The world’s first (and last?) national education intranet
This news crept under my radar three weeks ago. That’s to say, I saw the video where the Scottish Education Secretary announced the cancellation of the procurement of the next phase of the national education intranet, but the announcement was couched and contextualised in such a way that he was pulling the plug on the … Continue reading
Teaching kids to code outside the curriculum and classroom
This is from Emma Mulqueeny (@hubmum), a friend, a prime mover of Young Rewired State (http://youngrewiredstate.org/), and tireless advocate of young people building a better world through coding. Here she describes the practical and (I would say) agile steps that an initiative called Computing at School (http://www.computingatschool.org.uk/) is taking to help schoolkids to learn to … Continue reading
Do virtual schools have to be about “warehouse teaching”?
Many of us believe that new forms of learning that are self-organised and encourage self-starting resilience can be better than the traditional models. But we must be alive to the risks and the “other side of the coin” all the time. This account (possibly not impartial, but neither are many accounts) paints a dystopian picture … Continue reading
Managing shared resources and reclaiming the commons with the School of Commoning
The number of new initiatives that are reimagining learning in some way continues to grow. Compared with the US, where initiatives are entrepreneurial in spirit and mass-scale in ambition, those in the UK seem more to be modest, organic and many are growing out of existing institutions (especially universities). I came across the School of … Continue reading
Good to see things hotting up @UnivProject, starting with Universities: Past & Future event in October
Looking forward to this free weekend event in London, and finding out/contributing to how the plans hatched by Dougald Hine (@Dougald) and others are taking shape Clipped from univproject.pbworks.com Welcome to the University Project A whole set of forces are coming together to disrupt higher education as we know it – here in the UK, … Continue reading
Entrepreneurship accelerator threatens to disrupt Higher Ed model – or is it emperor’s new clothes?
It’s difficult to know what to make of the General Assembly ‘accelerator’ that’s at the centre of this post, because there’s so little detail. “So will we open a bunch more campuses? Put all our classes online? Start training executives? We don’t know,” writes cofounder Brad Harvgreaves in a linked article (http://www.businessinsider.com/general-assembly-financing-expands-abroad-2011-9). “Right now we’re … Continue reading
A ‘starting over again’ school for design and architecture professionals
Still in early stages of development and supported by design thought-leader (I hate that term, but it feels authentic here) John Thackara @johnthackara. He refers to it as “A feral encounter, [which] brings people into contact with the lived reality of a situation.” (http://observersroom.designobserver.com/johnthackara/post/in-praise-of-the-feral-update-on-xskool/29608/). A pilot group “embraced the idea of no curriculum, no standardised … Continue reading
Wikispaces Projects: no classroom needed in theory, so why is one needed in practice?
Good to see that Wikispaces is adding more support for collaborative work to their offerings. These kinds of tools are really useful for people who want to organise their own learning. There’s just one fly in the ointment: people who want to organise their own learning can’t use them. That’s because Wikispaces is only making … Continue reading
How has the web enabled new theories of learning? Concise overview from @fredgarnett
This is one of a series of posts under the title “From Education to Learning; A Brief History of Open” by Fred Garnett. Here he begs to differ from what he sees as a complacent view in an interview: “I wouldn’t say there are any profound changes in the way we should be thinking about … Continue reading
If you can spare a week in New York this autumn/fall, this looks like an intriguing & educational event
It may be a crucible for revolutionising learning, or it may be a way of schmoozing with the rising (and already risen) stars of post-institutional learning. Or a bit of both. The cost of registration appears to be extremely good value ($30-40), so if you’re near NYC and can spare the time, you’d be daft … Continue reading
Agile Learning 