The Nail House

Once upon a time there lived a very arrogant King. He ruled his land with an iron hand and ensured that all his people did as they were told. He was nothing like his now-dead father who had laid out laws and rules that protected his people.

One day the new King decided he wanted to build the grandest palace the world had ever seen and he wanted to build it on top of the city - the city where all his people lived. So he served notice that all of the people in the city were to be evicted with no compensation so that the new palace could be built on that land.

Everyone in the city feared the new King and so they reluctantly did as they were told and moved out leaving their homes behind. Everyone that is, except for a little tailor and his family.

Jarvik knew that the old king had decreed that people had the right to their homes and they could not be evicted if they stood their ground - why had the rest of the people not realised this? Jarvik thought they must have had the wool pulled over their eyes.

So he told the King, "Your father passed a law protecting me and my home and I am NOT MOVING!"

Angrily, the King consulted his legal advisors and they had to confirm that Jarvik was right. All around him all the other homes were demolished until only Jarvik's home stood there alone - like a nail that would not be beaten down - The Nail House.

"Go ask what he wants," ordered the king to his advisors. "Tell him he can have anything. I just want him OUT!"

The advisors returned saying, "He wants apartments in your new palace for him and his family on exactly the spot his home is on now."

The King could see his grand plans for his palace disappearing before his eyes, so he decided to give in to Jarvik's wishes. So Jarvik and his family got their new home.

However, word soon spread amongst all the other people who had moved out of the city and they too came to the King and said, "We want homes in your new palace exactly where they were before." And the King had to relent.

In the end the King finished his grand scheme around him, but instead of building a palace for himself, he had ended up building a new city for his people.

And all because of 'The Nail House'.This story is inspired by the tale of Ms Wu (see photograph) and her dogged determination to stick to her guns and refuse to bow to pressure for authority.

In many ways her struggle and ultimate triumph seemingly against all the odds, is a metaphor for the struggle that schools in the UK currently face in their choice of VLE. They can choose to go for the ten 'Becta accredited' VLE providers, or they can be 'digital mavericks' and choose 'The Nail House' option - the Open Source alternative that is Moodle.

I have spoken at several conferences and I know very well that much as the powers that be would like it not to be the case, Moodle is a Nail House that will not go away.

Grasping the nettle - collaborative work using Wikis

When I use a Wiki with my students (usually within Moodle), one basic tenet needs to be understood by them, and that is as follows:
“No one person’s word is more important than any other’s”

It is crucially important that all participants get used to this mantra. This is because, the very nature of Wikis means that all users edit text that has been written by another member or members of the group. It can take a lot of courage for a students to edit the work of another pupil (especially a bigger or supposedly cleverer pupil) – after all by making changes the editor is implying that the original was not as good as it can be.

Therefore this is the main area that a teacher should work at if she wishes to use a Wiki in her teaching. There is no good in letting pupils loose on a Wiki without preparing them in the art of editing each others’ work.

There are different strategies for doing this - one is to start a Wiki with some entries of your own. These entries should be blatantly erroneous – such as a factually incorrect description of the life of Henry VIII or the geography of Great Britain. Then the class should use those entries as a starting point and that all must edit one inaccurate statement within the Wiki and then add a sentence of their own. This allows the document to be built into a substantially different one to that which it was at the outset. Best of all this is a truly collaborative piece of work, one which the group can take pride in, and in so doing the group can learn how a Wiki works.

Wikis usually have two important tools which a teacher can call upon to help with assessing what pupils have done. Firstly, there is usually the facility to UNDO any contentious or malicious statements – in other words the Wiki can easily be returned to the state it was in before it was ‘abused’. Secondly, and this is a powerful tool in the right hands, there is usually a ‘history’ option which allows the teacher to see each iteration of the Wiki. By using this tool the teacher can ascertain exactly who has contributed to the Wiki and exactly what that contribution has been.

Here are three examples in which a Wiki has successfully been used within my classroom.

a) Writing an Acceptable Use Policy

Pupils were given a Wiki as part of an A Level ICT lesson in which educational use of ICT was the topic. Pupils were asked to construct their own Acceptable Use Policy for the school. To ensure they had somewhere to begin, the Wiki began with the following text:

“Pupils may consume as much food and drink as they like in the computer rooms. It is acceptable to leave bags lying around on the floor. Running around in the rooms is fun and is to be encouraged.”

