Becta's Next Generation Learning ... or the Starship Enterprise ran on Linux

It must be true. Consider; the Enterprise's computers never blue-screened... even under attack (did you know Vista still reports a BSOD message when it crashes?...who said MS did not do irony?) and its engineers were always telling the bridge that it was not possible to do whatever it was no matter how simple in the time allocated...hah proof!

And so it goes, but the truth is that great science fiction is not prophetic. The reality is that those who read/watch it merely come one day to 'make it so'. Huxley's Brave New World (my all time favourite), Rodenberry's Star Trek and Adams' Hitch Hiker's Guide simply told us what to do...and we have duly obliged by creating the future suggested to us.

What then does the future hold for the students in Becta's Next Generation Learning?

How will pupil-tracking databases have improved results?

How will open Source software have fared?

To find out read on...with apologies as usual...

Chapter 1

Somewhere outside Milton Keynes a young woman stops walking.

Nissan Cherry glanced down at her e-book which was making a small whiny slightly off key noise, this was odd because normally it did not require attention at this time of night, which was as it happens, precisely and irrelevantly midnight.

On the front of her book, as was now the case for every student's book, in large but crammed glowing letters the words 'Now is just about the right time to panic!'.

Nissan was disgruntled. She had just completed her history of education micro-assignment which required her to research the words 'quango', 'open-source software', 'education' and 'Microsoft', for her 10th A level in early 21st century technology. The book had returned only 'mostly-harmless', 'not that harmless', 'pointless' and 'not at all harmless' which in terms of essay writing, although accurate was not particularly helpful.

In the past her e-book was very helpful, especially on things like the number of wives that a particular celebrity had currently or how to untwist knickers in a confined space. However since Wikipedia had collapsed following its rash decision to allow page updates via Twitter and had subsequently been bought by Micro-Apple (or was it 'Soft-Core?') who then outsourced it to a nearby planet inhabited by ex-quangocrats no longer able to fit into Coventry, some of the entries had become less informative...to say the least.

Nissan tapped the screen 'you have a new message' it gleefully trilled making her ear piece vibrate gently like she had a small gnat in her ear. She hated that, it made all of her podcast lessons intensely irritating, it was a good job then that 'lessons' had been reduced to thirty seconds on account of budget cuts leaving only one teacher per thousand students and also that experts had agreed all of today's students had attention spans similar in duration to real gnats.

Her teacher's face appeared on the screen smiling enigmatically, 'Nissan' he said, and it seemed to her he was about to say something very important when the picture faded to be replaced by 'charge me now' message. She cursed out loud, 'just how much juice does this slim ultra stylish fashionable tablet need for Ford's sake?'

Then, glancing up into the starry night she thought that it looked unaccountably very odd indeed. She took a deep, long, drink from her bottle of Bucky, 'Looks like I won't have to do those retakes after all she sighed'.

Chapter 2

A tall than expected second generation sales-droid stood motionless in front of a massive grey windowless building that was distinguished from its equally grey and dusty landscape only by large blue letters on the roof, which if you tilted your head on one side, dimly spelt out NATIONAL DATAB...before disappearing into the Moon's softer than expected ground.

'This was the spot where it all went horribly wrong' mused the droid with a weary detachment that only several lifetimes spent selling into the Public Sector and a nicotine habit could engender. The National Database Cloud Computing Distributed Informatics System to give it its full name, was created to store all the details of every citizen from birth to death in order to track a pupil's progress through school. Or was it to prevent them being harmed by strangers, or was it to catch terrorist suspects?

No one really knows now, one legend has it that the database grew so quickly the cost of the server licences soon exceeded the entire GDP of the country eventually causing an economic collapse when Server 2020 (Service Pack 42) was released. Another legend recounts that it started sinking into the ground shortly after it was constructed adding new meaning to the term 'compressed data'.

Meanwhile Nissan Cherry was still looking at the stars unaware that what little data that could be salvaged from the building listed her as 'female, 10 A levels, unknown ethnic group, wanted by police'... non of which of course mattered in the least now.