Tell me lies, Tell me sweet little lies....

".... tell me, tell me lies", so sang Fleetwood Mac in their 1987 hit song. The song is a plea from one partner to another saying they can lie as much as they want, as long they are together it's all that matters.

In many ways we as a society seem to have grown used to this sort of philosophy. We are confronted with so many contradictions in every walk of life that it can be hard for young people (or anyone for that matter) to judge exactly who is telling the truth.

I am reminded of the 6th February 2003. Picture the scene: America and Britain are hurtling towards invading Iraq and Colyn Powell appears in front of the UN with a tiny vial of white powder. The two newspapers with the biggest readership in Britain feature the same close-up of this esteemed man and the vial. However, the headlines could not be more different. The Sun says 'Gotcha' whilst The Mirror says 'Not Enough' - two strong opinions, but poles apart. From the same information, using the same photograph, two publications came to two different conclusions. So how on earth do people know which to believe? The Mirror's point of view becomes more obvious however, when one realises that they were running a high profile 'No War' campaign.


Anyway, in ICT we do our best through the National Curriculum strategy units, to discuss the 'Reliability, validity and bias' of information. And we mostly cover this in ICT by looking at web sites.

Last week I introduced this theme to my Year 8 classes by asking them to write a report on Boilerplate, the famous Victorian robot. This Year group have to carry out a large History coursework (thanks to the ingenuity of Mrs Anne Ratcliffe, my colleague and Head of History) in the next month or so, which requires them to use a wide variety of sources for research. Now if you've looked at the site you'll probably agree that it looks very impressive. The students had to write 300 words about this little-know marvel of engineering. In canvassing the students' opinions of Boilerplate, one said 'I think its fascinating to see what was possible even in Victorian times' adding, 'if you hadn't shown us that site I'd have chosen Boilerplate for my History project.'

Small wonder that Boilerplate is little known - the site is a work of complete fiction.

When I unveiled to my students this week that this site was completely ficticious, not one of the 64 students said they had worked that out. NOT ONE! Their response was to be angry (in a good natured way) with me for lying to them (which of course I had not done - at NO POINT did I ever say the site was truthful). Ah bless students put SUCH trust in us as teachers.

Having read the reports they wrote, they are lovingly written as many students had seemed to like the idea of a Victorian robot that might have saved the world. But what I find most interesting is their lack of investigation or observation. Not one of the 64 students had looked on any website other than the one I pointed them to, in order to find out more information about Boilerplate. They had implicitly trusted the information they were presented with. This shows how important this topic is prior to their big research project for History.

Secondly the instructions I gave the students were:

a) Use Google to search for Boilerplate
b) Choose the top hit and look at the official Boilerplate website.

And what I found MOST interesting is that the second hit that Google presents the user with, contains the words 'a fictional Victorian-era robot created as a hoax. Site include a wealth of humorous "historical" photos and fictional accounts of the robot's exploits in...'. But not one of my 64 students was able to pick up on this vital nugget of information.

My students learned from this exercise because they have realised how much they trust the information they are presented with on the web and how little they do to validate or verify the information they obtain.

In fact most seem deflated to discover the content was false, prefering me to 'tell them lies, tell them sweet little lies'.

Mika-ing a name for himself

I've been listening to to the sublime voice of Mika for a couple of months now, ever since I saw his name crop up on so many people's lists of 'names to watch for 2007' and since catching him on an episode of 'Later ... with Jools Holland'. YouTube helped me by showing me some live footage of him performing and I've been captivated since. I got the chance of tickets to see him at London's Koko, but dithered too long (grrrrrrrrrrrrr!) and after he won BBC's 'Sound of 2007', tickets have become worth more than a snooker-table sized flat in Chelsea.

Anyway, I was very impressed to see that Mika had benefitted from the timely changes to the UK singles charts by becoming No.1 with 'Grace Kelly'. This was made in response to the vast numbers of digitally downloaded tracks which seems to be the main way people are obtaining music singles these days. Now that ANY single including those digitally downloaded - no matter when it was released - counts towards a chart position, we are going to see some amazing music charts in the future. It's an exciting time we live in right enough, and people like Mika are rightly benefitting.

This started me thinking about ICT as a subject and the fact that ICT has changed immeasurably since all of the last syllabi and National Curriculum strategy was written - yet these courses and syllabi dictate students computer experiences in schools today. Just as the UK singles charts were updated to take account of new technology, so indeed, I believe, should the UK's school curricula.

A recent discussion on the NAACE mailing list in which the demise (for want of a better way of putting it) of the KS3 ICT online test was roundly celebrated, made for interesting reading. This was originally conceived as a revolutionary test that assessed pupils' ICT performance, not with pen and paper, but through their use of a complex piece of software. One of the biggest criticisms on the mailing list cited 'a lack of wikis, blogs and other Web 2.0 social software tools'. Colleagues seemed to relish the opportunity to be like the cast of 'Murder on the Orient Express' and all want to stick the knife in.

I will state now that I was a co-writer of content for the KS3 test and a lot of the content was written over 3 years ago - when Web 2.0 wasn't even a flicker of an idea in Tim O'Reilly's head and few people had heard of wikis or Myspace or YouTube. So it seems astonishing to me that people would decry the test for lacking these tools. And here's a thought - only a year ago I did a presentation to 42 ICT Co-ordinators from schools in a city which shall remain nameless. When I asked how many of these so-called ICT experts knew what a wiki was only 2 ICT Co-ordinators put their hand up! So ICT colleagues need to remember that although the Web 2.0 bandwagon is rolling apace, its only barely been built and only a relatively few people are on board at the moment.

At the same time though, I completely advocate a more rapid updating of ICT syllabi as technology changes year on year and we need to encourage teachers, parents and students to use these rapidly evolving tools. How many schools ban the use of Flickr for example - despite it presenting immense educational possibilities? And how many teachers get the chance to explore this sort of package never mind incorporate it into their lessons?

Here we are in an age when all of this social software is out there yet no UK ICT syllabus explicitly states that these are tools that should be used. I think this is largely due to the sheer time it takes to plan syllabus changes, meaning that ICT syllabuses are obsolete by the time they are first implemented. But I feel there should be more flexibility to incoporate such tools and packages in lessons without feeling we are spending time on irrelevant topics or content. I have seen for myself the creativity that students can show when allowed to use these collaborative tools.