Every nappy and wet-wipe; every hissy-fit; every temper-tantrum; every sweet little moment which nearly makes you weep; every gurgle; every deep conversation about the cat dying and going into the stars; every scribble, drawing, painting and stunning work of art; every random creation which you don’t understand but proves creativity and imagination without bounds; every little thing which shows that your baby isn’t one any more; all of these things and so many more validated with three words:

“She’s doing fine.”

Kick-ass.

While strictly not a hero of mine, I’ve always liked Gene Wilder, principally for his role in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory but also for the film The Woman in Red (Kelly LeBrock was a bit of a childhood crush of mine, especially after Weird Science), so I was actually quite excited to sit down with my five-year-old to watch Charlie.

So a little later, after enjoying the film in the same way I did about 25 years ago (the film itself is 39 years old as I write this), I pull up Gene Wilder’s Wikipedia page (link up top) and was a little shocked at the picture of him they have there:

Gene Wilder at a book signing in May 2007

That is most definately not my memory of Gene.  My memory of Gene is as I saw earlier, that of his most famous role:

Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka in the 1971 film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory

Time may heal all wounds but it makes fools of us all at the same time.

I guess that may be one of the curses of the web: there is no nostalgia any more.  All your childhood memories of cartoons, people, TV adverts and so on can be called up with little effort and the bare facts laid out before you, ruining your rose-tinted memories. You can even (thanks to the demand for all things ‘older’) purchase most of the TV programmes you used to watch as a child for next to sod-all.

What truly concerns me is the reminder about my own mortality. Being reminded that my time on this planet is finite can send me into a nasty panic attack (not that there are any good ones). I know my time here is limited.  But I guess I’m not dealing with it very well, especially after the recent hard reminder with the death of our cat Fingers. I start to worry if I am making the most of my life. Then I get doubly worried about my child: am I raising her to appreciate the time she has? Oh shit, her time is finite too…

So now I’m thinking morbid throughts about not only my owm mortality but my daughter’s, my wife’s, my parents’, my friends’… “Life. You’ll never get out of it alive…”

I’m already 32. While that’s not old (not to me anyway) I still think of myself as ‘young’.  But with better glasses. And worse hair. Sometimes it’s odd and not a little scary to realise that I am twice the age of the new students at the college where I work.  TWICE their age. Glad I’m not 16 any more but the realisation’s a shocker.

A friend of mine who I really should stay in closer contact with, made a decision years ago which saved his life.  (This goes back to 2002 or 2003 so the details are a little hazy.)  He spent some time in Nepal (as he does) and had the opportunity to get an earlier flight back to the UK.  He came to the conclusion that one extra day in Nepal is preferable to coming home early.  I think I would have come to the same decision!  Well the earlier plane he would have got on crashed into a mountain with no survivors.  He didn’t find out ’til later.  To tell me this story, over a coffee on Park Street, Bristol, he pulls out a printout of the BBC News webpage with the story on it (can’t find it now).  He looks me in the eye and says, dead seriously,  “You’ll be dead a lot longer than you’ll be alive, Vaughany.” No shit.

So, Have you Googled any of your childhood ‘heroes’ recently? I strongly suggest you don’t. Or do it quickly, to get the viscious mortality hit, before you waste away.

Last week, I saw our 9-month-old kitten run over, twice in quick succession, and lie spasming, dying on the road.

Not a good start to the week.

Fingers, named by my four-year-old, was a loving cat but none too bright. I’d seen her nearly hit about a month before (and who knows how many times it had nearly been hit that we didn’t see) and you just know that a cat with no road sense is not long for this earth.

So I collect the body (still desperately trying to think of it as a cat, not a corpse) from the road and bring it back to the house, not realising that my 4yo was watching from the lounge window. She’s waiting for me by the door as I arrive and she’s obviously seen what I’ve been doing. I cover the  head (seriously, NOBODY, not even me, needed to see that) and ask my daughter if she’d like to say goodbye to Fingers. Understandably she declines.

