Turning the Supertanker

I said that sleep was over rated at the start of this trip. I have to say that sleep has been something that has largely eluded me. I think that my brain must be on over time or it may be an indication of how stressed I really am. Most nights on this trip I have had both late nights and early starts in some combination or other, due to late arrivals or early departures. What has been constant is the time that I am waking, I am waking at 3:15 AM and once awake find it really difficult to get back to sleep, today was no exception. I find hotel rooms stuffy anyway, but the Copthorne in Plymouth also had its heating on, making the atmosphere really opressive. I tossed and turned from 3:15 onwards until I finally gave in and got up at 5:50, watched the news and got up.

Today was the day that I finally got to meet my virtual students and they their virtual teacher. Helen picked me up from the hotel and we headed out of the city to the east to Woodford and her students. After signing in, I met the staff who were all really excited to put a body to a face, having only seen and heard me from the neck up via Skype!

I worked all morning with Helen and Jim’s classes, class three and four respectively. Each class had a double ICT session with me and we worked on Inkscape, the students using the pen tool to trace and create a digital portrait of themselves from a photo. The children found some of this tricky, but they perservered. They will now continue and complete this task after I have gone.

For lunch I was a made a special school dinner of shepherds pie and apple crumble and custard. These particular school dinner delicacies are not on the Plymouth Local Authority authorised school lunches menu, so the cook made them especially for me! It took me back to my school dinners from 40 years ago, wonderful. Thanks cookie, it made my day, it was lovely and I really appreciate the effort.

In the afternoon I spent it split between the infants school and the junior school. I went down to Julie’s class, Robin Class. This is the class that has been working with Natasha’s class at Meadowbank. I had a package for them, photos, letters and a book made by room 27 at Meadowbank. The students will read these at a later date, but were intrigued about New Zealand and spent about 30 minutes asking me lots of questions, we got into a bit of dead end about swimming pools, getting changed and the organisational aspects of wet togs… They were amazed that children in New Zealand can walk to school in bare feet, they were concerned about all the broken glass on the streets. Obviously for these kids the prevalance of broken bottles and other sharp objects on their paths is a very real issue. Back in Helen’s class we did a similar exercise and this time the students were more fascinated about the numerous similarities between them, their Meadowbank counterparts and school in general.

After school I ran the staff meeting. I gave the combined staff of the infant and junior schools a presentation, outlining the argument for pedagogical change in the classroom, how the learning landscape is flattening, where access to information is not the preserve of the wealthy few, but that it is more egalitarian than that now. In addition I spoke about how we need to prepare our students for the rigours of the information age. I showed them the Karl Fisch ‘Did You Know?‘ video and outlined how Meadowbank is addressing some of the issues the video raised and how with our digital classrooms, we are providing the appropriate range of tools for students to use and how in tandem with that we are implementing the pedagogical change required of teachers. There were many questions and I think that perhaps I may have opened up some eyes, certainly the question and answer session was quite lively.

I am writing again on the train heading back to London Paddington, Brunel’s great terminus. This whole trip has been a fantastic success. Helen and I have proved that not only can we work remotely, but work very well together in person. We have got lots of ideas that we will be working on through her summer holidays. We created the biggest buzz at the conference in Prague, Helen will have the UK academics beating a path to her school. I have visited her students, presented my idesas to her school and have opened some eyes there too. My trip has cemented the partnership between Woodford and Meadowbank. Meadowbank can expect more teachers wanting to partner with them from Woodford. Parting at the station was not a sad affair, it was simply a change in state, from three dimensional to virtual, from the unusual to the usual. It has been an affirming and liberating trip, quite simply brilliant!

Tomorrow is Athens, another long day of sitting, security checks, late departures and late arrivals! Wednesday is the reverse. Thursday is lunch in London with a great friend and Friday is the start of the homeward trip on one of those shiny new A380’s. This can only start after another protracted and final round of security checks… I think that my body has been permanently irradiated with all the x-ray machines that I have been through in the last week!

The journey to Prague has been an interesting one.  I will refrain from commenting on Easy Jet until I get back from Athens at the end of next week, but suffice it to say that we were delayed.  Indeed, delayed, inconvenienced and downright petrified would be good words to describe Sunday.

