John Connell: The Blog

A lit­tle birdie tells me that the last of the 32 Scot­tish local author­i­ties to sign up for­mally to Glow will do so within the next week or two at most. That is great news, and says much for Glow itself as well as for those who are lead­ing the project today, both in LTS and in RM (and in the Scot­tish Executive).

It is also, I have to say, a great affir­ma­tion of the con­tin­u­ing and ben­e­fi­cial impact of that long and fruit­ful process we all went through over a two or three year period from around 2002 to 2004/05 when so many peo­ple from every airt and pairt of Scot­tish edu­ca­tion came together to work out the shape and pur­pose of SSDN, as it was then called. That work by the Glow com­mu­nity itself, in effect, has ensured that an entirely non-mandated project has been taken on and endorsed now by every edu­ca­tion author­ity in the coun­try. That has been the case in an infor­mal sense all along, of course, but it is good to see that con­firmed through the for­mal process of cus­tomer agreements.

The image shows the three main logos that have been attached to the project along the way — first SSDN (Scot­tish Schools Dig­i­tal Net­work), then Spark, then back to SSDN (briefly — a tale of trade­mark infringe­ment on ‘Spark’, basi­cally), and then, of course, Glow.

Tech­no­rati Tags: glow, ssdn, spark, ltscot­land, rm

Will Richard­son, via Twit­ter, pointed, with no lit­tle dis­may, to this arti­cle in the Salt Lake Tri­bune — Utah to buy edu­ca­tion tech­nol­ogy with stim­u­lus fund­ing.

Just the first sen­tence reads:

Utah will use some of its fed­eral stim­u­lus money to pay for high-tech teach­ing soft­ware and new com­puter labs in Utah’s poor­est schools as part of an effort to use new tech­nolo­gies to boost test scores.

And, no, it doesn’t get any better.…..

Where do you start in try­ing to explain every­thing that is wrong with that state­ment?

Tech­no­rati Tags: stim­u­lus pack­age, edu­ca­tion, utah, will richard­son

Fol­low­ing the dan­ger­ous non­sense spouted, once again, by Baroness Green­field, and echoed in blood-dripping head­lines by the ever-splenetic Daily Mail — Social web­sites harm children’s brains: Chill­ing warn­ing to par­ents from top neu­ro­sci­en­tist — I enjoyed the pointer from Nigel Gib­son (via Twit­ter) to a Daily Dust piece offer­ing twenty causes of can­cer offered by Daily Mail head­lines over the years. They include:

Face­book — Wine — A Cold — Deodor­ant — Chips — Oral Sex — Vit­a­min E — Sausages and Burg­ers — Soup — Hair Dye — Mouth­wash — Sun Cream — Pringles, Hula Hoops and Duchy Orig­i­nals Organic Crisps — X-Rays — Tal­cum Pow­der — Mois­turis­ers — Mobile Phones — Red Meat — Tooth Whitener — Choco­late and Bagged Snacks

I really don’t fancy my own chances, since I indulge in at least 11 out of the list of 20 — but I’m not telling which 11 !!

Post­script It’s good to see Ben Goldacre get­ting stuck into Susan Green­field (and Aric Sig­man) on his Bad Sci­ence blog! And like the good sci­en­tist he is, he cites his sources.

Tech­no­rati Tags: susan green­field, nog­bad, daily mail, daily dust, bad sci­ence, causes of can­cer, ben goldacre

Do you want to help cre­ate the ulti­mate Scot­tish playlist? Head over to Theo Kuechel’s blog and join the band.……

Tech­no­rati Tags: theo kuechel, dig­i­tal sign­posts, spo­tify, scot­tish music

I am in Man­ama, Bahrain, to attend and speak at a ‘Strate­gic Inter­na­tional Plan­ning Ses­sion’ for the pro­posed Cen­tre for Infor­ma­tion and Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Tech­nol­ogy (CICT), which is to be estab­lished as a cen­tre for excel­lence in the Gulf region. The pri­mary objec­tive for the ini­tia­tive is to build capac­ity and capa­bil­ity in ICT across all sec­tors in the region. I find myself amongst many good and inter­est­ing peo­ple from the pub­lic, pri­vate and 3^rd sec­tors, all of whom have an inter­est in fur­ther­ing knowl­edge and com­pe­ten­cies in ICT through­out the Gulf. With great sup­port from UNESCO and a clear com­mit­ment to the con­cept from the Min­istry of Edu­ca­tion in Bahrain, the CICT ven­ture is one that seems to have con­sid­er­able momen­tum build­ing behind it.

I have had the good for­tune to bump into a num­ber of inter­est­ing peo­ple while I have been here in Bahrain.

It was great, for instance, to meet up with Dr Lynn Nolan, who is the Senior Strate­gic Ini­tia­tives Offi­cer at ISTE. Hav­ing fol­lowed remotely and with great inter­est the hap­pen­ings at the Flat Class­room Con­fer­ence (and in which Julie Lind­say, whose blog I fol­low, was a prime mover) which took place at Qatar Acad­emy in Doha, Qatar, just two or three weeks ago, it was good to be able to get a first hand account of the event from Lynn, since she was heav­ily involved in the whole thing.

It was also good to meet up with Anna Batchelder and Bar­bara Kur­shan (known to every­one as Bobbi) of Cur­riki. Cur­riki is an ini­tia­tive I have been aware of for some time — I recall that it was first pointed out to me by my friend and col­league, Charles Fadel. It is a well-established and grow­ing repos­i­tory of high qual­ity open-source cur­ric­u­lar con­tent for edu­ca­tion, and of course is a lead­ing light in the move towards open edu­ca­tional resources worldwide.

