Hi Andrew,
I read yesterday’s article in the TESS and your response above with interest.

My school ‘uses’ Glow. We have been introduced to it, given our Logins and been shown how to put our forward planning onto it. We have used the instant messaging app on it and, just like our children would, said hi and sent smileys to each other.

2 sets of my classes (P7) have now been shown how to logon.

They’ve changed their passwords successfully and have ‘looked around’ the site. They have found each others e-mails in the directory bit and have e-mailed their friends.

We’ve watched the West Lothian X-factor on it (although my class logged in indiviually as well which seemed to cause problems – my fault really, they asked if they could and seeing no reason why not I said yes!)

And so far, that is it. Now I feel I could be missing out on a lot of things it has to offer here, but I’m not sure how or why I’m missing out. I login regularly and use ICT on a regular daily basis, but not Glow. I understand this could be down to my LA or school, but no-one has told me this (and I’m not looking to apportion blame). I am left to assume that this is it for Glow so far.
By surfing around some educational links, I have found some fantastic resources which I feel enhance the learning of my classes. I have yet to discover resources or applications in Glow which enhance the learning of my classes beyond that.

I feel that everything Glow has to offer can be served better, by applications that are already available, often for free.

I can upload all my planning in one click to my google docs account (which is of course free).
I can get my class to work collaboratively using etherpad or primary pad for writing and using a program like flockdraw for collaborative art.
If I want my class to access a document I can post it onto our shared server at school, or e-mail it to them on their existing webmail account (which seems to be the one most teachers check still).

On a personal level if I want to seek ideas/support/resources from fellow professionals I can use my PLN on Twitter, read my followed educational blogs on google reader, check new links on delicious etc. I can share my planning with my stage colleagues either through sharing google docs (as I type this Twitter has just invited me to join in with a shared spreadsheet, sharing science usage of web 2.0 apps) or using something like dropbox or even a memory stick.

I’ve had a quick look at the National page with ideas for improvement. I found the method for reading the ‘forum’ quite frustrating until I saw the expand collapse icon.
I read the my glow groups thread and found out how to create a my own glow groups but this is a really complicated way to do it compared to grab and drag technology used on so many other sites.

I read your responses that suggest a lot of change is on the way and looking at the changes those will improve it a long way. I guess in an ideal world Glow would not have been introduced until it had been thoroughly road tested. I appreciate that as a national intranet Glow is breaking new ground, but the applications within Glow are often not breaking new ground and using pre-exisiting models for these would have made the Glow experience easier.

My experience with Glow, however, is that I can find better resources for using in my teaching elsewhere, I can store and share my documents more easily using other means, the areas that I do access are not as accessible as their counterparts in the non-Glow world and I can share resources and ideas with a range of teachers from around the Globe using simple to use web 2.0 tech such as twitter and google.

I would like Glow to improve my experiences of ICT and education. That would be great.

Cheers,

Robert

Hi Robert,

thanks for taking the time to respond, and for detailing so well your experiences. I suspect that for many teachers that regularly use web2.0 technologies, their experience and views on Glow would be very similar. I voiced my disappointment when I saw that in 2007 Glow didn’t contain many of the web2.0 apps that up until then I’d been encouraging people to use – the good news is that some of those technologies are on the cusp of being introduced into Glow this year, so what you’ll be able to do through Glow, and what you’ll be able to find in Glow will radically change for the better in 2010.

One of the successes of Glow will be it’s scale – already I’ve seen teachers do great things with Glow that they hadn’t done with web2.0 tech (either they didn’t know of it’s existence, or sites were blocked by local filtering), so leveraging this scale to make use of collaborative web2.0 technologies through Glow in the future will have a big impact on the use of technology and sharing across the country.

I suspect (although I’ve never researched this) that it’s between 1-5% of the teaching population in Scotland that are using web2.0 tech in their teaching – there are already more than this using Glow. What I’d love to do now is introduce them to the web2.0 world of sharing – Glow will facilitate that this year.

