Comments on Lopa Patel's Blog: Britain’s Education Cloud

Sam, there is a wealth of evidence to support my v...

2010-08-26T22:55:44.237+01:00

Sam, there is a wealth of evidence to support my viewpoint. Take a look at the Becta Research Reports at http://publications.becta.org.uk

In particular:
1. The Impact of Digital Technology.
2. Personal Technologies for Learning.

Folks, I need supporting references in public doma...

2010-08-26T06:43:04.630+01:00

Folks, I need supporting references in public domain for Lopa's viewpoint as quoted below. Please advise?

"Children and young adults would love the concept of a personalised online space in which they can upload and download work; get appraisals from teachers, collaborate on projects with their friends; an account that could build and grow with them as they move between schools and into higher education. Parents already value the ability to have online assessments of their children’s work, without the worry of having to monitor and track activities of their kids on a daily basis. At present the under 18 generation on average have greater skills than their parents anyway. If all this is sounding like a “Facebook for schools” then I have failed to explain that this type of personalised space currently does not exist. It could very easily come into being, by ensuring that different providers collaborated on a single canvas - Britain’s Education Cloud – that is owned by UK Plc"

Lopa - excellent post and to someone who has been ...

2010-08-15T15:51:50.791+01:00

Lopa - excellent post and to someone who has been running at cloud based VLE (LP+) for the past 6 years - its music!

Agree with you EdintheClouds, but what will make u...

2010-08-15T13:35:53.125+01:00

Agree with you EdintheClouds, but what will make up this workflow "glue"? If it is something that could occur without intervention then Open Source would the defacto software/platform for the world (rather than in just China). My argument is that some (non-commercial) intervention is required to created the "glue" (or canvas as I prefer to call it) and I feel in the UK, where a huge proportion of taxpayers money is used to fund the education system, it is incumbent upon the government to invest in this for the sake of taxpayers, children and the future generations. At the moment we are exporting our money to the US companies who dominate this market and who pay disproportionately low tax in this country as many choose to be located in Ireland, Luxembourg and other tax havens. Surely this is not in the best interests of the UK Public?

Excellent post, Lopa. There seems to be little ch...

2010-08-14T12:46:53.796+01:00

Excellent post, Lopa. There seems to be little chance that the current government will be either ideologically or financially attracted to a new centralised model, especially when they're busy moving in the opposite direction, dismantling the current structures as fast as they can. I agree that 'playing into the hands' of the 800lb gorillas is to be avoided if at all possible, but there is an alternative scenario: it could be that the 'small pieces, loosely-joined' model is the one which prevails. After all, Google, Apple, Microsoft do not make the best individual tools for many of the new social media activities, and people are adopting whichever web service feels right for them. Some sort of workflow 'glue' is needed to hold it all together: in my school we use Google Apps for that, but it's the activity of creating and collaborating and communicating which is more important than the platform we're using.