I popped over to see what was going down on Will Richardson’s blog (where, by the way, there is a great article about online learning, which I’ve been investigating lately), and discovered, via the comments, the Transleadership blog of Tony Baldasaro. This is a real feast.
Read MoreWhat could be worse than not doing as you’re told? The answer, of course, is doing what you’re told – and no more.
Read MoreThis is the first in what I hope to be a regular spot here on ICT in Education. Terry has kindly invited me to respond some of the articles in his series ’25 things to Make Yourself Unpopular’. The posts will be like an extended comment & I hope you will feel able to comment on them & visit me over at The Head’s Office.
Read MoreOne of the things I’ve discovered is that a lot of people need, or at least want, tightly-defined boundaries. I’ve found this to be the case not only in the management roles I’ve had, but even as an editor of Computers in Classrooms and the ICT in Education website.
Read MoreMany ICT strategy documents include a section called "A day in the life". The idea of this is to bring the vision to life in a way that people can relate to, by describing what it will be like in practice. The trouble is, many of these attempts at descriptive prose are completely useless. They are often boring to read, and usually either pedestrian, unrealistic or like a scene from Star Trek.
Read MoreOne of the things we tend to forget when it comes to major upheavals – such as, in Britain, the so-called “bonfire of the quangoes”, which has seen the disbandment of Becta, Qualifications & Curriculum Development Agency and the Training & Development Agency – is a fundamental law of nature, namely Nature abhors a vacuum.
Read MoreIf always expressing an opinion is bad, never doing so is, arguably, worse. Members of a team usually expect their boss to show some leadership, and that always requires opinions to be expressed, and decisions to be taken sooner or later.
Read MoreIt’s always useful to carry out what I call an ICT health check. It’s like a medical health check: rather than wait for symptoms of disease to manifest themselves, it is far better to be proactive and have a “once over” every so often, say once a year. We rarely do, of course. Another analogy might be farmers’ footing, the practice whereby a farmer will walk around the farm every day to make sure no fences have blown down or anything like that. In short, the idea of a health check is to nip any potential problems in the bud. So what should an ICT health check look like?
Read MoreYou’re probably familiar with the saying “If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing properly”, and its cousin, “If you want a job doing, do it yourself”. Each has a certain intuitive appeal and each, in a leadership/management situation especially, is utterly untenable.
Read MoreLast night I watched the first two episodes of The Killing, a 20-part Danish thriller. I have never been to Denmark, and as far as I can remember I’ve never seen it depicted on film or video. But my impression of Denmark is now as follows:
Read MoreIt’s been a week of three conferences including, of course, the BETT show. I really enjoyed it, and will be writing about it in more depth in Computers in Classrooms in the very near future. But for now, here are some reflections.
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In this day and age, in which anyone can publish and distribute their books electronically, or self-publish them by going down several routes (none of which need include the traditional vanity publisher), why should anyone bother approaching a traditional publisher? After all, very few of the thousands of manuscripts that publishers receive find their way into book form, and of those that do, very few hit the big time.
