Turning the Supertanker

image source: http://www.gobcn.ca/uploads/sH/9Y/sH9YyXtgT0_pDVnysHuJgg/Fiber-optic.jpg

During the term 1 holidays I was asked to be part of a Broadband meeting.  The great and the good, well the educators and business people who were invited, were asked their views of and the needs for the Internet infrastructure of New Zealand.  It was a very interesting meeting.  One of the business representatives there bemoaned the fact that upgrades in infrastructure always means that the user pays for the infrastructure and the increased tariffs of the new service.  He argued that the Telco’s who get a 20-40 year return on their investments should wear the infrastructure costs up front and recoup their costs on a user pays basis, rather like a toll bridge over the intervening years.  I have to say that I agree with that argument.  As the evening progressed I began to reflect upon the need for speed on the Supertanker.

Ours is a ratio of too many machines trying to do more with the Internet with a dreadful connection.  We have an ‘advertised’ service of 512kbps but only get 375kbps in reality, this is painfully slow.  I have gone over this before but feel that it is worth covering again.  When you divide 512kbps by the 183 machines that have the ability to access the Internet at school you soon see that the equal division of the Internet pie equates to 2.79kbps per machine, painfully slow!  In effect dead.  That manifests itself as frustration with the teachers who are trying to integrate this resource into their classroom pedagogy, but don’t trust the service and see no prospect of immediate improvement.  I know that not every machine is on-line all day all the time, but now that we have Mathletics in every classroom you can bet that every class that does numeracy will be using this service every day, so we do have real issues.  We want to use a service that we have paid for, but the infrastructure we use can not deliver the service we wish to use.  It is only getting worse, we purchase more machines each year and our expectations of what we can get out of the Internet increases.  The speed does not.

The proposed ‘cabinetisation’ of our local roadside cabinet is scheduled for late 2009, I will start holding my breath in 2010!  When this  service is implemented, we can look forward to Internet connectivity speeds of 2mbps and  an eight fold increase in speed.  This will be a good thing right?  Well no not really.  I have just come back from Europe and apart from free wifi access in most cafe’s and bars in Prague, a loss leader to get you to come and sit down.  The school Internet connection at Woodford School was 10mbps.  The UK has invested heavily in their network and schools are benefiting.  I have just read the following article about BT’s proposed investment plans to roll out fibre to 10 000 000 UK homes by 2012 giving them potential speeds of 50-60mbps.  I would dearly love a slice of that pie for school.

Is it right that our students should be limping along in the slow lane of the internet?  New Zealand needs to start seeing itself as an integral node of the Internet, not some piece of  furry cheese forgotten at the back of the Internet larder.  The Internet will increasingly offer richer content and a wider range of services to those who have the speed to access them.  Until our national and international infrastructure can deliver an equivalent level of access, we will continue to be pin mould on the cheddar!  We will be languishing in the dial up internet world of the first iteration of the web looking enviously over the fence at the users of the third or even fourth iteration of the web.

I for one am looking forward to the day when I can distribute my data storage to a service on the Internet.  I am looking forward to being able to use in a real and practical sense online programmes like Google Docs so that my TCO for server maintenance will drop.  This remains a distant fantasy whilst my connection to the largest and ever expanding information repostitory on the planet remains stubbornly fixed at 512kbps!

Today was meant to be split into two.  The morning was to be spent visiting two Czech schools and in the afternoon doing some cultural stuff visiting the local silver mines and the town hall.  At the end of the day yesterday we were informed that the schools would welcome us but the children would be on school trips, in other words we would be visiting empty classes!  I elected to give that a miss and take the opportunity to see a little bit of Prague.  

By all accounts history has been kind to Prague in terms of architectural loss due to conflict.  When you consider that cities like Plymouth, Dresden and London were heavily affected by the conflict of WWII Prague survived that, it seems to me, intact.  The Soviet invasion might also have been a stimulus for the removal of decadent architecture in the name of comrade Stalin, a cleansing process as it were.  I am glad to say that neither incident seems to have scarred the cities architecture, I am sure the populace would take a different view of the scars caused by invasion and occupation.  In short Prague is a delight, a fondant icing extravaganza, a city of embelishments and ornamentation.  Quite simply it is fantastic eye candy.  The winding streets of the old city, the mix of Gothic, Baroque and the European C17th and C18th styles make for an intoxicating mix.

We have walked through the winding streets, taken the trams and have got a real feel for the city.  We spent most of today up at the castle.  The following slide show is a representation of where we have been today.

Our hotel is a short 400m walk from the University and over breakfast it was obvious, because of the conversations we heard, that many of the guests would turn out to be our fellow delegates.  After a short walk on cobbled streets, past one onion domed church in blistering heat at 8:00 am, we arrived at the university. The university is celebrating its 660th birthday, but the faculty of education is only 70 years old and this particular faculty building’s architecture proudly flaunted its stolid early C20th architectural style.  Registration was a quick affair and all at once we were in the lecture theatre armed with the usual booty of conference registrations!

