A few weeks ago on twitter I passed remark to Matt Johnston that it would be great to have Industry-funded, STEM-focused schools in Northern Ireland. Yesterday, Matt put me in touch with  Denis Stewart and his wife, who between them have more experience of the education system than everyone I know, combined.

In the IT industry we love to rail on the “failings” of the education system and think if only we had the chance we could do it better. There are so many factors involved in changing education that it become much more than just changing education; cultural factors, family pressures, financial implications and job vacancies all have to be taken into consideration. There are already schools in NI, who receive funding from Industry and who have specialities in a range of STEM subjects, who I have no doubt are very good at what they do. Innovation is contagious; I’m sure many of these schools developed their speciality from one teacher, passionate about their subject who drove school policy forward.

I don’t pretend I can fix things or that I have all (if any) answers. My school has been very good in giving me free reign, setting IT policy and testing out new systems, but we’re part of a very small sub-group of a much larger system and as someone put it yesterday in “the Tasmania of Northern Ireland.”

Is it enough to have a few specialist schools and a few innovative teachers? What about those who are still unreached? Mostly working class boys, whose career aspirations are either professional footballer, reality TV star, claim benefits, or “get out of school at 16, join a trade and make some money.” I’m not being elitist; if I’m honest this is my cultural background. Neither am I saying everyone should go down an academic route. What I ask is, how many of these students would be potential innovators, if we could only get them past, “maths is hard” and “science is boring.” How can we show what will be out there in ten years time when to them school is so irrelevant; they have more technology in their bedroom than most classrooms and they make better use of it too.

How can we better connect technology? Not just connect different elements of technology but how can we connect with teachers and students and get them engaged with it. Napster was one of those moments when society became truly engaged with the Internet; I knew it had made a difference when my 70 year old Aunt began using a Napster clone to download knitting patterns.  Education needs it’s Napster. Not a way to illegally download music in class, but a way to connect existing technologies; meeting a need which it’s users may not even realise they have.

Whether it’s debating the need for STEM schools/STEM in schools, developing Jotter or teaching, I want to make the best of technology that exists, which we may even have, but aren’t using in a useful way. Aspiring that my software project, Jotter be like Napster is perhaps a very lofty ambition; but is it not better to set a high goal and fall short, achieving something, than not set any goal or try at all. Is that not what we keep advising our students and if it isn’t, why on earth not?

]]> http://andrewgribben.com/2011/04/waiting-for-napster/feed/ 0 http://andrewgribben.com/2011/03/the-red-pill/ http://andrewgribben.com/2011/03/the-red-pill/#comments Thu, 24 Mar 2011 17:04:44 +0000 Andrew http://andrewgribben.com/?p=4740

My move from developing software to teaching high school was extremely enlightening; working and socialising with a tech savvy crowd had made me ignorant to how IT was perceived by users in the “real world.”

After watching Objectified I began to think about how you don’t need to know about all of your users to make a good product, just the extremes; the middle will fall into place by itself.

On one end there are some really switched-on people in education, Fraser Speirs and David Cleland, to name but two, who are pioneering the use of technology in schools.  At the other, you have teachers who have don’t have an internet at home or know how to use The Google and who reluctantly go along with new IT policies that come across their desk, they’ll need help, but have no other choice. To them IT is an unnecessary inconvenience. In the middle you have teachers who are IT aware, they can send emails, use a printer and probably have a Facebook account, but it’s a means to an end. As long as things work they’re happy to make use of it.

As software is developed, we not only need to ensure it is relevant, functional and well designed, but that it is usable even by those who have very little IT experience; there’s no age barrier either, graduates can have worse IT skills than veteran teachers; none of them will be installing Moodle. Users in the middle might not spend time online searching for a new piece of software (although now that “apps” are such an embedded part of culture, perhaps I’m wrong) but if what they use works, in that it works how they work, then the software itself will melt away.

As I see it, a huge problem with how ICT is used in education is that is still isn’t seen as an infrastructure, like the building or the electricity. We get a pile of computers and throw them into a classroom and tell the teacher to work away. In Northern Ireland, C2K has made huge leaps forward, but there are still too few teachers who are happy, willing and/or skilled enough to innovate with the resources they’ve been given.