Apart from the fun of seeing my brother in law, there was a logic to staying in Luton, where he lives.  Over the duration of my stay I will be flying into and out of three of London’s airports, Heathrow, Gatwick and Luton.  Luton is ideally placed as a place to stay for this kind of trip. However I use the words Luton, ideal and stay advisedly in one sentence.  If the architectural historian who critiques northern architecture, Grundy’s Wonders could be enticed to venture south, he would have a lot to say about Luton and not a lot of it would be good…

However the train route that Luton is on links directly with Brighton on the south coast and one of the stations along the way is Gatwick airport, this is what makes makes Luton an ideal location, it is an easy drive from Heathrow, has its own airport and is on the direct train link to Gatwick.  However this weekend, right after I had been charged 22 pounds, I learnt that I was not able to go right through London, but had to get off at St Pancras due to essential engineering works at Blackfriars.  I therefore had to get accross town, suitcase and all using the tube, what an exercise in madness that is, how anyone with a wheelchair negotiates the London Underground with its myriad of levels, stairs and inter connecting bridges is a wonder.  Anyway the 50 minute trip from Luton to Gatwick took just over two hours.  So hot and sweaty I was late to meet Helen.

After the initial hellos we quickly settled to working on our presentation for the first time in person amidst the throngs of the great British public making their annual pilgrimage to the Costas for too much sun, too much of everything…

We were delayed by Easy Jet and had to hang around for ages to check in, the cute dogs of Auckland Airport were not nearly as cute at Gatwick. This was in part due to their breed but principally they were being handled by Police, armed to the teeth with machine guns and they were not checking to see if you had a banana in your bag, they were looking for something all together more sinister.  After the scrum of check in and the dogs and guns, we had to run the gauntlet of UK security.  They make you take everything off, shoes, belts, watches etc (interestingly the metal in my arm, does not set off the alarms).  With everything being scanned it is and was hard to keep track of what you had upon you before the deconstruction of your being to be scanned, prodded and x-rayed.  I temporarily mislaid my passport in the melee.  Helen however did not fair as well as me, she had already been through the same security process earlier in the day as part of her flight up to London from Plymouth, however on this second scan they found her utility knife in her handbag (see above) it was all very funny, but it was not happening to me…

90 minutes after we should have left we departed Gatwick on an Airbus bound for Prague.  We were further delayed by the luggage handlers in Prague, so it was well after 11:00 when we staggered out of the terminal to be picked up by the hotel transfer driver, who spoke two words of English, yes and no and used them in a random staccato fashion that made no sense, by the time we had left the airport perimeter we had all fallen into a weary silence, partly brought on by his driving skill.  He was a man on a mission, traffic lights and general road craft were an optional extra as was the brake pedal, my right leg had practically cramped through phantom breaking by the time we arrived at the hotel.  It has to be said that traveling at speed on a motorway is one thing, however doing that same speed on the cobbled streets of a medieval city is quite another.  At one point after we had crossed the river into the old city, we were doing 110km…  Sleep was not an easy state to acquire that night as images of the city, replayed at great speed, flashed disconcertingly across my sub conscious state…  What a way to prepare for a presentation.

Image from: http://www.abc.net.au/reslib/200710/r194207_736065.jpg

My bags are packed, tickets double checked. (Not that they issue tickets these days! I have a print out from my computer and have already reserved my seats there and back!) All cables and electronic peripherals that seem to be the indispensable ephemera of modern existence are all charged. International adapters packed and presentation printed off, saved in three places and even posted to a wiki (just in case!). Camera with plenty of CF cards packed and lenses polished. I am good to go.

The next couple of weeks will be daunting, fun an adventure all mixed into one. Tomorrow night (Thursday) I depart Auckland for Singapore, I hope to blog along the way if I can tap into some wifi hotspots. Not long to wait in Singapore, before getting on the London flight. I arrive in London Friday afternoon, local time. 2:15 AM Saturday morning for my body clock! I sat down and worked it out, this will be the 23rd time I have done this trip (Auckland to London or London to Auckland), I am currently working on a carbon footprint post…. As Steve Kosovich said to me recently, I will have to cycle to work for several eternities to work off that personal carbon debt!

I fly to Prague on Sunday and stay until Thursday. On the Friday I will ‘drop’ in on my old school in St Albans in Hertfordshire and surprise them, mind you if they read this, it will not be a surprise! I will be catching up with friends along the way too. On the Sunday I take a train to Plymouth, spend the remainder of Sunday on the trail of all things Brunel, especially the Royal Albert Bridge. Then on the Monday I will spend the day with Helen’s class and after school give a presentation at their staff meeting about how ICT is happening here on the Supertanker.