She’s sad all day, and the next day and for about the next week she gets really sad when she realises she’s “forgotten” about Fingers (her words). So, to remind herself of the good memories, without any prompting from me or mum, she pens the following (and asks for a little help with the words):

A happy memory of our deceased kitten Fingers, drawn by my 4yo.

She dealt with the grief her way, by remembering the happy times and realising it as best she could with the tools at hand.

So despite having to wash blood off my hands (not a metaphor) and doing a lot of not-very-manly things, I now have a reminder of Fingers which puts a smile on my face, thanks to my 4yo.

Today, one year after I joined, we are once again a Technology Exemplar college, and actually we are really good at what we do. No, honestly, we are.

Last week we hosted a TEN open day, in which we showcased what we were good at and how we got there, and invited other colleges to attend and share our good practice. While we had a lot of information to pass on, I personally had 3 lots of 15 minutes to show good practice in developing and managing the technical aspects of our VLE (virtual learning environment) Moodle.

Many of the ways in which I do my job have been inherited from the Lead Web Developer, as he was doing it before I was, however it doesn’t make it any less relevant, or less good. What struck me was how many questions I received and how many conversations I was involved in, where what I perceived as the simplest things weren’t being done, were being done badly, or were being overlooked.

For example, we have four people directly involved in the training and development of Moodle: two technical people (the Lead Web Developer and I (Senior Web Dev), as well as two front-of-house people (the Blended Learning Manager and e-Learning Coordinator). The technical people manage the servers, codebase, and do developent as required by the other two, who teach the teachers how to use Moodle to ensure effective teaching and learning are taking place.

The Moodle Development Team meets every two weeks, and to be honest, they are the best, most productive meetings I have ever attended. I think this is mostly because we are all peers with nobody dictating what is and is not done. (It is worth mentioning that the Blended Learning Manager has the final say as she is the business manager for Moodle, but as she responds to the needs of the teachers and the learners, we are not doing things for no reason or at someone’s whim. Everything we do is driven by the needs of the learners, as they are the reason we are here.)

At the open day, one chap we spoke to (in the context of a whole IT department, not just in terms of Moodle) said that his college’s IT Manager ran the IT aspects of the college as his own personal fiefdom, dictating what was allowed and what was not, regardless of the request or the reason behind it. Consequently the OFSTED report for this college showed that teaching and learning were being prevented from taking place.  Not just ineffective, but prevented. This is a very sad state of affairs indeed. (Please note that so far I’ve been unable to verify this via OFSTED’s website and I’m not naming names.)  Why the IT Manager is not puting the needs of the learners at the top of his list, or has been replaced by a more learner-centric IT Manager, is beyond me.

It surprised me, at our open day, how many colleges do not have a working link between the “front of house” (as I call them) teaching and learning people, and the technical people (whether they are Moodle-specific, as I am, or not). In one case, the people teaching and training the use of Moodle don’t have a channel to request new features be added, or even perform updates (quite vital as of the 1.9.7 release).

We use a code versioning system (called Git) to pull the very latest code from git.moodle.org (to keep on top of security updates, bug fixes and so on), and manage the changes we make to the code.  This way we can modify the core code to meet any needs that we have, and it won’t be overwritten when the next version of Moodle is released. Instead, changes from ‘upstream’ are merged with ours.

It’s simple to use, very effective, and I have trouble remembering how I used to develop code without it, however it strikes me as somewhat odd (maybe ‘unfortunate’ is a better choice of words) the sheer number of Moodle users who aren’t using version control.  Such was the short time I had and the number of questions directed at me that I didn’t have the chance to ask my own, but it would have been as simple as “Why aren’t you using version control?”

We also use the Ruby gem Capistrano to deploy our code to multiple web servers simultaneously and seamlessly.  I know very little about Ruby as a whole but the Lead has developed a number of bespoke in-house systems which use it, and it is simple enough to set up to deploy any code anywhere.

