The school is introducing a bio-metric system for pupil identification in the new College. The new system will  be used to register pupils, for use of the library and for catering use.

Biometrics in schools? When did this happen?

My initial impression is that the letter (copied at the end of this post) presents a one-sided argument of the use of such a system, focusing on the benefits. This includes selective quotes from the Data Protection Commissioner’s Office and reassurances that the “thumbprint is NOT stored”. Attached to the letter is a 2006 statement from Mark McMorran MD of Cyclone Industries, the company providing the system, stating “This is not fingerprinting of the type associated with the police”. That’s great Mark, but none of this helps to allay my fundamental uneasiness about the collection and use of such data.

Adding to these fears, the letter provides no information about any alternative should the parent decide not to give permission. They are simply asked to sign “an authorisation slip which should be returned to the school as soon as possible”.

Hmmm.

What follows is a collection of my thoughts and collaborative research on this topic since mid last week.

This is happening across the country seemingly without much scrutiny. Search for “thumbprint school” and you come up with a wealth of information on the topic, most of which seems to come from bewildered parents with questions and concerns. In March of 2010 Dr Emmeline Taylor, who conducted a study on surveillance of pupils funded by Salford University, was quoted saying “3,500 schools in the UK – one in seven [~14%] – are estimated to be using fingerprint technology”. In July of the same year a Guardian report claimed “Some estimates suggest that as many as 30% of all schools in the UK have fingerprinting technology”.

Parental consent is still a grey area since there exists no law, only advice, stopping schools taking fingerprints without permission. In fact, laws covering this are only just making their way through Parliament as part of the Protection of Freedoms Bill.

As long ago as 2002 Privacy International condemned mass fingerprinting of UK school children:

Privacy International says the practice “de-humanises our children and degrades their human rights”, and has called for the unconditional withdrawal of the technology from schools. PI’s director, Simon Davies, said “the use of such systems will have the effect of de-sensitising people to more comprehensive privacy invasion later in life”.

And on that last point I completely agree. In fact, please read that article, in it Privacy International strongly criticise the biased involvement of the Office of the Information Commissioner and the then Department for Education and Skills who they claimed were “equally culpable”.

Going further:

Privacy International warned that the practice of finger printing for the purpose of library cards was in clear violation of the Human Rights Act and the Data Protection Act. “The law states that privacy invasion must be proportionate to the threat. A few lost library cards do not warrant mass finger printing” said Mr Davies.

My thanks to Rachel Mawhood and Jim Killock in pointing me to much of this information. I wanted to use this post to spark debate, so please leave a note in the comments if you have anything to add. Thanks.

Letter from Crown Woods School, dated 11 February 2011.

And from Cyclone Industries:

Of course this talk has some bias because Edward is running just such a service, but a lot of the arguments here inspired some internal debate for me about the motivations of the different roles in creating and consuming online resources for teaching. His point about the dozen or so failed public sector projects is powerful for me (since at least £40m has apparently been misspent) but also it’s true that we need to make the most of our inspiring content and educators, especially in web education. Whatever your take on the solution, there seems to be a place for these types of services.

Edward’s talk is about what it’s like to have a startup in the education sector, Teachable.net.

The majority of your life’s education happens in school. However, there are only a finite number of teachers out there. We need to become more efficient with our practices of conveying education. Also, we must make the most of inspirational teaching content.

So how do you make more of the engaging teachers’ time? We need innovation. For him this will only come through getting private enterprise investing in education.

Before starting this service, he sat with his teacher friends who felt demoralised because they were overworked and spent too much time preparing lessons. There’s also a lot of reinventing the wheel.

His idea is to create a marketplace where teachers upload content, it goes through a quality review process and individuals on the other end pay to download it. Individual teachers are the ones that subscribe to this. Every time a teacher’s content is downloaded, they get a cut of the profits.

They now have 50,000 teacher users (consuming content). They’ve got 4,000 educational items of content. But what’s radical about this? What’s unusual? It’s the money thing.

Statement: Education is a noble act, it’s not for making money.

Often 20% of teachers think this way. However the BETT show exists in its current format because schools have a budget and they want to spend it.

Statement: Individual teachers should not be profiting from educational material generated around their job.

Sometimes schools sell their material. They can give the money to charity, split the money between the school and the individual teacher. Their model though is that they take 50% to cover funding of their site.

There have been a dozen other such public sector initiatives to start this kind of content sharing platform. Curriculum Online cost £40m, where public bodies and corporate companies could post content. However it was a complete failure. In his view there were cultural problems that were it’s biggest failing. The entrepreneurial culture is suited to run this kind of venture, not the committee based public sector.