That evening it is back to London, then on the Tuesday I fly to Athens to meet my daughter who will have just flown in from Auckland, ensure that she makes her connecting flight to the island where her grandparents live for half of the year. Wednesday it is back to London and on the Friday I fly out of Heathrow on one of those shiny new A380 double deck super Jumbos that Singapore Airlines have just purchased.

Sometime on that Saturday evening I arrive back in Auckland.

As I have said, I intend to blog along the way, post a few images of my travels and generally divert from the educational norm of this post for some gratuitous tourist snaps! I will also be feeding back from the conference too.

For the next two weeks I think that, excess coffee, spirulina and the mantra that sleep is over rated will be the norm if I am to achieve what I have planned on my overly full itinerary. If there is a fuel embargo, French Air Traffic controllers strike or some such fact of European life, I am going to be in a bit of a bind as there is no room for error!

C’est la vie!

As I have mentioned earlier, you can wait for ages for something to happen and then just like a London Bus, two come at once.  Perhaps many of you will be more familiar with the notion that ‘things come in threes’ just what the things are and whether they are positive or negative things depends upon your personal outlook and your philosophical take on life.

If I could have planned the last two weeks I would have certainly not planned it like they have turned out!  Right in the middle of report writing season our Primary Domain Controller decided to blow a gasket!  Well it blew a hard drive and I was faced with a dilema.  Repair the disk (it was a striped array on a 6 year old HP server) and nurse the ailing machine through the rest of the year then retire it as planned this Christmas.  The alternative was to bite the bullet and migrate all the data on this ailing machine and promote a younger, faster and greater capacity machine to the role of top dog on the domain.  It was a classic “take a chance or pay a $10 fine” situation from Monopoly.  I opted to migrate the data.

It has proved to have been the right move to make, but the ‘bump’ on the network has been a stressful event for all the staff and especially me.  I have had to placate a seemingly countless phalanx of  stressed teachers panicking that their work had gone west with the dead drive.  Added into the mix was the secondary decision to finally take the opportunity to break the heavily scripted, over policied  environment that was a legacy from the previous tech support arrangement. I now had a pressure cooker environment where printers kept appearing or dissapearing, profiles would or would not work, software would want to be re-installed after each re-boot.  Not a good environment to work in.  Then the Internet failed!

On top of having to cope with all of these changes and everyone demanding stability, the Internet stopped.  It did not really stop, it just went dead slow, dead, dead slow.  At one point I disconnected the entire network from the Internet router and plugged my laptop in, it was just me and the router connected to the Net and even then it took 11 seconds for Google to load!

I spent four days, one of them last Sunday, constantly phoning my ISP trying to get them to see that the fault was with them and not, as they asserted,  with us and our network.  Fortunately my ISA server and their own data stats painted a picture that proved that the fault lay beyond school.  On Sunday alone, they alleged that we had downloaded 8gb of data on a 512kb connecton with all the machines in school turned off! By Tuesday an engineer had finally been dispatched, Eddie.  Eddie could see straight away that there was a fault and stuck at it.  Eventually it was decided that their router might be at fault and was duly changed.  And what do you know, the Internet is back again, not lightening fast, but we can surf.  But it has never been fast.  This week also saw us install two more ADSL connections to school so that we can split our Internet traffic via three lines.  This will reduce our user to speed ratio from 183:512kb to 60:512kb thus making the net to individual users seem faster as they get a better slice of available bandwidth.

By the time I had left school today, I began to feel that for the first time this year we had broken the back of the strangle hold that our previous network had upon us and that we have now broken the shackles of that restrictive regime.  Now for the first time the staff on the Supertanker will be able to really forge ahead with their ideas unfettered by the scripted restraints that previously held them back.  Profiles are gradually coming right, printers are printing, reports have been printed in time for today’s deadline and the dust is settling.

Now I can turn my attention to Prague.  Before I do though I need to acknowledge the calm headed and unflappable  tenacity of Steve our IT guru.  The diligence of Mark our onsite tech and of Eddie who was prepared to wade through the sea of nonsense emanating from our ISP (his employer) to fix our problem.  Thanks to you guys the blood pressure has stabilised, just in time to tweak it again in preparation for Prague next week!

