A new competition from IC Tomorrow (a Technology Strategy Board programme) and Nesta offers up to £48,000 to develop ideas that make great use of technology to support learning. The competition is now open to applicants.
Like most parents with young children, I get a lot of joy from imagining what type of boy my young son will turn out to be (here's my best guess: sporty, intrigued by the world, cheeky, and a giggler).
On Monday, I attended the Education Endowment Foundation's Evidence in Action Seminar, which was full of good people, proposing good ideas, for closer aligning what goes on in the classroom with what we know about learning. However, I was struck that there was no talk of how technology can support this aspiration. As I often do, I thought I would collect my thoughts in a blog post.
The following blog sums up a presentation I gave at the Whole Education conference this week:
It has been claimed that the history of technology and education is one of overselling and underuse. Which feels about right to me, but, given that I am an optimist about what technology can do for learning, I owe an explanation of what has gone wrong in the past.
In a previous blog post I set out five challenges to the movement to get more children coding, making apps, hacking websites and so on.
As part of a project planning process it's often an effective technique to employ Gary Klein's idea of a pre-mortem exercise - something that Kahneman in his wonderful book 'Thinking, Fast and Slow' describes as "the best idea"[1] for taming unfounded optimism.
In one sense, you would be hard pushed to find someone who argued for less rigour in education - who doesn't want students to learn as much, and as deeply, as possible. The crux comes when people start defining the learning processes and the content that constitute 'rigour'.
For the last few months we have been busy articulating a new practical programme to respond to the challenges and opportunities that an ever more ubiquitous, larger and smarter digital environment creates for education.
Tim Harford, in his (wonderful) new book puts it very sharply - any solution to climate change "is going to come either because individuals voluntarily change their behaviour, or because governments change the rules."[1]
This week I visited a learning experience that The Philosophy Shop are delivering on idiscover.
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