I’ve been in the portal, but not blogged about it. To be honest, it’s pretty dull in there just now. That’ s not a negative comment on the structure or implementation of Glow – it’s just empty. Like wandering around a empty school. It’s hard to comment upon the fitness-for-purpose until we actually start using it for real. The lack of an RSS feed widget means that it also feels very isolated from the real Web. I’m sure that will be added soon though. Tess and Dave and Knox have got to use it with classes – that sounds like much more fun, and you can see from their posts that it has been interesting. I can’t wait for Glow to go live.

I’d have to agree with that. The first thing I noticed about the portal was the tumbleweed rolling across the screen. We’re having a session for PKC’s Glow Mentors next Tuesday to go through the portal (apologies to Lewis Carroll for that one) and I intend saying more once my colleagues and I have discussed it.

At the moment, I have to be honest and say that I find it singularly underwhelming. That may be because of the lack of content, but I also have real issues with the layout as it is at the moment… though this is (apparently) a known issued that will be addressed before the next phase in the New Year.

We should have acess to it at home in the New Year as well, and this will probably be when we start getting real advances in content and useage… I certainly hope so.

I think that the lack of comments which has been shown on mentor’s blogs should not be a reflection that people are not using and experimenting with GLOW. It is very esy to be critical, one way or another. The place for comments and opinions is surely on the GLOW site itself. Comments, which may be adverse and which can be seen by the whole world is not exactly constructive. A time and place for everything………….

Ceratinly it is difficult to comment on something that is empty, but I think I would have expected comments on ease of use, layout, prospective use etc – it is after all the functionality of Glow that the Mentors need to be principally thinking about, rather than any stack of content. The Mentors are of course first in there, and therefore the ‘content’ that the rank and file will see at the beginning needs to be added and created by the Mentors, unless I’m missing something?

Alastair, I couldn’t disagree more – the last thing the web needs is another closed shop – if the live web has taught us anything, then it is how easy it is to find free information. It is open discussion taking place in the big wide connected world that can make criticism constructive. Why work in a closed shop, when the rest of the world is open?

In my authority we have been advised:

“Regarding blog comments; while currently promoting Mentors’ blogs as the route to existing practices in ICT I would prefer that these are not used for negative comments about the pilot and that the LTS evaluation process is honoured.  Your readers will not be in a position to check for themselves and I don’t think it would be fair to criticise Glow publicly at such an early stage.”

My own views are still the same, a time and place for everything. I do not think that negative comments will always be construed as constructive criticism, however well intended they may have been. Ask a hundred people for an answer and you will get a hundred replies. Some will be in line with one’s own thinking, others not, and could well be misconstrued if the person replying is not in full possession of the facts. This is the position of GLOW mentors and their blogs. The world at large is not able to view the whole programme and will only be able to see comments. That would be a waste of time for them as the will not understand what is going on. People will get frustrated and possibly annoyed. 

Why work in a shop if it is not fully built and the designers are still deciding what the final scheme will look like. Leave it to the professionals to work away, to alter and amend so that when it is unveiled to the public a smooth working, polished product is on show. The world may be open, but this shop has only got its foundations and should not be opened yet.

Hi Andrew,
You managed to stir up quite a bit of glow feedback.
One of the problems is that the portal is only available in school monday to Thursday, I don’t have much time then. I have more time out of school.
Bob explained some of the basics to me, but I feel quite lost in Glow at the moment. I think I’ll need some hand holding to get use to the functionality which feels a bit alien if you are used to web 2/ajax stylee stuff. It feels a lot more corporate than most of the blogs/wikis/forums that I’ve hung around.

The lack of blog posts is the exact opposite to the amount of comment being made by mentors and others within the discussions in the glow portal itself. I have said a few wee things in my bloggings but have kept most of it for my comments within Glow. I am not being secretive, it’s just important to be able to give thr right messages to the right people in the right places and at the right times.

Where I have something to say in public I am trying to find the time to say it. If I don’t think it is the right place then I will keep quiet (this is very hard for me )

I also disagree with your authority’s advice Alastair. What is the one thing that will kill Glow? Lack of participation. Glow needs mass participation, and mass participation needs mass awareness. Tess has done an amazing job, posting screenshots and writing up her experiences trialling the portal. Her blog has more information about what the glow portal is really like than anything on the official glow site (unless I’ve missed something – please put me right if I have). If we want to spread the word about Glow we surely want to encourage more blog posts like Tess’s. Advice that says “do not speak freely about your experiences on the portal” does seems rather counterproductive to me.

