Inspired by Tim O’Reilly’s dictum “Take the intelligence of all your users and put it in the interface“, I’ve asked my colleague Nataly to adapt Amazon’s “Customers who bought” feature for the Chalkface site as “Teachers who bought…” This is what’s known as an ‘implicit recommendation engine’. The theory is that by looking at what…

Miranda says Just been chatting with Barry Blake fom Mangotsfield School who rang because he’d used up all his [Yacapaca] tests and not realised. He needed more, urgently. The idea came up of having a facility which would enable teachers in a similar position to access an additional 100 emergency uses from their interface without…

Back in January we got a mauling from a couple of local authority ICT advisers who felt that our KS3 ICT Assessment didn’t cover the full range of processes at the higher levels. “Never mind” said I, “it’s all online so we can change it in a trice”. Ahem. The ‘trice’ turned out to be…

The full BECTA report into open source software has been out for a few days now, long enough to digest. As I (and others) predicted, its tone is pro-open source, but by no means evangelical. What I failed to predict was that the report would come out more in favour of open-source operating systems than…