Alex Muller

David was kind enough to invite me back to St Paul’s yesterday to hear Fraser Speirs, the chap behind FlickrExport and Darkslide, talk about his rollout of an iPad to every pupil at Cedars School of Excellence near Glasgow.

Fraser spoke about the situation that led up to the iPad decision; the scarcity of MacBooks in his school, the lack of faith in the iPod touch as a complete desktop replacement. He talked about the deployment process, and how it’s completely changed the way many subjects are taught.

The example he gave that stuck with me was Art. A teacher can use Brushes on the iPad to create a drawing that illustrates a particular artistic technique. Brushes will create a ‘recording’ (a timelapse) of the creation, which can be exported and played back. And then, the magic: during a class the teacher can talk over the video and carefully explain the technique. If you’re an Art teacher and that doesn’t make you want an iPad… I’m speechless.

Then, the Q&A (I’m paraphrasing from memory – please correct me if I’ve got this wrong). George asked whether Fraser was worried that he was sending kids out into the world who couldn’t use Microsoft Office.

Fraser responded by saying that it wasn’t a worry, but it was something to think about. He went on to say that there’s no way to tell what the world of work will be like in 2023, when some of these kids will leave school.

Having worked in a huge organisation for (only!) six months so far, this worried me. I’ve experienced the brain-achingly slow rate at which IT in corporations—at least this corporation—moves. Internet Explorer 8 was released in March 2009; it’s being pushed out in June 2011, over two years later. Our Windows 7 release will start in November this year and conclude in September 2014, a full five years after the retail release. By 2015, all 100,000 employees will be running Windows 7. I’m willing to bet (and this is a total guess, I don’t work in IT or have any inside information) that even in 2023, Microsoft will be an important part of this company’s infrastructure.

Is that a good thing? Nope, not one bit. But what’s going to happen here? Will the next generation start avoiding job ads that require some kind of Microsoft Office competency? I’m really worried about the future for large companies that have such a heavy reliance on Microsoft who haven’t learnt to adapt yet. To offer, for example, new starters the OS of their choice. This talk has prompted some really interesting conversations here about the future of education and work, thank you Fraser.

From a BBC News article today, “Schoolgirl fell to death from bridge after sex claims”:

[St Edward’s School headmaster Dr Andrew Nash] said he had later been told of “unpleasant comments” about Holly which had been placed online and in text messages.
But that was not something the school knew about at the time, he said.
“Facebook is something we worry about because it is so completely outside of our control,” he added.

At least he’s honest.

Email is really important to me, especially at the moment – I’m going to be moving a fair bit over the next few months, but my email can stay in one place (the cloud, if you don’t cringe every time you hear that). Like just about every geek, I’m in love with what Google have achieved with Gmail. The simplicity, while at the same time managing to offer every feature I could need along with bucket loads of storage (all for free) is amazing.

This one is a screenshot of the webmail system implemented at York University at the moment:

Wow. While I’m sure there were reasons for using this software, I’d be curious to know what advantages it offers over MS Exchange Server or Google Apps. Let’s be honest, it’s not as pretty as either of them.

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One thing that really concerns me is whether I’ll be able to hang onto my email for years to come. I’m a complete hoarder, so I have this irrational urge to want to keep every message received… which is why Gmail appeals so much.

For the last four years, I’ve had all my email from my school redirected to my ‘personal’ Gmail account. Having left school, I’m over the moon that I still have 524 emails about crap like my A Level choices. You won’t understand this unless you’re stupidly crazy-obsessive like me, but just to have the ability to be able to read any of that is great. I haven’t even started at York yet and I’ve already set up redirection using their online IT account system; I don’t want to leave the university and lose four years worth of correspondence with professors and friends.

What’s the absolute worst case scenario right now? That Google goes bump, or decides it can’t be arsed to keep Gmail ticking along anymore, but something tells me that won’t happen just yet. This is an issue that’s going to become even more important than it is right now: the ability for users to extract their data from a service and move somewhere else. Someone clever already took the idea and gave it a name.

Everything I’ve learnt at St Paul’s School (Wikipedia) has been on the same campus, from September 1998 until this summer, when I left for the final time. I started this post at the beginning of December 2007 in the hope that things would be fresher in my mind than they are now (that’s because it had a couple of paragraphs on everything I thought was wrong with the place; I decided I didn’t want those hanging around).

There are so many fantastic things that I need to list and, as much of a cliché as it sounds, I really don’t know where to begin. I do know that I’ll have run out of positive adjectives by the end of this post. The friends I’ve made have been the best, and we’ve had more awesome moments than I can remember. I really hate the fact that I’m listening to Eagles – Take It to the Limit while writing this, because it’s making me well up inside – that said, any song would probably do the same right now. The long lunches, sitting talking about such specific stereotypical rubbish as “girls” and “the weekend” for two hours, never failed to put a smile on my face. Conversations about sporks and Adam snorting salt won’t be forgotten any time soon.

The second great thing was the teaching staff. This is the place where I have to mention people, if only so that I remember them more clearly; Dr Gerry Leversha, my tutor for five years, who helped take care of just about every problem I ever had – one of the most intelligent, kind and considerate people in the place, and I was lucky to know him; David Smith, head of ICT since the beginning of 2007, has changed the department (and the way it’s thought of) for the better in so many ways; and finally Okan Avni, for dealing with my UCAS application fantastically, and not complaining when I kept on letting it get behind.

There are too many others to mention that I could fill a book with names. To finish: Alex Wilson, Jenifer Ball, Richard Barker, Chris Fry, and even back to James Renshaw when I was an eleven year old learning Latin. David Emery deserves a mention; he was never really a teacher to me, but just such a brilliant person. Let’s face it, they’ve all had the fun of writing reports about me for the last nine years, so it’s only fair I get my chance to mention them now ;-)

I have no idea how to end this. No idea at all, so it’s going to be fast. How about just… thank you.

As school’s finished and i’ve got nothing better to do at the moment, i thought i’d take on the ‘fun’ task of a new design for our school intranet. To start, here’s a look at what we see at the moment:

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