7 Signs of a 21st century educator. Having criticised the overuse of the phrase ’21st Century …’ , here I am using it, doh!

Thirty, Twenty, Ten, even perhaps five, years ago, if you had said to me that the purpose of technology in education is to enhance, extend or support teaching, then I would have said that that was a very perspicacious summary of the role of educational technology. Now, though, that view seems very old-fashioned and outdated.

In their early days, I would suspect that the role of chalk and blackboard would have been seen as enhancing teaching whereas when I was a pupil, they were seen as much more fundamental to teaching. The same may also be true for textbooks, at one time they may have been seen as enhancing teaching but by my time as a school pupil they were pretty much fundamental.

I would argue that the same is now true for technology, which was once regarded as an enhancement but which should nowadays be seen as fundamental to good educational practice.

I say it is fundamental for two reasons; firstly we have over 30 years of experience of using the technology, we have built up a great deal of insight and experience in using technology in a variety of ways. It is now commonplace and usual to see computers and other devices being used in our schools. As I have argued elsewhere in this blog, a good teacher who does not use technology is not a good teacher.

Secondly, there has been a subtle but fundamental shift in the way the use of technology is viewed in schools; in the past it has been regarded as a teaching resource ( a role it still fulfils) but in recent times it has become much more regarded as a learning resource. That is not just a play with semantics, it is a significant change; it means that technology is viewed more as a tool for pupils and students to capture, create and share their learning and experiences.

I have a third objection to the notion that the role of technology is still to enhance, extend or support teaching but this is one which is more difficult to express. If we accept that these three roles are the purpose of technology, then if the technology does not enhance, does not extend nor support teaching, then we have a reason for not using the technology. This then leads to teachers foolishly and narrowly planning or evaluating their use of technology based upon whether it meets one of these criteria or not. When planning a lesson, if the teacher does not know how the technology can be used to enhance, extend or support the lesson then they will not use it. Yet, this comes down to a lack of knowledge or experience on behalf of the teacher rather than a failing of the technology. It is often when they try to use technology or allow the pupils to use technology that the teacher learns how it can be used. Without that prior experience, experimentation and exploration, a teacher will often not know whether technology can be used. It is important that teachers are encouraged and supported to explore the uses of technology before they are allowed to reject it out of hand.

The world of education has moved on from where a single computer was the only piece of modern technology in the class. Nowadays we have to consider the world of e-learning, where learning is delivered online and the technology is not an enhancement or an extension but becomes a delivery system.

Okay, so this post risks becoming a bit of a rant but there are influential people in schools and in wider education who maintain that the role of technology is only to enhance, extend or support teaching and I sincerely believe that view is wrong and that it could hold back the future development of educational technology. To my mind, the future of educational technology lies not in regarding it as an add-on or enhancement but as being fundamental to education.

http://dougwoods.co.uk/blog/the-purpose-of-technology-in-education-is-not-to-enhance-extend-or-support-teaching/

If you’re like most people, you’re annoyed by passwords. You’ve got dozens to remember — some of them tortuously complex — and on any given day, as you read e-mails, send tweets, and order groceries online, you’re bound to forget one, or at least mistype it. You may even be one of those unfortunate people who’ve had a password stolen, thanks to the dodgy security on the machines that store them.

But who’s to blame? Who invented the computer password?

Like the invention of the wheel or the story of the doorknob, the password’s creation is shrouded in the mists of history. Romans used them. Shakespeare kicks off Hamlet with one — “Long live the King” — when Bernardo must prove he’s a loyal soldier of the King of Denmark. But where did the first computer password show up?

It probably arrived at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the mid-1960s, when researchers at the university built a massive time-sharing computer called CTSS. The punchline is that even then, passwords didn’t protect users as well as they could have. Technology changes. But, then again, it doesn’t.

Nearly all of the computer historians contacted by Wired in the past few weeks said that the first password must have come from MIT’s Compatible Time-Sharing System. In geek circles, it’s famous. CTSS pioneered many of the building blocks of computing as we know it today: things like e-mail, virtual machines, instant messaging, and file sharing.

Fernando Corbató — the man who shepherded the CTSS project back in the mid-1960s — is a little reluctant to take credit. “Surely there must be some antecedents for this mechanism,” he told us, before questioning whether the CTSS was beaten to the punch by IBM’s $30 million Sabre ticketing system, a contraption built in 1960, back when $30 million could buy you a handful of jetliners. But when we contacted IBM, it wasn’t sure.

According to Corbató, even though the MIT computer hackers were breaking new ground with much of what they did, passwords were pretty much a no-brainer. “The key problem was that we were setting up multiple terminals which were to be used by multiple persons but with each person having his own private set of files,” he told Wired. “Putting a password on for each individual user as a lock seemed like a very straightforward solution.”

Back in the ’60s, there were other options, according to Fred Schneider, a computer science professor at Cornell University. The CTSS guys could have gone for knowledge-based authentication, where instead of a password, the computer asks you for something that other people probably don’t know — your mother’s maiden name, for example.

But in the early days of computing, passwords were surely smaller and easier to store than the alternative, Schneider says. A knowledge-based system “would have required storing a fair bit of information about a person, and nobody wanted to devote many machine resources to this authentication stuff.”

The irony is that the MIT researchers who pioneered the passwords didn’t really care much about security. CTSS may also have been the first system to experience a data breach. One day in 1966, a software bug jumbled up the system’s welcome message and its master password file so that anyone who logged in was presented with the entire list of CTSS passwords. But that’s not the good story.

Twenty-five years after the fact, Allan Scherr, a Ph.D. researcher at MIT in the early ’60s, came clean about the earliest documented case of password theft.

In the spring of 1962, Scherr was looking for a way to bump up his usage time on CTSS. He had been allotted four hours per week, but it wasn’t nearly enough time to run the detailed performance simulations he’d designed for the new computer system. So he simply printed out all of the passwords stored on the system.

“There was a way to request files to be printed offline by submitting a punched card,” he remembered in a pamphlet written last year to commemorate the invention of the CTSS. “Late one Friday night, I submitted a request to print the password files and very early Saturday morning went to the file cabinet where printouts were placed and took the listing.”

To spread the guilt around, Scherr then handed the passwords over to other users. One of them — J.C.R. Licklieder — promptly started logging into the account of the computer lab’s director Robert Fano, and leaving “taunting messages” behind.

Scherr left MIT in May 1965 to take a job at IBM, but 25 years later he confessed to Professor Fano in person. “He assured me that my Ph.D. would not be revoked.”

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/01/computer-password/