Australia’s Great Wall

In a town hall somewhere in suburban Australia a group of people, all over 70 years of age, are attending classes to learn how to by-pass internet filters. The reason they are doing this is simple. All of them want information relating to euthanasia. All of them know that in the very near future a [...]

Who are the Information Imposters?

I think as learning professionals we should be alarmed when someone walks in and spouts so much unsubstantiated drivel as if it were fact. I’ll go even further: I think as learning professionals in this time, in the middle of the seismic shifts that are going on, it is our responsibility to point out the [...]

Debating Twitter: useful or not?

Doug Johnson is an educator and blogger who I have followed and read since I started my own blog, and someone whose views I respect and, generally, agree with. He penned a piece recently – I killed my Twitter account – in which he explained why he had decided to, um, kill his Twitter account. [...]

Angela Maiers Tests the Waters of Digital Publishing

Back in the summer of last year, I wrote a couple of longish posts (first post; second post) about what I termed the ‘persistent fetish’ of the book. My basic point, over the two pieces, was that the book as we know it is undoubtedly about to be caught up in the same digital whirlwind [...]

Education Networks: who will take responsibility?

Ewan called it incompetence. I have some sympathy for that view and for the evident anger behind the view. Ewan was talking specifically about the top-down, heavy-handed approach to web filtering still practised by some local education authorities in Scotland (and by many schools’ systems worldwide). He wrote, in response to the blacklisting of the [...]

21st Century Skills: Postscript

For a too-short 40 minutes or so yesterday, I had the pleasure of joining Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, Will Richardson, Jeff Utecht, Caroline Novak and David DeSchryver in leading a great discusssion about 21st century skills. My contribution was fortified by the varied comments that I received on my previous post and by rummages though earlier discussions [...]

21st Century Skills

I have been asked to join an online conversation tomorrow on the subject of 21st century skills. Inevitably, I have been thinking through my own take on the topic and I have come up with a few bon mots that give me, at least, some food for thought.
None of these is intended as a finished, [...]

Fiona Hyslop gets it wrong…but has a chance to put it right!

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I attended the keynote at SLF given by the current Cabinet Secretary for Education in the Scottish Government, Fiona Hyslop. The speech was interesting without being riveting, more competent than impressive.
However, in a response to a question from Neil Winton, she made a serious error, one that betrayed [...]

The Persistent Fetish (2): Disintermediation Beckons

It is a commonplace that predictions of our digital future tend to underestimate both the timescale for change and the impact of that change. In other words, while changes may take longer than predicted, we tend to underestimate the overall impact of those changes over time.
Recently, a number of assertions over the future of the [...]

The Imperial Way

Secondary schooling is distorted by the reductive need to act as a national filter for the university system. If every university could instead follow Imperial’s lead, we might be able to start shifting schools back to focusing on what is important: learning rather than grading.

Technorati Tags: school, learning, grading, imperial college

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