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My earliest memory is of the white trellis over the front door - I was lying on my back in the pram and gazing up at it!

I also remember playing in the newly laid tarmac round the corner and getting told off when I got home for getting tar on my shoes.

We moved as a family to Dumfries in Scotland, since my father, Richard senior,  was offered a good package to work in the Imperial Chemical Industries Plastics Division there as an inspector. My mother, Elizabeth senior, raised us four children ( Elizabeth was born in 1954, Seán in 1957 and Bridget was born in 1963), but returned to teaching as we became old enough.

Reflection: The girl who lived next door to my house, was sitting next to me in class when she heard that she would not be joining me in grammar school. Watching her tears began a realisation of the failure to value individual perspectives when educational selection is used to stream children, but also a more general desire to value individuals regardless of educational attainment. In spite of this, all my sons were selected for the schools they attended!

I joined Miss Mill's class in P1 and remember writing on slates, using Cuisenaire rods and tripping Rosemary Farries as she walked past my desk - I was smacked on the hand with a ruler as punishment for that.

In the playground I was afraid of one boy in my class and avoided him by endlessly playing 'Japs and Commandos' - making annoying machine-gun sounds to kill each other.

P2, P3 and P4 are very difficult to remember, although I could place the rooms in the building!

My most rewarding learning memory came from P5, when the teacher, Miss Lawson, drew a straight line on the chalk board and invited us to divide it exactly in two by compass and straight-edge method - I imagined and volunteered a solution without being taught (as far as I know) and proudly demonstrated it to the whole class.

I enjoyed being 'milk monitor' helping to carry the crate of third-pint glass bottles to the class mid-morning - if I was lucky there would be one left over so I could have two!

I remember believing strongly in my abilities, reinforced by success and building ever stronger confidence. I was also aware of children who were much slower, but didn't understand why.

In September 1966 I skipped P6, moving from P5 to P7 to 'catch up' with my age/ability peers. It meant missing Miss Harkness' year, who specialised in humanities subjects to my detriment.

It came as a shock to come 29th= at the end of the first term in P7 with Mr Davidson (also the headteacher), having lead all my classes so far, but I was reassured to come 2nd= in the third term and passed the 11+ test to be admitted to the selective grammar school, Dumfries Academy Secondary.

Reflection: The experience of the tawse, and especially the effect on my friend, not only cemented an opposition to corporal punishment, but set in train a critique of the system itself.

I also played rugby, the french horn, sang in the choir and dabbled in the debating society.

My strongest memory is of being reported by a prefect for talking in prayers (hadn't started, so I thought it OK). I was strapped on the hand with a tawse, as was my friend who then proceeded to faint in the playground as we made our way to the next lesson. Suffering from blood pressure issues, the tawse had triggered a physiological reaction.

I also played rugby and badminton. A highlight of the year came at the end, going on an activity week in Hay-on-Wye in the Black Mountains of Wales and enjoying camping, horse-riding, abseiling, caving and canoeing.

Reflection: Physics lab sessions made me angry with their expectations of repetition of the 'grand experiments', with little scope for my own inquiry.

Reflection: The Neurobiology module introduced me to ideas of neural plasticity - then a relatively new concept - which gave me the belief that learning was not limited by age nor fixed by genetics.

Reflection: War & Science encouraged me to think more freely about ethical and moral issues in science research and to develop discursive writing, otherwise absent in a degree focussing on mathematics and science.

Reflection: I failed Advanced Computing by being overambitious with a project to create four part harmony - I got stuck on the printing of musical notes on a line printer, by using arrays of characters for each note, a tough enough project in its own right. This gave me an early insight into the challenge of engineering software and managing software projects effectively.

Reflection: Games, Decisions and Gambling was the only module I studied which offered me pre-prepared printed notes at the start of each lecture, before a dialogic lecturing style based on those notes and the problems they described. This approach to teaching was completely new, making me think about resource-based learning and to see how wasteful most lecture-based teaching was, where our aim was to simply keep up with writing notes verbatim from the board. The freedom and creativity to think about the lecturer's material was very welcome and caused me to consider the concept of effectiveness in teaching.

After the first two years of my degree, it was clear that I should diversify in my third year, as pure mathematics failed to satisfy my growing curiosity about a wider world.

