The sun sets on Becta

So the British Educational Communication and Technology Agency (Becta) is no more, euthanised by the new UK coalition Government's first round of cuts. About 240 jobs will be lost for a saving of around £65 million a year. We suspected it would happen, and our fears were confirmed this morning. Since its inception, Becta has been responsible for advising schools and colleges throughout the UK on how best to maximise the potential of ICT - information and communication technologies - in teaching and learning. But Becta has been a political pawn from the start. On it's website today, there is a statement reading: "A new UK Government took office on 11 May. As a result the content on this site may not reflect current Government policy". It leaves us asking just how much was Becta allowed to do? And how effective were they given the constraints imposed upon them by their political masters?

The Twitterverse and Blogosphere have been polarised. There are those who say good riddance, Becta did little more than impose a technocratic set of solutions onto schools and colleges who relied blindly on its advice. There was disquiet from some teachers that "schools often ending up with out-of-date and expensive technology" and that and did not have "the freedom to choose what they wanted, rather than what some bureaucrat felt they needed." That commentary is sourced from Rory Cellan-Jones's BBC Technology blog. Others mourn the loss, as if it were a member of their family - and when one considers all those who are losing their livelihood, I can see why the sentiment is strong. Among others, Ian Usher's blogpost for example, is fiercely protective of Becta's record, and points out several bits of disinformation circulating that shed a poorer light on the agency than they perhaps deserved. Then there are those who take the middle road. A brief blog perspective from John McLear makes a point I want to elaborate upon. He suggests that the demise of Becta will have teachers searching around for expertise, and this may ultimately lead to creative solutions, and that ultimately schools "may benefit from a slightly more fragmented decision making process inside authorities and nationwide."

A few years back, in his seminal YouTube video "The Machine is Us/ing Us", Mike Wesch made the point that the Web was us, and that we would be the ones who organised the content of the web, through tagging, linking and otherwise making some sense out of chaos - Teaching the Machine. I think the same will apply to the future support of ICT in schools and colleges. I may be wrong, but I think there are enough learning technology experts out there who are connected enough to join forces and provide advice for schools when they need it. Here's my opinion on this, for what it's worth: I know there is a danger, as Neil Adam has counselled, "we are in danger of islands of brilliance in sea of mediocrity", but isn't that the way Advanced Skills Teachers work from their home school - and out across their networks of schools, cascading their skills? Isn't this also the way Specialist Status Colleges disseminate their funding down through their network of feeder primary schools? I see the opportunity here for a modern day version of Illich's 'Learning Webs' where we help each other more, and through the use of social media, it is emminently achievable. Peter Ford sees a danger in our voices becoming 'lost in the echo chamber' of social media, but poses the question - does the loss of Becta provide for a new age in which OFSTED pays "more than lipservice to the use of new technologies in schools". These are by no means the only voices out there - there is plenty more commentary to come over the next few days I am sure. I will say this - although the loss of Becta is very bad news and I'm very sorry for those who have lost their jobs, we can either look out from our cages and see the mud or see the stars. I for one would be very happy to provide advice and support to schools who need it, and indeed I am already doing so.

Thanks for what you have achieved Becta. Now here's to a future where teachers help each other more.

Some other related posts

Graham Attwell How Becta's closure fits into the ConDem Plans

Dan Roberts Bye Bye Becta

Miles Berry On Becta's Closure

Electric Chalk Becta Closure: Blog Round Up

Glyn Moody Goodby Becta and Good Riddance

Stephen Downes Government to close Becta

Tony Sheppard Becta: Opportunities lost and opportunities gained

NAACE Press release

Doug Woods ICT: An uncertain future?

Gareth Davies Dead and Buried: How could Becta survive?

Seb Schmoller The way forward after Becta

Merlin John Becta closure stokes fears

This work by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

Never mind the quality, feel the width

Is Wikipedia dying a slow death? Will the one-stop shop for students soon draw its final breath?

These are the questions posed by the BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones in his blog post 'Wikipedia on the wane?' His post was fomented by a recent report from a Spanish academic who claims that editors are leaving the online wiki based encyclopedia faster than new ones are joining. The study estimates that Wikipedia has lost 49,000 editors in just a few months. That's rather careless of them - just where did all those editors go? What are they doing now? And where were they the last time we saw them? They certainly aren't editing Wikipedia's pages anymore says the report. And it seems that the crisis has been caused by heavy handed tactics and beaurocracy which is offputting to those who wish to create new pages or make changes to existing entries. Love or hate Wikipedia, you have to admit it is a real phenomenon, with just about every subject under the sun covered, and high rankings for all pages in search engines. If you want depth of information, go to Encyclopaedia Brittanica. If you want breadth and width of topic coverage, it's Wikipedia you need. They are both fairly accurate, but when an error was detected in the past, Wikipedians moved in quickly to rectify it. But will that continue, or will the website fall into neglect and disrepair?

The report, which also features in the Wall Street Journal, shows that enthusiasm (which let's face it, was the reason for Wikipedia's early success) seems to be falling away. Cellan-Jones suggests that without the 'worker bees' nurturing the pages of Wikipedia, and dedicated armies of enthusiastic and knowledgeable editors maintaining the fine balance between opinion and fact, the online encyclopedia may fall into disrepute. It would be ironic indeed if this was the case, now that Wikipedia seems to be gaining respect with its recently introduced new quality measures.

But there is light at the end of the tunnel - visitors to Wikipedia are on the increase, and it looks as though the rumours of its demise are premature. The solution has to be that more users need to become contributors - which was after all, the original ethos of the wiki, wasn't it?

Image source (edited)