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Glowing news from Scotland

My good friend and colleague John Connell brought this to my attention today.

It involves the use of Glow Meet which is one component of the Glow Learning Platform that I worked on during 2006-7. Using this system an autopsy performed on a Fulmar was beamed live into Scottish classrooms and the after wards the scientist who performed the autopsy hosted a question and answer session when pupils were able to interact him.

See the article here on the BBC News website.

You can read more about how Glow is now being used in Scottish classrooms here.

A sign of things to come? I think not its happening now.

May the Glow be with you

Delighted to hear the news today that Laurie O’Donnell has been acknowledged by the George Lucas Educational Foundation as one of its Global 6.

I will not go into much detail here but it felt very good to see that Laurie’s work on the Glow project cited as the reason for this award and recognition.

I had the privilege to work on the Scottish Schools Digital Network (SSDN) project, of which Glow is a main component and it is great to see it being acknowledged in this way.

Laurie writes about it in his blog – click here to read and also John Connell has commented too click here to read.

Once again – well done to Laurie and of course the whole team of people who have worked on and continue to work on Glow to ensure its future success.

From Projection to Reality

This week I presented a Technical Brief about the Glow project at the Scottish Learning Festival. Part of the presentation included a few slides about the amount of network traffic that Scottish Local Authorities have generated since the introduction of the SSDN Interconnect some three and a half years ago. There is an often quoted trend which is that Internet Traffic level double every 1 – 1.5 years. So having collected data about traffic level since the start of the 2004, it seemed like a good time to see what the underlying trends are.

But First, what is the SSDN Interconnect – it is a wide area data network which connects each of the 32 local authorities and national organizations like the Scottish Qualifications Authority and Learning and Teaching Scotland to each other and to the Internet via the JANET network. The management and development of this network has been one of the main aspects of my work since it was installed. There are current 49 actual circuits which connect the participating bodies. This infrastructure provides the primary means for deliver of the Glow service – another project that I have been working on of late.

OK – back to the real business of this post.

The following Graphs show the traffic trends for the SSDN Interconnect as a whole since the start of 2004 up till the and of July 2007.

Click on the diagram to see it in more detail.

The fine detail is not too important, the blue lines represent the actual traffic levels which are plotted on a monthly basis (horizontal axes) and the black line which indicate the overall trend. The top diagram provides the detail for all the traffic leaving the connected sites and heading for the Internet and the bottom graph shows the detail of the traffic coming from the Internet to the connected sites. As you can see more traffic enters the connected orgaizations then leave them. The data plotted are the aggregate figures for all the connected sites. The lower graph shows that the traffic level at the start of the study was approximately 5,000,000 Mb per month whilst the traffic level at the end of the study was approximately 40,000,000 Mb per month – this is the total through put in the months in questions. So this shows that during the 3.5 year period that the network has been operating we have seen traffic level more or less double in each 12 month period.

Of course there are some seasonal dips and peaks which we might expect. Note that in the periods labeled 7, 19, 31, 43 there is a notable dip – this relates to the fact that schools will be on holiday between July and August each year – month 7 was July 2004 etc….. So the needs of education as clearly quite considerable and represent the main use of the Interconnect.

But the overall trend is always upward. I expect that this trend will continue in the future and for me it is good to find some empirical evidence that confirms the often quoted predictions that traffic levels will increase at the rates confirmed here.

For the future, I predict that, as Glow becomes embedded into the Scottish Education system, as an every day tool for teachers and learners that we will see an increase in the amount of rich media network based resources which are use in the classroom – that can only service to maintain the traffic trends shown here. But then there is another prediction, I wonder if we will be able to confirm this one in another 3 years or so?

Google obtains Marratech

I heard about this on Thursday last week and have been interested to know what implication there might be for Glow which uses the Marratech product as an integral component. Bottom line is that the some original indications that “Google has obtained Marratech” could be interpreted in the wrong way.

Have done some reading in Blogshere ( a Google search for “Marratech and Google” reveals loads of interesting and relevant posts) – I believe that what has happened is that Google has purchased the Marratech software for its own internal use. Not to say of course that this will not lead to an extension of the Google online functionality for general web users.

So “Google has obtained the Marratech software for its use by its employees” would be a more precise interpretation. Google has not bought the Marratech company. At least this is my current understanding.

Of course the fact that a corporation like Google has chosen Marratech is a inticates of its believe that Marratech is fit for purpose and robust.

I have been using Marratech for about 2.5 years now and have see the product develop. I for one have a fair degree of confidence that it will meet the needs of Scottish Education used when deployed through Glow.

For further information see this post which contains the following quote from the blog Google says:

“As a company, we thrive on casual interactions and spontaneous collaboration. So we’re excited about acquiring Marratech’s video conferencing software, which will enable from-the-desktop participation for Googlers in video conference meetings wherever there’s an Internet connection.”

Googlers is the term used by Google to refer to its own employees.

Jim

Lighting up Learning – Glow

I have commented here about the YouTube service which can be use to publish videos etc. I just heard that video about an educational project that I have been working on for the last few years has been published on YouTube.

The project is now called Glow and will deliver a Scotland wide education intranet. The solution which is still under development includes a Portal, Email system, a Virtual Learning Environment, Discussion Groups, Web Conferencing (video and audio and application sharing). Eventually, the user base can include all of Scotlands pupils, teachers and other people who work to support the classroom. It is a very ambitious project which is being implemented on a scale which is big by any standards. A key feature of Glow is that it is a closed environment which is only accessible by authorised users. Pupils safety in the online environment is a number one priority so this system is definitely not like other ‘public’ on line community environments like BeBo and MySpace.

The video shows a teacher (actually one of the project educationalists) talking about the Glow system and how she uses it with her pupils. Of course this is actually simulation as the Glow service is not fully developed as yet.

You can read more about the Glow project here

Click here to view the Glow Project web site.

or

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

It is currently planned that Glow will be available for use starting in late August 2007. I expect that it will take some further time before it will be fully available to users throughout Scotland. Local Authorities and schools have some work to do to setup user accounts and configure their networks to facilitate access for their users. Glow can also be accessed from the home too assuming that the user has a suitable connection.

I think this is a very exciting project that has the potential to allow teachers and pupils throughout Scotland to deliver and support learning in ways that hithertoo have not been possible.