A quick scan down the list of presenters revealed that I was the only representative from New Zealand and to my increasing alarm that Helen and I were the only practicing teachers.  All the others who were to speak are all University lecturers with PhD’s.  As the day wore on it became abundantly clear that the vast majority of the papers being discussed had already been published and peer reviewed in academic journals.  Helen and I started to feel like minnows swimming in a tank of sharks!   However as the day wore on this welling sense of dread was abated somewhat when the organising president of the World Computer Congress 2009 specifically mentioned our presentation stating that he was particularly looking forward to hearing how we had built and sustained our ‘vibrant online learning community.’  After that we started to begin to feel a little better, even privilleged to be the only representatives of the real world reality of classroom teaching that our fellow delegates theorise about at this conference.

There is no doubt that we are presenting at an important organisation.  IFIP is an organisation that was set up by UNESCO and has 14 organising committees.  The age of the committe is denoted by the number and the education one, at which we are speaking is 3, which indicates that it was set up at the start of the organisation.  The AGM is tomorrow.  By the way, the organising president of WCC2009 asked me in one of he breaks whether i would be presenting at WCC2009.  I knew about the conference from earlier net searches, it is in Brasil…. I wonder if I could get funding?

So as I write this we are due to do our presentation in just a few hours.  Last night, we wandered around the old part of the city to clear our heads.  Prague is truly wonderful, well the old bits that we have seen are.  We had dinner in a fantastic restaurant and then got back to the hotel to work on our presentation for the final time.  Today’s the day.

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!

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!

…you wait and two come at once!

I have had two fantastic events happen this week. The programme for Prague has been released, I now know when and on what day I am presenting with Helen. It is all coming together and almost daily Helen and I are working on our presentation. When we finally meet at Gatwick airport in June we will then have the opportunity to polish the presentation further.

Going back to Gatwick for the first time in many years will be rather nostalgic as I used to pass through Gatwick airport every day on my commute to work. I used to live in north London and commute to Gatwick, to where our large photographic studio was in one of the warehouses at the edge of the runway. We were right next door to the Virgin Airlines training facility, complete with a mock up of a 747 cabin for passenger refreshment delivery training…

It has been an interesting exercise in professional collaboration with Helen not only to get the entire tohatoha project off the ground, but putting this paper and presentation together. It has taken a lot of effort on beahalf of both of us, but the results have been more than worth it. There has been a spin off, I will be visiting Helen’s class on 30 June and the school has asked me to make a presentation to them at a staff meeting that day, before I get the train back to London and my flight to Athens (long story). Now I am working on that presentation too.

The second bus of the metaphor is that I have been approached in the last week by ICT learning in Kuala Lumpur to run some workshops and speak at one of their conferences in August. This connection was made through Greg Adams at Interface magazine, thanks Greg. This is exactly the kind of thing that I want to do, reach out and share to the greater teaching world, the potential of ICT and especially the raft of online web2.0 tools to enhance the conditions of learning for our students.

Of course I said yes, now I have another set of presentations and workshops to prepare. How good is that?!

Taken from: Prague Picures

Last year an e-mail arrived in my in box from the ICTRN Becta list serv out of the UK. I dip into and out of links and mail that arrives and follow the threads and discussions as my whim takes me. I often contribute but the traffic seems decidedly one way. Still it is a good way of keeping track of trends in ICT in Europe. The specific mail in question was a request for papers for a conference to be held in Prague in June 2008. I followed the link and the conference focus intrigued me.  I was particularly fascinated by the focus because the tohatoha blog was really gathering momentum and Helen and I were planning to do something for International Education week later on in the year.

As I cycled home that evening I began thinking.

I cherish my time on the bike, I am able to get clear headed thinking time as I cycle and some of my most adventurous, innovative and some would say hairbrained ideas for ICT have been hatched whilst grinding the gears on my Avanti Hurricane over the years. I reasoned that Helen and I had a story to tell about the success of our collaboration, which was and still is, going from strength to strength. What especially fascinated me was the strength of our virtual relationship. The fact that we have never met, yet have created something very successful and work very well together is so full of oxymorons, that on paper the partnership between schools and colleagues was almost bound to fail from the start, yet it has not. I pondered:

Why has the partnership succeeded?

What are the ingredients of this collaboration, with no common grounds and a completely randomly created partnership, that have ensured success?

How have the students regarded being taught by virtual teachers?

Just what do the students gain from virtual collaboration?

What are the benefits/pitfalls for students accessing specific skills and talents from a global network of teachers?

What might be the potential impact for educational delivery if students could access JIT skills/training/information that this model implies is possible?

It seemed to me perfect that we share our findings. Later that evening I suggested to Helen that we had a story to tell and that we should put a proposal together to speak in Prague based on the success of our blog collaboration. We wrote a proposal over some days, again via Skype and Word’s track changes facility to come up with a proposal entitled:

Collaborative Triumphs and Planning Tensions: Using a blog to enable classes separated by time zones and hemispheres to work together, the Tohatoha story.

This morning I received a mail from the organisers and our proposal has been successful. I am over the moon! Now the reality hits. This trip needs funding the paper needs to be written Helen is approaching the British Council in the UK and is fairly confident that she can get funding. I too now have to find the cash. There is a delicious irony in the fact that the first time that we shall meet will be in a city that neither of us have ever been to, talking about a project that has been conceived, hatched and executed entirely through the virtual medium of the Internet. June can not arrive fast enough.