Icon Information Systems

Spend the last three days at the Naace conference in Torquay. See my postings on LL4Schools here:

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

• mailed add2community.php script to Seb Gasse
• problem with the tar file uploaded by Norfolk: the tar file did not expand correctly. There was an EOF error. Mailed back with extra instructions on making the tar file. (norfolkelgg_data)

By sheer serendipity I happened to see a programme on teacher's tv about blogging this afternoon. And very interesting it was too. The school they visited was a Primary in East Sussex which also had an autistic centre. All the pupils used blogs and clearly found them both stimulating and fun. Boys who were not keen on writing really wanted to work on the computer to create entries that could be read not just by their classmates but the whole world. There was a boy had come over from Iraq whose self confidence had been greatly improved by the whole experience of blogging: members of his family still in Iraq could see his work and telephone him to say how good it was. How different from just having work displayed on the classroom wall!

Another boy, from Bangladesh, had very little English when he can into the school and found writing his blog difficult at first: but now it is easy and his English is excellent. I know this cannot all be put down to blogging but the thought of the global audience which included his family still in Bangladesh was a great motivator. As were the calls from them saying how well he was doing.

This breaking down of the classroom wall is one of the most powerful motivators there is. Alan November talks of some pupils writing for a fan-fiction site where, like the pupils in this Primary, the motivation comes from knowing that others are reading your work, appreciating it, commenting on it, and maybe also being inspired by it. As he said: "If you had the choice of writing for your class homework or an audience of millions what would you do?"

The autism centre was just as interesting: the computer given them a distance that they don't have when talking face to face. Also the non-judgemental interaction is confidence building. I saw something similar when doing some work on video conferencing. A special school was using it with its pupils to talk to pupils in another school. Some pupils had found any sort of conversation with a teacher difficult but when using the VC equipment they came into their own and found their voice. Perhaps blogging can have a similar effect: when blogging is also taken to include podcasts, video-blogging and a global audience then perhaps we have a powerful tool at our disposal.

As well as the full programme two shorter clips from it are also on the teachers tv site: one about blogging in the autistic unit and another about the benefits of blogging in the more general context. It is well worth watching.

See my ll4schools post

See my ll4Schools post.

See my ll4Schools blog.

The following was taken from the Insafe survey was sponsored by UPC, with support from the European Commission. Further survey results will be available on the Insafe website in the coming weeks.

This survey just goes to show how important it is that online security is covered in schools with users of social networks being educated about the issues. Here are a few snippets:

• 57% of young people make their online social network profiles public and disclose a great deal of personal information, according to a recent survey of 21,872 people across Europe organised by European Schoolnet, coordinator of European Insafe network.
• Almost a third of youngsters responding indicated that they didn't know what to do about making information public or private.
• In some contexts, many young people are aware of what to do: for instance, when using MSN, 58% of young people surveyed reported that they would not accept a request for contact from a person they didn't know.
• The under 10 age group seems to have relatively little awareness of the dangers of going to meet someone they have been chatting with online. More than a third indicated hypothetically they would go to meet online contacts without telling parents.
• However, awareness increases greatly for 10 to 13 year olds, and then steadily declines; 22% of 17 year olds would forget to tell their parents about such a meeting and 24% of 18 year olds would go alone.
• A similar pattern of increased risk-taking from age 14 to 17 can be repeatedly seen in a detailed analysis of the survey results, underlining the need to tailor awareness-raising campaigns to target these age groups.

LL4Schools enforces the privacy of personal, profile data - currently we prevent all but the user's biogaphy from being made public. All other profile data is made available only to other logged in users: and all accounts on LL4Schools are created at the request of schools with full traceability and no self-sign up. If there is demand from users we could, on a school-by-school basis, restrict such data further.

Performance was so bad today I decided to swap the router they supplied with the one I bought a few weeks ago just to see if that improved things. Lo and behold - I now have access to redhat.com and live.com! How did that happen? It seems my router was blocking these sites although I have no filtering running on the router! Even the firewall of trivial as I have my own firewall in place behind it. Very strange.

I cannot access some sites - in particular I am still cut off from all redhat.com sites and today I found I cannot get to login.live.com! I need access to this to test how best to filter it on my local copy of Protex before making any regional changes. Bulldog technical support were not very helpful - they didn't seem to think routing was their problem to resolve! I've sent a mail asking for my MAC address so I can go back to Demon without any loss of service...I've never got the promised 16Mb so Demon's 8Mb should be just as effective as I get now.

Much quieter today. The 10am deluge was more restrained today. On Thursday and Friday there was complete mayhem as people flooded in and then made a beeline for the cafe areas before the queues built up! Today it was more sedate. E2BN still had a steady trickle of interest in the filtering system and, in fact, we probably saw more schools from our own region today than on the other days.

BETT is very much a business-to-business show for the delegates and exhibiters as well as a selling-to-customers one. In fact, for E2BN, this is probably the most important aspect of the show. And I think we made useful contacts this year for Protex

Well, that's it for another year. I can now give my feet a rest and let my shoes air! And Monday we start to follow up those we spoke to and plan all the work for the next few months!