The iPad, solution or not, is seen as the “microwave” of the computing world and, what many don’t realise, is more cost effective than netbooks, which, my school at least, thought, would be good value for money. If you count up the cost of repairs, and reinstalls we could have bought an iPad and still had change. Its not the only way either, I have high hopes for Google’s Chrome OS; I customised Ubuntu on our netbooks so that they don’t even have a traditional GUI, only the browser and I’ve never looked back.

While many in the IT industry (myself included) have called for the death of the traditional IT Teacher and instead have IT as an integral part of every subject, it isn’t possible; not until hardware and software become invisible, just like an everyday appliance. I can only hope that Jotter will be invisible to its users.

As the project continues, I’ll release more information about exactly what Jotter is. At the moment I’m still not sure how to describe it myself, but hopefully from these blog posts you’ll at least see the reasons behind what we are doing.

Andrew Gribben

]]> http://andrewgribben.com/2011/03/the-red-pill/feed/ 0 http://andrewgribben.com/2010/04/death-of-the-ebook-reader/ http://andrewgribben.com/2010/04/death-of-the-ebook-reader/#comments Thu, 08 Apr 2010 20:06:16 +0000 Andrew http://andrewgribben.com/?p=4656

AKA “The inevitable iPad post”

Even though the iPad has not yet reached these shores, it seems that the world has been taken up by the frenzy of it’s release, it’s design, it functionality and, it’s iBooks. It would seem that in just over a week the Ebook (or is it eBook?) reader has been relegated to a niche product and the LCD backlit iPad announced as the new saviour of books, newspapers and the rest of the publishing industry. Ironically the move that will save this industry is the exact same one that only a few years ago was apparently going to destroy the record industry. The iPad with it’s shiny colourful iBooks and funky page turn transitions is apparently the closest thing to a real book that you will get.

Do you know what, they’re probably right too, with the power of the Apple brand and the iPad hype, it’s hard to see iBooks not being a success. Even setting aside the damage done to your retinas and the carpal tunnel from the weight of holding a 9″ “book” I really do feel that it’s going to reintroduce reading to an increasingly illiterate TV cultured society. Once they’re hooked on iBooks its still not the end for eBook readers, no, it’s a wake up call. The manufacturers can raise their game, not necessarily to add features, but to perform the simple task of displaying and browsing an electronic book, only better. Colour eink, touch displays (everyone who picks up my Nook and the Kindle before that intuitively try to tap the screen) are a few features that spring to mind.

Already Amazon and Barnes & Noble have released some major Kindle and Nook updates. The Kindle is to get an SDK (KDK actually) and the Nook has had a facelift (see below) along with a much needed speed and battery life boost. It’s good to see continued support and development for these devices. Although having played with the Nook for a while, rooting it (similar to jailbreaking an iPhone,) installing a web browser, feed reader and other apps, I’ve found them to be an annoying distraction to what I prefer to use it on most, actual reading! The only third-party Nook app I wouldn’t be without is Trook, which allows me to download books from my Calibre library at home, including daily “newspapers” compiled from RSS feeds and that’s only because I’m too tight to buy actual eNewspapers.

The Nook’s New Look – From stylish and minimalist to glossy and “Windows XP” like.

Footnote: The latest update to the Nook has really transformed it into a very capable device which negates most of the original concerns I mentioned in an earlier review. Although I prefer the Nook, there are still three important features missing which are available in the Kindle, the ability to export notes, rotation of display and the sorting of books by date.

In September 2009 I began teaching in Mourne Independent Christian School, a small private Primary and Secondary school in Kilkeel. Along with my teaching responsibilities I also inherited the privilege (and it is actually a privilege) of setting the IT policy and managing the IT infrastructure. With the blessing of the principal and school committee I set about replacing the ageing computer room expanding the network to allow teachers to have IT resources in their classrooms. Through the Community Microsoft Authorised Refurbisher (MAR) programme, we were able to get  2-3 year old, ex-governement Dell desktops, very capable machines which met our requirements and then some. Although having never heard about it before this programme allows WEEE disposal contractors to refresh and resell old hardware.A few weeks ago we took delivery (actually I collected in the back of a Vauxhall Agila) of our new desktops and over the course of the past week, with the help of some very eager pupils, we stripped out the old and connected up the new.

