On How Technology Made Us What We Are
This chat between Tom Chatfield and and Tom Hodgkinson was interesting, I thought. I’d no idea that when the Incans – and, from some quick browsing, other Mesomerican peoples – invented the wheel, they saw it as something for children. It stayed a plaything because their lives were dominated by mountainous slopes.
On Gerolamo Cardano
He was certainly an extraordinary man. There’s something, I think, to telling students stories about the people who have helped invent today’s: mathematics. It may be the most abstract of subjects. But the range of characters involved in it are far from dull. This wrestling with the abstract, perhaps, might provide an In for those...
What cathedral are you building?
I’ve been on a school trip to York these last few days. As you’ll know if you’ve been there, the Minster dominates the city. On a walk round the city walls, I was chatting with a 10-year old about the 250 years it took to build, from 1220 and 1472. We spoke about how many […]
An Epidemic of Listicles
I like this excerpt from Krista Tippett’s interview with Maria Popova, curator of the wonderful Brain Pickings [Thanks to the Centre for Teaching] Culture needs stewardship, not disruption. … We seem somehow bored with thinking. We want to instantly know. And there’s this epidemic of listicles. Why think about what...
The Dynamo and the Social
Thought this was an interesting piece at Slate based on Paul David’s paper. There are some obvious parallels with personal or mobile computing and education and the difficulties we have with using it well. “Electric light bulbs were available by 1879, and there were generating stations in New York and London by 1881. Yet a...
Couple of School Projects
There are a couple of mini-projects I thought I’d share. FPS Zoo The first is the FPS Zoo. Most of our Year 6 have finished exams so this is an experiment to tie in various cross-curricular themes in (hopefully) a fun way. The idea is to make a zoo full of made-up animals. Science will […]
Packaged Opinion
There is simply too much to think about. It is hopeless — too many kinds of special preparation are required. In electronics, in economics, in social analysis, in history, in psychology, in international politics, most of us are, given the oceanic proliferating complexity of things, paralyzed by the very suggestion that we assume...
Pericles, or Why the Ancient Greeks deserve study
Yesterday, I had another one of those conversations about classics. Anyone who studied Latin, Greek or both to any level will have had something similar. “Really, ancient Greek? Wow. What’s the point of that? I mean, I’m sure it’s interesting but why bother? What jobs does it set you up for?” Everyone who...
The Indiana Jones of Solar Power
Aidan Dwyer – at 13 years old – has made a solar power breakthrough by looking at the way trees are shaped. That’s pretty darn impressive – a little bit like the Blackawton primary school science class and their academic paper on bees. What I love, though, is his explanation of the process of his […]
Wittgenstein, Popper and Education
A little bit of history goes a long way – and certainly puts some of the 21st Century Learning rhetoric in perspective. “The Pedagogic Institute had been established to further the Austrian educational reform program. This attempted to steer education away from a ‘drill school’ approach, in which schoolchildren...