I write this as screens are unplugged, seats emptied and boxes taped at the Learning@School Conference 2008 in Rotorua, New Zealand. As things wind down after the final keynote by Richard Millwood it’s time for some reflections on the last few days’ events…

My first experience of a conference, it consisted of 3 keynotes and about 8 million mini-sandwiches surrounding a large number of breakout sessions with presenters from everywhere and attendees from everywhere else. I spent most of the time running around on various tasks around the edges of the days events like keeping a slideshow of notices running and grabbing video snapshots of everything that was going on.

That didn’t mean, of course, that there was no time to absorb some of what Learning@School was really about. Teachers from all over planet Earth were there improving their practice, making contributions, nodding with approval and fist-shaking in dissent. Never have I seen so many educators of all kinds so fired to change the way schools work, the way teaching works. During all of it I wondered how long those inspirational ideas and people would take to filter down to schools all over the world, and if they could overcome a system geared against the major change called for in the present, and the dynamic flexibility that will no doubt be demanded by future developments.

I am in New Zealand! I’m here doing more work for Core UK, some for Core NZ and a little holiday on the side. Me and Richard arrived on Sunday 17th February and since getting over jet lag we’ve been getting up to all sorts. After stocking up on supplies and yawning professionally on Sunday afternoon, we spent Monday visiting Horohoro School in the Rotorua area. Horohoro currently has 54 children from year 0 to 8 (ages around 5-14) in three classes staffed by four teachers. We spent the day in the classrooms and talking to the Principal Lorraine Taylor, and while we were there I was constantly impressed by the teaching and discipline of the children, many of whom had special educational needs or were from poorer backgrounds. The teachers were unafraid to practice their profession in a way that didn’t seek to define policies or procedures, but was led by an uncommon sense.

This was the kind of uncommon sense that saw a child sent out of the classroom for misbehaving to walk around the grounds for five minutes, without fanfare or embarassment, and brought back in the same fashion, only to contribute to the lesson minutes later. The idea of treating these children as young as five as learning colleagues rather than subordinates paid dividends when discipline was necessary, and reinforced the community atmosphere of the school. It occurred to me that treating children as colleagues and masters of their own destiny helped them to become masters of their own learning, and as a result they were forming ideas about the reason for their learning beyond ‘the teacher told me to learn it’.

If more of this practice could spread to other schools we might begin to see less disillusionment with the education system when children become young adults and start making choices about whether or not to continue in school beyond 16. Allowing them to form their own reasons and aspirations for learning might reduce the number that ask ‘What is the point of this lesson? Where is this knowledge useful?’ with the implication that the answer ‘nothing and nowhere’.

At this year’s end, a reflection on what I have achieved over the past 31,536,000 seconds:

This year I finished school, leaving with A Levels in English Literature, Mathematics and Further Mathematics. Education dispensed with for the year, I worked for Core UK; building websites and designing logos (shoot over to somni.loquy to see my work!). During the summer holidays in July, I applied to join the Metropolitan Special Constabulary. I passed the assessment in September and training will begin next week.

In my free time, I began learning the Ruby programming language and wrote my first programs. I also played a lot of Halo 3 with friends, and designed and built my own website on loquy.net (inspired by and based on Julian Klewes’ Pink Growth Live! WordPress theme).

This year I learned a lot about freelance work and the professional world, perhaps more than the technical skills I learned using XHTML, Ruby and CSS. One way or another it was a very busy year, and forecasters predict an increase in activity in the year to come. More on this story later.

This is no fun.
While working on some websites for Core UK projects, I’ve had two jobs. The first is the design, coding and testing of the websites; something I enjoy doing and happily do in my own time (some of which you can see right here on loquy.net). The second job is doing the research, re-coding, testing and hair-tearing inherent in making basic CSS (opacity, the :hover pseudoclass) function properly or at all in Microsoft Internet Explorer. It astounds me that even the modern IE7 doesn’t adhere to basic standards for CSS 2.1 set out by the W3C organisation when CSS 3 is already being drafted.

As tempting as it sometimes is to rant about Microsoft, there is a serious point here. A company whose browsers currently occupy a 77% usage share is failing to support basic web standards that developers worldwide adhere to. This isn’t just irritating for employed web designers whose work relies on getting around the broken compatibility of IE, it is stomping on small web developers the world over; those who design for fun and find out they can’t show their friends who use Vista or XP. Microsoft spend millions every year on sponsorships and charitable initiatives encouraging the use of new technologies and educating people about the internet, and yet here they are choking new development with a poorly designed web engine (the same engine runs IE7 that ran IE4 back in 1997) and a stubborn anti-standards policy.

In closing, I must do what my open-source upbringing has taught me; evangelize about Firefox. This is a browser developed and distributed free that complies with modern CSS standards and is close to passing the Acid2 test for compatibility. Opera 9 already passes the test and carries many of the same features as IE. It seems bizarre that paid-for products like IE and even Apple’s Safari are playing catch-up with free software products developed by interested individuals on their own time. It makes it much easier to forsee a time when IE is a minority browser, with the children of Firefox and Opera (Operox?) opening up the web to people eveywhere with standards-compliant browsing for all. One can only hope that that day comes soon, but in the mean time Microsoft has a big cleanup to do on the mess that is standards compliance in Redmond.

Sources:
Internet Explorer on Wikipedia
CNET’s Review of Internet Explorer 7

Scientific experts have today discovered traces of blog at soli.loquy.net, part of the loquy.net website run by Patrick Millwood. “It’s early days” reports a leading head-case, “but it looks like blogging activity in the area may persist well into the future”. Cabinet minister for Interwebnet Mr Mark Luscious declined to comment, but government bodies will no doubt be involved soon in what is being seen as a breakthrough in internet exploration.