From Ben Hammersley who will be at Reboot 8 next week...
"Rome did not create a great Empire by organising committees and holding meetings.
They did it by ruthlessly slaughtering everyone who opposed them."
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You can guess the sort of week I've had...
John Clare, Education Editor at the Daily Telegraph answers a question about the progress Independent pupils make when they move onto University.
Specifically, whether "state school pupils really tend to do better at university than those who went to independent schools?
There is some evidence that it is so - which has encouraged some universities to discriminate in favour of state school applicants - but it came from research that assumed all universities and courses were equally demanding, which is absurd.
By contrast, a new study by three Oxford dons comparing the degree performance over the past 30 years of state and independent school pupils who entered Oxford and Cambridge with the same A-level scores found no significant difference between them.
The BBC reports that there is 'Too much choice' on school menus and that:
The best way to ensure children eat a healthy school meal is to cut down the choice of food available.
I suspect that there are wider lessons to be drawn here.
I suspect that the real way to ensure children get an effective education is to cut down the choice of subjects available.
But I fear no-one will wish to adopt that strategy either...
Scan This Book from yesterday's New York Times is lengthy but well worth a read. It's written by Kevin Kelly from Wired.
Synopsis:
1. All the world's books will soon be available in digital form. Google will do much of the work. Likewise Amazon. They can offshore to India to get much of the actual scanning done. The Chinese will pick up most of the stuff that the rest of us are told is still in copyright. It is cheap and easy to scan a book. $10 per book...
2. "Turning inked letters into electronic dots that can be read on a screen is simply the first essential step in creating a new world library. The real magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before. In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages."
3. "Once digitized, books can be unraveled into single pages or be reduced further, into snippets of a page. These snippets will be re-mixed, re-used and re-sequenced. Just as the music audience now juggles and reorders songs into new albums (or "playlists"), the universal library will encourage the creation of mashed-up books on virtual bookshelves."
4. Old fashioned publishers won't enjoy this one bit.
5. New-wave consumers won't care about old-fashioned publishers.
6. It's iTunes for books...
The Times Educational Supplement (UK) runs a splendid article about the ICT infrastructure on the Isle of Man (just off the UK mainland).
In total Graham is responsible for 3,900 client computers (desktop and laptop). As well as 115 servers, 40 networks, 300 wireless access points (Apple Base Stations) and numerous other pieces of equipment. This is all done with just two technicians.
Well, they use Apple of course...
Link: UK Educational Resources - TES - The Times Educational Supplement .
Eva Langlands writes in Scottish Sunday Herald, and looks at how Scotland might close the gender gap in schools and improve boys’ attitude to learning.
YOU can sense the nervous excitement at Dalziel High School, Motherwell. Pupils stream out of the front gates dressed in the school’s distinctive blazer and tie, having just taken the first major academic test of their lives: Standard Grades.
As pupils confer on answers, some will attribute today’s achievement to one single factor: single-sex teaching.
“My grades have improved since boys and girls separated. I find it a lot easier to concentrate now,” says 14-year-old male Saas el-Zuba, who attends single-sex maths classes at the school.
“Before boys were always trying to show off or be cheeky to the teacher. Now the atmosphere is more relaxed. I’d like to have single-sex classes for more subjects, particularly difficult ones.”
Single-sex schooling is the Motherwell school’s answer to closing the ever-widening gender gap in attainment, highlighted last week by new figures which revealed that female students at Scottish universities outnumber men by more than 36,000.
The article also offers the following statistics:
The Freakanomics authors, writing in the New York Times, report that:
[Academics in the USA have] compiled the "Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance," a 900-page academic book that will be published next month.
This tome makes a rather startling assertion: that the trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated.
Or, put another way, expert performers — whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming — are nearly always made, not born.
And yes, practice does make perfect. These may be the sort of clichés that parents are fond of whispering to their children. But these particular clichés just happen to be true.
Will Richardson looks at the latest clamp down on ICT in Education, USA style...
I thought the Americans had tried this sort of approach before and found that it didn't work?
So here we go…let’s REALLY get around this messy job of educating our kids by just legislating away school access to not only MySpace but to any:
…commercial Web sites that let users create public “Web pages or profiles” and also offer a discussion board, chat room, or e-mail service. Including blogs, wikis, online gaming…No joke. This is a bill offered up by a group of Republicans whose polling shows that now is the time to capitalize on the hysteria that a slew of fright-filled articles about social networking sites has wrought.
This is disturbing on so many levels that I hardly know where to begin.
Link: Weblogg-ed Headline: Congress Targets Social Network Sites.
Good stuff. Colin Ashby talks a lot of sense. I'm due to speak at Trinity School later this term.
A head teacher is urging others to take up what he called the "noble" role of leader of a school.
Addressing the Independent Schools Association conference in Torquay, Chairman Colin Ashby (Head Teacher at Trinity School, Teignmouth) appealed for more potential heads to step forward.
He said that among professionals, the role carried a "label of integrity of the highest order".
But he noted that 1,500 schools were without permanent heads and applications were down by 16%.
He said that in 2005, 1,786 teachers left state schools to teach in independent ones.
He said it was a "vote of confidence" in the independent sector but "we must look beyond the confines of our own sector".
Link: BBC NEWS | Education | Call to join 'noble' profession.
The staff are right. And the ATL are wrong. And I write as paid up member of the ATL.
This ISN'T a technology issue - it's a behaviour issue.
An essential lesson of history is that you can't expect prohibition to work. Banning "phones", wireless iPods and their like, won't alter the underlying patterns of poor behaviour.
That's an education issue...
Teachers have voted to boycott a pupil who secretly took a photo of a female member of staff's cleavage.
The boy was caught by another member of staff at St Cuthbert's RC school in Newcastle upon Tyne, while adding a lewd caption to the camera phone image.
Members of the NASUWT and ATL voted to refuse to teach the boy, who was expelled but later reinstated when his parents won an appeal.
The ATL said it highlighted the threat posed to teachers by new technology.
More worrying was this remark from the NASUWT:
The NASUWT's national executive member for north-east England, Mick Lyons, added: "I can't see any reason whatsoever why pupils should have camera phones in schools."
I'm guessing that Mick Lyons is either a bit short on the imagination front, or has somehow avoided recent developments in multi-media...
Link: BBC Education.