Luckily the modular scheme that King's College offered allowed me to create a rich year of study complementing the mathematics and physics required of me with modules in Neurobiology in the Biology Department, War & Science in the History Department, Advanced Computing in the Computer Science Department and Games Decisions & Gambling in the London School of Economics across the Strand.

Reflection: The challenges of teaching mixed ability groups started me thinking about learner-centredness, negotiated learning, differentiation and how the curriculum could be collaboratively developed  by practicing teachers.

I took this post directly after graduation without any clue of what to do nor any teaching qualification or preparation.

I had been recommended to the post by a friend who was leaving the same job in order to travel.

It was in this post that I first encountered the Secondary Mathematics Individualised Learning Experiment (SMILE) through conversations and meetings with colleague Alistair Buckenham at the school and acquaintance Dylan Wiliam, who was working at a neighbouring school.  By the end of the year I was committed to teaching and searched for my next post at a comprehensive school with mixed-ability teaching as a central goal.

Aim: To design improvements to mathematics education practice.

I took this post in order to pursue my new found interest in teaching in a comprehensive and mixed ability setting.

The Mathematics department, led by Keith Philip adopted the Heinemann Modular Mathematics scheme - a limited flexibility mixed ability resource-based learning curriculum. Oleg Liber, a colleague in the school, led a vigorous debate around switching to the Secondary Mathematics Individualised Learning Experiment (SMILE), but the consensus in the department was to remain with the existing scheme. Oleg Liber left after my first year to pursue his passion at Stockwell Manor school.

In my second year, I took additional responsibility for teaching Computer Studies and helped develop a Mode 3 CSE syllabus and examination with teachers from local schools. I also joined professional development courses run by the Inner London Educational Computing Centre (ILECC), based at the City of London Polytechnic.

Reflection: Developing examinations led to an interest in the design of objective tests - multiple choice questions - and I began to see the value of building reliable banks of such questions for testing factual knowledge.

In this period I taught programming with BASIC (Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Interaction Code) and CESIL (a simplified assembly language). The BASIC work was achieved by marking the code for each character on 80-column cards. The cards were sent to ILECC and returned by motorcycle courier a week later. This introduced me to the idea of a learning loop, in this case a week long before another cycle could begin! Some work was also done using the teletype connected by acoustic coupler modem to the City of London Polytechnic minicomputer.

In my third year I took a much greater interest in programming when the school was encouraged to purchase a Research Machines 380z microcomputer. This found its way home with me each weekend whenever possible. Using it, I constructed a simulation of a snooker ball which used dynamic graphics to show the path it would take once given a bearing and cue strength - the aim was to pocket the ball.

Reflection: Observing children using my snooker program for fun, showed me how engaging simulations could be and how they could drive mathematical inquiry. Pupils would search the cupboard for a protractor to hold up against the screen, and, as they continued to try and pocket the ball, a non-judgmental learning-loop occurred, later cemented by reading David Hargreaves ideas (Hargreaves, 1975) where their attempts drove an understanding of bearings. My analysis [A1] Expressive constructivism is rooted in this experience which also informed [A2] How can technology enhance learning.

As the year progressed I became involved with the Microcomputers in Computer Education (MICE) group which tried to develop new software which used the new dynamic graphics capability of microcomputers to explain and explore computing concepts. I was now fully involved in my spare time designing educational software and begun looking for a job which could fulfil this new-found passion. I signed up for a course run at the Polytechnic of the South Bank by Dr Morfydd Edwards - her lectures and workshops brought the current research into the field, particularly that of the National Development Programme for Computer Assisted Learning (NDPCAL) (Hooper, 1978; Millwood, 1987 p8) into an effective relationship with practical design, development approaches and skills.

Also in this year I undertook to create a summary analysis of the curriculum offered by the school in terms of the resources allocated to each subject area.

Reflection: The task of creating a whole school curriculum analysis brought me into direct contact with the school's management and permitted me to gain insight into a holistic view of a school's organisation.

Contribution: I led the teaching and development of Computer Studies in the school working with colleagues in the local authority, developing Mode 3 syllabus and examination. I independently developed the Snooker learning software for mathematics and for computer studies and was solely responsible for creating a curriculum analysis for the whole school. My part: 100%

Originality, impact and importance: The software developed, Snooker, was in its time completely original as a design for learning and foreshadowed many interactive graphic simulations to come. It was published later and was widely used in schools in the 1980s (SMILE, 1984).

