I especially worry about the displacement of subjects like art, drama, music, history and geography, all of which are vitally important but which seem to be treated as the poor cousins in the curriculum. Yes, STEAM is better than STEM, but it’s not enough.
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Blogger, by Terry Freedman
Blogging is not dead!
There is still a great interest in writing blogs. One of the reasons I know this is that my course on blogging currently has twelve sign-ups. That may not sound a lot, but many courses at the City Lit have far fewer.
Read MoreDystopian visions: My Object All Sublime revisited
What if an amazing technology like time travel were used purely and simply as a form of punishment?
Read MoreDystopian visions: Computers don't argue (Updated with reference to AI)
The writer does an excellent job of both reflecting the annoyance of dealing with a computer program that has no flexibility as well as no intelligence, and highlighting the need for programs to invite human input when the consequences of not doing so can be catastrophic.
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Blogger, by Terry Freedman
Writing for blogs
Every so often I read some pundit, or usually a journalist pretending to be a pundit, suggesting that blogs are dead. What can I say? They’re not.
Read More11 predictions concerning technology in education revisited and updated
Here is a list of predictions I made in 2001 about the classroom of the future, with an evaluation of its accuracy.
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Click the pic to see the original report's website.
Shape of the Future: How education system leaders can respond to the provocations of AI
I used Google’s Notebook LM to summarise this report. I have done this to bring the report and its main points to your attention, and to put Notebook LM through its paces.
Read MoreReview: How I review books on edtech
My views on what constitutes a book on edtech are fairly catholic. Indeed, it would me more accurate to denote the books I review as books for teachers of ICT, Computing, digital literacy etc etc,, rather than books on edtech. The latter tend to have titles like “How to teach Computing”, or “How to use Excel in the classroom”.
Read MoreReflections: What's the point of book reviews?
So many authors think they ought to be the recipient of the Nobel prize for literature.
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Review: Nuts and Bolts: How Tiny Inventions Make Our World Work
It's rather disconcerting when one considers that buildings like The Shard are essentially held together by nuts, bolts and washers.
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Click the image to see this book on Amazon (affiliate link)
Review: Love Triangle: The Life-changing Magic of Trigonometry
Like, I suspect, many people, I have never knowingly come across an isosceles triangle in my life, and wouldn’t know what to do with it if I did. However...
Read MoreElevator speeches
Sometimes, the elevator speech I hear was presumably crafted whilst going from the top floor to the bottom floor in a very tall building.
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Created in Bing Image Creator
The human touch
I’ve been experimenting a lot with using AI, especially for summarising long documents. But the summaries lacked the human touch.
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Come back! Drawing by Terry Freedman
The KCL Report on the future of Computing Education
The Computing curriculum report from Kings College makes some great recommendations for fixing the failures of the current curriculum.
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Created using Bing Image Creator
The future of AI in Education: notes on a Westminster Education Forum Conference
A few months ago I attended a Westminster Education Forum about the use of AI in Education. I spent quite some time going through the transcript and making notes, but then I thought: why not use AI to do the work?
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Quick look: The Art of Uncertainty: How to navigate chance, ignorance, risk and luck
The first thing that struck me is that it is quite readable.
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Quick look: Hitler's People
Yes, I know that this has nothing (ostensibly at least) to do with ICT or Computing, but I thought it might be an interesting book in general, and for history teachers in particular.
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Review: Making Sense Of Chaos – A Better Economics for a Better World
Before you rush off on the grounds that this book has nothing to do with Computing, let me reassure you that it does.
Read MoreBjork & Bjork’s Desirable Difficulties in Action
The original work on which this volume is based has perhaps been honoured more in the breach than in the observance.
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Click the image to see this book on Amazon (affiliate link)
Review: Coderspeak – The language of computer programmers
This book won’t necessarily help a student pass a computing exam, but it will almost certainly make them a more aware, and thus better, programmer.
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