Are we empowering a generation of computer literate creators or are we creating secretaries? He has a hunch it’s the latter. Anna Debenham will be talking about the current state of ICT but he wants to look at how to change it. See the BeBettr programme.

The curriculum is so poor, students are disinterested. They’re learning Microsoft technologies, Word, PowerPoint and other office related skills. This doesn’t excite anyone. It’s bad that this is people’s first experience of ICT.

BETT is a Microsoft/Windows-fest. There were no open source solutions. Even One Laptop Per Child wasn’t there. Aral will be asking Ubuntu about why he didn’t see them there. If we replaced computers in school with One Laptop Per Child he thinks we might see a huge increase in digital literacy.

It’s not all doom and gloom, the BCS are trying to change things for the better.

If the teachers don’t know these basics then we have a problem. To get good teachers you must pay them well, a quote he showed:

“they’re paying peanuts, getting monkeys and having the nerve to complain about standards”

The Past

Education is a personal thing for Aral. What got him started was his first experience with a computer, it was magical for him. What is the magical thing for you that makes you love what you do? Think about it, use it.

He’s showing us some examples using BASIC, the first computer programmes he ever wrote. He was happy to see he could make the computer do what he wanted. He progressed quickly. As a seven year old he was creating star backgrounds using simple code and making cool games etc.

Today

What can we do instead of teaching kids Word or Excel? How about some graphic tools? In Scratch he shows a figure of a cat that he wants to get interacting with the mouse. It’s all GUI based programming, you don’t need to code to programme.

The Future

Kids can start to code things in the browser today. He shows an example of simplified manipulations of HTML5 canvas. He’s doing pretty much the same thing as his other examples in BASIC and Scratch, but what if we get the objects we’re drawing in canvas to change size and rotation? Isn’t that more interesting for students to learn? What separates this from the other examples is this can be posted online for quick sharing with friends.

We have to make it fun, give them reusable skills and it would be better to use Open Source technologies. We’re not teaching secretarial skills, but skills that empower students. We must pay teachers what they’re worth and try to show the next generation that spark of magic that got us into the industry to start with.

When it comes to hacking education we’ve got nothing to lose but our metaphors. The cliches that come with childhood education are transferred to adult education. Hacking education is about reorganising it. He wants to talk about hacking the system.

Family and Kinship study from 1955. It found a poor economic world, but one rich in connections where people worked and learnt together. During the 60′s and 70′s this idea of social capital was eroded. E.g. TV has eroded our social time, the car has allowed people to ignore their neighbours.

That era might be over. Silently the city is becoming connected to the internet. The information layer as a representation of the real world is bringing people together. The School of Everything aims to do this. It brings together people who want to teach and people who want to learn.

Most of the learning they connect is one-to-one. However, they realised there was power in small group learning. E.g “Brain Trains”, peer learning on a commuter train with a study circle taking place. This was popular but didn’t survive the change to more open carriages when they were introduced.

A university is just a set of rules. We can recreate them in code. School of Everything wants to create those rules for people to work to. Hacking education is about simple interventions that change eveything. A sort of education jujitsu.

Accreditation. Can put people off. School of Everything is about learning for fun.

Biggest subjects for learning at the SoE are music, arts and crafts, languages and some tutoring of more classroom based subjects.

The problem has always been one of copyright and consistent design across browsers. With version 3.5 (released June 2009), Firefox was the last of the major browsers to support the @font-face rule. Before then, web designers had to use other ingenious font replacement methods.

Up until September this year my personal choice in font replacement was still sIFR.

Now, I know what you’re probably thinking… most standards-aware web designers would recoil in disgust at the mere mention of a Flash-based technology. You’d be right, in my case I had to think long and hard about whether to stick with this technology. It was a constant source of frustration for me and prompted much debate with my peers.

Why would I use it?

Flash is a processor hog (on Mac), it’s inaccessible (on Mac) plus some people actively block it in their web browsers (probably mostly on Mac). I used it simply because it gave me a choice of font. Something that, had I stuck with the developer coding doctrine of the time, I wouldn’t have had. On a blog where the minimal design is mostly down to my choice of font, this was important.

Thanks to the well-intentioned development efforts of Mike Davidson, Mark Wubben and others, sIFR is mature and manages to get around a lot of the inadequacies that other font substitution technologies still suffer from. Resizing is impossible with image replacement and Cufón, plus what happens when images are switched off? Then there’s the screen-reader-unfriendly use of span tags. sIFR text is selectable and it gracefully degrades to a chosen system font where JavaScript or Flash isn’t available (think iOS), it’s even accessible and protects fonts from online piracy, in that regard only image replacement beats it. sIFR deals with all of this.

