I started the day with a session looking at the role of industry in the Universal Home Access programme – interesting how this has challenged and developed the services provided by the commercial partners.  The challenges for schools is also ’interesting’ – if a class of 30 children turn up with their own laptops what  happens next?  Does the network manager say ‘not on my network’?  Have we got 30 power sockets for when they need re-charging?  How does the teacher ‘cope’ with possibly 30 different laptops each with the software that the student has loaded (some relevant some far from relevant)? What to I need to do in my lesson planning to take advantage of all of this additional resource?

There were no answers today but the challenges are real – they’re certainly not an excuse for ignoring or knocking the initiative.  How will you manage and benefit from the programme?  From a social perspective the scheme is powerful and for the LA the benefits from being able to reach a cohort of citizens that are the biggest users of services is huge.  The potential for reducing the transactional cost is also huge – will our local authorities have funding released that they can then reuse in an education context?

The session on ‘School of Clouds’ was interesting – concepts of virtual organisations that are not bounded by time or place – with a call to arms, looking at the action plan as it develops will be interesting – coincidentally supporting some of Lord Mandelsons’ aspirations for HE.

Paul Shoesmith – responsible for Technical Strategy at Becta – led an interesting and interactive session on ‘ICT and Environmental Sustainability: Striking the Balance’.   Some good news about new building designs, but some challenges concerning the equipment within them.

There’s some smart technology from Cisco (and I’m sure from others too) that can turn off the devices connected to a network and even the peripheral network itself as usage of the building changes during the course of the day.  I’ve been in schools where spookily the lights turned on in front of me, and off behind me as I walked down the corridor but the ICT equipment was always on.

More to come, what struck a chord with you most?