I had another look at Buzzword–an online wordprocessor–today. It’s the first time I’ve been back to it since Adobe bought it out last Autumn. I have to say that not much seems to have changed after my quick scout around. There are some improved formatting and it now handles the new Microsoft Office format (although [...]
I’ve been re-reading The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen about technological change and company success– specifically disruptive technologies. Whilst being about 10 years old, it is still interesting and relevant. As I read it, I can’t help thinking about the whole-sale introduction of learning platforms (read VLE’s) in UK schools. I wonder if DfES/ BECTA [...]
The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) have published an animation explaining the benefits of the single sign-on and becoming a member of the UK Access Management Federation. They are distributing it via Google Video which is cool (see below). The UK Access Management Federation gives educational institutions in the UK the ability to provide identity [...]
The UK has come in 9th in the World Economic Forum’s Network Readiness Index with Denmark and Sweden coming in front. This is an improvement on our 10th ranking in 2005-6. The US has dropped from 1st in 2005-6 to 7th in 2006-7. Looking at the last three years it seems that those in the [...]
The Learn for Life website has a podcast from Robin Ball, Learning Services Manager of BECTA, in which he talks about learning platforms, the framework , and pupils being unable to use Web2.0 from within schools (an e-safety issue). Amongst a discussion about pedagogy and VLEs, Robin expresses some frustration that the framework has been [...]
The results of a survey of e-portfolio and e-Personal Development Planning (PDP) practice in UK higher education has been published by the Centre for Recording Achievement on behalf of the Higher Education Academy. Things of note: Almost all claimed that PDP had now been implemented in their institution and over three-quarters of these were using some form [...]
An article on ZDNet with Stephen Lucey (Becta’s executive director of strategic technologies) is worth a read. Good advice for Vista and Office 2007. I am glad that Stephen defined a learning platform in the following way: A learning platform is a range of products, so we were looking for the ability of a supplier [...]
Ian Usher of Bucks (and big Moodle advocate) makes an interesting point in a recent blog posting: embedding a learning platform in the culture of a school is something which you can’t do during a month’s or a week’s “free trial” of a commercial product – unless they’re willing to let you trial it for [...]
Moodle still seems to be centre stage in the ongoing debate over the place of open source software in education. This is primarily due to the knot Becta appear to be typing themselves up in with regard to the learning platform framework and the inconvenient fact that many schools (and LAs) seem to like Moodle. [...]