And I got the chance to meet Ms Salma Abbasi, founder and chair­per­son of eWorld­wide Group. Salma’s name is one that I have heard often in my trav­els in the Gulf in par­tic­u­lar, and it was good, finally, to see this one-woman-powerhouse of ideas in action as she shep­herded and cajoled all the con­trib­u­tors to the CICT event over the past cou­ple of days and in the run-up to the event.

Tech­no­rati Tags: cict, bahrain, iste, cur­riki>, eworld­wide group

Aviary, who already offer some nice online graph­ics apps to play with, now claim to be offer­ing the first online vec­tor graph­ics appli­ca­tion — Raven. It’s very sim­ple to use and seems to offer some decent, if basic, func­tion­al­ity. It’s cer­tainly worth a look.

Tech­no­rati Tags: aviary, vec­tor graph­ics, web 2.0, raven

Research engi­neers at Penn State have cre­ated a plas­monic switch, which basi­cally enables binary logic at the mol­e­c­u­lar level. If it proves pos­si­ble to cre­ate a chip based on the tech­nol­ogy, then Moore’s Law might still have a good few years left in it.

Thanks to the ZDNET blog for the link.

Tech­no­rati Tags: penn state, plas­mon­ics, moore’s law, binary logic

I posted recently on the green cre­den­tials of Telep­res­ence. Dil­bert gives those cre­den­tials a fur­ther pol­ish:

Tech­no­rati Tags: telep­res­ence, dil­bert, cisco, scott adams

School­ing:

.….teaches peo­ple the accountant’s view of the value of time, the bureaucrat’s view of the value of pro­mo­tion, the salesman’s view of the value of increased con­sump­tion, and the union leader’s view of the pur­pose of work. Peo­ple are taught all this not by the teacher but by the cur­ricu­lum hid­den in the struc­ture of the school. It does not mat­ter what the teacher teaches so long as the pupil has to attend hun­dreds of hours of age-specific assem­blies to engage in a rou­tine decreed by the cur­ricu­lum and is graded accord­ing to his abil­ity to sub­mit to it.

Peo­ple learn that they acquire more value in the mar­ket if they spend more hours in class. They learn to value pro­gres­sive con­sump­tion of cur­ric­ula. They learn that what­ever a major insti­tu­tion pro­duces has value, even invis­i­ble things such as edu­ca­tion and health. They learn to value grade advance­ment, pas­sive sub­mis­sion, and even the stan­dard mis­be­hav­iour that teach­ers like to inter­pret as a sign of creativity.

They learn dis­ci­plined com­pe­ti­tion for the favour of the bureau­crat who pre­sides over their daily ses­sions, who is called their teacher as long as they are in class, and their boss when they go to work. They learn to define them­selves as hold­ers of knowl­edge stock in the spe­cial­ity in which they have made invest­ments of their time. They learn to accept their place in soci­ety pre­cisely in the class and career cor­re­spond­ing to the level at which they leave school and to the field of their aca­d­e­mic specialization.

[Ivan Illich, Tools for Con­vivi­al­ity, Part III ‘Mul­ti­ple Balance’]

Illich’s writ­ings are always pro­foundly polit­i­cal and, indeed, polem­i­cal. When he wrote this in the 1970s, he believed it might be pos­si­ble for schools and edu­ca­tion in the devel­op­ing world to avoid the ‘indus­tri­al­ism’ of school­ing in the devel­oped world.

Does any of the above still res­onate today?

Tech­no­rati Tags: ivan illich, tools for con­vivi­al­ity, school­ing, indus­tri­al­ism

I liked David Mitchell’s assess­ment of Wikipedia in his weekly Observer col­umn today:

I think, for instance, that Wikipedia is bril­liant. That such a vast resource should have evolved so quickly is amaz­ing, in a way that its inac­cu­ra­cies and those who van­dalise it can­not seri­ously under­mine. I read a very stu­pid arti­cle about it last week, say­ing that it was worth­less or harm­ful because read­ers have to be aware that it could con­tain errors or lies.

This ignores two things. First, Wikipedia’s level of accu­racy is remark­able con­sid­er­ing its eclec­tic prove­nance. And sec­ond, read­ers should always ques­tion the verac­ity of what they read and the motives of who­ever wrote it, and in the inter­net age more than ever. Peo­ple who allow them­selves to be made cred­u­lous by styl­ish type­set­ting and a serif font are screwed. And if Wikipedia, while being very infor­ma­tive in most cases, teaches a few lessons about ques­tion­ing sources, then that’s all to the good.

His com­ments on the recent bit of Tory naugh­ti­ness around the vexed ques­tion of how old Tit­ian was when he died are also worth reading:

In a small way, that action is gen­uinely dis­grace­ful. The Con­ser­v­a­tives were happy to mis­in­form the world in order to back up their boss’s quip — to dam­age a char­ity that gives knowl­edge free to bil­lions, for triv­ial polit­i­cal gain.

It’s the act of some­one who’d forge a dis­abled park­ing badge, a tiny unit of pure, socio­pathic evil. Even politi­cians should be ashamed that they’re har­bour­ing any­one like that.

Tech­no­rati Tags: david mitchell, wikipedia, con­ser­v­a­tive party, tit­ian