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Only a week left to make sure that your favourite blogs, bloggers and projects are nominated for the third international Edublog Awards!
Please do help spread the word – huge thanks to everyone who has posted about them so far. Nominations have been flooding in – again – many thanks for taking the time to make such a valuable contribution - and the shortlist will be announced on the 2nd December. Nominations call and procedure here.
I recently put together a response to Becta's Learning Platform Specifications. Stuart Yates commented at the time that:
"The central issue, of course, is that the BECTA model of spending IT money is centred on paying a commercial company for licences, hardware, training, support and installation, and because of previous bad experiences these commercial companies are required to be of a certain size and age. This doesn't sit well with open source projects, whose focus is on small groups, communities and informal consortia."
I got this related call through today, which I'm happy to pass on here:
"John Pugh MP has tabled an Early Day Motion in the House of Commons entitled Software in Education, number 179. Please write to, or email, your MP within the next week with a request that he or she add their name to this motion:
"That this House congratulates the Open University and other schools, colleges and universities for utilising free and open source software to deliver cost-effective educational benefit not just for their own institutions but also the wider community; and expresses concern that Becta and the Department for Education and Skills, through the use of outdated purchasing frameworks, are effectively denying schools the option of benefiting from both free and open source and the value and experience small and medium ICT companies could bring to the schools market."
This is a huge opportunity to put FLOSS on our politicians agenda, and the issue is precisely where we want the DfES to take action. Please let Ian Roberts know about your letters. Iain is co-ordinating this effort on behalf of the Open Schools Alliance."
It’s strange, but the public face of EdTech continues to belie the hideous truth: that we do actually have a sense of humour. In fact, as anyone who has worked at the chalk-face (there I go giving away my considerable age again) will tell you, it’s an absolute necessity to function over any meaningful period of time in the field, let alone to have some impact and to drive ‘stuff’ (the technical term) forward.
Weirdly, since the infamous Leon Lighips last chuckled over the Blackboard takeover, there’s been no one about laughing in the face of EdTech righteousness – surely not a good sign. In fact, in the current political climate, a cause for some concern – is EdTech on the cards for the next US liberation? Should we be preparing for the confirmation of the constituents of the Axis of EdTech Evil?
Ah well. Here are team Elgg letting us know that what ever we do, we’re still accountable to ridicule.
If you blog about education, why not contribute to this years fabulous international Edublog Awards by nominating your favourite edubloggers in this years categories? Nominations are open from now until the end of November. You can also really help spread the word by posting about the awards on your own blog.
The main purpose of the awards is to demonstrate the huge variety of excellent practice going on across the world, to provide a showcase site for everyone interested using social software to support informal or formal education, and to have some fun along the way. If you aren't familiar with the awards, check out 2005's amazing roll-call. I’m really looking forward to seeing this years short-list!
This year there are ten categories:
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