Possibly another example of many small things adding up to one big good thing, is our use of Linux. The Web Team (a small part of the IT department) use Ubuntu Linux on our desktops (three) as well as our servers (seven and counting).  The Moodle developers recommend a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) over all the other web and database server options, as do the Mahara people,  and our bespoke internal systems use the same but with the addition of Ruby on Rails.  We could use Microsoft products like every other server in the building, indeed there is a small yet constant pressure to do just that, to conform, what with all the Microsoft-specific knowledge and experience in our immediate team, but would it make our Moodle/teaching and learning/us “better”?  Just because something is popular, doesn’t necessarily make it right.  Likewise it’s not necessarily right because it’s less popular either, however the fact of the matter is that we use “non-standard” stuff and it works for us really well.

Example One

Recently we had a bit of snow.  You may have seen it on the news? The college was shut for one afternoon and the whole of the next day.  Despite this, learning was able to continue due to the college strategy of having (two weeks’ worth of) resources available on each and every Moodle course for just such an occasion.  Using Google Analytics we could see that although total ‘hits’ (logged-in page and resource accesses) on Moodle had dropped off to a quarter of what could be considered normal, the number of external ‘hits’ was up by 30%, proving that despite the snow being immense fun, some learners were going home, logging in and getting on with some learning.

Example Two

Did you know that even Technology Exemplar colleges get viruses?  Well, if you logged into Moodle when we had our virus, you wouldn’t have noticed, because like most viruses, it was targetted at computers and servers running Microsoft operating systems and software. We were, however, affected in two ways.

1. The account Moodle uses internally to log into LDAP to authenticate users was deactivated by the virus, meaning that for a minute or two, anyone trying to log in was unable to. A pain, but out of the control of the Web Team who have no authority to administer user accounts.
2. Our e-portfolio software Mahara runs on Ubuntu Linux, just like all the other servers, but this one  is running virtually via Microsoft’s Hyper-V on a host computer running Server 2008, which, you guessed it, fell victim to the virus and had to be (literally) switched off, killing one physical server and quite a few virtual ones. Mahara was off for quite some time (will leave out the actual time to spare some blushes) and it is a good job we are trialling it and it is not considered mission-critical.

Conclusion?

I’m less concerned that we’re exemplar now, but more concerned interested in how to do my part to ensure we’re exemplar this time next year, and one year is a very long time in technology.

Created by Oatmeal

Updates soon.

I get through a lot of sci-fi, because I read for pleasure and I get a lot of pleasure out of the fantasies and escapism which sci-fi provides. The downside is that I now have a kind of “vendor lock-in” with just three authors (Banks, Reynolds (who recently signed a £10m, 10-book deal), Hamilton) whose work I enjoy and have read, re-read and re-read again, so I have nothing new to read by these authors.

It is my intention to read a lot of ‘early’ sci-fi, of the Asimov and Philip K. Dick eras, but I find this harder going than more modern sci-fi, so I thought my luck was in when totally by accident I stumbled across a promising new (to me) author who I had not before heard of and whose books I had not read. The author is Kevin J. Anderson and the books were the Saga of Seven Suns.

Well, five of  them.  The last five.

I saw the five books at a local car boot sale. They are well presented and in good condition, and the rear covers described the sort of story I wanted to read, but the first two were missing. “No bother,” I thought, “I can pick up the others on eBay.”  So I paid for the five books and left.

But the chap I bought the books from said he had the others at home, and his wife (nice passing the buck there) didn’t pack them, so I went back to him, brandished a green beer token and asked him to post them to me. Call it an exercise in human decency. I stood to lose, well, a fiver, which I had already saved several times over by buying five books for £2 when the RRP is about £8 each, and I stood to gain two more books for £5 (or so, after postage and packaging) which, again, woould have cost £8 each in the shops. Whatever the outcome I was quids in: five books for £2 (saving £38 of the £40 RRP) or seven books for £7 (which is nice, considering the title and number of the books) saving £49 of the £56 RRP…

I suppose I always knew the last/first two books would turn up, judging from the well-to-do, easy-going nature of the chap I entrusted my hard-earned cash to, but I wouldn’t have even considered doing that back where I used to live in Somerset.  Maybe I’m not giving the people there enough credit, but I think I know the people and the place well enough not to trust even a penny to someone I met 10 minutes ago.

