Danah Boyd is an anthropologist who researches the cultural implications of social software, and like the great anthropologists, she lives with her subjects (the early adopters) as one of them. These early adopters are mainly teenagers, and I’ve often found Danah’s writing to provide insight into the way they perceive technology. We adults have a…

James Farmer is one of online education’s freer thinkers, and he’s recently speculated that the new technology might put us publishers out of business by letting teachers share work directly. So, not thinking about putting Ian out of business, but I’m sure that people will have attempted a kind of open source lesson-plan / resource…

Ruth Kelly, it would seem, is trying to cultivate the ‘hard bastard’ image that did so well for David Blunkett until his libido got the better of his career. Today she’s taking a pop a low-level disruption in the classroom ahead of Ofsted’s annual report due out tomorrow. Reading between the lines of the BBC’s…

I went through school believing that knowledge was something that came exclusively from outside my personal universe. It came in textbooks and it came in encyclopaedias. It certainly did not come from me or anyone I knew*. That’s a poisonously disempowering distortion of reality. As an antidote, I recommend Wikipedia. Sixth form students, in particular,…

Most kids are now taught print-media literacy as part of the English curriculum. They can, for example, distinguish between editorial, advertorial and advert. But what about on the internet, a medium far more important to most school students? This Pew Report and associated Wired article (thanks Stephen for the reference) suggests that very few people…