What changed?

Web font services matured and started offering the web fonts I actually want to use, plus free fonts improved. With Fontdeck, Typekit, Fonts.com, Google Font Directory and Font Squirrel I have choice! Within two weeks of Fontdeck offering my chosen font Baskerville, I started using it on this blog. Fontdeck can even serve corporate fonts for those that don’t use something generic. Plus, the speed with which these font services are bringing new (and old) fonts on board seems to be reaching a critical mass.

This means the reasons for using sIFR are diminishing and it’s taking its rightful place as a backup to open web font embedding. Which is really what it always was. Cool! Don’t use it, seriously don’t… unless you have a very good reason, it will never be as good as @font-face.

So when someone wants to proclaim today as the first Web Font Day to promote their conference (#wbfntdy), I support it; after what feels like two years of wrangling I finally believe it’s a good time to say, at least for me, web fonts have arrived.

If you’re interested to read more, there are lots of great resources on the web, including: http://craigmod.com/journal/font-face/

These are just my notes, there may be inaccuracies. I share them because they’re more useful on the web than sitting in Google Docs. Thoughts, corrections etc, please put them in the comments.

This was the first presentation, by Chris Mills. It’s from Monday’s Web Teaching Day that Richard Eskins (Lecturer in the Department of Information & Communications) so generously organised at Manchester Metropolitan University.

This was the second presentation from Monday’s Web Teaching Day that Richard Eskins (Lecturer in the Department of Information & Communications) so generously organised at Manchester Metropolitan University.

The presentation was by David Watson, programme leader for the MA in Web Design and Content Planning at The University of Greenwich. See David’s presentation in PDF and PowerPoint formats.

Website Architecture

At the University of Greenwich Web (Design) Architecture is taught in the school of Architecture and Construction. Their course has been going for 10 years and the first cohort came out in September 2003.

Why bother?

They saw a gap where web design should be. 10 years ago web design was being lead by either the graphic of computer science courses. They compared this to architecture (it’s David’s background). The architect at the centre of the picture can’t deliver a building without the engineers and the web designer is in the same position.

Some key points

• Don’t be too specific with the course description, e.g. Don’t write “will learn CSS 2.1″ in the course spec. This will change over time.
• Don’t even think about trying to keep yourself up to date with everything. Accepted norms and standards can easily change. Consider your role as a team leader rather than teacher and learn with your students.
• For 10 years they didn’t recruit well. They needed to promote properly. They made a marketing web page, He even uses the website as a teaching tool. He came up against university politics just trying to teach PHP on the course.
• Earn while you learn (cheesy but true). A lot of their students managed to earn more money on their thesis project than they spent on the course.
• He’d like to provide more web business content into the course. He wants to interface more with the industry. Get students to intern in offices.

This was the last presentation before lunch from last Monday’s Web Teaching Day that Richard Eskins (Lecturer in the Department of Information & Communications) so generously organised at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Christopher Murphy and Nik Persson (the Web Standardistas) from the University of Ulster.

The Context

Getting into web design people either came from an engineering or design background. The industry has grown and we now have this job title called “web designer”. In their course they used to mix-in only maybe a small part of the other side of web design. So, a graphic course would have a small part of code and vice versa. These were the old days, but it sometimes still exists now, there’s a separation of design and technical. They call it the “nerd/designer continuum”.

They have a good setup, some of their lecturers are from industry. They don’t want to lose touch with contemporary practice.

Segregation vs. Integration

They have two types of course set up:

Option A.
The course they’re teaching at the moment. Mostly computer science lead. There are 11 engineering modules and 7 design. The content of the course is based on what the people in engineering decide.

Option B.
The Visual Communication course only teaches one module on WordPress and how to go “from print to web”. The problem with this is that students learn nothing about web design. They think they can do it all in Flash.

What’s wrong with this segregated approach?

Everything. It’s not what the graduates of today need. We need to rethink how we do these courses urgently. They came up with a new course, they ran into political problems (again) over cannibalising numbers from older courses.

Can graduates leave without learning all of the basics they need? No. No employer should be expected to teach the rest of web design. industry is struggling to keep up with client demands, they have no time go teach web design (but it’s almost expected by some educators).

It’s a really big list of principles that people need to know if they want to learn web standards. They use a lot of exemplars, Koy Vin, FontDeck. The lecturers also need to keep learning more.

