Last year I asked whether BETT was where it was truly at, this year my doubts were swept away, not by the hundreds and thousands of products on show, but by the slow but sure “takeover” of teachers and educators in the back channel and fringe. Like Diagon alley all sorts of exciting things were [...]
Over the weekend I got my invitation to join those testing the alpha of Jolicloud, a new OS for netbooks based on Ubuntu. Installing Jolicloud was remarkably easy, and I had it up and running with no hitches. The OS is very impressive, responsive and fast, and does not seem as sluggish as gOS 3.1 [...]
For those used to such things it might seem strange to organise a face-to-face event about Virtual Worlds, but Naace’s seminar held yesterday in London did just that. The point was to introduce those that has not necessarily plunged themselves into Second Life, or any of the other virtual worlds, with a traditional introduction in [...]
The dream of the One Laptop Per Child project had gone bad for some advocates of educational technology for all. Nicholas Negroponte stated that the point of the scheme to provide laptops to the poorest children in the world was “an education project not a laptop project”. Part of this philosophy was to provide the [...]
Becta’s new DVD, Learning Platforms in action, provides some great showcase examples of VLEs being used in schools. I particularly like some of the clips from Buckingham Primary School (who have Moodle) and the way in which they are changing the way in which children think about how a VLE can extend their use of [...]
Flatworld Knowledge is a new service that will launch in January aimed at the higher education market (it seems a shame they will have missed the beginning of the academic year). The idea is to provide quality textbooks to students to read online for free or download in a variety of formats for a fee. [...]
It’s interesting reading Ian’s latest post in which he highlights NineHub where you can get a fully functioning Moodle for free in a blink of an eye. My view of the history of education has always been of subversion. Centrally imposed edicts and initiatives have often fallen on stony ground when it comes to implementation [...]
In a recent post to the Naace Open Source Community blog, Ian Lynch asks the question, “Why is Open Source a contentious issue?” and goes on to say:
“a further irony is that the real power of Open Source is not that it saves money or is technically better, it is what we can learn [...]
I’ve often said that there are three types of teacher: creators, adapters and users. Creators develop new ideas for students in their classroom, they are the ones that write (and maybe still do) the textbooks that you find in classrooms, and some even make money out of it. The next group are the adapters, [...]
Open source is the latest arena chosen by the Conservative Party to try and score political points against the Government. George Osborne, Shadow Chancellor, in a speech at the Royal Society of Arts today announced their aim to make Britain the “open source leader in Europe”.
“What it is about is better and more effective government. [...]
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