purchases. Years ago I convinced my then boss to invest in three subscriptions to 'real robots' which through weekly magazines built up into a real programmable expandable robot. After 18 issues and with three partly built but non functioning robots later, it was clear the publishers were being economical with the truth and in fact it would need another 12 issues to complete and then another subscription to add the features we were told were included within the initial 18 issues. Ate humble pie, apologised to my boss and we scrapped the lot.
Many schools are part of larger organisations that often 'prefer' their own curriculum model. These are cited as being better than the stamndard and come with shiny books or acres of presentations. Unlike a bike or a robot, it's devastating to scrap a curriculum half way through, especially if the philosophy it's based on is very strong. Beware if you a signed up to one of these 'all in one' versions. Government policy or the law or student rights may change swift,y and leave you having to pay more for the update than it would have cost you to write or pay someone to write your own. A good point to consider is whether the 'color' of your curriculum matches your local circumstances. If jimmy plays baseball, and his maths worksheet is based on it, james may flunk a test based on the worksheets teaching, and that's just not cricket....
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
You are third...
Very hot off the press, Tinkercad is closing down. Now you may never have heard of Tinkercad but it is (or soon to be 'was') a browser based cad program. You design and develop your idea in 3D without needing a powerful computer because the grunt work is done online. I knew of it but didn't use it but countless millions do, including many schools.
Schools only have one shot, due to limited curriculum time, to teach specific skills. Though some graphic packages make it easier to understand the basics and then move onto a bigger better version, Ms Paint to a more powerful editing Program for example, 3D is not really one of them. 3D graphic program's tend to embed a workflow, almost a philosophy, that influences your thinking because each step is often built upon previous steps in many many layers of work. This is seen most clearly in packages that allow you to go back and edit sizes in a script later on. Fine detail work can happen later in the design process. Other packages need you to define these sizes at the start or risk having to redraw from scratch.
Tinkercad is an example of what appears to be a bargain in education. A free program ( for limited but still school friendly use) that allows you to save and store models, but when the owners of the program pull the plug, your lesson plans, guides, worksheets and videos are compost. With traditional program's installed on your computer you cam use them for years after every one else has moved onto the next great version, witness the wide use of Office 2007 in many homes, with online editing and creation packages, if they pull the plug, your work dies.
So clearly there is.a lesson to be learned here. I would suggest it could be 'don't put all your eggs in one basket' but sadly in education we often only have one basket that we can introduce students to in the limited time and attention span we have. Perhaps the best lesson is this. Use these online tools. dip in and show them, but think carefully about building hours of your time into projects built around something built on the shifting sand of the web.
So why is this article titled 'You are Third'? Because with web based free ( or even paid for program's like some levels of Tinkercad are /were) , Once something gets successful enough, somebody outside will choose to buy/invest. Then the owner starts looking to make them happy, not you. The Tinkercad developers have hinted at a new online system they will be launching. Presumably now they have a serious investor on board, Tinkercad had to go as it could tread on the toes of the new business model.
So where should you look for the next free 3D modelling system? I think Autocads 123D is a strong contender, and there is always Sketchup, but all these firms look towards their investor and their own ambitions first and at any point in the future, like today, we may wake up and find the whole structure of our lesson plans, guides and storage ripped away. 123D and Sketchup don't require a network connection to work once installed, but it would be easy to add this at a future date if a investor put forward a compelling business model, them you and I and all the users, despite the marketing and PR proclamations, would be third...
Schools only have one shot, due to limited curriculum time, to teach specific skills. Though some graphic packages make it easier to understand the basics and then move onto a bigger better version, Ms Paint to a more powerful editing Program for example, 3D is not really one of them. 3D graphic program's tend to embed a workflow, almost a philosophy, that influences your thinking because each step is often built upon previous steps in many many layers of work. This is seen most clearly in packages that allow you to go back and edit sizes in a script later on. Fine detail work can happen later in the design process. Other packages need you to define these sizes at the start or risk having to redraw from scratch.
