Wallands Progress Report

This was the final session before the onslaught of Christmas and interviews were held with all the groups as well as the smaller group who had continued the project for a month longer. Their excitement remained and they plan to take readings on their mouldy and dry bread until the end of term.

The research team is very grateful to Sue Elliott and Maria Rogers for their help and patience in the project.

This session was a final session for the whole class in which they were asked about the key points that they remembered from the use of KF. These included entries about mould on bread and how it arrived and grew.

Comments were also elicited about the use of KF itself and how they felt about typing sentences that everyone could read. This was a useful discussion sustained for around 30 minutes which was impressive.

A small group of 8 pupils have agreed to work a little further on their experiments regarding bread and will be able to consult Professor Derek Lamport further.

This session was held with Professor Lamport who described how he got interested in science from a young age. He described some of his current work and what it takes to get papers published. He had also done some of his own experiments on food preservation which he shared with the pupils and was interested in seeing how the pupils had got on themselves.

It has still not been possible to up-grade the new version of Knowledge Forum due to protocols within the school system and this will be a major hurdle to overcome for schools who, in due course, will want to develop this approach. The pilot is uncovering such problems which will be included in our final report and which we feel sure will be overcome in time. We are bringing in additional expertise and are grateful to Toby Evan-Jones from Brighton University for his calm, knowledgeable and enthusiastic approach to the current problems.

Despite this, the class is working on the old 4.5 version of Knowledge Forum with some success.

This class is by far the youngest in the pilot and it is remarkable the way that some of them have taken to the software as can be seen by some of the blogs that are being written already. Both teachers and researchers are learning as we go and we are starting to pace the approach into 10 - 12 minute periods of activity which we expect to grow as the experiment progresses.

Work has begun on looking at food and how the Victorians stored food before the use of fridges. Two pieces of bread have been stored and observed in plastic dishes, one of which was kept in a fridge.

The first session was an introductory session to Knowledge Forum for this Year 3 class, the youngest in the pilot research. Access to blogs will happen a little later. Initial questions were grouped around the idea that heat (and the sun in particular) probably had something to do with the bread going off.

The first phase of the pilot suggested that we should introduce a scientist into the process at an earlier stage and this will happen on 18th October at Wallands when the group will be joined by Professor Derek Lamport. Meanwhile, the class will explore their initial hypothesis further and will begin to post notes to their Knowledge Forum page.