Schools normally react to technological change by confiscating it to protect the past: ballpoint pens to save our handwriting, calculators to save our arithmetic, digital watches to save our analogue timekeeping, mobile phones to save our…er well, just because they are new. Source: Education Futures, RSA, 2000.

South Korea is the most connected society on earth. 75% of the population has broadband; 85% in urban areas. They have the world’s highest density of wi-fi access points. A full one-third of the economy operates through the internet, compared to about 2% here. So it will be very useful to watch how the Koreans…

Finally, the Chalkface Blog has an RSS feed. For good measure, we’ve added RSS feeds to each news category (Teachers, Students, Default) and all 31 product category listings on the site. What’s RSS? Really Simple Syndication is a system that makes all kinds of timed information (news feeds, blogs, student assignments….) much more accessible than…

Since Rob Daniels left Heinemann, British educational publishing has lost its best resource on metadata and related information management concepts. So I found this article Metadata? Thesauri? Taxonomies? Topic Maps! (via OL Daily) extremely useful as an overview of what all the jargon means. It also helped crystallise my opinions on the use and misuse…

I argued in an earlier post for schools to invest in desktop, not laptop computers. I don’t like laptops because they are heavy, expensive and altogether too nickable. But what when mobile computers become as small, light and inexpensive as an exercise book? One technology that will make this possible is digital paper. This device,…