Tinkercad is an example of what appears to be a bargain in education. A free program ( for limited but still school friendly use) that allows you to save and store models, but when the owners of the program pull the plug, your lesson plans, guides, worksheets and videos are compost. With traditional program's installed on your computer you cam use them for years after every one else has moved onto the next great version, witness the wide use of Office 2007 in many homes, with online editing and creation packages, if they pull the plug, your work dies.
So clearly there is.a lesson to be learned here. I would suggest it could be 'don't put all your eggs in one basket' but sadly in education we often only have one basket that we can introduce students to in the limited time and attention span we have. Perhaps the best lesson is this. Use these online tools. dip in and show them, but think carefully about building hours of your time into projects built around something built on the shifting sand of the web.
So why is this article titled 'You are Third'? Because with web based free ( or even paid for program's like some levels of Tinkercad are /were) , Once something gets successful enough, somebody outside will choose to buy/invest. Then the owner starts looking to make them happy, not you. The Tinkercad developers have hinted at a new online system they will be launching. Presumably now they have a serious investor on board, Tinkercad had to go as it could tread on the toes of the new business model.
So where should you look for the next free 3D modelling system? I think Autocads 123D is a strong contender, and there is always Sketchup, but all these firms look towards their investor and their own ambitions first and at any point in the future, like today, we may wake up and find the whole structure of our lesson plans, guides and storage ripped away. 123D and Sketchup don't require a network connection to work once installed, but it would be easy to add this at a future date if a investor put forward a compelling business model, them you and I and all the users, despite the marketing and PR proclamations, would be third...
Monday, March 25, 2013
Kick the tyres
A constant theme in my blogging has been kicking the tyres of new technology. The analogy is not brilliant because though the phrase tends to be interpreted as giving a new technology or system a stress test to see how well it copes in real world conditions, kicking the tyres is a useless investigative factor in buying a car.
You can see I have been 'kicking the tyres' of my new 3D printer. I can now go from switch on to start printing in about 5 minutes now which is pretty good, but if it was a photocopier, it would be wearing an axe by now with start rates that slow.
I showed the printer to a friend who was initially impressed and then said, 'when there's one with cartridges that works as quickly and smoothly as a printer, It'll be worth buying one'. I think that's missing the point. I believe it is unlikely the vast majority will ever have 3D printers in their homes because most of what we want to create uses diverse technologies and materials to manufacturing tolerances that would be very hard to replicate in the home economically compared to just buying a mass produced version.
Perhaps what we need is a new material. As I said to a class one day, 'If we hadn't found wood was such an excellent all round building material, we would have had to invent it'. Maybe that's the missing link, a material that's easy and VERY quick to 3D 'print', robust, cheap and can substitute for the endless plastic metal and glass parts that make up much of what we consume. Or as Scottie would have put it 'Transparent Aluminium, Now there's a thing...'
You can see I have been 'kicking the tyres' of my new 3D printer. I can now go from switch on to start printing in about 5 minutes now which is pretty good, but if it was a photocopier, it would be wearing an axe by now with start rates that slow.
I showed the printer to a friend who was initially impressed and then said, 'when there's one with cartridges that works as quickly and smoothly as a printer, It'll be worth buying one'. I think that's missing the point. I believe it is unlikely the vast majority will ever have 3D printers in their homes because most of what we want to create uses diverse technologies and materials to manufacturing tolerances that would be very hard to replicate in the home economically compared to just buying a mass produced version.
Perhaps what we need is a new material. As I said to a class one day, 'If we hadn't found wood was such an excellent all round building material, we would have had to invent it'. Maybe that's the missing link, a material that's easy and VERY quick to 3D 'print', robust, cheap and can substitute for the endless plastic metal and glass parts that make up much of what we consume. Or as Scottie would have put it 'Transparent Aluminium, Now there's a thing...'
Wednesday, March 20, 2013
Volume Control
Having started with 3D printing, and learned an awful lot in the last month about it, I have some salient observations that you should consider if thinking of buying one
- Can you afford the time? The downsides of printing in 3D is similar to that of laser cutting. A small 6cm snowflake on a laser cutter might only take 2 minutes in acrylic but double the size and it takes four times as long. With 3D printing, double the size and it takes eight times as long because there is eight times as much volume compared to the original. So a small part which takes 6 minutes and is a great demo, becomes a 48 minute wait. If you have a whole class wanting to have their work made, that's a lot of time to commit.
