Diving into the moshpit

The Mosh pit

When diving in to a mosh pit a person has to have a fair amount of trust that the group of people about to be squashed are going to catch him, after all a six foot fall on to the floor is not my idea of a great night out. Similarly behind every success there is a network of people who provide a vital role of support and action to make the success blossom. In the case of the Apollo moon landings it is the hundreds and thousands of designers, engineers, and everyone involved with placing 2 guys on the moon that made it happen.

Thank you all

Well, this year at Magicka and PlymouthEDU we have had a great year and this post is to acknowledge some of the amazing people who have contributed to that success over the last year (mainly because I can't fit it in a tweet ;)).

BGCFL

On the first day of christmas comes Brookgreen Centre for Learning a school I feel so very privileged to be involved with, a superb forward thinking school with happy students and a radical approach to learning and technology, OfSTED agree. Brookgreen have trusted us to guide them in ICT completely and trustingly even though at the time our advice was seen as "non-conventional" and "fringe". 

Thank you Helen for all the help with the delivery of the curriculum and total trust you have in our advice, thank you for pushing the boundaries even further than we advised or thought possible this year.

Thank you Sara, and the SLT for just allowing us to operate like a member of staff and give us the flexibility to change our working arrangements to suit the load, as a very small company this is the most fantastic gift and one we are very very grateful for.

To the rest of the amazing staff at BG, thank you for adopting the cloud, chromebooks and a different way of working over the last 12 years, you are all pioneers in education space and I use Brookgreen to proudly show how technology in education can be so different and fun.

Finally to the amazing students who might need help with a bit of reading, writing and sometimes social interaction, but are amazing when given technology to play with, fizzingly excited to show off their skills to guests of the school and amaze me everyday.

Plymouth City Council

On the second day of christmas, Plymouth City Council decided to retain the services of Simon after almost every other authority had made all their lifelong learning teams redundant to save money, Plymouth remained committed to providing schools with a connection point to the authority with Simon.

Simon, thank you for helping to develop a cloud vision for the city, I am sure with your assistance we can deliver a world class educational system in the city as we have often spoken about and dreamed of.

Assorted Techs and Networky bods

On the third day of Christmas came a list of amazing people.

Ben F, Shane C, Sharon D, Daisy B, Dan L, Mark A, and many many many other people that see the future and have a thirst for change, Just like a tree lifts concrete on a city street, these people strive for change in a world where conformity is the norm want to shake the status quo. To these people I say thank you.

...... The Amazing Keith

The rest of the Christmas days are dedicated to the Amazing Keith and my long suffering family, they just know why. Thank you!!!

Dipping into dart

Google GO

After spending the last 15 years writing Java on Tomcat  and Swing for the GUI interfaces my gaze switched to a new kid on the block that new kid was Google GO or golang as it is know by it users. After spending some time getting used to the new language I pretty much switched all my development to GO, it is a really nice language that feels fantastic to code in but requires a step back from the Object Orientated world that Java gives, needless to say I am a big fan.

Enter Dart

I started noticing Dart about 12 months ago but really didn't have the time to have a real play with the language, I was starting to rewrite some of my frontend javascript code and was considering a number of javascript frameworks including Ember, Angular etc, but the all made come to the same conclusion, it was the <flamewar start="true"> javascript I did not like in the same way I am not a PHP fan as these languages seem coughed up rather than designed </flamewar>. Dart seemed the answer to my frontend development conundrum, an elegantly designed language with optional static typing (yes I do like that java boy pre-generics see!) more importantly I was able to do something useful in less than a minute which is my golden rule for testing software (Blender I love you but you fail this test).

Simple and Beautiful

Dart has made design on the browser similar to developing in Java again, currently I develop in Intellij Idea 13 Ultimate and have two modules in the project called backend and frontend, these are a golang and dartlang module respectively.

Dart allows object orientated design in the browser and with the addition of the polymer UI library port allows custom components to be created in an encapsulated way.

The Future

Because Dart compiles to javascript there is really no downside to developing in Dart, even if the Dart VM is not widely adopted (I hope it is) you can relax in the knowledge that dart2js will convert your code for running on any modern browser.

The hardest part of learning any new language is to learn the "toolkit" functions that you take for granted in other languages you know well, and on that note I would like to congratulate the Dart team on some really useful well though out documentation it really is excellent.

So head on over to dartlang and grab youself a slice of the future today.

Selecting Wifi for a school

Selecting Wifi for a school is a minefield of choice and vendors who are "experts" in Wifi professing that their solution is the right one for your school. The biggest problem is that many educators and supporting staff have little experience of performance Wifi short of the type that came with their home broadband. This guide will give you and idea of how it works and questions to ask.

