Archive for August, 2008

gOS – getting there

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

gOS is a version of Linux that is intended to be easy to use and designed around what most computer users want to do (Web, photos, music, e-mail, documents). The distribution is based on Ubuntu, in turn based on Debian, but the gOS people have made an honest attempt to make the desktop easy to [...]

Exploratory learning, 1967

Monday, August 25th, 2008

A school in Dagenham was loaned seventeen Summa 20 and six Divisumma 24 [calculators] in an experiment to teach maths. The Olivetti machines replaced log tables and slide rules for two groups of 11 to 15 year olds. The first group were given 2.5 hours tuition to learn multiplication. Whereas the second group were left [...]

Passing notes outside class

Monday, August 18th, 2008

“Many of the students we spoke to are making some use of their own tools to socialise and network in personal and public spaces, and in doing so are actually supporting their learning in that they use these tools to communicate and share information and resources between themselves and their peers, even though they did [...]

Rules

Monday, August 18th, 2008

It is that time of year again, teaching will be under way in a month or less. This photo makes me think about negotiating the ground rules with new classes of students (I’m a bit more liberal than the ‘manager’). I’ll need to add in some rules about using Moodle/e-mail as well, if only to [...]

Proper Museums

Saturday, August 9th, 2008

proper museums have things in glass cases with typewritten descriptions on card. Accept nothing less.

Partial eclipse

Friday, August 1st, 2008

14% partial eclipse visible from Midlands despite showers and cloud.