These three statements were clearly wrong, and so pupils had to change what was initially written in order to make a sensible policy. This served two purposes: they got used to changing someone else’s erroneous entries and it showed the tenet stated above is true: “No one person’s word is more important than any other’s”.


b) Inventing a new sport

Following on from the ‘rule’ format of a) above, it was suggested to students that they invent a new sport. They were given 4 basic elements that were SET IN STONE, they were told to add any other rules as they saw fit. Not only was the final product a set of rigid rules, but the students piloted the use of their new sport amongst their friends. A hospitable PE department might allow this to be played within their lessons.

c) Song-writing

A group of 15 pupils were asked to write a song by giving them a title (The Bellringer) and the structure the song should follow. They then produced an outstanding 5-verse song – having decided on the theme and structure of the song themselves. This was constructed in a 24-hour period during a school holiday period. When asked the pupils said it was one of the most exciting educational tasks they had ever undertaken. One asked ‘why don’t we get to do something like this in school lessons?’

It was found that the best results from Wiki work were obtained when students used avatar names or pseudonyms. Under such guises they felt happier about editing their peers work, than they did when it could be identified who they were. When questioned about this, they felt the anonymity meant that quieter pupils felt less intimidated about editing the work of more aggressive or vocal pupils. In the same way it allowed less able students to edit the work of their more able peers where this may not happen in a more conventional lesson situation.
Why Wikis?

Some schools have shared areas on their hard drives where work can be edited by multiple users, so what is so special about Wikis? As mentioned earlier, the History tool mentioned earlier allows the teacher to see who has carried out particular edits within the Wiki, this is not possible within a saved file on a network. Furthermore if one person has a file open on a network then someone who tries to load the same file at the same time will receive a ‘read only’ error message. This is not the case with a Wiki as multiple users can edit the document at the same time depending upon the flexibility of the Wiki software being used.

I have mentioned the term Wiki at many lectures and conferences at which ICT specialists have been present. It comes as a great surprise to me that so few ICT ‘experts’ know what a Wiki is - this is usually established by blank looks when the word is mentioned or a show of hands. This would indicate that if ICT experts are unaware of Wikis, then few less ICT-literate teachers would be also unaware of the tool. Many people now know about Wikipedia, but do not realise how it works. Once the concept has been explained most people understand what makes a Wiki so different but few teachers with limited ICT skills would choose to use such a tool. In their seminal book ‘Working the Wiki Way’, Bo Leuf and Ward Cunningham describe “a perspective on the nature of wiki-style online communication”. The Wiki Way describes a willingness of users to accept that others may know better than they do and that as described in German as Gestalt, “something is so unified as a whole that it cannot be described merely as a sum of its parts”. In other words it is not just the finished product which is important as the contributions that individuals have made to get it there.

It is unfortunate that a caveat should be added as an end note, but anyone who wishes to use Wikis within their lessons has to realise that there are some drawbacks to the use of Wikis over conventional methods of collaborative work. Firstly, as has been well documented in news stories over the past year, it is possible for blatantly erroneous or fraudulent information to be added to Wikis. A study by nature magazine claimed to have found “factual errors: 162 in Wikipedia and 123 in Britannica” – the slight difference between the 2 does not disguise the fact that there are errors in the printed encyclopedia as much as in the Wiki version. It also goes without saying that any teacher who uses a Wiki in their lesson takes risks in doing so.

Ironically, the following quote from the Wikipedia website, on the page defining the word ‘WikiWiki’ serves as a salutary lesson to any teacher who wants to use Wikis within their lessons: “Because of recent vandalism or other disruption, editing of this article by unregistered or newly registered users is currently disabled".

A version of this post will appear in the next edition of 'Coming of Age' edited by Terry Freedman.

Badly Laced Shoes

Okay. Notice anything unusual about those shoes? Okay they are tatty, but apart from that do you notice anything unusual? Well I guess the title of this post kind of gives the game away, but I'll explain.

A few months ago I was sat on my sofa having returned from work dog-tired, and promptly fell asleep. I still had my shoes on. I was awakened by some furtive activity at my feet and looked down to see my six year old daughter admiring her handiwork. She had undone my shoelaces and now proclaimed loudly that she had managed to lace them back up again.

