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The ITEC project has one year to run. In the last 3 years, it has done many good things in stimulating technical engagement in schools across Europe. There have been some very heartening and enthusiastic engagements with the project coming from places ranging from Turkey and Portugal to Norway and Finland with talented teachers finding a voice and a platform for experimenting with technology and doing...

The Cambridge Realist Workshop (see http://www.econ.cam.ac.uk/events/seminars/realist/workshop_programme.htm) has been very important to me over the years. When I realised as a fledgling educational technologist about 10 years ago, that most attempts to evaluate educational technology were ridiculous, and that 'ontology' was the thing that mattered, I signed up to the group - simply because they...

My post about student employability gave me some worries after I'd published it. Maybe, I thought, to suggest that people are 'addicted' to excuses is too strong: after all, we all need excuses as ways of explaining the things that we don't do: I feel a need to excuse my addiction to excuses! There are many things I should have done two or three weeks ago that I haven't done that I need to make excuses...

I think that Information is the most important phenomenon that urgently requires a coherent scientific understanding. Currently we only have fragments of 'information theory' and the fragments don't fit together: information as communication between machines (Shannon's theory) which has been so important in technology; information in meaningful human communication processes (i.e. not machines); information...

I was in a meeting about student employability today. My institution is one that gives opportunities to students who would not otherwise have the opportunity of getting a degree, and who have often had difficult experiences with education in the past. I believe this is the most important group of students in education - it's where we can really make a difference. But it's very difficult.The moment...

I'm very grateful to @paddytherabbit (David Sherlock) for showing me the easiest way to get started with Oculus Rift development. For David's post, see http://paddytherabbit.com/3d-worlds-web-using-oculus-rift-attempt-1/. From my perspective, this is almost as exciting as the Rift itself. It means that development can be placed in the hands of hacky programmers like me who are too lazy to...

- I have a thesis about education ministers: if we connected the personal biographies of successive Secretaries of State for Education with their political actions in office we would be able to identify strong correlations between family circumstance (household income, emotional stability or upheaval, social capital, schooling, career development) and political orientation. (Actually, the same could...

What is a creative process? How does improvisation relate to the creative process? As I always wanted to be a composer (and never really managed it), these questions have troubled me for a long time. Sometimes, I would ascribe my creative frustration to the time I was living in: the telly, the computer (in 1982), school work and family were all madly distracting. "It was never this difficult for Beethoven,...

Something which struck me from yesterday's post was the whole business of 'deletion' with technology. The absenting of something through destruction (like a fire) usually leaves some kind of trace. Although one might inspect the magnetic bits on a disk after a file has been erased (and sometimes recover it), the whole principle of a computer is the obliteration of things without trace. Indeed, erasure...

I find composition very difficult. I start something in all enthusiasm and slowly I lose heart and can't get it to go anywhere. I usually benefit from the struggle though - I appear to need to try to compose! The problem, it seems to me, is that composing is such a slow process. I simply can't get it down quick enough. And computers get in the way rather than help. So I'm much fonder of improvising.But...

Have things changed that much in the last 10 years? In 2003, we had smartphones (although not iPhones). It was the year of the 2nd Gulf war. Mass broadband was on its way. VLEs were well-embedded in education. There's little, apart from tablets (although what were called 'tablets' - which we now call convertible laptops - were available), which we have now that we didn't have then. But we didn't have...

Bibliometrics now dominates the academic landscape. Government research resource allocation, measures of academic status and professional development all now depend on a bunch of statistical measures that supposedly track merit. It is an international game that has turned intellectual effort into paper production factories, publishers into 'credit rating agencies', and academic against academic in...

Someone who leads a learning technology firm that has specialised in school-based technology asked me the other week how to break into the higher education market. I answered that one of the most important things is to understand institutional politics. Blackboard, for example, send their salespeople to sell to Vice-chancellors. They give the "big-spiel" about tracking students (and staff), about...