I have just read the following post from David Warlick’s blog and it strikes more than a passing resonance with me! How do we teach and how do we learn when it comes to working with peers and colleagues?

One of the banes of my life is getting staff to update their web pages. At the start of every term we have a series of staff meetings dedicated to allow the staff time to update their pages. Several of the staff on the Supertanker diligently bring along pad and paper to each and every one of these sessions each term and write down the exact same set of instructions to update their web pages. They reassure me that they need to do this as this is how they learn. However they do not seem to see the irony in their actions. If this were a valid learning method for them, then logically the notes would be taken once and then used on subsequent occasions as a reference manual. This is clearly not the case, as each session, each term starts with a brand new sheet of paper and a shiny new pen. This learning orthodoxy is further challenged as there does not seem to be, on behalf of my colleagues, any improvement in knowledge retention, we always have to start at the begining. We never start at just a few clicks along the continuum.

I always wonder just what happened to the reams of identical instructions that they have taken from past sessions? I also wonder at the complete waste of time that these instructions represent! They are obviously some kind of crutch, a panacea to get through the session but are not actually an aid to learning. We are obviously, teacher and student, stuck in a behavioral cycle that benefits no one. My questions now are these?

• How do I encourage staff to throw away their crutches, roll their sleeves up and just play with the software?
• How should I adapt my teaching style to encourage my colleagues to discard their paper and pencil learning orthodoxy in order for them to become masters of and not slaves to the software they have to use?

I have created all manner of instructions in pdf format, html format and have stored them on our Intranet for future reference. I have worked 1:1 with these staff, I have created ‘how to videos’ but to no avail, we make no progress. The whole cycle is a negative self fulfilling prophecy. My own teaching behavioral pattern is a sequential one, I can not see how else to teach a necessary, defined series of steps in any other way, other than sequential, yet clearly I am failing my students. At the same time my students and their learning orthodoxy, when applied to learning how to use software, is clearly not helping them.

To answer my own earlier question about the missing written notes; I suspect that rather like Zaphod Beeblebox’s illicit trade in stolen biros, the reams of instructions written by colleagues like mine on the Supertanker and others like them all over the planet end up as drafts for Computing for Dummies!

I leave for Prague on 19 June and things are starting to hot up. Helen and I have been collaborating via Skype to put our presentation together since March 5^th when we heard that our paper had been accepted. In that time we have been shuttling backwards and forwards various iterations of our slide show (yes PowerPoint!-in truth I have created it on the Mac using Open Office Presentation and then embedding the Flash videos in PowerPoint. I have spent some time using Blender to animate our school logo for the presentation ) At the moment we are on our 6^th iteration and even that has been modified several times in the last week. There is nothing like a looming deadline to bring out the jitters.

In the last week in particular I have been burning the midnight oil working not only on the slide show but the script too. Not that we are going to read our paper, it is just that we are working out exactly what needs to be said in relation to each slide. This process is fiddly enough when preparing a presentation individually but in our case, working as remotely as we do, it has proved very time consuming. In this particular case we seem to dove tail very well and despite the long hours the show is looking very good; on three nights this week I have stopped working well past midnight, by Friday I was very jaded . We are finally starting to feel OK about our presentation. When we actually get to meet and work together on 21 June, we can then put the final touches to the show.

Part of our anxiety is knowing exactly how to pitch our paper. We are not sure yet how many people we will be presenting to and what the composition of the audience will be. We are hoping that our audience will comprise fellow classroom practitioners, however the conference is being held at the Charles University as part of its 660^th anniversary celebrations. Therefore the conference could be more academic than practical or collaborative, if this turns out to be the case is our paper of sufficient rigour or of a standard that we can be proud to present to an audience not of our peers? Time will tell, but by the early hours of this morning I had completely re-written the script (again!) It is now time to draw a line in the sand, be satisfied with the quality of the story that we have to tell and as the Nike ads implore us, just “do it.”

I knew that when I wrote the last paragraph, I would not be able to resist making some changes…. Helen had re-read the script overnight and had sent her alterations back. Having had a good nights sleep and having read her alterations, all good, I have spent several hours again today tinkering, each editing pass makes the script tighter and more polished. When will we stop tinkering? I doubt that we will!

I am sure that I can squeeze a few more edits in between now and June 19!