Aim: To develop new ways to teach computer studies using animated visualisations.

Reflection: My own program was intended to visually simulate the layout and operations of the central processing unit of a computer and would respond to CESIL programs. My intention was to bring these to life in a 'revelatory' mode (Millwood 1987) and relate them visually to the computer hardware.

Contribution: The design and development of educational software and the critique of others' designs. My part: 20%  (with the members of the group)

Orginality, impact and importance: Although there was a growing interest in teaching programming concepts through animations in higher education, it was new to be focussing such innovation on secondary school. Our work made impact on the practice of colleagues in the Inner London Education Authority and at the time was considered a vital part of the development of teaching computer studies there. Its work was reported regularly in the newsletter distributed to computer studies teachers in London by the advisory service.

Each of us developed a program to help with teaching computing.

My proposal was based on the teaching of the computer language CESIL, which was intended to be a simplified assembly language. An assembly language consisted of a set of short terms made up of alphabetic letters. Each term formed a cryptic mnemonic name for each operation instead of the computer's numeric or binary codes, thus making it easier to understand programs. Nevertheless this was low-level programming, matched to the central processing unit architecture rather than the high-level problem-related languages such as BASIC, COBOL, Fortran and Pascal.

Course tutors included:

Course leaders - Derek Esterson and Brian Weaver

Biology - Jenny Denham (latterly Preece)

Chemistry - Keith Shaw

Physics - David Squires

Geography - Ifan Sheperd

Mathematics - Rosemary Fraser

This course led by Morfydd Edwards and Susan Eisenbach introduced me to the evaluation outcomes of the National Development Programme in Computer Assisted Learning (NDPCAL). Although that project had been at higher education level, the evaluation findings proposed four categories of computer use which might support learning: instructional, revelatory, conjectural and emancipatory. This offered me an early practical analysis to inform my own designs.

This flyer summarises the course:

"This course is intended for teachers who already have some knowledge of programming in BASIC.

Guidance will be given in producing computer-based teaching material in the participant's own subject area, e.g. Business Studies, Social Studies and Economics.

The design of interactive graphics programs will be a major feature of the course.

Computing systems employed will include: HP 2000F, Systime, 380Z, PDP11/40 and DEC10.

NOTE: If you are interested in teaching using microcomputers, but do not have the pre-requisite knowledge of BASIC, it may be possible for the Polytechnic to offer again an Introductory Course in BASIC Programming in the Summer Term."

The programme of sessions was:

My notes on publications I might read include:

'Introduction to Educational Computing', Rushby, Groom H 1979

'CAL in Science and Maths', Beech

'CAL News', Council for Educational Technology

'Computer Education'

Reflection: I didn't get this post, but the extended interview process confirmed that educational computing was the career for me thanks to the useful dialogue with Rosemary Fraser and Hugh Burkhardt.

This final interview at the Shell Centre, University of Nottingham was for one of two Science Research Council funded research fellow positions working with the Investigations into Teaching with Microcomputer as an Aid (ITMA) project, after an earlier interview in Plymouth at the College of St Mark and St John, where ITMA was based.

ITMA at the time was one of only two UK independent, research-based projects developing school educational software and in the end, I won a post at the other, to work for the Computers in the Curriculum project at Chelsea College, London.

The two research fellows appointed at ITMA were in fact David Benzie and Jon Coupland - worthy winners and friends throughout their careers!

Aim: To establish design leadership for teams of programmers developing computer assisted learning for secondary age students.

I was the first employee at the Computers in the Curriculum project to be hired as a programmer, their earlier programs having been developed by teachers, lecturers and helpers.

I took this post after applying for two others in the field for which I was shortlisted, firstly for the ITMA Research Fellow,  and secondly to have been research asssistant at the Polytechnic of the South Bank working with Morfydd Edwards. I didn't get the first and declined the second in favour of the job in the Computers in the Curriculum Project, which offered greater scope and prestige as well as a longer contract!

Reflection: The design challenge of taking a finished piece of software and make it work in a quite different interactive graphical environment was a real foundation for understanding the interoperability issues and design questions for educational software.

