Different Internet between countries

I'm just back in Ireland so am noticing interesting distinctions between the level of access to Internet websites and facilities between the UK and Ireland. It's reminded me how evident it is that while the Internet in principle is an open playing field, various legal and contract agreements mean that every country gets different services.

Examples: Amazon mp3's. Unable to purchase in Ireland. A real pity too as they had no rights management and a better price than iTunes.
Spotify. The hugely hyped online music service that isn't offered here (with no sign of an offering).
Amazon electronics. Unable to purchase in Ireland.
the new iPhone 4s's new voice interaction feature, Siri, is not available in Ireland to begin with.


I could continue going on here but the whole point is that there is different tiers starting to appear online. A 1st world Internet, 2nd world, etc. Ireland isn't on that top tier unfortunately - economies of scale play a part here as we're just too small for some of the larger companies to be given an incentive.
Of course, this means that companies in Ireland have a massive opportunity here to take this market. There's no excuse for one of them to go and negotiate with the music labels. What are you waiting for?

What do you think? Are some countries getting better offerings than others? Am I missing competing services here in Ireland so that I shouldn't notice?

Teaching ICT, not educating in Office tools

Update 30/8/11: Fixed formatting issues on page

"He said he had been flabbergasted to learn that computer science was not taught as standard in UK schools, despite what he called the "fabulous initiative" in the 1980s when the BBC not only broadcast programmes for children about coding, but shipped over a million BBC Micro computers into schools and homes."Your IT curriculum focuses on teaching how to use software, but gives no insight into how it's made. That is just throwing away your great computing heritage," he said."

As taken from BBC article from a recent talk by Google Chairman, Eric Schmidt.

"But, more importantly, the curriculum is disabling rather than enabling for most kids, because it is preparing them for a technological world that is vanishing before their eyes. Training children to use Microsoft Office is the contemporary equivalent of the touch-typing courses that secretarial colleges used to run for girls in the 1940s and 1950s – useful for a limited role in the workplace, perhaps, but not much good for life in the modern world.
The worse thing about the ICT curriculum, however, is its implicit assumption about our relationship to the technology. "Look," it says seductively, "using a computer is like driving a car: you don't need to know how the thing works – you just need to know how to drive it."
Of course, this is, broadly speaking, true for cars, because few of us are going to go into the car-making (or even car-repairing) business. But computers are not like cars. They are machines driven by software, and software is pure "thought-stuff", in other words, something that is accessible to anyone with the requisite curiosity, intelligence and talent. So while teenagers might not be able to make cars, they can certainly get into the software business, because the entry barrier is so low. All you need is imagination, talent, time and persistence. But it really helps if you're schooled in an environment that encourages tinkering and experimentation, rather than one which just preaches utilitarian use of information appliances with "no user-serviceable parts", as the saying goes."

As from an article on the Guardian about 'Kids needing a license to tinker', sourced from @philwheeler1




One of the highlights of teaching ICT is getting the opportunity to teach and educate pupils on computers, those tools that are living, breathing parts of almost everyone's daily workflows, whatever their career nowadays. But one of the disadvantages and most common looks of shock I got throughout the year was when I showed a pupil a piece of raw HTML code, or even basic Java. The look of shock on their faces that this was how a computer actually worked never ceased to amaze me - this was the first time they'd ever seen this type of thing. Even more incredibly, 99% of them almost looked as if they'd never even considered how the fancy graphics appeared on their mobile-phone/console/tablet/computer. Are we missing out on something major here? I think so.....

The solution, I think personally, (other than a change in the curriculum) revolves around ensuring that the teachers are comfortable to work with this type of code. This will obviously required either training, or giving teachers adequate time to self-learn amongst each other (something similar to what I saw in Spanish International Schools - a two week block of time before the pupils arrive in school at the beginning of the school year to learn and develop new skills). Am I wrong here?

Collaborative work projects

One of the best experiments I've tried this year with the pupils to introduce new technology into their classes is the use of collaborative tools to allow multiple pupils work on documents at the same time. The tool of choice has been the well known Google Docs - and the word processing tools.

The interesting part has been watching pupils adapting to working together. One common issue I've noticed across many of my ICT classes is the independent tasks that all pupils have been required to complete. There is no team work or incentive to try and complete work that other people will depend on. In whatever job they work on in the future, most tasks they will be completing will be for someone else to support another project. So the idea of creating some group projects really intrigued me.

As it happens, as we started a new topic on e-safety the timing seemed perfect to develop some posters in different groups on the topics covered.

Of course, the first 10 minutes involved lots of pupils work being deleted and modified and some silly comments. But over the next 20 minutes that they developed the work, some fantastic resources started to appear. They're not perfect yet but I've seen enough potential in the couple of classes that we've tried this to know that this is the future of my classes.......

Wiki-races

I got pointed to this from ChickenMan's blog (for Saltash.net school) - it's called a wikirace!

the idea is to make your way from one page on Wikipedia to another one on a completely different topic, but only using the links inside of wikipedia.

As an example, I started my pupils this morning on St. Mary's wikipedia page and told them to find their way to the page for Avatar (the movie).

I'll give the answer here to help you as an idea :)

1. click on 'Chesterfield'
2. on this, go to section on 'The Arts' and click on "Odeon Cinemas"
3. Then click on the section for 'Controversy' and follow for "Alice in Wonderland"
4. From here, go to the section on 'Reception' and under the section for North America, you'll see a link to Avatar!

Can you come up with any more good ideas?

Watch from minute 21:50 onwards. Look at the incredible power that a mobile phone can now have and realize that we're really only at the tip the iceberg of their potential.......

I wonder nowadays, as pupils are growing through all these technologies, does it matter that they don't really think about how these devices or tools work. I don't expect all of them, but is there many of the pupils who could potentially be technically minded and just don't appreciate what is going on here? Are we all going to the point where it's like cars now - we all just buy them but don't really think (other than knowing how to change a tire and bring it for a service) about how it works. Is this a good thing? or just basic evolution of tools and services?

And for more amusing ideas from Google, this was part of their promotional project where all staff were invited to play around with Google products and use them in weird and wonderful ways. Enjoy :)

Learning to Program

One of the fun things at times in teaching is pupils showing an interest in learning topics outside of the planned curriculum set. I regularly have pupils asking me about game programming or development so I've started pointing them towards this, Scratch. Developed by MIT, it's a programming language for children to introduce them to the idea of coding.

I honestly haven't tried it out myself yet so maybe it'll be something to try out over the New Year.....

Google has published a really nice online book discussing all the various components that make up the modern Internet.


It covers all the pieces, from how you connect to the Internet, to how the fancy animations are displayed on screen, to how social networking operates. A really nice piece of work.

Also, if you look at this using a 'modern' web browser (i.e. not Internet Explorer - I laughed when I saw this comment at the top of the screen when I read it in school!), it should have nice flow effects between pages and it shouldn't feel like the page flashes to load the next page. This is using just the basic programming code of the Internet, HTML (although the latest version 5 which Internet Explorer does not support), and not using anything extra like Flash, etc.

What do you think? learn something new from it? Are you interested in learning more, or appreciate a bit more how the wonders of the Internet now operates?