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
Will @schooX do for school-level educators what Mendeley does for academics?
SchooX is just starting out and it’s not yet clear what tricks it has up its sleeve to support learning, teaching, discovery and accreditation — or whether it will be “just another social network” with a skew towards education. Or as they put it, in one of my least favourite words, edutainment. What’s interesting is … Continue reading
Will this alternative to the spreadsheet+filestore approach to VLEs fly?
I’m predicting that we’re going to see more cut-down alternative forms of Virtual Learning Environments and Learning Management Systems. The argument (whether you’re convinced by it or not) is that VLEs are just big tracking spreadsheets which have become increasingly bloated with successive iterations of poorly-integrated bolt-on functions. If that is the case, then alternatives … Continue reading
Interview with @stephenheppell about future schools, including his “rule of 3” (http://goo.gl/WkzlW)
Here’s an excerpt from a fairly wide-ranging interview. It’s four months old now, but I’m guessing only a minority of those passing by this site will have seen it before… The quote, “Schools are full of things that our descendants will look back on and laugh out loud at”, seems especially plausible. Clipped from http://www.fastcodesign.com … Continue reading
Rough notes from yesterday’s meetup with @andrew_davis, creator of Social Media Fundamentals course
Here are some rough notes with minimal editing from our meetup yesterday. If you’re near London, please join our group to keep up with this series of meetings. Andrew Davis started by outlining his career path. After graduating from Roehampton University in 2000 and failing to make a proper living from DJing for a year, … Continue reading
Tomorrow’s London meet-up has Andrew Davis (MySpace, BBC,EdExcel) on why teachers need to understand social media
Looking forward to this – Thanks to Lucy Johnson (@clumie on Amplify or @creativeducator on Twitter) for setting this up! Clipped from http://www.meetup.com Andrew Davis on applying social media to help schools and educational institutes We’ve invited Andrew Davis of Edexel, Myspace and the BBC to come and chat to us. Andrew is is the … Continue reading
If you step back, kids achieve the impossible, emergent properties are always astonishing – Sugata Mitra at ALT-C
The full transcript of Sugata Mitra’s keynote to the ALT-C conference last month will be published shortly but I took some notes to embed my own learning. I thought these might be helpful to others, as they’re easier to skim than either a full transcript or 54 minutes of video. The (or A) Future of … Continue reading
The principles & practice of home education: intvw with a parent on how she & her sons improvise their learning
Below are just a few excerpts from a lengthy interview I did with a friend of mine, whose teenage sons have been educated at home. Home education includes a range of approaches, and Annie places herself at one end of the spectrum. Quite a few thought-provoking perspectives (at least that’s how it seemed to me). … Continue reading
Agile Learning 