Dick Sblog

The International Science Grid This Week (iSCTW) sounds like an esoteric publication for grid computing geeks. In fact its offers fascinating insights into the ways in which new computing infrastructures and applications are being brought to bear on a wide range of problems. This week’s iGSTW carries a piece about ‘citizen cyberspace‘, about how, with [...]

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Jorge Luis Borges wrote, “there is nothing written that has not been written before”. I’ve just had an illustration of this in a newsletter from Futurelab. It describes one of their programmes, Digital Participation, which “is designed to devise, pilot and review practical classroom approaches that can support children to create as well as communicate [...]

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I’ve just read an interview with with Jill Nemiro, Author of “Creativity in Virtual Teams”. She makes some interesting points about making space for creativity to take place, as well as about the ways in which virtual teams operate. Here are a few quotes from the interview:
“…most people do not take the time to allow [...]

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iEARN UK recently ran a learning circle in Bristol as part of the Science City Bristol initiative. From the start, the project suffered a few problems – of the 5 participating schools who sent teachers to the briefing sessions, 2 sets of teachers weren’t sure why they were there and one set reported that their [...]

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Last week I attended a consultation meeting held by e-Skills UK to look at issues relating to the ICT GCSE curriculum. The participants were a mix of awarding bodies and businesses – most of the latter were big corporates. I’m part of a two person company.  The focus of the meeting was about engaging businesses [...]

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I recently applied for money to fund a project addressing the issue of work related learning. Predictably,  my approach was focused on distributed working. The growth in flexible/home based and distributed working is one of the most significant changes to working practice in recent years and with the pressure on to reduce travel costs and [...]

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Last week I attended a consultation workshop organised by NESTA (the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) and BERR (Dept for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform). The workshop was staged to get feedback on a report prepared by Outsell on the topic of, “Innovation in Internet Content Services”.
The report contained a SWOT analysis [...]

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In his article on Extended Projects, (Guardian. Tuesday January 8, 2008 ) Peter Kington discusses at length the problems associated with this otherwise very welcome development. Quite rightly he points out that a result of making the EPs into qualifications will be that they become yet another target – something to be exploited [...]

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I’m grateful to the BBC Digital Planet podcast for alerting me to Peter Norvig’s address at the Association for Learning Technology’s conference on Learning for the social networking generation. Peter is the Director of Research at Google. His conclusion is that most education should be:
1    Centred on engaging, real-world projects
2    Explored in teams
3    Teachers are [...]

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Get a full list of iEARN projects here.  Get blown away by the range and scope of educational collaboration as we move into a new school year and the too often humdrum nature of lessons and homework.

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