What Glow needs though Robert is people like you who are doing great things with collaborative technology to get involved in shaping it into what it needs to be – I’d like all those that have great ideas of using technology to make sure that changes made to Glow are for the right reasons, and that plans being drawn up this year for what comes after the existing contract with RM in 2012 meet the needs of Scottish education. If only a handful of people are involved in that planning, then it won’t work – it needs the thoughts of all of us added.

thanks,

AB

My only frustration, Andrew, is that you sell Glow’s success of being more successful than web technologies that, with all due respect, don’t have to prove their value, worth and ubiquitous nature to anyone, all on the basis of making available content and services that are otherwise filtered in local authorities. The fact is: the services and content made available are thus far less effective than those available in the free market.

Sure, more people use them within Glow because they’re available, but your inference that this is thanks to Glow is wrong:

1. The best web-based technologies are often blocked in Local Authorities
2. Glow makes available a technology that is recognised largely as not being quite as good
3. Considerably more is spent in time and money and personnel on educating teachers and students on the use of these technologies than those which live in the ‘real world’
4. Therefore more people use what is available and ’supported’ rather than the best that is available
5. Glow applauds its more universal uptake, an uptake that is in spite of rather than thanks to what Glow’s been able to offer.

In a very practical content-based example, my own blog isn’t readable within almost every Scottish secondary school – despite it providing one of the most widely read educational discussion points in Europe.

I don’t mean to be confrontational for the sake of it: I aim only to provoke a different way of thinking about things and a clearer explanation of the whys and hows. The five point vicious circle of deskilling I outline above has troubled me for some time, yet never been taken apart before. I’d appreciate the discussion (amongst the many others that are popping out my head at the moment .

For what it’s worth, I can’t wait for the next iteration of Glow to take things mobile, thus getting rid of the Local Authority bias reflected in their filtering and get on to the real beef of learning online: understanding how to converse online and exploit what’s out there in the most honest, intelligent manner.

It’s been a huge investment of public money, and that’s always going to call for validation. The fact is, many Local Authorities have now decommissioned services that they previously paid for, in order to take up the service offered by Glow. You can either do one of two things here – either get involved to change what Glow is, or convince LAs to take up their own services again.

I have no doubt that were Glow to be created now, it would involve far less at the centre and much more integration of technologies that already exist out there on the web. It would also involve a great discussion with LAs about what is filtered, and how we do it. Ideally, this would also involve a discussion around how our young people are educated to live their lives online, something that has been sadly lacking in the past.

I’ll reiterate again, that in 2010 Glow will contain tools that are regarded as “the best web-based technologies” (WordPress being a great example), but this is a change to how Glow works due to what users are looking for. Another change from SharePoint discussion boards to phpBB forums is also a direct response to what people are asking for.

I certainly hope that discussion this year focuses around your points above – as someone who’s been frustrated by filtering and the pain of training, we need to get this right in order to provide the best opportunities for learners in Scotland.

I’m pleased to see your support for the next iteration of Glow, Ewan. Whatever comes after Glow in 2012 needs to be mobile, and it needs to be personal. Let’s make no mistake though – Glow needs to be designed in order to reflect the best that the web has to offer in the future, and be adaptable to adjust to shifting technology. It needs to be agile enough to do this, and open enough for those inolved in the system to develop the technology themselves, not just merely use what others produce. Perhaps most of all, it needs to share the successes of what happens in learning in Scotland with the world – something that collectively we’re not doing as well as we could.

Thanks for thoughtful and informative post. I may be oversimplifying things here but is it not the case that the majority of Scottish educators (particularly at management level who still determine much of how we spend our time) will simply NOT use the ‘freely available’ tools? I am not sure why but I suspect it’s a combination of security concerns, longevity of services and the ‘hidden curriculum’ introduced by branding and adverts.

Thanks to all for such a detailed, helpful conversation.

Glow is being used in my school with about 15 staff (out of 70) using it daily and a few others using it less often.

This of course could be better. More staff could be using it more often. Some staff could be using it more effectively. This is also true of many other web 2.0 technologies. Too often Glow is discussed by some as a poorer alternative to other ‘freely available’ technologies. The fact is that there is room for both.

