New company, new logo

www.clsystems.co.uk

I am very sorry to lose Cleveratom – such a cool brand! I wish my former colleagues well in their new endeavours, and will look forward to carrying on doing some excellent learning based consultancy, learning space design and web application development with Matthew Eaves as a co-director.

Since we have no development team anymore, we will be looking for excellent individuals who have a lot of skills and want to work in a dynamic way. If you know of anyone, do send me their info (or send them mine!).

I am slightly disturbed by the whole thing. The emphasis seemed to be to make the boys able to succeed within the existing curriculum and assessment system. At no point did anyone consider that these are the things that need to change… and whilst the great outdoors seemed to be the preferred classroom area, little was said about the impact of the environment on learning. Nothing was said about the potential of virtual learning spaces and how they could be leveraged.

Finally, as yet I’ve not seen how any of this is to be made sustainable, which surely it needs to be if it is to be anything more than a small intervention.

hmm.

Collaborative learning is foremost again this year, but not just between pupils. Becta’s lead on engaging parents in dialogue demands closer collaboration between home and school. More than simply sending out reports and giving access to summative data, great schools know this is about a structured, ongoing dialogue, not an event. It should happen throughout the year to be effective, and go well beyond accessing summative data, talking at parents’ evenings, or sending SMS messages about attainment or attendance.

Collaboration is also central to the New Diplomas. Students from different schools learning together in a consortium, physically or virtually, presents some interesting dilemmas. Current ‘approved’ learning platforms are not yet communicating clearly between themselves and alternative solutions are needed that don’t depend on a single school’s management system. Such platforms do exist, and these often offer greater opportunities for collaboration when managed well.

Encouraging effective collaboration between schools, and between home and school, perhaps requires an interesting shift in our use of existing tools, or alternatively the adoption of new ones. Most importantly, we must actively reduce the barriers around our virtual spaces, in a safe and secure way, if large-scale collaboration is to underpin learning moving forward.

As you can see, the importance of engaging parents goes well beyond simply reporting data to them at frequent intervals, and should certainly embrace the idea of participation in the process, and not simply attending an event. This is hard for lots of schools, but if it wasn’t it probably wouldn’t be worth striving for. The benefits of enabling this level of participation are likely to be clearer understanding of the aims of the school, less surprises at parents’ evenings and almost certainly a higher standard of attainment from the students.

And then there are the New Diplomas, which demand cross school collaboration for many of the lines of learning. Further, they demand close collaboration with local businesses too; working online to extend the opportunity for learning carries many challenges. How will schools introduce students from other partner schools into an online space that they already run – all Becta approved spaces (VLEs, MLEs, etc) are linked to the school management and information system (MIS: a database of student information) to populate the member data. Adding a temporary student to this is hard enough, but adding them regularly, frequently and removing them afterwards is harder still. Worse – how do you add an external adult from the local car dealership (for example) who is working with the school on a specific strand?

At Cleveratom we have been considering this for a while and conclude that it probably isn’t the right approach to link everything to the school MIS, and in the case of diplomas and engaging parents then it isn’t practical either. We have two products that might be of real interest to schools:

Spoke – a self evaluation and review framework tool. This allows you to set up ‘scenarios’ with sets of questions that students can use to evaluate themselves against. Parents can also be invited in to a scenario and staff of course are part of it to. The system allows individual reflection and review of performance, allows peer review, mentoring, group review and even acts as a standard questionnaire tool, too. It is remarkably adaptable and will easily enable a school to engage in ongoing and continuous dialogue with parents regarding their children’s learning, but introduces a strong element of self-evaluation for the students themselves.

Thought Park – a learning platform designed to be simple, engaging and powerful, it is often referred to as a ‘facebook’ for schools. However, it is a closed environment with a known membership that leverages social networking tools to support and extend learning. We have deployed it in a number of different schools around the country, including primary, secondary and FE colleges and it seems to fit the needs at many different levels. We are developing Thought Park for the New Diplomas to include all of the features needed to deliver the programmes. It is most certainly not a Becta approved VLE, and we really don’t want it to be, for the reasons above. It is making a difference to the schools piloting the roll out of the New Diploma in Essex and we think it could be of real interest to you if you are at all involved in implementing New Diplomas in your school, or across a consortium of schools, and are looking at online collaboration as part of that.

It would be wrong to assume that these tools are another way of building walls around information that should be shared. Both systems are able to have the membership extended to whoever you choose, and schools can manage that themselves. As I said in the article, the future of collaborative learning must include the lowering of walls around our virtual spaces, the idea of sharing information and passing on learning to others. We cannot expect to put learning under any specific bubble and not allow bubles to join together. Such is the way VLEs tend to work, sadly – each is its own bubble, and whilst lots of schools in the same VLE can often work toegether, real life in school settings isn’t like that, with lots of different schools using different products that still, sadly, do not ‘talk’ to each other.

