e-learning Team : Activity

Peter Hemingway Award – Not too late to enter

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 12:05:21 GMT

It’s not too late to submit your entry for the Peter Hemingway Award and a chance to win £5000 for your school! You still have until 17^th October to tell about how you have made a difference to pupils learning through the use of broadband!

Previous winners (and recipients of a special discretionary award) have included:

· St Thomas Aquinas Primary School, Milton Keynes - video conferencing

· Stifford Clays Primary for work, Thurrock- Jolly Roger – A VLE /home access project

· Buckhurst Hill Primary School, Essex- Project Nerva - an interactive online role play

This award is open to all schools in the E2BN region using E2BN broadband.

Closing date for this award is 16:30 0n 17^th October 2008.

Applications and guidance notes are available from

e2bn.org/events/13/peter-hemingway-award.html

Schools Computer Animation Competition

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 16:20:28 GMT

2008 sees the 60th anniversary of the world's first stored program digital computer, designed and built at the University of Manchester.

As part of the celebrations the University of Manchester is running a Computer Animation Competition for schoolchildren aged from 7 to 19.

To enter the competition, entrants will create a short (up to 1-minute) animated Computer Graphics film using Alice, a free downloadable drag-and-drop computer animation system that requires no knowledge of programming.

The film can be about any topic that links to National Curriculum material, and need not be about computing or the 60th anniversary (but could be).

The competition will be open 1 January - 1 April 2008. Full details at http://www.cs.manchester.ac.uk/Digital60.

Idea's factory

Wed, 26 Sep 2007 21:02:29 GMT

Hi colleagues,

I'm sometimes fortunate enought to go to conferences, see exciting speakers and talk to interesting people who do amazing stuff with technology nationally. Sometimes I find myself putting a few things together in my head and a new idea pops out. Many of them are a little whacky, some could work and some are just not worth thinking about. I need the rest of the e-learning team to help me find the good ones and develop them into successful projects. So I will post them here and hope that you will make some helpful comments, such as 'Seb you're nuts' or 'How about turning it on its head, then it might work etc.

I'll add this as a property to the e-learning team space too.

The dangers of a 'Vanguard Party'

Mon, 04 Dec 2006 12:09:03 GMT

The Bolsheviks saw themselves as the vanguard of the proletariat. Their superior political insight and revolutionary zeal gave them the right and made it their duty to drive through changes on behalf of, and for the benefit of, the workers and peasants. They achieved remarkable things - they won a civil war, defeated interventionist armies bent on destroying their fledgling state, established a whole new form of government, brought electricity to the most remote Siberian village. But in the end they failed. There came to be a massive disjuncture between the revolutionary rhetoric af the apparatchiks at the top of the Communist Party hiarachy on the one hand, and daily experience of the poor bloody infantry in the factories and on the collective farms on the other. In the end the Soviet Union came to be built on lies: as the worker in the tractor factory told the visiting western journalist, "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us." The Soviet Union became a tatty, ill-functioning, cynical nightmare festooned with posters declaring it to be paradise.

Now, when it comes to e-learning, I am a true believer. I am certain that e-learning platforms will one day be an important means by which CPD develops. Web2.0 technology will enable networks of learners to converse, share, think together and review progress. We must do all we can to ensure that this glorious day dawns as soon as possible. Leading Practitioners and Leading Learners are going to be in the vanguard of this development. It is vital they are more successful than the vanguard of the proletariat in 20th century Russia.

As Richard Gates notes in his post, there is something about Web2.0 technology that makes it quite slow-going to get to grips with. Andy Fidler had a similar reaction. Now these two guys are ICT specialists. The vast majority of the learners with whom we work will find it even tougher. We must think about how to help and inspire colleagues to learn the ropes without intimidating them and without losing touch with their reality. Any ideas anyone?