Litigation in the nursery?

Kinda Learning Stuff: "Why do people do this? When did they forget they were dealing with children and prioritise hyper-protective practices above meeting their needs? Education, education, education = litigation, litigation, litigation?!"

Blog entry made on my Kinda Learning site which is E891 relevant because it touches on the dissemination of research and also the misappropriation of guidelines in education. Worth remembering

What's del.icio.us today...

Links for 2008-02-25 [del.icio.us] Posted: 26 Feb 2008 12:00 AM CST "Intellectual property" is a silly euphemism * News * Technology * Intellectual property Series: Digital rights, digital wrongs Who Is This Person? :: Firefox Add-ons Could be so useful for helping to critically evaluate web sources during web research Smaller class sizes 'less effective' Interesting article which touches on the way in which research is disseminated to and by teachers

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Links for 2008-02-22 [del.icio.us] Posted: 23 Feb 2008 12:00 AM CST Wealthy 'thrive at poor schools' So... family background is more important than selection of school... who knew...

Trust no-one... well, do... but trust yourself more!

The web is your hard drive -- but it's an unreliable hard drive | Technology | Guardian Unlimited: "Bear this in mind when the next snake-oil salesman does a pitch for 'cloud computing'. Sure, you can let somebody else take responsibility for the safety and security of your data, but only if you don't mind losing it."

Useful reminder about why it's good to use the web 2.0 services that are out there... but relying on them for 100% uptime and for complete reliability of data storage is a mistake. Just as with learning out to manage our digital identity is a skill modification we need to get to grips with, so are issues of data storage, ownership and management. If you want it doing right... don't necessarily do it yourself because there are some fantastic online tools out there. But if you want it doing reliably... make sure you take backups and take responsibility for those backups yourself.

Nothing ever really changes, huh? A slight tweak with the way you do things to take account of differing contexts, and you'll be right.

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Links for 2008-02-20 [del.icio.us] Posted: 21 Feb 2008 12:00 AM CST Context beats exam tables in search for best schools University dropout steady at 22% Interesting to note because of the attempt to manipulate figures to superficially improve outcomes rather than addressing the real support issue Why do so many students drop out, MPs ask | Students | EducationGuardian.co.uk Student retention and the issues surrounding that and widening participation There is good reason to be worried about declining rates of reading | Comment is free | The Guardian Interesting response to an earlier article about the Dawn of the Digital Natives (also in The Guardian)

Links for 2008-02-18 [del.icio.us] Posted: 19 Feb 2008 12:00 AM CST Can we teach people to be happy? Interesting seed for a debate on the future of education A third of teachers 'struggle with technology' | E-learning | EducationGuardian.co.uk

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Links for 2008-02-17 [del.icio.us] Posted: 18 Feb 2008 12:00 AM CST JISC : supporting education and research Mind42.com - Collaborative mind mapping in your browser Free online mindmapping which could be extremely useful and compete with the MindMeister version

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Links for 2008-02-16 [del.icio.us] Posted: 17 Feb 2008 12:00 AM CST Lesson one: no Orwellian language The impact of Orwellian language on the educational environment. One to get the mental juices flowing!

Lesson one: no Orwellian language

BBC NEWS | Education | Lesson one: no Orwellian language: "The need to measure everything and to find equivalents for different types of education arises from a natural enough desire to achieve value-for-money, and to promote different routes for young people.

But it can also be a strait-jacket, implying that all types of learning can, and should, be forced into the same model."

Terrific article about the impact of language in education or rather, the language used to talk about education. Makes you think about the debate surrounding quantitative vs. qualitative methods and which is most appropriate for education. I think that the point is that there are strengths and weaknesses in all things and that by blundering on with scant regard for the weaknesses, focussing only on the strengths matching what you 'need' from education, then the impacts can extend beyond the immediate. Can language really change educational culture? The way it is perceived in general? If we talk about 'delivering', 'facilitating', 'customers' etc when we're describing the educational environment, do we risk forgetting that it's actually about people's development at all and it becomes a tick box, future-employee-producing exercise...

Very thought-provoking.

Simple ideas

LinkBunch BETA - http://linkbun.ch: "A link bunch is just that - a bunch of links"

Aren't simple ideas just great? The ability to shorten and send a bunch of links together. Reading lists in a single URL - done. Collections of resources for research - together. Enthusiastic 'same theme' URLs being shared via several 'tweets' - nope. Just bung them altogether. Pop into LinkBunch and... ping! Done! The Firefox extension looks pretty nifty too)

Oakley on quantitative vs. qualitative methods

Brief biography: "arguing about who does what in terms of methods doesn’t help the work (of social science) get done in the most efficient and appropriate way."

Lovely quote about qualitative vs. quantitative methods from Ann Oakley's biography. Nit-picking the advantages and disadvantages of both forms of research doesn't help get the research job done. Worth remembering!

Is testing too testing?

England young 'among most tested'

Interesting article which raises questions about the way in which schoolchildren are tested in the UK... but it also raises questions about the way in which qualitative and / or quantitative testing affects those within the system. The more measures and standards there are in place, the more testing there is in place to generates the numbers needed. But quantity of education, as another related report notes, is not the be all and end all and it doesn't generate the quality of results desired: "The Primary Review, taking an overview of the evidence, suggests that there is no clear link between quantity and quality in education." (BBC, 2008).

It's a fascinating area. Does insisting that quantitative analysis must be able to be performed in education damage the quality of that education in the long run? Is everyone encouraged to become complicit in a system that just isn't working in the interests of the participants? Would I want my children educated in the UK as it currently stands? Not really...

Fostering the research community

e4innovation.com » Blog Archive » Fostering the research community: "We want the students to “experience” e-learning research, for them to become members of our research community. This fits very much with Wenger’s Community of Practice ideas and his views on identity and constellations of practice. So instead of “dry content” and our views on what e-learning is about, we have designed the course around a series of seminal research papers which encapsulate some of the key features of e-learning research. We want the students to get a feel for the changing nature of e-learning as a research field, the predominant educational theories and perspectives which underpin it and examples of methodological innovation. But many of the students who are likely to take the course will be researchers or practitioners in the field themselves. So we want to ensure that we can capture and build very much on their expertise as well. Soooo to the role of blogs in the course. We will be asking each of the student to keep a reflective research blog as they work through the course and will be encouraging them to read and comment on each others blogs. We want them to experience the role of blogs in a research context and for them to reflect on their own views of how blogging offers a valuable, alternative communication channel for academic discourse."

Poop! Now I wish I was doing the above course to complement E891... ah well!! Worth keeping an eye on this blog to see how the course progresses and whether learning research through experiencing research and reflecting on that experience is a better way of understanding it than the more dry, for want of a better expression(!), E891 traditional-style OU approach.