Too many cooks in the edu-kitchen

Are there too many cooks in the education kitchen? It seems that as technology permeates everything, we are awash with pilot projects, initiatives and layer upon layer of ‘special circumstances’ staff, all with new agendas prefixed by the world ‘digital’. Their agenda is to make innovation more system-wide and sustainable, through 21st century skills, and [...]

Why edu-systems need a social media PD strategy

I read a couple of reports this week about life in perpetual beta and try but never buy culture. Both of these things relate to the way teacher educators carry out the formidable task of mediating the exploding internet and entrenched expectations of how and why we go about professional development. Print technology – the [...]

The king is in his counting house

Our education system as one of the major instruments for the maintenance of both the positive and negative aspects of our culture. Liberation theory broadly suggest that society’s cultural system perpetuates power relationships and holds people (and groups) in place like an invisible web. There are of course numerous branches and extremes (including anarchism) associated with Libertarianism [...]

Should we trust books?

I read a great article on on the Gutenberg Parenthesis and its implications. It is a fascinating idea – do we place trust in books, simply because of the way they appear to us – in particular, the idea that truth itself can be contained in text. In the parenthesis, people like to categorize — [...]

Teacher Educators – The missing Association.

Teacher educators as a specialised professional group within education create their own specific identity and their own specific professional development needs. In this post, I look at the identities that teacher educators are creating – their key role in the retention of teachers, and the need to form an Teacher Educator Association that supports today’s [...]

Edublogs Awards 2010

Firstly, thanks to all who have kindly nominated me in some way. It is incredibly humbling to think people take the time to read this stuff. Secondly, thanks again to some very special people in my metaverse – the #permalist – @jokay, @heyjudeonline @akpc @kerryjcom @bronst @middleclassgirl @teacherman79 – without whom I would have bailed [...]

Three NEW things we need to see in education

Cognitive science tells us that learning with technology is a duel-band activity, which in some way explains our desire to live in a world with multiple tabs, multiple devices and multiple streams of information at our finger-tips. This post is about actively dealing with three things: cognitive load and capacity, the modality in which we [...]

Where is learning?

Why bare assumptions are a problem

Jenny Luca has kicked an excellent post about why bare URLS are a problem – and well worth reading, as this post has a lot to do with what Jenny’s saying. Mostly, this post is about a new semantic search machine called Blekko (read some background here) – and why it’s appearance is really important [...]

What is it for?

In a world of a million online tools, where we can consume and produce with equal ease, one of the key things teachers struggle with is trying to decide which tools could be used to promote deeper learning. Of course these tools do little without adapting pedagogy, but all too often, the question to from [...]