Photo from Stencil CC0 licence
Recipes as algorithms is one of the themes I'll be exploring in the next issue of Digital Education, which will be out soon.
Other themes include 'Is educational research worth the paper it's written on?' and much, much more.
Read More
The classroom is a great place to conduct some research. Picture by Jordan Dreyer
In my opinion, every teacher should be a researcher, and I think that especially applies to teachers who have some degree of influence of what education technology is bought and used.
Finally, do share your research and findings, whether from your own research or reading, with other people. If you haven't already done so, start a blog. Or share on Twitter or Facebook.
You might like my article, Education Technology research, and how it's reported
In case you became sidetracked earlier, here's the sign-up form for my newsletter, Digital Education:
Steve publishes the Learning with E's blog. The articles are not only very thought-provoking, they often also include references so you can follow up the reading for yourself. At the moment, Steve is writing a great series on learning theories. I asked him to tell me about his current research.
The Spectator does it. The Economist does it. Even children’s comics do it. So I thought: Let’s do it. Let’s make a Christmas double issue of the Digital Education newsletter.
I’d like to be able to say I’d planned it that way right from the start, but that would be something of (to use Winston Churchill’s wonderful expression) a terminological inexactitude. In truth, the November edition was delayed due to a family illness, so it made sense to bring out a bumper edition now so people who subscribe have plenty to keep them going until January! I’ve included articles on a wide variety of topics:
In 1981 the then Conservative government announced that the Department of Trade and Industry would provide funding for one microcomputer in every school. Throughout the ensuing three decades there has hardly ever been a year when there has not been some earmarked or ring-fenced funding for ICT in schools in England. But in 2014 we are in new territory. The Harnessing Technology Grant, which for several years was the main source of devolved funding to support ICT in schools, is no more and many schools will have to make do with the ICT equipment they already have rather than spending on the latest technology. Yet teachers should still aim to make the very best use of the resources available to them and aspire to excellent teaching with ICT.
I will never understand why so many people think that Wikipedia is OK to use for serious research on the grounds that it is mostly reliable. Mostly? Some years ago I posited the idea of a wiki timetable, in which people get to edit train timetables how they like. Some of the information displayed on the electronic noticeboards would probably be accurate some of the time. Useful, eh?
The most popular article on the ICT in Education website is one by a 17 year-old student called The Importance Of Mobile Phones In Education. To give you an idea of its popularity, I would estimate that it has been viewed at least 30,000 times since it was published back in July 2010. So the question is, why is it so popular?
Is it because it was written by a student? Well, there is no doubt that student articles receive a lot of attention, but not usually this much.
Is it because it is about mobile phones? I don’t think so: I have written about mobile phones before, and again, the articles haven’t attracted 30,000 views as far as I know.
I think the answer lies in the combination: an article about mobile phones written by a student who appears to be surgically attached to one.
This is the subtitle of an exhibition at the British Library. Called “Growing Knowledge”, the exhibition seeks to answer the following questions:
This is the gist of the question posed by the Royal Society, which, as promised in a previous article, has just launched a call for evidence.
Unless The Register has missed something out of its report, or I'm not thinking straight, there is a serious flaw in Hitwise's conclusion that Brits' greater use of social networking sites than search engines prove that they are "more interested in talking about themselves than they are in learning about their world".
How does one reach that conclusion? Perhaps there is a legitimate chain of logic, but I can't see it, and it hasn't been explained as far as I can see. It's an excellent example of the need to probe beyond the headlines and soundbites, and to teach our pupils to do the same.
Anyway, any true narcissist wouldn't bother to visit social networks to see what people are saying about them: they'd set up a few Google Alerts.
That's what I've done, anyway.
I think it's easy to take for granted all the information we have at our fingertips, but every so often I have an experience that reminds me of how wonderful it all is.
Take last Wednesday for example. Elaine and I went shopping in the afternoon to a local supermarket, and all of a sudden a good music track started wafting over the airwaves, one which sounded original rather than the usual ersatz rubbish. Neither of us could place it, but when I arrived home I looked up the only snippet of the lyrics I could remember.
I plugged the following into Google:
lyrics: love is kinda crazy
From that I discovered that the song was called Spooky. I looked that up in Spotify, and very quickly found out that the version being played in the supermarket was the one recorded by Dusty Springfield.
Total length of time spent on research? Three minutes. I can't imagine how long that would have taken me in pre-web days.
So what was all the fuss about? Well, here is the YouTube video of Dusty singing it. To be honest, the video is not exactly the most exciting thing you've ever seen, but the tune is nice!
(c) Terry Freedman All Rights Reserved