They don’t use Dreamweaver in their teaching, they use free tools. Their course is based on a deep understanding of markup. They create a lot of markup documents with intricate comments. This is part of their role as editors for their students, they make the files more useful for the students.

The Educators’ Toolbox

• Face-to-face,
• Lectures,
• Seminars,
• Tutorials,
• Distance – using the tools at our disposal,
• Engaging the audience,
• Build communities.

They also have one-to-one time with students, including meeting in the pub. They scheduled a tutorial session between 1 and 5 on a Friday afternoon in order to weed out the less passionate (potentially time wasting) students.

I had a gap here where I zoned out responding to emails!

The language that you use in course documentation – they’ve been going through and removing specifics of mentioning HTML or any particular technology. They got to the stage where the engineering department wouldn’t teach CSS alongside it because it wasn’t mentioned in the course description.

Student feedback is important. Read the negatives and find out what’s not working there. Use the feedback to change your delivery. Ensure your teaching is fit for purpose.

Iterate. Sometimes lecturers focus too much on research projects. They don’t necessarily update their course content. Don’t be afraid of throwing away old content.

Q&A

Q. Have they incorporated audio in their course?
A. They have thought about it, but are not in the situation where they going to implement it. They do change content all the time, partly inspired by what they learn from students. There are ways to change content.

Q. At undergraduate level what are the top 5 technologies their students have heard of?
A. HTML, CSS, JS, PHP and other more general content eg. Understanding comics by Scott McCloud.

Q. How do you differentiate the level of the content eg for undergraduate and postgraduate?
A. It’s just a different approach rather than different content.

Q. Surprisinng that they’re still doing one-to-one tutorials. Greenwich has studio critiques, how is it set up?
A. One to ones are lab based.

This was the last presentation from yesterday’s Web Teaching Day that Richard Eskins (Lecturer in the Department of Information & Communications) so generously organised at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Andy hasn’t been involved in education since he left trent polytechnic in 1985. He’s unqualified in talking about education. He’s also famously unemployable so knows nothing about what corporations want.

He wants to facilitate a discussion. His son Alex has just got into university. When he was younger he’d completed an IT course with web design as a part. The teacher took them through to FrontPage. The teacher was convinced tables are were the way to do it. Alex took issue with this. He failed the class.

Andy’s general impression is that curriculums take ages to create, e.g. success criteria etc, and particularly in this industry the knowledge is moving a lot faster. We need to refocus education away from the measurement criteria, tools and technologies and on to best practice and ways in which we can teach students to be self sufficient.

Most people don’t study what they end up doing. Their final job often doesn’t reflect this. Andy feels lucky that he got himself onto an unstructured fine art course. Most people find that incredibly intimidating, a lot of the other students spent a huge amount of time in the life drawing class because they couldn’t deal with finding their own ideas and finding their own path.

This taught him how to stay motivated. We often accept somebody else telling us what to do. We need to refocus on how to learn, how to question and do things that are not part of convention.

In 1997 he was working in an ad agency in London. He then moved to North Wales and at that time he wanted to work for a local design group in the area. However, he got into the internet and he felt completely unqualified, he still does. He doesn’t think it’s about qualifications, it’s about attitude.

At a later conference he heard for the first time about web accessibility. He started a programme for 6 months where he taught himself good coding and CSS for layout. There were very few resources around so he spent months learning it for himself.

Over the course of the next couple of years there was a huge rise in blogging on such experiments. The stuff they did changed the face of the industry, they published it, they got it out there for free. Lots of people couldn’t understand why you’d spend months figuring something out and then give it out for free. That process of participation is what he wants to encourage in institutions. Let’s get them to create their own content, let’s get them to participate.

The people that are starting their journey now as students need to be participating in the industry, contributing to W3C working groups for example.

In his book Transcending CSS he mostly talked about attitudes to CSS and HTML. A lot of people said he doesn’t understand the real world. Over the fours years since then some of those ideas have become more mainstream. Two years ago, he wrote an article about fonts in IE6. It lead on to his new book, people said he’s barmy. He’s now getting emails saying he’s right (it’s all about websites looking different in different browsers).

Conventions guide us, but they shouldn’t limit our creativity. It’s about having an attitude and being able to question what you’re being told. How can we foster that? He wants people to push boundaries and question what they’re being taught. It’s less about what the industry wants, because all they want it what affects them now. Its about the wider community. It’s about getting the conversation started.

Q&A

There was a general Q&A, Andy didn’t necessarily supply these answers, they mostly came from the group.