Of course, I am talking about blog posting.

Cleveratom has been a really busy place to be around of late, with many things going on that are simply taking huge amounts of time. This is all good, but it does mean there isn’t enough time left to do things like write blog posts.

So what’s been taking the time away?

First up, BBC Blast are recomissioning their wonderful touring entourage, and extending it somewhat too. The amazingly innovative truck and marquee are to be joined by a further space on each location (where it is possible to fit it in) and have an advanced vehicle visiting locations in advance. It will all make sense when you see it, even if it doesn’t right now, but suffice to say the project continues to go from strength to strength and should be an astonishingly brilliant tour in 2009 – 2011.

Next, the NHS are developing a professional networking solution that should complement and extend the learning management systems, and provide greater opportunities for dialogue between all of the various parts that make up the health care provision we all enjoy. Creating a robust solution that meets everybody’s needs is quite a challenge, but with many years experience to call on, and colleagues from our old university too, we feel confident of getting it into shape by the deadline of 5th December.

The BETT show is fast approaching and as ever Cleveratom will be there, this time partnering with City Cllege Norwich to develop an excellent stand space and provide a rich insight into what happens in the college ‘RUGroom’ space which we helped develop. This development has been exceptiionally successful in providing a rich and creative experience for all of the RUGroom students. We are considerably proud of the fact that our involvement in Norwich has been over such a long time, and that one of the outcomes has been a ‘Beacon Award’ for CCN. Can we now say that we have helped develop an award winning space? I’d like to think so! In the mean time we have to prepare the space for BETT, design the stand, arrange for the hire of the necessary kit, organise merchandising and leaflets and generally get it all into a viable project. We will be on stand U130 (and U120) in the New Technology zone where we will be showing products such as ‘Spoke’, ‘Thought Park’ and ‘Mobi Stick’… all wonderful creations! There is more information about these tools on the Cleveratom Website.

All in all these things take time to get right, and with three major pieces of work like this it is no surprise to find a distinct lack of blogging going on. As soon as there is enough of a space I’ll report about each of these projects in turn.

The points I raised were the background of the personalised learning debate in England, how personalised learning fits with other systems and structures in schools and what tools are available to support the introduction and embedding of personalised learning in primary settings.

I drew from the work of David Hopkins’s 2007 book ‘Every school a great school’ (Open University Press) which clearly discusses the processes that have been happening in educational reform and offers suggestions for how the process of change can be taken further. Building in examples from around the world, during my time at Ultralab, and adding in a fair smattering of my own opinion about how virtual learning environments, as they currently stand, are not going to support personalised learning without a great deal of effort on bealf of the teachers who use them.

Far from being pessimistic, the situation couldn’t be more full of opportunity, but dismissing some of the myths and dispelling rumours is necessary before schools will be able to move towards implementing systems rigorously enough to really embedd the processes required.

Not surprisingly, the response has a clear focus on the procurement process which has been a bone of contention for quite a while now. Recently revised, it still causes concern in that the emphasis on procurement is often detracting from the more fundamental educational needs. Whilst I shudder at the thought of the word ‘Transformation’ being used glibly (it is, in my opinion, a retrospective activity to look back and see if you have transformed, rather than a forward looking activity that you can plan for), we are simply not going to transform learning through the BSF process if we don’t have a good hard look at how learners engage with the process of learning. Much of this absolutely must come from engagement of the stakeholders to inform the bidding teams, which currently happens far too late in the process, or worse, not at all.

And once we have bought and paid for such inspirational buildings, and challenged current wisdom about how learners learn, created a new and exciting curriculum and put in place cutting edge technology to support it, what then? How do we then evaluate (I hasten to remove the word ‘measure’) the impact? Where is the single unified post-occupancy evaluation that tells us whether or not a real and sustainable difference has been made, because surely it is only through such a system that we can begin to grasp the extent of transformation. However, a post occupancy evaluation may also help to stay the dogs of war who are looking to criticise the way public money is being spent. We all know only too well the ongoing rumblings of discontent surrounding some of the first projects, and it is exactly this sort of thing that sends people (often politicians) into a rear guard action and cuts short or stifles an otherwise brilliant opportunity for change.

What I would welcome in BSF is a far greater involvement in the very teachers and students who are going to leave one old, decrepit building and enter a bright, shiny new one which will in some way transform learning. Whereas we have Design Quality Indicators which are intended to show the ways a building could be better, they are hardly written in a way that can engage young people in the decision making process. What we need is a system that allows teachers and students, parents, governors – all stakeholders – to be able to give the right kind of rich data that bidding teams need in order to create more exciting, more relevant responses. Incidentally, such a system would help the local authorities collect more vibrant information and help them ask the right questions of the bid teams.