Open source software has always been of great interest to me, both from a moral and from a geek point of view. I’ve always preferred Linux as an alternative Operating System to Windows and especially over the last few years it has grown into an incredibly useable everyday system. The maturity of the Ubuntu distribution would allow us to have a secure, reliable and fully loaded learning platform, for free, which would work the way we wanted. Without even a second thought the decision was made to switch from Windows to Ubuntu 9.10 (with Edubuntu packages installed) for desktops, using the default GNOME desktop for high school pupils and the OLPC Sugar interface for the primary school. Having tested it in Parallels, for a server we choose  Ebox, itself based on Ubuntu 8.04. Configuring it as a content filter, print, file and OpenLDAP server we have been able to set it, and the Ubuntu desktops, so that each pupil and staff member has a roaming profile with private and public networked Documents folders. Having installed several similar, larger Window Server based solutions, this was not only easier, more user friendly and free but after a long hard week it was a real feel good moment to see the new computer room booted up for the first time yesterday.

With ICT classes resuming after half term, pupils in the midst of CLAIT exams will be able use Microsoft Office under CX Office, but by September all pupils will have migrated to OpenOffice.org.

Teachers will have to learn the new system, but as some have already commented its very user friendly and intuitive. The biggest challenge will be fully utilise the huge range of educational software available in our lesson plans. I don’t think it’ll take long, the level of excitement and interest among staff and student alike is not something you’d see after rolling out another C2K network. Ubuntu is going to be a real asset to the school for the foreseeable future and as a friend alluded to earlier will help produce pupils with some real IT skills.

So reads the strap line for Barnes & Noble Nook. For those of you who aren’t familiar with American book retailers, Wikipedia says:

Barnes & Noble, Inc. is the largest book retailer in the United States, operating mainly through its Barnes & Noble Booksellers chain of bookstores headquartered in lower Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

I should mention at this point that I have a great fondness for Barnes & Noble, having visited this amazing (and huge) store in Baltimore in 2000, it may have had something to do with this being the first book shop I’d ever been in which had a cafe (great idea btw.)

Equatable with Waterstone’s here in the UK, B&N operate both on the high street and online, selling physical and electronic books and a range of ebook readers. In late 2009 B&N launched their own reader, the Nook, into an increasingly crowded marketplace, in direct competition with Amazon’s Kindle 2. In what would seem to be lessons learnt from competitors, Amazon and Sony, the Nook featured both a 6″ e-ink display and an LCD touchscreen, avoiding the Kindle’s sluggish e-ink based menu navigation and the glare from the Reader Touch. Powered by Android and featuring both an AT&T 3G Sim and Wifi for OTA purchases, on first glance the Nook seemed to represent the next generation of ebook readers, but after initial reviews hit the internet, it seemed that was not the case. The Nook’s Android (1.5) OS was accused of being unstable and buggy and page turns were slooow. Hackers at Nookdevs discovered the whole operating system ran of a MicroSD card, which gave users the impression that the slowness was a hardware problem, rather than a problem that could be fixed with firmware. Along with delays of Christmas Nook orders (well into the new year) and the talk of an impending “Kindle killer” from Apple, the Nook seems to have dropped from off the tech radar entirely for most people. I am not most people.

After determining my Kindle DX was just too big for reading novels (in the interim, my usage patterns had changed along with my job) and so after selling the DX, my options seemed to be the aforementioned Kindle 2 or the Sony Reader Touch. After checking out Mark’s Sony Touch I felt the glare was too much for me; I liked the idea of the International 3G on the Kindle 2, but it’s limited to Amazon and Wikipedia only, so not a huge advantage then. The Nook, on the other hand, had in the interim received two firmware updates, improving speed and stability, had been rooted (similar to jailbreaking an iPhone) and could now run a Web browser, Pandora and could download directly from Stanza and Calibre libraries using Trook. All using wifi, meaning they would work in the UK, unlike the Nook’s 3G, starting to sound good?