The trouble is that we can’t actually interact with other mentors through the portal just now (at least all my attempts have failed).We can however, search for each other. Had we been able to interact, I think more people would be blogging about glow. I myself have to rememeber that this is the trial of the glow portal. In the words of RM, ‘This is not the real glow’

Thank you for all your encouraging comments on work that Dave Rawson and I are currently doing at Knox Academy

I currently have no access to Glow. Invalid user name and password and then account locked whilst I tried again. Have had a forwarded email to show that there have been requests and efforts to get it unblocked. I was able to see it for a few minutes on one occasion. The potential is enormous, so we have to be patient.

To be fair, Robert and Alastair, the advice from the LA does not say “Do not speak freely about your experiences on the portal” – what it does say is that blogging is not the arena for “negative comments about the portal” – this, to me is completely different from not saying anything at all? For the Mentors in Argyll & Bute, they need to be aware that the purpose of a blog is to create audience and share their thoughts and ideas. When out and about as a Mentor once the portal is live for the world, they can point everyone in the direction of their blog to find up-to-date ideas and advice. What better way to start than by telling people about the portal as you investigate it and it develops? If you’ve got something interesting to say on a blog, then people come back and visit more often.

Alastair – I think I also still stand by my point. One of the brilliant things about blogging is that you can explain something to everyone else – take http://pocketables.net for example. Jenn reviews devices that I can only dream of owning (sigh!), and her explanations are very detailed. I am therefore in possession of a great deal of information without ever having put my hands on any of this technology.

Transfer this to Glow – as an early reviewer, it would have been very easy to walk a reader through your experience of Glow whilst still keeping negative remarks within the portal itself. My point that there really hasn’t been much discussion at all on the edublogosphere should be a concern for the powers that be.

I think that even though “this is not the real glow”, Robert you are quite right in that what could kill Glow would be lack of participation. If the mentors themselves do not see fit to even hint at how they would use this in a curricular context, then I would be very worried indeed as to the success of the project.

John – It does seem a confusing environment to be in if you have had no experience of Sharepoint, and I know they are working on how useable the final interface is. As Mentors, you will be charged with explaining and encouraging others with how to use it, so I suppose it is vital that you all get used to using it, and then being able to enthuse about it? It is a shame about the availability timing, as busy teachers can rarely find enough time to explore during the school day, but I understand there are huge technical issues at play here.

Roll-out is not really that far away, and for that reason also I find the silence quite troubling. This is after all, the biggest educational initiative we have and will be the vehicle for ACfE (whatever that is, but don’t start me on that one!) – so like it not, we need to start figuring out how best we can use it…

It seems that you now have your access sorted out too Marlyn – I hope you enjoy the experience meeting new Mentors as well as ‘well kent’ Masterclassers?

It’s also important to keep in mind the purpose of this phase of the Glow development – it is primarily about pilot-testing the environment. There is not much point in debating whether or not it will be better once it has access to all the content that has been promised for Glow – at this stage, the aim is a technical (both in the ‘technical’ and in the ‘educational’ sense) testing of the environment to see what works, what doesn’t, what could be better, and so on.

This, for me, is why Tess’s approach has been so good to follow. She has blogged very much on the specifics of the tasks she has been asked to undertake, and has not seen fit to speculate on the wider aspects that arise when you get access to an early version of a system such as this.

If, on the one hand, we think it’s important that people are open about their experiences in the pilot, and indeed to blog about it, we also have to be fair and see it for what it is at this stage: very much part of the technical development process for Glow.

I’m all in favour of a technical development process – at the moment I’m taking part in such for both Adobe and Microsoft. I also agree that now is not the time for speculation about what ‘could be’, but I think encouraging people to post about how they find the portal (even in this early testing stage) is a good thing to do.

One of the aspects that I held (or should that be hold?) most hope for was(is) the ‘Glow groups’, and I had hoped that this would spark (poor choice of word) imagination amongst our Mentors. When something catches my imagination, you’ve got to hold me back not to blog about it?

Spark? Ouch!

I don’t think, in spite of obvious differing viewpoints so far, that I am being disloyal to the spirit of the pilot when I say that the discussion group navigation and usage is clumsy. It is not as slick as many discussion boards which are about.

As I have now said in several places … the Glow groups are not the only thing that will be available in the final manifestation of Glow.

It would be very useful if mentors with blogs were to start discussing the pedagogy and uses of Glow and its relationship with aCfE.

I didn’t mean to suggest that it’s only the Glow groups that interest me, but as they are there in the present incarnation I had hoped there would be some discussion of their potential use.

Relationship to aCfE? Now there’s a starter for 10… and what, exactly, is aCfE then?