Whereas on the one hand we have got the ‘Every Child Matters’ agenda, and initiatives such as ‘Extended Schools’ (both of which are valuable, in my opinion), these seem to disappear in the cut and thrust of procurement in BSF – they absolutely start off right in the thick of it, but seemingly get left on the sidelines as soon as real money is debated. I’ve lost count of the times I have heard of particular features of a design being ‘cost engineered’ out and what that really means is that we are not looking at the best opportunities for learning (isn’t that the core purpose of a school anymore?) but at the buildings and facilities. Are we not then losing sight of what this is all about?

I have a theory that any new or redevelopment absolutely must be a balance of three core things: first and foremost, the pedagogy; secondly the technology to underpin the opportunities; thirdly the buildings and environment for learning. Somewhere in amongst that triangle will sit every single school and all will have an emphasis towards one or two of those three aspects. It won’t be the same for all schools, and even in very similar settings the fine grain detail will differentiate between them, but before a school can ‘transform’ it surely needs to know where it is. Most seem to, thankfully.

So then the transformation must be evaluated after we have juggled the three dimensions and looked at the path the school has been down, and to what extent things are different after the project completes. Even then we might say that we have got the same old school in a new building, and that alone is not transformation. Only when we consider the difference, and the opportunities for learning that are introduced, and the take up of those opportunities can we begin to grasp whether the BSF process has had the desired impact.

And we can only do that after the students and teachers take their place in the new building and start to work in new ways, with the new curriculum and new structures and processes.

If the procurement process is to end up as the main driver in BSF are we not losing the plot? Of course it must be a massive consideration – we don’t have an infinite amount of money, after all – but if we don’t look at how we can better inform the process with data from the end users, both before and after occupancy of the buildings, how are we ever going to improve this?

The BCSE response goes much further, of course, and considers many of the contentious issues (Building Bulletin 98 is *still* the guiding principle when creating learning spaces – it is TEN YEARS old… we need to throw down the gauntlet here -let’s have a better Building Bulletin), stakeholder engagement, DQI complexity and so on. It seems to me that we ought to all support the BCSE in challenging the process, and open up the debate surrounding how to improve BSF procedures. We don’t need to be confrontational, but we do need to bring to bear a lot of experience we have all gathered and most importantly, listen to the staff and students.

Cleveratom were there to provide an interactive session and encourage the delegates to ask questions. To do this I worked with half of the group (there were just too many delegates to fit in one room) and used the ever improving SMS tools that we are developing. The current incarnation is dubbed as ‘Walls iStream’, meaning text that is streamed onto a wall… Hais has been refining the interface and making it more linear than the previous versions, although we see a space for both in the future. The current version looks like this:

What we have seen is that architects are desperately keen to get the design of new schools right, and that they are under immense pressures from a number of different angles to confrm in one way or another with guidelines that limit the way spaces can be developed.

The BCSE event served to really highlight some of the issues to a wider audience and encouraged wider dialogue between people involved in BSF work.

Ty Goddard is the director for BCSE and is known as a strong campaigner for good design in schools. The responses from the event will be used to inform a document to go back to the Select Committee and let them know what is happening ‘on the street’. This is no easy task and there are many diverse views to consider.

The blog site for the seminar is http://www.buildingbetterschools.org.uk and you might like to sign up there and continue (or engage in) some of the dialogue as it unfolds. Participants at the seminar are particularly encouraged to make their views known (and felt) but anyone with an interest should have a sign in and join in the debate.

We combined our knowledge and understanding of how technology can be used to engage learners with our approach to digital creativity and created a program of events, which we delivered to the college on a week by week basis. At the same time as this, we invited a small group to our offices in Chelmsford so that they can help specify and design the online space, too.

The opening on Friday was attended by none other than Charles Clarke, MP for the City and former Secretary of State for Education. He spoke of the potential that is within all learners and the importance of unleashing that, which of course is what we believe, too! Our programme of sessions, run brilliantly by Matthew Eaves, has shown repeatedly that there are ways to engage all learners, and it is about finding the way in… technology is important, but interestingly, not always essential. A lot depends on the learner, the subject and of course the purpose for the activity.

The BBC ‘Look East’ news team were there in the shape of Louise Holmes (who we worked alongside in 2006 with the BBC Blast project), and the event was reported on BBC Look East throughout the afternoon and early evening. A snapshot of this is available on YouTube.

There is more about all this on the Digital Creativity web site, which explores what we did, why we did it and what we found out.

It speaks volumes about the quality of the designs for new schools around the country, and the opportunities that thousands of children are getting now that they weren’t getting before. I’m delighted to be involved in BSF work throughout the country and once again it has been emphasised to me just how important this work actually is.

I can’t say which of the entries will go forward to the final evaluations, of course, but I can comfortably say that innovation is thriving!