
Good lord it’s been a long time since I made a post. The reality is that I’ve been working on this for about four months, in and around everything else that’s been going on. It’s now just about ready for release, so here it is.
Some Rights Reserved is a resource to be used to complete the OCR Nationals in ICT unit 1 course. The website contains resources to be used to create the required documents, presentations, databases & spreadsheets – all with an intellectual property/Creative Commons twist. The teacher’s handbook provides information on assessment, guidelines for how to complete the assessment objectives & exemplar work.
The project is based around the idea of sharing ideas – the written word, music, video – for free. As such, I’m releasing it for free.
So feel free to visit the website, and the teacher’s area for the handbook.

A recent US Department of Education report concluded that “on average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction”. In the New York Times analysis of the report, Steve Lohr said:
Until fairly recently, online education amounted to little more than electronic versions of the old-line correspondence courses. That has changed with arrival of Web-based video, instant messaging and collaboration tools.
The study combined data from 99 studies with quantitative comparisons of online and classroom learning. The difference in grades was modest but meaningful enough to draw the conclusion, so many drew the conclusion that online > classroom learning.
I’d caution against this. As I said in a previous post, computer-based learning isn’t intrinsically more motivating, more engaging, or better than any other kind of learning, but that’s not to say that teachers shouldn’t be doing all they can to make online content accessible, engaging & useful. Read the rest of this entry »
I really have to start the first roundup of useful links with the first site that got me really thinking about the role of technology in education. Jamie McKenzie takes a cautionary role, looking for the good in applying technology rather than evangelising. He provides excellent food for thought, and was quoted several times in my dissertation.
Key posts
I described Richard Stallman in my famous faces in tech poster series as an “open source evangelist”. Here, he makes an excellent argument against the war on piracy & file sharing.
Stephen Fry speaks on the history of copyright, and talks candidly about his own attitudes to file sharing. An excellent talk on the subject from someone who makes money by virtue of his intellectual property. Downloadable m4a podcast.
I’m pretty much done with tweaking the new look of the site, though I would still appreciate feedback if you find any issues – can’t be sure I’ve got them all!
I’ve added a new option for people who would rather receive post updates via email. You can subscribe to this blog using the By Email link in the top right of the page, or click here.
Some old posts have had a little tweak to make them more accessible, including the system life cycle poster, level descriptors wall display, and famous faces in tech posters. I have also stopped hosting my posters with Box.net because of bandwidth limitations. The original reason was so as not to put too much stress on this server, but that doesn’t seem to be too much of an issue at the moment.
I’m also going to start running a weekly roundup of interesting websites in education & technology that I plan to use in the classroom. I hope to keep it topical, but may throw in some older sites that I’ve found useful. If any of you have suggestions, please feel free to submit them in the comments.
This draws me nicely on to my final point. I set this blog up effectively as a continuation of the conversation on Twitter – very much a two-way street, yet by the very nature of this being a (relatively) static website, it presents information in a top-down way. I’ve had lots of very favourable comments about how the site is useful, and I’m glad to hear that resources I’ve posted here are being used, but I’d like to set out my stall as someone up for collaboration. By combining Debbie Jones’s knowledge with mine for the moral issues in ICT handouts, the finished resource was better than if either of us had done it alone.
So, you can see what interests me plastered across this site, my Delicious bookmarks & on Twitter. If you’re working on something you’d like to collaborate on, or have an idea for a poster but don’t have the software or time to draw it up, drop me a line.
Regular visitors will notice the site no longer looks as it did. I changed the theme out of necessity, as anyone who clicked on a tag from the cloud on the sidebar would only see the last three posts with that tag, with no option to see older posts. As a result, my older posts were completely inaccessible bar schlepping through 8 pages… not exactly a model of usability from someone with a pretty extensive post on making VLE courses usable!
Please do let me know via a comment or email if you spot anything that I haven’t fixed – the next couple of days will be spent tinkering, tweaking, and (the biggest job) putting together excerpts of each post, again in an effort to make the site more accessible. Any suggestions would be appreciated!

“So what do you teach?”
“ICT.”
“Oh, well at least the kids must find that interesting.”
- Opening to half a dozen conversations I’ve had with non-teachers.
We’re not in the ‘90s anymore, and sitting a kid in front of a computer generates little more excitement than sitting them in front of a toaster. In a society where computers are truly ubiquitous, they can’t be expected to be intrinsically exciting. How impressed would you be to find a TV in a classroom? What if I said it received Ceefax?
This isn’t a bad thing, it’s just the process of innovation – or the final stage in the hype cycle. New developments only remain interesting for as long as they can be called new developments… technologies older than that (or “the most profound” technologies, as Marc Weiser said) simply disappear into the fabric of our lives and are thereon taken for granted. Read the rest of this entry »