Archive | September, 2010

Learning with Auntie

This week the BBC launched its new strategy for learning. Despite the unalloyed successes of the revision service Bitesize, the foolishly shelved creative offering for teenagers Blast and the sterling work of Adult Learning, the BBC has been frustratingly timid about its Charter-proclaimed educational remit for the last few years.  The reason for the half-heartedness was, no doubt, […]

Violent Play – Rubbing salt into the wound

I came across an interesting research paper today in the Social Psychological and Personality Science journal.   Brad Bushman (Ohio State University) and Bryan Gibson (Central Michigan University) suggest that the aggression associated with violent video games can persist long after the game play has finished. Many people, notably Craig Anderson of the Department of Psychology at […]

Where success counts

Last week I listened to two fascinating talks from TEDxSheffield.  The first was by Richard St John based on his book, The 8 traits successful people have in common (Amazon link).  St John  describes the results of an extensive survey he’s conducted of the world’s most successful people – leaders from all fields and walks […]

Gaga

“Gaga’s fans are marooned in a global technocracy of fancy gadgets but emotional poverty. Everything is refracted for them through the media. They have been raised in a relativistic cultural vacuum where chronology and sequence as well as distinctions of value have been lost or jettisoned by politically-correct educators” says Camille Paglia, professor of humanities […]

Free iPhone

While I was in Leeds this week, I came across a fascinating research project that is having a major impact on undergraduate studies. Following an earlier collaboration between health schools across the north of England called ALPS (Assessment and Learning in Practice Settings) which explored the value of mobile computing for medical students, Leeds Medical […]

Failure, Friends and Finding your Feet

I love being a dad.  I find it the most astonishing, life-affirming, challenging wonder-filled experience I have ever known and my children keep surprising me and teaching me new lessons. My little boy, Jacob, is 17 months old.  He’s been tentatively and briefly on his feet for the last few weeks but mostly he’s been […]

Ping – too little, too late?

We’ve become accustomed to rather cynical annual software updates from the likes of Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Studio that deliver dubious new ‘features’ and diminishing backwards compatibility. Likewise we’re increasingly familiar with the perpetual beta nature of apps – software released early and continually refined. But I wonder if we’re entirely sold on the […]