Q. Whats the difference between web designer and web developer?
A. The distinction is blurred. They’re not polar opposites, just because you’re backend doesn’t mean you’re not designing, you could be designing a beautiful object in code.

Q. How much of this is instinctive and how much can it be taught?
A. Some of it is about just inspiring people. Mentoring. but how do you pay for the teacher’s time? E.g. Jeffery Zeldman did a website critique session at An Event Apart conference. Even people in industry can mentor each other.

Bruce Lawson from Opera software came to Skillsmatter on Wednesday night to talk about HTML5 (video here). What follows are my notes. I’m not an HTML5 boffin, but I did start to code a client site in the new doctype recently. Here are the bits I thought were interesting. To read it properly you need to understand more about HTML5. I’d recommend the HTML5 Doctor website or tentatively (I haven’t read it) Bruce and Remy’s book. Sorry for any typo’s etc in the following.

Opera did their own study of the top twenty class and ID names because Google wouldn’t share their results (the HTML5 spec was built on the results of Google’s research). Google looked at 1000 million web pages. You’d wonder why was this important, but e.g. The ID and class names are really important for screen readers. HTML5 gives 28 new tags (or 29 because one’s still being decided).

There’s no version number in the HTML5 doctype because in implementation it never really mattered, bowsers will render what they can, they don’t care whether the tag’s in HTML4 or whatever. All the HTML5 doctype is designed to do is send the browser into standards mode. Therefore it’s the shortest string possible.

Interesting, if you don’t declare a character set, Internet Explorer (IE) has a small but real security risk. The character set declaration must appear within the first 512 bytes of the document. Browsers also never cared whether you closed your tags, they didn’t care whether you used upper or lowercase tag names. The validator did, but the browsers didn’t. The browser also doesn’t care (in HTML5) whether you put in the <head> and <body> elements, the browser puts them in if you don’t. He demo’ed Opera doing this. However Internet Explorer (I assume before IE9) won’t style up a page unless the body tag is present.

He recommends http://html5.validator.nu since it’s the validator that tends to be most up to date.

I forgot you don’t need to close tags in HTML5, that’s just weird, surely the browser has more to guess? Surely the rendering will become less predictable?

* Actually, I spoke to Bruce about this afterwards. He said 70 pages of the HTML5 spec are devoted to telling browsers what to do when elements aren’t closed properly. Therefore any guesswork (not really guesswork if it’s in the spec) on the browser’s part will be consistent across all UAs. The only thing I didn’t ask about is what happens in browsers that use the HTML5shiv and don’t support HTML5, e.g. if IE reads the page, is it still rendering in HTML4? Do I still need to use closing tags to help it along?

The <small> element has been redesigned in HTML5 to mean ‘copyright’. It’s designed to isolate legalese from the rest of the content.

When thinking of <article> don’t think of a newspaper article (one per page), think of an article of clothing. If the content is discrete and could be pulled into another website it’s probably an article.

HTML5 can be styled in IE without JavaScript but you must know the DOM throughout. Bruce will post a link about this on Monday.

Forms

In HTML5 the browser implements standard error messages for forms. What I didn’t know was using JavaScript, you can intercept these messages and replace with your own. HTML5 is potentially more accessible since “built-in beats bolt-on”, if a slider etc are already built into the browser it’s better for you and accessibility. At the moment the date picker doesn’t work very well with screen readers. It currently depends on the browser and the operating system. NVDA and VoiceOver both work quite well with HTML5 forms. The leading commercial screen reader vendors don’t appear to be interested.

Video

HTML5 video controls are keyboard accessible. You can use a still image to represent a video on screen but there’s a bug in Mobile Safari that doesn’t show the default image. Supporting Ogg and H.264 at the same time is possible! For Safari you put in a second child video source that’s coded in MP4. It means you have to encode your video twice to be cross browser compatible (three times if you use a Flash fallback). Put in an Ogg <source> for Opera, an H.264 <source> for Safari, then a Flash <embed> for IE (before IE9). There’s a bug in iPad that means it only recognises the first source element, so where you want to include H.264, Ogg and Flash fallback, you need to include them in that order. Bruce plans to post his code examples for all of this on Monday, or you can review the video at the top of this post.

CSS3

There were lots of snippets of information on this. All I wrote down was the following: if using vendor prefixes in CSS, Bruce always includes all for the major browsers e.g. -moz- ,-ms-, -o-, -webkit- and the unprefixed statement, e.g “transition:”. Use these features with caution, you don’t know if proposed CSS declarations will be modified in implementation or dropped from the spec entirely (as “box-shadow” apparently has been, but it may come back).