This weekend I heard Sugata Mitra, Professor of Educational Technology at Newcastle University for the first time. Professor Mitra had what he modestly called, “his 15 minutes of fame” last year when Vikas Swarup, author of the novel on which the award-winning ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ film is based, cited Prof. Mitra’s “Hole in the Wall” research [...]
With the launch of the iPad real soon now, a number of main-stream education suppliers are gearing up to provide educational resources for the new machine. Penguin, who now hold the rights to so many of the titles that saw the the boom time of CD ROM, are just one publisher re-purposing content for the [...]
I had the privilege of facilitating on one of Becta’s Parental Engagement briefings this week for Primary schools. Despite being a long way from home, I’d volunteered to help with the Manchester briefing since I was in the area doing some work with schools. Held in the Manchester United conference facilities, I turned up early [...]
You might have picked up on yesterday’s Radio 4 Today programme a short piece on how the Danish government are running a pilot in which students taking final year exams in secondary schools will not only be allowed to use laptops, but have full access to the internet. There is only one simple rule, you [...]
In his latest post, Ewan takes the cudgel to Local Authorities that have banned social networking citing a call by Carol Rozwell, a Gartner vice president, at their recent symposium for corporates to loosen up on social networks in the workplace. In it he feels embarrassed that most education authorities continue to be “ignorant of [...]
In an episode of “Henry’s Cat” mending his cuckoo clock takes him back in time. On his way back to the end of the 20th century he catalogues strange inventions that took place in the early decades of that century. Watching the second episode of BBC Four’s Electric Dreams last night somewhat reminded me of [...]
This was one question Simon Armitage asked himself at one point in last night’s, Upgrade Me, the first in a series programmes in BBC Four’s “Electronic Revolution” season. If you missed it you can catch it on BBC’s iPlayer for the next seven days in the UK, or it is repeated on a number of [...]
I’ve been picking my way through Richard Millwood’s excellent paper on the history of educational computing in the UK entitled, “A short history offline” which, rather ironically went online a couple of days ago. Richard now looks after the National Archive of Educational Computing, a project started in the days of Ultralab. The archive is [...]
What do you think was most important 20th century invention applicable to education? I think the common ballpoint pen would be up there. You know the device that teachers banned me from using in school. They said it would ruin my hand-writing and was messy and blotchy. For that reason I never used a ballpoint [...]
The BBC have just released Tomorrow’s World into their online archive, and glancing through it this morning I came across this report on the Home Computer terminal broadcast on 20th September 1967. For £30 a week, Rex Malik has the first “Home Computer” terminal installed in his home. Like all things from the past, [...]
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