In my school more people are using Glow than are using blogs, wikis, wallwisher, classtools, twitter, google docs……

We as a country need to rally round Glow and realise how lucky we are to have a secure place on the Internet where both learners and facilitators of learning can collaborate, communicate, share ideas and resources, share successes…

I talked to many people at BETT last week who do not have a system in their school that does this, never mind in their country.

Let’s quickly identify what we agree on and work hard to improve what we disagree on. I am up for the conversation. I am fed up listening to the others (not those who have commented on this post) who are hell bent on slagging Glow at every opportunity without any thought to how to improve or realisation of what we can be proud of.

Glow should and will be better. But only if we all join together.

Hi,

I’m not a teacher although I’m married to one, my brother is one as was my mum and I know loads of teachers. I work in IT and have done for over twenty years – the vast majority of that time being in direct support roles. As such I’ve dealt with a lot of unjustified user gripes and a lot of justified user gripes.

A lot of the gripes I’ve heard about Glow are firmly in the justified camp. I have lost count of the number of times things have not worked and passwords have had to be reset, permissions reset etc.

If you are gauging the ’success’ by the number of logins I hope you are reducing it by a major factor to account for the repeat login because the email session has timed out during the length of a class? Or for the repeated need to login because permissions don’t work properly?

I would put the blame for this firmly on the technology you are using – sharepoint is a beast, especially 2003. I’ve supported it commercially and it is a nightmare for non-technical people to deal with – and that is exactly the problem that you have encountered.

Is Glow wedded to Microsoft architecture or is it going to embrace more open source stuff? Because I can tell you for a fact that the resources required to run a sharepoint site are immense – if you had the same functionality running on a linux/unix server you would require much less resources to achieve the same bangs per buck.

While I understand and fully support that the deployed Glow is walled off and thus safe could RM not start an opensource project to try and develop an opensource glow?

Regards
EddieH

Andrew

I appreciate that blogs and wikis etc are coming but I still find the main problem is with the Local Authorities. Ours for example is removing both GLOW Support teachers shortly which means they expect ONE GLOW mentor in a busy secondary school to run GLOW accounts for 106 staff, 970 kids, 1000 odd parents plus assorted hangers on from Council! Multiply this by 8 secondaries, 32 primaries of varying sizes and a rural area and you have fun in the making. My work/life balance is already out of kilter at this time of year with S4 folios, S5/6/4 prelims and the like during what is our busiest term. GLOW? No time to get the kids into it, no training time or CPD for staff not even the odd period at night showing parents what it could do. If the LA are not interested (but claim to be publicly) what chance has GLOW got of being rolled out properly and with the support each user needs?

GLOW has problems of access, usability etc but these can be resolved over time as new ‘widgets’ come in. What can’t be sorted is the total lack of local support – it should be taken over nationally and run nationally with support available from locally based teams(1 for Grampian, 1 for Highland etc?)

Sorry folks – haven’t been here for a while, so apologies for the lateness in replying.

Con – I suspect you are right, that there are a great number of reasons why staff won’t use ‘free’ tools. It would be interesting to see some research in this area.

Alan – I wholeheartedly agree – there are a huge number of things we should be proud of, but there are definitely things that we can improve. This only happens if we all get involved though.

EddieH – I agree that SharePoint is in many ways cumbersome in it’s 2003 variety, and that it takes a lot to support. Part of the reason for encouraging RM to look at open source solutions for blogging, discussion and wikis that will appear in Glow over the coming months is so that we move to a more ‘open’ solution, so to answer your question, Glow isn’t wedded to Microsoft architecture – there is I’m sure a debate to be had about ‘open source’ versus ‘open standards’ but that’s for another post.

Dave t – part of the problem with any rollout is capacity. If a technologicial solution is seen to be complex that will require lots of training, then I can understand why some would be nervous about how it would be supported. I’m a huge believer in simplifying things so that you minimise the need for training, and put as much training online in video format/help notes and discussion forums as you can. That way, those with little capacity don’t feel overwhelmed, and can let rollout take it’s own course. We’re not there yet, but I think we’re definitely moving in that direction with some of the changes we’re making.

[...] in his ‘reply’ to the January news features in TESS, Andrew Brown makes some comments about being glad that GLOW [...]