My first challenge was to acclimatise to the more laid-back HE sector as a researcher after working as a teacher in school. My work was to take programs developed for minicomputers to output onto teletype which were distributed on paper tape, and make them suitable for use on microcomputers with 'glass-teletype' screens. As graphics capabilities became more widely available, we began to develop more interesting and visually clear outputs, often graphs, but increasingly diagrams and visualisations.

Reflection: The design of simulations that invited students to make decisions and evaluate consequences was based on innovative and learner-centred pedagogy.

In 1981, the establishment of the Microelectronics Education Programme (MEP) (Fothergill, 1981) by the government led to a large investment in the development of software by our project. This meant the expansion of our software team and our whole enterprise.

I was attached to several groups of teachers to develop simulations, notably the Economics 14-16 group (based in Stoke-on-Trent) and the History 13-16 group (based in Leeds). My activity was to develop software that responded to the teachers' ideas and specifications and that was suitable for the range of microcomputers becoming available to schools. I became responsible for the 'Subroutine Library' designed to offer an interoperable framework for development amongst a team of a dozen programmers.

Reflection: Teaching programming to adults in the context of their development as computer studies teachers caused me to consider the pedagogy of computing afresh with considerably more articulate and educationally aware students. Together with discussions with colleagues I developed a lifelong interest in the role of computing as a subject for learners. My widening role as a higher education lecturer at Masters level gave a broader view of the educational computing scene beyond the merely technical and towards a social, cultural and systemic understanding. As a lecturer in Mathematics Education, I was regularly visiting schools and engage in debate with practitioners so that I could keep my feet on the ground.

In the middle of this decade I was invited to teach programming as part of a new Diploma course to re-train a range of subject specialist teachers to take responsibility for  Computer Studies. In turn this led to greater involvement in the Post Graduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) programmes, and finally I took on the rôle of Mathematics Education lecturer for part of my time and also designed and delivered a Masters module on the Social Context of Educational Computing.

Reflection: The role of MESU fellow made me take a nationwide perspective across private and public developments in educational computing.

Meanwhile my development work evolved into a Micro-electronics Education Support Unit (MESU) fellowship in Software Tools, for which I was expected to investigate and evaluate tools for authoring educational software. As part of this work I pioneered the use of the Compulink Information Exchange (CIX) online community to connect educational software developers around the country and to continue professional discussion beyond our face-to-face meetings.

Reflection: Team leadership for development of interactive multimedia gave me real responsibility for design and development guidelines for others in our large nationwide team, giving me a first taste of leadership in educational computing.

Towards the end of this period, I became involved in developing using HyperCard and with colleagues wrote books to guide others on how to design in this environment. We also began to create interactive multimedia and CD-ROM software.

Contribution: I designed and developed many educational programs, guidance documents, course materials and developed analytical models for evaluation of user-interfaces. I exercised nationwide team leadership and national leadership in educational software interoperability. My part: 100%

Originality, impact and importance: The Computers in the Curriculum project, first established in 1973, was one of only a very few world-leading curriculum development projects in its time to create brand new computer assisted learning materials based on a 'revelatory' approach using simulations (Millwood, 1987, p8). There were very few predecessors in the schools sector. It was funded for the first half of the eighties by the UK government funded Micro-electronics Education Programme, absorbing a large proportion of its budget. The materials were widely published internationally through Longman, BBC and others. The work covered a wide range of subjects in the secondary curriculum. (Watson, 1987)

Such was the interest that there was a follow up extra course in May 1983 and a repeat of the same course in September 1983.

I was proud of the overhead slides which I designed and made for presentation on the overhead projector. They provided a kit for progressively overlaying slides which were specific to the Z-80 and 6502 processors on a common base of key features of all microprocessors.

Reflection: My intent was that the clarity of display and the contrast between two examples would help learners to see a clear conceptual model of the central processing unit for and thus support their construction of a mental model as a basis for further understanding of hardware, machine code and assembly language programming.

This was a tough activity, persuading experienced software engineers that they should attempt to create code that was interoperable. Their eventual decision was to use BCPL, a good combination of concise syntax and speed and memory use compatible with the limited hardware used.