- Bigger things look better and have better definition. If you print a boat in 6 minutes, its going to be a pretty tiny (2cm long) horizontally stripy boat as the layers are a fixed height. Double the size to 4cm and you get better detail. Double it again and the layer lines are lot less noticeable and you can start putting in finer detail, but that takes time to print
- You have to fiddle. With a laser cutter, once set up you can throw material on the bed and provided you dont do anything daft, it will work every time regardless of shape. Cut lines do not interfere with each other.
With a 3D printer every first print is effectively a draft. My boat design (search ajbooker on thingiverse.com) has a raised front because the printer builds up a thicker layer due to flow of material. This fouls the next layer and makes the print rough at that point. I redesign the boat to avoid this but then I have to print it again to check it works. The software I check the design with only tells me it is printable, not the outcome quality. - When things go wrong, they take a while to put right. I accidentally left the extruder head heater on (easy to do as it doesn't have a command to automatically shut down after so many minutes) overnight. It took me a day and the purchase of acetone (nail varnish remover) boiling water ina saucepan and a 0.4mm drill (not a common part) to unclog it. In a workshop under time pressure it would be easy to use what's available and damage the nozzle
- All those marvellous things you see, take forever to print. That cut skull that you can make 4" high? Better put aside a couple of days for a good quality print and £10 of materials. Overall they look great but large parts are a logistical nightmare but you HAVE to print them big to get the detail or mechanism working properly
- Heat, Height, Habitat. Thee ambient heat will affect how well your prints work. In a cool room you might get different results to in a hot one. You have to not knock it while its printing and any feed problems will result in issues
- There will always be a better printer out there. I spent £320 plus Vat on my kit. £500 + Vat and it would print faster and bigger. £2500 plus Vat and it would print faster again with 3 colours or materials. Educational machines have to earn their stripes by being in use for long periods of time, your printer WILL be an antique in a year, let alone three years
So should the above put you off buying one? NO, but look before you leap!
Here's one I made earlier....
After much thought and checking of specifications, I finally bought a 3D printer last Month. It is a kit from Printrbot, the Jr model which at this point is the cheapest 3D printer on the market. It did well in tests carried out by Make magazine but it is clear to me that though excellent for the money (£320 plus Vat by the time it arrives from America by courier), 3D printing still lacks ease of use for the average school.
The good:
The good:
- Relatively easy to build
- Everything in kit including a kg of printing material
- Free software downloadable from net is robust and works well
- Twinned with a free 'STL' export plugin for Sketchup, you can design your own stuff
- Once set up, levelled, heated up and various bits adjusted, good quality prints
- All electrics ready wired and set up
The bits that show it's not ready for general use
- Instructions enthusiastic and often crowd sourced but assume an ability to solve problems due to manufacturing methods and iffy quality control of some parts
- You have to understand in depth how the 3D printer works to build a good one
- To adjust software beyond basic settings, get your programmers toolkit out
- Parts missing in kit (bolts) that are not readily available in Uk
- Strong assumption that you need to strive to build it because that's the fun part
The last point I make above, that you have to strive to build it, will brings howls of indignation from other printrbot jr owners. The difference is in education, tools need to work effectively without being an intellectual puzzle to get started with at all. I call this the 3Rs, they need to be ROBUST, REPRODUCIBLE, RELIABLE. In that way they can be used when needed.
My printrbot jr took me two days of adjusting, fettling, fixing and problem solving to build but when I pressed the go button, it printed perfectly until another issue needed to be fixed. After a week of tinkering its pretty reliable now but given the importance of adjusting belt tensions, attaching parts at just the right torque and adjusting clearances, I am not surprised that so many users post problems with their kits such as material feed issues, head crashes etc. The 3D printer community tells itself that these things are easy to build and use, but by definition the people are a very technical subset of the population.
So should you buy one? Lets put it this way, if you can assemble technical Lego kits but never bother designing you own ideas using the bricks, don't like experimenting or don't have the time or patience for constant tweaking, don't bother. If you do though, it is amazing what so little money can now buy in desktop manufacturing.
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