Dick Sblog

Sorry about the long absence… Being knocked off a motorbike a few months ago was an interesting experience and threw all my normal patterns of activity. The driver who hit me got 6 points on his licence and a £400 fine. I got a couple of weeks when I couldn’t work and had to be [...]

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At last, someone has taken the trouble to express how I feel about twitter

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Miri airport, Sarawak.
I’m sitting at a table in a well-known brand of global coffee shop, about to go cyber-incommunicado for 3 weeks in the heart of the Mulu National Park, exploring more of the world’s greatest caves.
It’s a novel experience these [...]

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I was listening to the radio this morning as I dragged myself into a new day. They were talking about developing autonomous military robots – killing machines that could be programmed to respect the Geneva Conventions.
This prompted two thoughts – firstly that computers are great at crunching numbers and making decisions based on rules. But [...]

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There’s an interesting discussion going on in ZD Net’s forum pages about the use of Google Apps in schools. For those of you not familiar with this bit of the Googlempire, it’s an online suite of applications that can be accessed on an anytime/from anywhere basis via a browser: it was one of the first [...]

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I’m always entertained by peoples’ differing views of what’s valuable in the application of science and technology. For me, this is best illustrated by the resurgence of civil nuclear power in the UK. With the increasing dependency on overseas energy and the entirely [in my opinion] justified concerns about climate change, nuclear power is being [...]

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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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Several good things this week and one bad thing.
The bad thing was seeing the Windows blue screen of death when I started my pc this morning. Fortunately the beast worked when I rebooted it, so most of the day has been spent backing everything up and failing to find out why several error messages have [...]

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The August issue of the CIPD’s quarterly update on policy and research contained an article saying that ‘the much heraled revolution in homeworking is yet to take off, although a quarter of employers say that homeworking will increase in their organisation in the next year’.
On September 9th, the Guardian ran a piece entitled, ‘Rapid rise [...]

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I do so like a nice bit of irony.
Here am I, quietly banging on to noone in particular about the need to develop skills of collaboration amongst our students, particularly in distributed working environments., when along comes Peter Kingston in the Guardian with a piece about an unpublished report on the Learning and Skills Council.
I [...]

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