The following summary of the scope of the organisation was published on the Compulink Information Exchange (CIX) bulletin board that we used to keep in contact between face-to-face meetings.

esdfinfo/info #1, from kings_ecu, 938 chars, Nov  8 13:01 88

--------------------------

TITLE: ESDF

The Educational Software Developers Forum - ESDF

ESDF consists of technical representatives from a wide range of

educational software development organisations, both commercial and

non-commercial.  The group was formed in the last two years of the

Microelectronics Education Programme (MEP) and continues with support

from the Microelectronics Education Support Unit (MESU).  Many of the

problems facing such organisations were common to all and each gained

by a sharing of expertise.  ESDF has benefited from the many years of

experience its members have in developing educational software for

national and international markets.

For further information leave a message on this conference or

contact:

Richard Millwood on kings_ecu

or through the post at:

Educational Computing Unit,

The Centre for Educational Studies,

King's College London,

552 King's Road

LONDON

SW10 0UA

telephone: 01 351 2488 extension 3750.

This workshop had the following goals:

• to show course members UK materials and discuss their use in the classroom
• to consider which materials might be suitable for versioning
• to discuss the design and development of educational software
• to begin an examination of the task of translation for Israeli schools

It was a pleasure working with Jon Coll - a hero for me of early endeavour in Oundle School and the author of the BBC computer handbook. It was also an early experience of international 'translation' of UK ideas, which tests them against local conditions and demands a succinct articulation to help those with English as a second language.

Aim: To discover new perspectives on the mental models of learners with regard to their use of technology as a tool for developing such models.

Reflection: The group provided me with a regular and powerful discourse to engage with in relation to the role of computers in learning and in particular analysing the nature of modelling and simulation software and its potential for learning.

Contribution: I participated and contributed ideas to seminars considering models of learning with technology. My part: 5% (Project led by the late Professor Joan Bliss)

Orginality, impact and importance: The work to integrate an educational approach to technology, learning, artificial intelligence and mental models was unique, recognised by an Economics and Social Research Council grant for the 'Tools for exploratory learning' project (Bliss & Ogborn 1989) and peer-reviewed publications. It had impact on the design of new modelling software and importance in raising the level of debate at an early stage in the maturation of technology in education amongst the educational research community in London.

The group's members were from King's College London, the Institute of Education, Imperial College London and Kingston Polytechnic and met monthly.

The common ground was Education, with specific focus on modelling cognition to inform more generally issues of learning and teaching in an information technology setting.

Aim: To improve standards of interoperability in the design of educational computer programmes.

Reflection: This work followed earlier attempts in the Computers in the Curriculum project to standardise software development and user interface in order to provide users with confidence, but this was not agreed by all. Others were keen to innovate and felt that standards would inhibit innovation. The needs of users won out in the end as the industry more widely created graphical user interfaces with consistent controls and software developers reaped the benefits, particularly pioneered in the Apple Macintosh operating system. I learnt that a learner-centred approach helped design decisions in this contested area of development.

Contribution: I designed the set of procedures and functions, wrote the BBC BASIC and Pascal code and technical guide and co-authored the design guide which included the creation of the diagram and analytical explanations. My part: 50% (with David Riley)

In the late eighties, BASIC as a programming language was beginning to show its age. It had originally been chosen for its ubiquity on small computers that schools and colleges could afford, but towards the end of the decade, computing power had increased to the point were a much wider range of powerful programming languages were readily available.

This situation inspired the development of the Procedure Library, focussing on BBC BASIC's extended capabilities and the language Pascal on other systems. It was intended to continue the principle of interoperable development established in the earlier Subroutine Library. As well as the program code for the Procedure Library, two guides were written in October 1988 'The Procedure Library Technical' Guide and 'The Procedure Library Design Guide'.

I worked on the latter with David Riley to produce the diagram Analysis of a Single Interaction (Millwood and Riley 1988) after reading Donald Norman's work breaking down the steps of interaction with a user interface.

which we expanded on to analyse the user's perspective when engaging with educational software.

I published this thinking more recently as this poster, 'An analysis of a single interaction'

Originality, impact and importance: The design, code and analysis were new, based on lessons learnt over seven years of using a BASIC subroutine library and the best of graphics routine library literature (Newman and Sproull 1989). The impact and importance was on the development and design of educational software by the Computers in the Curriculum team.

This society enabled me to pursue my interest in object-oriented programming in the company of scientists from industry and academia. I attended conferences and meetings to discuss the issues that this genre of programming was raising for software development.