Unrelated Posts

Passing clouds of inconsequential observations

Category: Education

  • Sophisticated Interactive Cheating Learning

    Only in the bizarre (as in anachronistic, educationally limiting and often damaging, economically draining and environmentally indefensible) world of mass schooling in the 21st century would looking something up on the Internet be considered cheating. To quote Stephen Crowne, Chief Executive, Becta,

    “Equipping our current and future generations with the necessary skills to compete in a digital world is crucial to our future. Through innovative programmes such as Home Access, Becta is driving this development.  We can see in schools and colleges across Britain how the use of technology breeds greater success for students and teachers alike.”

    Quite.

    Or from a Microsoft Word document (No! Don’t laugh!) linked from the DCSF site, but without any indication what it is or who created it or when it was created (No! Don’t laugh!) ….

    Gone are the days when young people spend endless school days poring over dusty textbooks. Learning is now interactive, sophisticated, and engaging.

    Ho hum!

  • Aptitude and Ability

    Last weekend threw up an interesting contrast. On Radio Three’s Private Passions available on iPlayer (until 6th December) Bill Bailey described his schooling (the independent King Edward’s School, Bath) where his talents were recognised and encouraged. On the other hand since her first audition for the X Factor:

    one felt that Stacey Solomon had somewhere along the line been failed by the school system. Is the King Solomon High School (motto: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, who am I? If not now, when?” Ethics of the Fathers, 1:14) really meeting the requirements of Section 7 of the Education Act 1996? If you delegate the education of a child to the mass schooling system do you have any redress when that system fails the child. As Ms Solomon enters the X Factor semi-finals (and, one hopes, ultimate victory) one can only wonder at the countless other children who have been failed by such a piss poor system. If only there were some form of education otherwise than by schooling….

  • Governmental visitors

    Whilst all are welcome to come and browse here, should tax payers be subsidising government browsing?
    govvisist

    More worrying is the Windows/Internet Explorer 6 thing. Do these people know nothing about security?

    Of course the [W:IP address] 195.92.40.49 is generic and could be from anywhere within gov.uk. Let’s hope they enjoyed, and were educated by, the silliness.

    See also:
    FreeBorn John

    Spy Blog (Watching Them, Watching Us)

  • The curious case of the missing "Badman" page

    Question:

    What do you get when you subtract….

    This Google.co.uk search

    from…

    an identical Google.com search?

    Answer:
    The Dark Lord Badman’s Guide to Home Education – Arranging An Inspection

    Remainder:

    Missing page
    Missing page

    Update 28th July 2009:
    This piece had a lot of visitors yesterday (but not a single comment ;-)) most of whom were from the UK. A couple of visitors from [W:Google] itself passed through – probably in response to this link.

    Of course Google searches are dynamic things and this page itself is now appearing in the .com listing. So for the record here is a picture of the original listings.

    Google search listings
    Google search listings

    Update 2nd August: Curiouser and curiouser.

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