Every so often, I’m tempted to do what I’ve seen other website/blog owners do, which is to insert some code that lists the most popular content on their website. But I can’t seem to be able to answer a very fundamental question:
What’s the point?
#edusum11 Mike Searson is the President of The School for Global Education & Innovation at Kean University in the USA. I met him in Paris the day before the EDUsummit 2011 conference which took place there. He headed up our small, intrepid band of social media folk.
Something Mike related really made me think.
To the casual listener, stride piano, boogie woogie piano and rock-n-roll piano all sound pretty much the same. Yet Fats Waller, perhaps the most famous stride pianist, detested boogie woogie. And nobody could deny the hint of menace in Long John Baldry’s voice as he sings his song:
Read MoreDon’t try to lay no boogie woogie on the king of rock-n-roll!
OK, I admit it: I was being a bit of a devil’s advocate when I suggested that the role of ICT Co-ordinator is redundant, but consider this. In these hard times, how will you respond if your Headteacher calls you into her office one morning and says:
I need to make some serious budget cuts. What exactly do you do, why does it need to be done anyway, and why can’t I get an admin person on half your salary to do it instead?
According to a study reported on by The Economist, 4 and 5 year-olds not told what could be done with an unfamiliar object explored it for longer and came up with more ideas than control groups who were shown, to varying degrees. The Economist states:
The researchers’ conclusion was that, in the context of strange toys of unknown function, prior explanation does, indeed, inhibit exploration and discovery. Generalising from that would be ambitious. But it suggests that further research might be quite a good idea.
Does this imply that the advocates of discovery learning (and their associated preference for “guide on the side” to “sage on the stage”) are right?
Here are three options for you to consider in order to give a boost to your professional development:
All this was published last week in Computers in Classrooms, the free e-newsletter for educational ICT professionals. Subscribe now (literally: right now) and you’ll stand a chance of winning a premium version of Xobni, a pretty good email management tool. I’m running the draw for that at 10 pm UK time today.
Read on for the details of those three resources.
The role of ICT Co-ordinator has been around for decades – ever since, in fact, someone decided that ICT activities ought to be co-ordinated across the curriculum. But why should it be, and what does it even mean to co-ordinate it anyway?
#edusum11 The conference is now in its final hour or so, with brief addresses from an international panel followed by "Next steps".
I started to write a blog post earlier, but realised very quickly that I need to do more reflecting. It's been a very rich experience in some respects, and I need to assimilate what I think I may have learnt. I've had the opportunity to meet with some of the organisers, representatives of Ministries of Education and researchers.
You can follow the conference on Twitter, using the hashtag given above. There will be video podcasts later (I'm told Monday).
More soon.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
#edusum11 Should anyone invite you to contribute to a handbook, don't turn it down. A few years ago, a handbok was put together (http://edusummit.nl/handbook), which led to several working group-type events, which led to an "EduSummIT" in 2009, which led to EduSummIT 2011.
With over 120 delegates from 40 countries, this promises to be a very interesting -- and useful -- event. Delegates have been allocated to working groups -- mine is 21st century skills. I hope to be reporting on this over the next few days, as long as the wi-fi, my iPad keyboard and my level of wakefulness hold out (the hotel fire alarm went off at around 1 am, which is no joke!)
Look for #edusum11 on Twitter, and edusummit2011 on the web and in Flickr. The conference website is http://edusummit.nl/, where you can find further information. You might also like to check out the latest edition of my newsletter (go to www.ictineducation.org/newsletter and scroll down), as it has a link to a very interesting recent report from UNESCO.
OK, that's it from me for now: I love blogging and writing in general, but sleep also has its attractions!
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
It’s fairly common to think about the “communication” part of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) in terms of sending and receiving information over great distances. But what about the opposite, ie communicating over very small distances?
Last week I had to go to my mother's bank to sort something out. Thus it was that I entered into a sort of Escheresque landscape...
I used to bank there myself, but it is so dreadful I thought, in the end, I could do without the stress.
Anyway, before I went I ascertained what I would need by way of documentation. Of course, when I arrived, I was told that I needed something else. Here's how the conversation (well, some of it), went:
When the cost of calling an engineer out to fix your printer is greater than the price of a new printer, you know it’s time to review your printer spending plans. That’s the situation I was faced with when I joined one particular school: a top-quality printer had been bought, one which was so highly engineered that you couldn’t fiddle around with it yourself if it stopped working.
Another unfortunate consequence of having such an expensive printer was that it
I attended an interesting event yesterday, which I’ll write about shortly, but I thought I’d share this video with you. It was shown at the event, and is a nice, humorous illustration of how technology has influenced our language.
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