Multimedia in Education and Learning : Reflections
Thanks to everyone who organised and attended the ‘Multimedia in Education and Learning’ seminar at Anglia Polytechnic University today.
Thanks to Roger Clark and Emily, and to Ultralab (1990-2006)’s Maureen and Mark for excellent organisation and food.
Martin Spaul, Richard Millwood and myself presented at the seminar.
Please click ‘Add comment’ below if you would like to continue the debate, ask a question or simply throw in some thoughts.
Thanks for coming. (thanks to James Brain for the picture).
Big big thanks also to Apple’s Leonie for sponsoring the event.
Links (as promised): Martin Spaul | Richard Millwood.
Gina Said….
mattheweaves
Ultralab (1990-2006)’s Mark Constable found and emailed the following link:
http://slartibartfast.ultralab.net/tomsmith/?q=node/view/120#comment
Basically, Tom Smith from The Other Blog (which I’m loving the new look of) wrote some stuff and did some work with us on anti-spam. If you click the link, you’ll find that the spammers spammed the anti-spam thread.
I’m constantly battling with spammers attacking the blogs hosted on ‘Captain Birdseye’ (my trusty server). Birdseye goes out every morning for me pulling RSS feeds from around the Internet and while she’s doing that, I’m in the SQL database blocking IP addresses that spam some entries on blogs hosted on Birdseye. I’ve found some truly bizarre stuff while exploring the IP records.
On Thursday last week I headed round to the server ‘Slartibartfast’, with Jonathan to try to begin to understand the spamming on Slartibartfast.
Slartibartfast hosts blogs for other Ultranauts. Reviewing my Old Blog, (which still exists on ‘Slartibartfast’, but redirects to ‘Birdseye’) we discovered some interesting stuff about ‘Movable Type and how it works and stores comments.
A year ago action was taken to try and stop spam on Slartibartfast, and on the active hosted blogs, that seems to have worked with an anti-spam field added and required to confuse the robots trying to post rubbish.
mattheweaves
Ray Le Couteur (King Edward VI, School, Chelmsford)
Submitted by visitor on Thu, 05/12/2005 – 20:48.
Very much enjoyed the presentations and really liked Martin’s quote ‘Need to know NOW’ in relation to the teaching of low level ICT skills.
What I don’t understand is why these ideas seem to be completely at odds with the National Curriculum in the UK – imposed upon us at school – which seems to militate against creative work and usually emphasises the lowest level skills.
My question is, how do we get the message across?
mattheweaves
Martin Spaul
Submitted by visitor on Fri, 05/13/2005 – 09:19.
All I can say is that any form of education based on higher-level cognitive skills – and the flexible use of low-level factual knowledge and skills – is likely to be at odds with the ‘check list’ ethos of the national curriculum. With higher-level cognitive skills it is difficult to tick boxes which ‘assure’ that they have been ‘delivered’.
I suspect that ICT is especially vulnerable in this regard … from what I understand, the A-level syllabus consists of a wide range of low-level techniques and tool usage, which discourages in-depth enquiry.
How do we get this message across? Well, it might be that the world will do it for us. Low-level skills are available at low cost in other parts of the world (the off-shoring phenomenon) and ICT employment opportunities in the UK have declined. The market seems to be demanding the kind of high-level planning and design abilities which can’t easily be off-shored.
mattheweaves
Sarah Dignasse, Headteacher Plume School, Maldon
Submitted by visitor on Thu, 05/12/2005 – 17:42.
Really enjoyed your presentation this afternoon. We used to work with Ultralab (1990-2006) a few years (8?)with our Art students putting their work onto the web.
We would be very interested in working with you again – particularly looking at students who should be ‘aiming higher’. Are there any possibilites of taking this forward? How do we do this?
Contacts: myself or Dan Gee, Head of Year 10: 01621 854681 or admin@plume.essex.sch.uk