I love it down here.

Daniel Kennedy blogged his general agreement with James Clay about finding a middle ground between institutional control and the learner’s ‘personal web’.  Adapt and survive, in a sense (not that in my opinion the VLE is in any way dead or dying). But what caught my attention about Daniel’s post was that his institution is using Microsoft’s SharePoint as a VLE.

Now, VLE stands for Virtual Learning Environment, and this is usually used to describe one piece of software / web application, such as (to name but a few) SharePoint, Blackboard and Moodle. Other phrases exist, such as ‘personal web’ which has been used to describe the various web 2.0 tools which exist (and they do, en masse) used for educational purposes.

As James points out the VLE could be the start of the ‘personal web’ if more learning professionals were willing to embrace them:

From my experience, most e-learning professionals aren’t engaging with the Web 2.0 tools and services out there let alone learning professionals. At ALT-C 2008 for example, six hundred delegates who were coming to a learning technology conference, and of those less than 8% were using Twitter!

Is it a case of the educators being out of date? (By the way: twitter.com/vaughany.)

When I was at school we didn’t have computers or the internet, we had chalk boards and ‘copy this into your workbooks’. Thank goodness, teaching has come a long way (and hopefully, so has learning). Since then, as a teacher I have used the internet and VLE products to teach, I am reasonably certain, very effectively. So if today’s learners are web-aware (or whatever phrase you wish to use to convey a reasonable degree of IT awareness) and the educators are not, isn’t that the first most serious problem which needs addressing?

I was a teacher, but I am not currently. I’d like to make this clear. Steve works in the Faculty of Education at a university. I’m not going to argue with his wisdom which must greatly exceed my own. Other ‘heavyweights’ such as James (and others, just read the comments on the various blogs and follow the links back) are also professionals and have lots more experience than I do. But one point I would like to make, as a former teacher but as someone who now works to support the development of a VLE, is that your VLE may not be a VLE.

‘The right tool for the right job’ is an important phrase to remember. Steve and Daniel’s university uses MS SharePoint as their VLE. Wait… what? SharePoint being used as a (let’s expand the acronym here so we have a full understanding) virtual learning environment? I’ve seen SharePoint used as a VLE elsewhere, albeit briefly, and I was not impressed. I personally see it as a high-quality extension to MS Office: it has collaborative editing of documents, version control of same, the ability to group users into departments/sections/hair colour as required with varying levels of permissions and a ton of other useful features besides. But none of the features of SharePoint actually strike me as facilitating teaching or learning, simply as facilitating better document management and control, and to a point, presentation of said documents.

Calling something a VLE when it is not is a sure-fire way of undermining the whole concept of what a VLE is and does. I could call Notepad a word processor or Paint (sorry for picking on Microsoft) a graphics design package. I would be wrong. If there’s no learning inherent in the system then don’t use that word.

There is no reason why the acronym VLE could not be used to encompass all non-physical tools which could be used to facilitate learning, itself containing the Managed Learning Environment (SharePoint, Blackboard, Moodle) as well as the personal web), or maybe it is the other way around, with the PLE containing the personal web as well as the VLE… Too many acronyms spoil the learning.

My (further) 2¢: give the learners a structure which fits the institution’s way of working, within a framework of tools the learners can use, or not, at their own discretion.

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This, below, is the essence of what I want to write, but know that my experience and understanding of teaching using (VLE/PLE/Web 2.0/all the many and various methods available to us) is considerably less than that of most of the people involved in this debate, and therefore my opinion is based on same, but I still want to write it:

If you think the VLE is dead, you’re not doing it right.