New report on ICT in British schools out now
A recent report from Key points of the report include:
- The current delivery of computing education in many UK schools is highly unsatisfactory
- Many pupils gain nothing beyond basic digital literacy skills such as word-processing or using a database
Not unlike the Dansih EVA-report from 2009, a lack of qualifications in the teaching staff is part of the problem. In Denmark, the current discussion on this issues often addresses the need for more contextualised development of teachers’ competencies.
Read the full Britisk report from the Royal Society here
New interesting journal has first issue out now:
multimodal communication, published by Multimodal Research Center at Auckland University of Technology. The people behind are Sigrid Norris and colleagues - will definately be checking it out in the near future.
The journal is published on line, and full papers are available from the website (follow link above).
In Copenhagen, participating in the conference “The Future of Development Research: The Nordic Perspective(s)”. Tom Nyvang, PO Zander and I have prepared a joint paper with the title Scandinavian Participatory Design - Beyond Design, Beyond Scandinavia where we discuss participatory approaches in development the case in the paper is our collaboration with Dhaka University, ePolicyInPractice.
Paper presentations take place in small workshops where the interaction and discussion following presentations is very lively and interesting.
As this is a conference on development research, we feared to be sticking out, but fortunately people seem to find our approach and work interesting – using terms like ‘refreshing’ and ‘very different’ in the nicest possible way J
Move, people, move….!
The picture above shows the dustbin in the shared kitchen/lunch room in our new building at the ‘city campus’. Staff moved into the building on August 1st this year, and app. 600 students joined us on Sept. 1st. Lots of details were not sorted by the time we moved in, and even by the time the students arrived. Network connections were not good, furniture was not in its right place, boxes were still to be unpacked, the coffee machine to be plugged in, etc. Many of us worked out of boxes for weeks and weeks, because the handy men were too busy to fix bookshelves in our offices for a long long time, etc. The fact that after 2,5 months in the building we still had no in the building seems very hard to understand - and even harder for anyone to explain. We have given up trying to understand how and where this went wrong, and why it was so hard to cmmunicate this very basic need to the right people at the right time. Instead we are just very pleased that the bins are finally here. Just make simple things really complicated, and you will get really happy employees when things miraculously ’solve themselves’. On a more serious note, the late arrival of the long needed bins also shows us that moving organisations or parts of them, from packing up the boxes in position A to unpacking them, settling in, and taking up work again in position B is a slow proces with lots and lots of small steps along the way…
