Gosh! I don’t know if there is something special about the date December 6th — like the Ides of March, say — but I seem to have been astonishingly prolific on that date.
Here are the articles I wrote and published on 6 December in days gone by:
But where’s the pen?
This was about designing things by consulting the people who are actually going to use them. Radical suggestion, eh?
“in her talk Carol Verity, an internet marketer, said that a large part of her job was asking website owners, “But where’s the pen?””
“Here’s a little tip for you: don’t upload stuff at past midnight, especially if you’re running on adrenalin and strong tea. ”
“So, there you are, basking in your new-found freedom to report to parents what their children can actually DO in Computing and ICT, when the data impresario in your school says they want you to supply the school office with a “Level” for each child. And for good measure, they want you to do that four times a term in order to monitor progress. How should you respond?”
“To borrow from Douglas Adams and his observation about ducks, if it looks like a Level and behaves like a Level, then it’s probably a Level. You can call it a rung of a ladder, a threshold, a bronze award or a set of blue badges. Unless you have a pretty good explanation at hand, you’d have a hard job convincing me that you haven’t just reinvented Levels by another name.”
“As far as the Government is concerned, Computer Science is more rigorous and more useful, while the stuff included in the ICT syllabuses will be covered elsewhere in the curriculum.
Really??
Well, someone hasn’t been paying attention for the last 30 years.”
I interviewed Kay Sawbridge about the awful decision to get rid of a qualification that attracted lots of “takers”, especially girls, and replace it with one that most teachers, most students, and most companies didn’t want. A triumph of political posturing and meddling by people and organisations who in my opinion shouldn’t have been allowed anywhere near the curriculum. Perhaps now, after 6 years of losing students in droves , it’s time for a rethink.