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Life in the Office

I have spent a large chunk of my computing life in Microsoft Office.  As a teacher, I think it’s hard to avoid.  Tools like Word, PowerPoint and Excel form a sizable basis of the sorts of tools we use every day to create and present stuff to our kids.  I even have a few “qualifications” in Office, from a bunch of Brainbench certificates, to an International Computer Driving Licence, and even a few units from the Microsoft Office Specialist certification program.  I mean, if you’re going to spend a lot of time in these apps, you may as well know how to use them properly, right?

I recently had to create a few teaching resources using Microsoft Office 2007.  Office 07 is a fairly radical rethink of the interface for the Office suite.  The trouble with previous versions of Office is that they had so many features and tools that most users never found them.  Many were buried so deep in the interface that the average user simply never stumbled across them.  I even had an semi-heated discussion with a guy at a technology trade show once who was telling me that certain features would be really neat to have in Excel, and when I told him that everything he was wanting was already there, he argued back that I was wrong… these tools simply didn’t exist in Excel.  I showed him, he was amazed that he had overlooked them.  even though he considered himself a “power user”, he had never found some of these must-have features, some of which I thought were pretty obvious.  After I showed him they were there, he was a happy camper again.

So the goal in Office 07 was to bring as many of the available tools right out to the front of the interface.  That’s a big ask, since there are literally hundreds of tools and features in there, and while there will still be people who criticise the new interface for being too cluttered, too different to the previous versions, too whatever, I must say I think they’ve done a pretty good job of taming a rather big animal.  I found the new Office easy to learn (though I will confess to being a power user of Office software to start with) and the new Ribbon UI seemed pretty intuitive to me.  I’m really looking forward to see what they do with the Mac version…

The only thing about Office that is irksome is the price.  At around AUD$1150 for a full copy, it’s just way too overpriced, and it  is little wonder that piracy is such a huge problem in the home market.  Fortunately, there is a Student and Teacher edition (which is basically the same as the full version) that can be had for a few hundred dollars, and there is even a promotion happening at the moment over at It’s Not Cheating, where Australian university students can buy a copy for only $75.  Not a bad deal, and probably well worth it for a clear, piracy-free, conscience.  Makes you wonder about the sort of profit margins in the software though when you see these sorts of discounts being offered.  I guess Bill became the worlds richest person for a reason…

The other interesting development in the Office space is Google’s recent announcement to add a presentation module to the already existing word processor and spreadsheet modules in Google Docs.  Sure, it won’t have all the bells and whistles that MS Office has, but like I said, most users never use the more advanced features anyway.  For the majority of users, if they can type and format a document, calculate some numbers or keep a list in a spreadsheet, and do a basic presentation for an audience, that’s most of their computing needs right there.  Add in the Gmail and Google calendar features, and Google Docs is starting to look like an interesting proposition.  It also has two nice extra features… it can enable online collaboration on documents, and of course it is free.  Free is good.  Free is hard to beat.  At school, we just renewed our Microsoft licensing agreement for the year and it cost us about $18,000.  That’s every year.  As I say, free is good, and Google Docs is starting to look very attractive, especially now you can even brand it with your own domain name using Google Apps for your Domain.  I’m sure Open Office and some of the other open source office stuff is also worth a more serious look these days.

The downside of Google Docs of course is that it requires a user to be online all the time, with a fairly fast connection if it is to be at all usable.  But that’s becoming more the norm, and is probably not a big issue.  The flip side of that is that it makes all your documents available online, anywhere, anytime, which can certainly be a good thing in a Web 2.0 world.

For me, I will keep using Office for now because I do tend to regularly tap into many of its more advanced features.  But I can see a day in the not too distant future where even I might start to seriously rethink my attitude to the alternatives.

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Stuff and Nonsense

I was watching a Toronto breakfast show the other morning called BT, in which they ran a story about a school being selected to be part of a $15,000 classroom makeover competition. The school was Philip Pocock Secondary School and the live cross to the school on the morning show presented the story in a typical teaser fashion… you know how it goes, “coming up after the break, we show you the amazing results of a classroom makeover…”

Of course, this caught my attention. As an educationalist, and particularly one who is interested in the ways in which schools need to change to become more relevant to our 21st century students, I was keen to see what sorts of things had been done to give this classroom a makeover. As the show cut to an ad break, my mind was running wild with questions… What sort of cool, innovative things have they done to this classroom? What could you do to a learning space that might better engage our digital natives in the learning process? What cutting edge technologies would we see built into the room? How would they take the concept of digital convergence – bringing together audio, video, the web, interactivity, and all the other digital technologies that our students need in order to function – and bring these together in new and amazing ways, helping to define the direction of the classrooms of the future.

After the break, they showed a bunch of photos of the classroom in its old, industrial age state… it looked much the same as so many other classrooms around the world. Rows of desks lined up facing a blackboard. No digital tools embedded into the architecture. Just a typical boring classroom that most baby boomers would instantly recognise as their version of “school”. The TV cameras showed Janina, the host of the live segment, standing outside the room building up the tension and excitement with a group of students who waited anxiously to enter the room and experience this bold new learning environment…

So, what would you expect if you were to enter this classroom? What types of tools, toys and technologies would YOU want in there? If you accept that technology plays a part in learning, what would you require in the room to ensure you could deliver the very best 21st century education to your students? How would you want the classroom technologies to enable that room to extend beyond its own physical boundaries and let you and your students tap into cultural diversity, live global information, expert opinion and authentic learning experiences? There is SO much that could be done to a classroom these days that would move it towards these end goals… I was really interested to see what they’d actually done.