Thanks to USUnlocked.com I was able to order a Nook and have it sent to the UK, for less than the price of a Kindle 2 (which adds tax, shipping and customs charges to its base price) and have been putting it through it’s paces over the past week. Initially I had planned a technical review in this post, but after some sage advice, I’m going to hold it off for another time along the some hi-res photos. Leaving this post to focus on my initial hands on reaction.

• The packaging is pretty, Apple pretty, but nigh on impossible to get into, unless you are a member of mensa. In fact it’s so nice, that I’ve used the sleeve and an old moleskine notebook to create a tidy case.
• The Nook is solid, but heavy, my wife reckons that it’s heavier than the Kindle DX, but Wikipedia disagrees.
• I’ve read that the design of the Nook is plasticky and cheap looking, but I find it quite stylish.
• It fits nicely into your hand thanks to an ergonomically curved back.
• All ebook readers should come with the default screensaver saying “Don’t Panic.” It should become law or something.
• Boot-up takes forever and a day, although resume from sleep is very fast, possibly faster than the Kindle.
• Once you update to firmware 1.1.1 page turns are fine, not bearable, not slower than the Kindle, fine, meaning not a problem.
• Once rooted you can do all kinds of fun stuff like replacing fonts (I like Georgia) and using Trook, letting me download books and news feeds from my Calibre library
• The touch screen is not an iPhone, but it’s useable, more so than the Kindle DX’s keyboard
• Unless you turn Airplane mode on and set the touchscreen backlight timer to 10s, the battery drains within a day or two. With those set, you might get a week, we’ll see.
• Like the Kindle the Nook doesn’t use folders to sort books, unlike the Kindle it offers no sort options, books seem to order themselves whatever way they feel.
• Removing the back cover is ok, but it makes scary cracking noises, so be brave.
• Inside you have a MicroSD slot, removable battery (sort of) and a sim card, remove more of the casing and as reported there is another MicroSD slot containing the file system and OS.
• I like the size and shape.
• The screen has great contrast and is helped further by the black strip around it. With black text on a grey screen, I’m surprised so many e-readers come in white, the black helps create an optical illusion that the grey background is whiter than it really is, making it more readable. True fact.
• B&N’s store has access to Google’s library of 1 million e-books, I’ve found some real gems that don’t even show up on the Google Books website. Getting these on a Kindle was a nightmare, well, not as easy.
• There is no rotate function, because:
• PDF reflow is awesome, you can scale up the fonts in any document (providing it has fonts), similar to the Sony Reader Touch.
• PDB files can be searched quicker and jumped about in faster than EPUBs.

The Nook has been a pleasant surprise, it has its flaws, which I’ll go into in my next post, but overall it’s a great device. Is it the world’s most advanced e-book reader? Probably not, especially when technology moves so fast. Is it the best e-book reader for me? Only time will tell.

I’d love to hear what my readers think about e-book readers, do you have one, would you buy another, what features do they need, or is there no point to them at all? Leave a comment below.

The Open Coffee idea was born in London “to encourage entrepreneurs, developers and investors to organise real-world informal meetups to chat, network and grow.”

Started one year ago, and held on alternative Friday mornings, the Open Coffee Lisburn branch has proven to be a huge success, drawing in techies, bloggers, entrepreneurs and more. Most importantly this random, free and open networking group has, for a lot of us, created real-world friendships.

The openness and social nature of Open Coffee, compared to the strict regimented structure of other business networking groups, such as BNI means that we can try different things. So on Saturday 16 January, we’ll be having our first Open Coffee Lisburn outside of Lisburn, in Banbridge. “On Tour” as I like to call it, we’ll be meeting at 9:30AM in Starbucks at The Outlet. With most attendees being married and with kids, we encourage you to bring the family along too, it’ll be a great social event.

If you’ve never been along to an Open Coffee meeting, this is the perfect opportunity to come along and meet the group.

You can contact us on twitter through http://twitter.com/oclisburn
The majority of us are on Google Wave and if you add me, I can invite you to the group – andrewgribben.com@googlewave.com
And finally, you can keep up with our events by subscribing to our iCal

A few weeks ago I started my own project and corresponding Facebook group for what soon became known as the Open Bible Project. The goal being to produce a version of the Scriptures for various e-book readers which, within the constraints of the device, has a useable user interface and readable layout.