Now, I felt I should be cross at her - after all you don't do shoe laces up as shown in the picture. You just don't. But wait a minute, she did! She chose to lace up my shoes that way. So just because they are not laced up the traditional way, is there anything wrong in that?

This set me thinking, we as teachers are so quick to judge the work of our students based on them producing out put that conforms to our expectations. Harry Chapin once sang 'Flowers are Red' - a song that resonates with any teacher or parent who wants pupils to be as creative as possible. It concerned a teacher who told a couple that their child was no good at art because he painted flowers all sorts of colours but 'there's no need to paint flowers any other way than the way they always have been seen' ie. red petals and green leaves.

So my daughter through her interpretive lacing of my shoes taught me a lesson about creativity and I just could not get cross at her. I was just proud - a VERY proud dad, that my wee girl had laced her first pair of shoes.

Her lacing made me focus on the outcomes of some of the work done in my Moodle by students at my school. Work that I had skirted over before and perhaps not given proper credit to now looks astonishing in the way it has innovatively made use of the available tools. I will post articles on these later.

Two personal examples that can be used to illustrate this point come to mind. Firstly there's this blog. Now in and of itself its nothing special - it's full of misspellings and poor grammar. But it was written by my son. My ten year old son. He has an interest in dinosaurs and Euan decided, off his own back that he wanted to make a web site to tell others what he knows about them. What better a mechanism for him to gain personal pride and self-esteem than by writing his Blog? All his posts are written by him, when he wants to write them. Through the fog of misspellings you can still see what he's trying to say. And I think that's amazing. You simply can't buy the feeling of pride I feel as a dad seeing his Blog.

The second example is this Blog by a former GCSE student of mine. I suggest you take a moment to read the text of a couple of her posts. This was her self-evaluation and diary covering the progress she was making on her GCSE ICT coursework. A post containing the seemingly inane comment 'Return of the music!!!!! I would like to point out that while I have been listening to music I have done THIS much work. When I wasn't I had only done this much work. Now I'm almost on my 10th page which may not sound like much but for me...' is followed by the far more valuable 'Grr, every time I change the font size all the 'spelling mistakes' reappear. They're not even mistakes the computer just doesn't recognise .bmp or whatever.' This idiosyncratic voice which the student had found for her Blog would not be acceptable in a formal GCSE coursework, but does that mean it is of no value at all? I think not.

I still have my shoes laced that way - 4 months after Shona laced them for me. In one way I'm a proud dad and when people ask me why they are laced that way I tell them the story. And hey, the lacing is functional - its fit for purpose and my shoes have never ever felt so comfy.

I WALK TALL in my uniquely laced shoes.

Walking on Glass

At long last this Blog sees the light of day - haha. After a somewhat turbulent year in my life, it has taken a collision of some unrelated events (reminiscent of both the fantastic film Amores Perros or Iain Banks's 'Walking on Glass') to focus my mind back to the Blogosphere. So it's a joyful moment for me to be back blogging again.

Firstly a trip to the wonderful, but ever-expanding Bett Show, reminded me of this blog's title. For it was there, at the Bett Show last year, that the irrepressable John Davitt referred to a group of 4 fellow teachers and Moodle users, and myself, as being 'DIGITAL MAVERICKS' because of our HUGToB project. At the time, and even now, I take this title as one of the greatest honours anyone has ever paid me.

Well my spirit for 'maverickitude' has not diminished, but rather it has been sidetracked a little by some events in my personal life. Still the enoucouragement of friends (you know who you are) and a recent upsurge in my reading of other people's Blogs (such as Ewan McIntosh, Ian Usher, Miles Berry and Josie Fraser) and just the inspiration that some individuals have given me (such as Dale Jones and my very good, Liverpool-supporting friend - sometimes the little prods are all you need), has fed a need in me to get Blogging again. Also my son Euan is inspiring me with his wonderful new Blog.

I'm involved with a few projects in school and out of it and I felt re-establishing a Blog would ensure that I could write about those too.

I have had a paper accepted for the forthcoming CAL 2007 conference which I see as really exciting. At the last CAL conference (in 2005 at Bristol) I was joint winner of the Teacher Poster competition, which was all the more amazing given that Miles Berry and some other notable educationalists were also involved in that event. So I am chuffed to have been accepted again this time.

Anyway, enough blathering for now. I'm away to think about my first meaningful post for this Blog.