There is always a lot of talk about the sorts of roles that technology can play in creating “the classrooms of tomorrow”. And although the real benefits of any sorts of learning technologies will come from the ways in which insightful and creative teachers are able to use these tools to engage and inspire their students, I am just as intrigued by the part the actual physical learning environment plays in achieving these goals, and the drivers behind the design of schools. So it was with some interest that I watched as the BT reporter flung the door open to reveal the magical classroom makeover.

What I saw made me both sad and angry. Sad that a school had a chance to make a difference to a classroom – even just one single classroom, and they blew it. And angry because the pathetic excuse for a “makeover” was getting so much hoo-ha on TV, and that the people behind the makeover were obviously so damn clueless.

The revolution in the classroom at Philip Pocock school? They painted the walls a nice lime green colour, got some new furniture from Ikea, replaced the blackboard with a whiteboard (not an interactive one, just a regular whiteboard) and stuck a TV/DVD in the corner of the classroom. Oh, and put a computer on the teacher’s desk. I was stunned. They had to be kidding me… This 21st century classroom was just an 18th century classroom with a coat of paint and some new furniture! the desks were all still arranged in rows facing the teacher at the front of the class. The technology was still not in the hands of the students, and the classroom was just as isolated from the outside world as it was previously.

The reporter started interviewing the kids about their reaction to the room and they all were saying how “cool” it looked and how much “better they would be able to learn”. Pleassse!!! I could not get over how shortsighted and silly they looked as they waffled on about how wonderful it was. Nothing had changed, not in any sort of fundamental way. It was all just cosmetic. Nothing would change in that classroom with regard to learning or teaching.

I’m telling you, we need a bloody revolution!

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It’s All About Choices

Dsc00127I was on an international flight the other day doing a long haul across the Pacific Ocean. It was aboard a new 767 that had been fitted out with personal entertainment screens in the back of every seat. Last time I flew on this particular airline they had a single large screen that showed one movie to everyone, but on this flight I had a choice of about 20 movies, as well as music and games, all accessed by a touch screen in front of me. I watched a few movies on the flight and found it was a much better way to absorb the long flight than the previous situation of sitting through a single screening of a pre-selected movie that I probably never even wanted to see in the first place. In fact, last time I recall being on a flight with a one-size-fits-all movie screening, most people, including me, were not even watching it.

On this flight however, as you can see in the photo, there are a few important differences. Firstly, most people were watching a movie. And not the same movie mind you, but different movies. Everyone was free to make whatever movies choices they liked. The airline didn’t care what movie you watched so long as you were entertained and happy, that was all that really mattered. The engagement factor was high too… very few people were just sitting doing nothing. Unlike the idea of everyone having to watch the same thing at the same time and the subsequent disinterest level for many people, most of the passengers seemed to be watching a movie and staying engaged with the process. They watch a movie because they want to, not because they have to.

For the airline, the cost of upgrading the aircraft to provide everyone with a personal entertainment system would not have been a cheap exercise. It would certainly have been much cheaper and easier to simply retain the old system of showing one movie to everyone at the same time. Like it or lump it. Hey, you’re on the plane to get from point A to point B right? You’re not there to watch a movie! What would it matter to the airline if your boredom factor was a little high for a while? It’s not like you can walk across the Pacific instead right? So why do they do it? Why do they bother spending the extra money to build a system that keeps their passengers happy?

They do it because happy passengers are repeat passengers. They fly with you again and again. They like you. They tell their friends. They become loyal. They buy-in to what you are offering…

Observing all this got me thinking about how it might relate to education. In schools, we have traditionally had the equivalent of a single movie screening. Kids turn up to school and we serve them a syllabus based on what is easiest for the system to deliver. They all get the same content at the same time, delivered more-or-less the same way. They progress through the grades at the same pace. We don’t bother to ask them what they already know, or what interests them, or what they’d like to learn about. We just force-feed them the content that we think they ought to know at that point in their school lives, and then act all surprised when they become disengaged from the process.

We need to take the same approach the airline took. We need to realise that if we want to “keep our customers” – to get our kids to engage with the learning and to buy-in to what we are offering them – then we need to figure out how to make school a more personal, more relevant, more choice-driven experience. We have to offer ways for them to engage with content they are interested in, to allow them to work through it at their own pace, and to give them enough choice in the process so that they feel a sense of personal responsibility for that engagement. We’d like them to do the “school thing” because they want to, not because they have to.

Like the airline, it would be far easier for schools to keep showing the equivalent of one-time screenings of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. But it’s only a matter of time before our customers just refuse to fly with us because the experience is just too painful. We need to think about how we can give kids their own “personal entertainment system” experience in the classroom, giving them some choices and putting them in some sort of control over what they do.

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