Here is a quick Wifi primer as a google presentation as given to an ISANet slam

Wifi primer

There are 3 real rules for Wifi

• How many radios can I see with signal strength > -65 dBm (minimum) as more visible radios means more available bandwidth *BANDWIDTH is WHAT YOU NEED IN A SCHOOL*
• More signal strength = more speed as the bit rate falls with distance
• does the system I have bought move clients to other nodes intelligently as the radios get loaded.

There are currently 2 vendors I use to meet the above requirements these are:-

Xirrus and Ubiquity Unify

I use Xirrus where I need Roll Royce performance and Unify where I need to fill holes or install wifi in an "Awkward" building.

When Dealing with Suppliers

• Wifi vendors typically send salesmen who rarely really know the "techy" stuff
• Always tell them that they have to meet and demonstrate they have met your performance specs (is amazing the amount of vendors who will not provide performance data after install)
• In high density areas ask for 60 devices all pulling 600Kbps as your worst case (this will make them go pale but you will need this if you are doing video or domain logins.)

User admin and history lesson

Sleepy Friday somewhere in Plymouth

On this particular Friday I am sat with my Zenbook flipped open running its customary Ubuntu Unity 12.04 with a terminal box open about to secure shell in to the main fileserver to create some new Teacher Accounts. There are three students sat by me who should be working on something that was set by the class teacher, but were generally chatting about non ICT related  topics. The student closest to me seeing the shell box leans over and asks "Wassat sir?" I explained it was a way to do some programming to automate tasks, in this case user creation, my response was met with a "Oh" and after a moment the young lad said "What like?". Over the next 5 minutes he watched as I showed him how to echo "Hello World" and a couple of loops in a BASH script, before the conversation at the table turned to the other two lads.

History Lesson 

The three lads at the table were now talking about a documentary they had seen the previous evening about a king who had been murdered by an assassin who hid in the cesspit under his royal toilet, apparently with a pike. I asked about pikes and the conversation turned to Infantry with pikes against Cavalry charges, with me trying to get them to imagine what it would be like with 1000+ thundering horses bearing down on you in a wet field on a winters morning. At the end of the lesson I went off to do another job and returned later in the day to help with the Minecraft group that ran on a Friday afternoon, to my surprise the three students that had been sat around the table in the morning avoiding their ICT work were back after opting for ICT for the afternoon, even more to my amazement two of the lads were looking at Cavalry and Infantry on google and the third was halfway through a bash scripting tutorial!

And the real kicker........ They could have been playing minecraft instead.

There's a storm coming

In The Begining

The web is undeniably the single most important communication tool of the 21st century, it was designed to use a simple markup script called HTML that was served over HTTP/S, any program capable of decoding this markup could render and output a pictorial representation of the page, in one fell swoop the swapping of information became cross platform and multi device.

Caught on the hop

The web caught many big players such as Microsoft and IBM completely by surprise these mega corporations of the Information Technology world struggled to see why anyone would want to swap their copy of Office 95 or Lotus Notes with a poorly rendered feature incomplete mess that was HTML and at that time in 1995 that's what it was, but what the giants of computing failed to understand was the fact that because the source code could be studied, copied, improved and republished, unlike a word document the cost of entry to the web was essentially low or free. No longer did some clever hacker have to reverse engineer the document format in order to remain compatible as all the changes were in plain sight.

Terrified!

Microsoft responded to kill the web by attempting to control it as an open format means anyone who can code could write a parser for the web and compete on an even keel with them, most dominant companies would respond in this way. For large companies control of a technology means you can dictate platforms, standards and ultimately the price of accessing a technology, the web made this impossible to do so it had to die.

Fast Forward to 2010

The web is now a secure and well defined technology with most of the major players conforming to standards and the search giant google forcing through new innovation in the API's available it seems the web is to be an unstoppable force..... but wait!

The Rise Of The App

The release of the iPhone and iPad brought a new idea...... The App Store, a convenient place to get programs designed to lever the most out of your new shiny geek toy, and place money in to the pocket of the App Store operator (Not that this is a bad thing. Everyone needs to earn a living). Before the rise of the App you could view any content on the internet with just a webbrowser, bbc.co.uk, cnn.com, techcrunch.com all webbrowser, but now each site could have an "app" all with different interfaces, ways of working and more importantly a way of charging should the need arise.

The app brought another restriction, the loss of the ability to view the code, the sharing of the way it worked all locked down and controlled for the few developers who paid for the development kit, each developer learning from scratch, not being able to freely examine each others work for best practice. The App non-cross platform making it harder to port software to other machines, after all it's not in the App Store provider's interest to allow you to port to competing platforms, The App store where the operator gets to decide what goes on it, and can remove things at a whim *cough* google maps *cough*.

The Web is Open Source

I believe the web is the new open source / open research / scientific method way of working, the web encourages sharing, conformance to standards and is inclusive to hardware platforms, it is my belief we should make the web and its supporting technologies the bedrock of our future education and govermental systems, as it is this digital inclusion, this technology, that empowers users rather than companies.