Many, many versions already exist around the web, but either have hideously formatted text or are far too unwieldy to fit into typical usage patterns for the Bible. Of course others have been working on this problem, Osnova has produced several Bibles and developed a jump to verse technique using the search function of the device. Type ge.1.10 and find and the reader will jump to the Genesis chapter 1 verse 10.

I’ve used a similar technique, by hiding a code for chapter using white coloured text (doesn’t show on the device but is still searchable) you can enter Gen.1, Matt.1 etc and the reader leaps to the correct chapter. As far as the reading experience goes, each verse flow into one another, with verse numbers showing in a smaller font.

Very soon I’ll have an Open Bible Project website up and running, hosting the scriptures and various reference books online. Each user of the website will be able to annotate, highlight and link text across books of the Bible and the reference library. This customised version of the Bible will be available (freely) as a download for use on your reader, bringing those highlights, notes and links with it.

We’ve got our Google Wave invites and while we figure out what it actually does and wait for what comes next, all we really have is another method to communicate with each other, that we actually have to login to and check. Unlike email, twitter and facebook which we are being prompted about regularly and are in the habit of checking, whole conversations could be going on in wave that we won’t realise until we decide to give it another go next month and see what the fuss is all about. But now thanks to the Prowl iPhone app, we can have push notifications coming from the desktop wave client wrapper, Waveboard

Here’s the steps you’ll need to get started.

• First off it’s really handy if you have a spare computer which you leave running, so you get notifications when you’re out.
• You’ll need Growl for this to work
• Prowl for iPhone and the Prowl plugin
• In the Growl system prefs make sure that the default notification is set to Prowl
• Visit http://www.getwaveboard.com and download the installer and let it do it’s thing (Mac Only)
• Install and run Waveboard. At the moment it’s a wrapper for the website but with a few nice features added; hotkeys, status bar icon etc

What should happen is when you get a new wave, or an existing wave is updated, Waveboard will send the notification to Growl which in turn will Push out the Prowl app on your trusty iPhone and look like this:

Waveboard also offer an iPhone app which can be launched from the Prowl notification, it’s £0.59 and is’nt much more than a wrapper, although I’m sure it will improve over time, but I decided to stick with Google’s webapp version. Just browse over to http://wave.google.com, accept the warning that your browser isn’t supported and you should see webapp version of Wave. At this point you can add it as a bookmark to the homescreen, giving you a nice Wave icon and remove those browser controls. It’s flakey but it quite useable.

I’m not sure what will come from Wave, it could be the next Gmail, or the next Orkut, either way it’ll be an interesting journey.

I’ve been using the Amazon Kindle DX, in the UK, for a while now and have grown to love it’s ability to display PDF, more than any other feature. Until recently once feature which I had never really used was subscribing to Newspapers, that is until I discovered Calibre.

Calibre is a free, open source, cross-platform ebook management software. It’s like iTunes (the way it used to be) for books, but kinda uglier. Looks may not be it’s strong point, but it is great for managing your library, converting formats (DRM free of course), renaming books and meta information individually or en masse. One feature I hadn’t made use of, was it’s ability to generate a newspaper from an RSS feed. What surprised me even further was that on the DX, the newspaper displayed in the exact same way, with a section list etc, as the newspapers from Amazon. Very nice when the blog or news site you use doesn’t have and issue to buy on Amazon, even nicer when you’re in the UK and Amazon have blocked purchases from outside the US.

But wait, it doesn’t stop there, Calibre goes as far as to contain “recipes” which are used to scrape text from certain websites. Web page scraping might be a controversial feature, but if you want a newspaper created from BBC News or a your unread Google Reader articles, then there’s a recipe for that. It’s even possible to customise your recipe by adding new feeds, so my BBC Newspaper now contains a section for news in Northern Ireland just after the headlines. You can see how it turns out, below.

As explained yesterday, the blog had a slight mishap which resulted in me spamming twitter, well his is what I’ve been up to. I’m trying to link the various social networks I make use of, through the blog, outputting to twitter and Facebook; one look at my blog will show my lifestream of posts, photos, videos, bookmarks and links in one neat time-ordered list.

So far delicious and two flickr accounts are being imported and a Feedburner feed of all the posts and twitter and Facebook updates going out.