It's all integral

It is said that “things are the way they are because they got that way”. So please, step back with me, into the mists of time …. time … time … Once upon a time, not so many years ago … the UK was swamped by a confusion of work-related qualifications based on classroom tests, [...]

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Most of my learning over the past quite a few years has been through on-line interaction with fellow travellers on this road through life, well, that or frantically scanning “help” files to find the magic bullet that will solve my problem. I guess the big difference between the two is that in that latter case, [...]

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I’m just starting on a consultancy contract to completely update the national occupational standards for the UK travel and tourism industries. Those standards will become the new basis for the National Vocational Qualifications (NVQs) in the industry so it is important to get them right and we are taking best part of a year to [...]

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There has been much UK press excitement this week about McDonald’s (yes, that McDonald’s) being approved as an “awarding body” so that they can offer, assess and moderate their own in-house management and supervisory qualifications. The extent of coverage came as something of a surprise. No so much because of the story itself, but because [...]

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Futurelab sent out a flier last week entitled Image a way to … support learning outside school. It points out that only 15% of children’s time is spent in school and appeals for ideas about how what it refers to as “informal learning” in the other 85% of their time, outside school, can best be [...]

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I’ve been making some good use of the Elluminate V-room facility, a secure virtual room with voice and video communication, chat room, interactive whiteboard and application sharing. It is free but the limit of three participants (including the moderator) limits the functionality for anything but the smallest of meetings. OK you can upgrade to whatever [...]

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Tony Buzan’s presentation on the creativity crisis. This emphasises what I have been arguing for years, through such things as Whole Brain Learning, that unless we help people learn to learn first we are on a hiding to nothing in teaching curriculum. Learning cannot be thought of as the natural consequence of being taught.

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Susan Greenfield, director of the Royal Institute, has thrown her weight behind the debunking the myth of learning styles. In an appallingly ill-informed introduction to an article in the Daily Telegraph, Julie Henry characterises learning styles based education as: … children are considered to have different “learning styles” and instead of being taught by the [...]

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I had my first experience of a flash-mob last night. My daughter had received a forwarded text message (SMS) advising that a bunch of people might well be meeting up on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral in London for a short dance party at precisely 6.46pm. I tagged along and arriving a few minutes [...]

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In “Patterns and sense-making: information visualisation”, George Siemens proposes a variety of strategies to create visual representations of data to help us, essentially, get our heads around the big picture by spotting relationships, trends and connections before getting into the finer and statistical details. It isn’t about oversimplifying complex issues, it is about giving the [...]

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