Personal sharing – this is for me, not you
So, what we’re seeing isn’t the expansion of our social network; it’s the shrinking of what and who we care about. My Facebook feed is full of what friends are listening to, what friends are reading, etc. And frankly, I don’t give a damn. I would care if they told me personally; I’d even care […]
The Photocopier Challenge
Enjoying The Lazy Teachers’s Handbook at the moment. Love this idea – will try it in the New Year. “may I suggest something I like to call the Photocopier Challenge, an easy and straightforward way of finding out the extent to which you are wasting your own time, let alone letting others waste it for […]
10 worst similes from students
Her eyes were like two brown circles with big black dots in the center. He was as tall as a 6?3? tree. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, […]
Little Printer
Christmas next year … Little Printer lives in your home, bringing you news, puzzles and gossip from friends. Use your smartphone to set up subscriptions and Little Printer will gather them together to create a timely, beautiful mini-newspaper. link: Little Printer | BERG Cloud
Social Graphs & Communities
Very, very well put. The funny thing is, no one’s really hiding the secret of how to make awesome online communities. Give people something cool to do and a way to talk to each other, moderate a little bit, and your job is done. Games like Eve Online or WoW have developed entire economies on […]
Seldon & Character Building
Anthony Seldon has a curiously off-target piece in the Guardian. Character in public schools is formed far less from breeding and connections than by a whole variety of methods which should become available to all. It is built in ways that some on the left find distasteful, and they’d better get over it. Competitive sport […]
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...
Cashiers and Maths Prodigies
From Bounce: In 1896 Alfred Binet, a French psychologist, carried out a simple experiment to find out. He compared the performance of two calculating prodigies with cashiers from the Bon Marché department store in Paris. The cashiers had an average of fourteen years experience in the store but had showed no early gift for mathematics....
The Effects of School Are Overplayed
John Hattie’s book Visible Learning is a (dense) treasure trove of statistically backed educational research. He looks at 800 meta-analyses of school research and then analyses them for effect. The idea is essentially to try to come up with a way of measuring how much good various initiatives as compared to, say, a child’s...