It’s true. I’m going for it this Movember 
They give you a page when you sign up. Here it is: http://uk.movember.com/mospace/1028858/
Please visit and donate cold, hard cash.
As a little treat, here’s a horrific moment halfway between the usual cool, suave gentleman with the beard and the petulant teenager with the bum fluff. Enjoy.
I have a confession to make – I am addicted to free online Flash games.
I can’t stop playing them, every moment I get. I love playing them, but when I finish playing them I feel somehow lessened and unfulfilled, as if I’d just been stuck in traffic for hours.
This has not gone unnoticed by my ever-loving wife, who has pointed out that this may be some sort of diversion strategy. In fact, she has wisely pointed out that I may find myself being more fulfilled by, perhaps, cleaning the house or, just maybe, cooking us our dinner, or even – who knows? – doing some shopping.
Now, a couple of days ago my wife and I were musing over the possibility that we don’t have anything that stimulates us mentally. Having just completed her degree, and not considering herself an intellectual, she was surprised to find herself enjoying her dissertation. We decided to do a little essay each over the next fortnight. We will choose a topic, research it and write up our findings. The results will be presented to each other one evening over a bottle of wine.
So, having found this quirk in my character that enables me to eschew my responsibilities and focus only a 17″ screen for hours on end, I’ve chosen to investigate the psycho-physiological effects of video gaming.
Results will be, undoubtedly be posted here in a fortnight.
Game on!
PS: God only knows what my life would be like if I’d ever ventured into serious MMRPG games such as Halo, World of Warcraft and others… you would literally never hear from me again!
You want to teach Design & Technology in your schools, but you don’t want your students to use these:
Do you have any idea what these things can DO?
This is not an advert for mobile phone companies – it is a call to arms against the anti-tech tyranny!
Do you, school leader or administrator, have any idea of the capability of these devices? Can you not see that all students, from all backgrounds, already have and regularly use one of these devices? Most of them have better ones than i do!! They can do more things, faster and easier, than most of the programmes supplied with my free teacher laptop! And the students ALREADY OWN THEM!!
Yet you want me to teach Design & Technology like it mattered, whilst pretending that nobody has one of these, that we’re all in some era where D&T is softwood mortice & tenon joints and ‘chalk and talk’ lessons. Ridiculous.
Rise up, D&T teachers of the world, (well, the UK then), and unite against evil tyranny of technology oppression!
Petition your headteacher and Local Authority to allow the use of mobile phones, in order to raise student engagement and cut unnecessary spending on duplicate resources. Throw off the yoke of alleged cyber-bullying and educate your students on the use of digital technology – send them the message (via text? <ouch>) that their culture is not subversive, but that it is the future!
You can do it if we all do it.
Cheers,
Philip
I firmly believe that the way we think forms habitual channels in our minds. Neuroscience bears this out, with works such as ‘What the Bleep…‘ and, dare I say it, ‘The Secret‘ following the trend.
As such , I now find myself having to think creatively – making stuff for the ‘Mr Watson…‘ DVDs that I’m making. Trouble is, I’ve been doing do much analytical thinking, my brain is just stuck on that “analyse the inputs, process, produce an output” kind of stimulus-response behaviour, to the extent that my creative muscles are totally dead!
For anyone stuck in the same situation, take some heart from the fact that we can reprogram our brains, with just a little effort.
If you’ve ever had to think creatively (and I don’t just mean doing a piece of ‘art’), then the way of thinking you used will still be in there, somewhere. All you have to do is try to start thinking like that again, and it will surely follow.
For example – cast your mind back to the time that felt that you were coming up with creative solutions to stuff in your life. Where were you? Who was around you? What was the atmosphere/ambience?What did it feel like? What were you physically doing? What period of your life was this? What were the overiding themes of that time? Reminisce
Then do a few simple exercises. Creative thinking is ‘right brain‘, where most of the activities we do day-to-day tend to be ‘left-brain’. Make the shift by taking an object and asking yourself weird questions, like ‘what would it be if it were made of ice/could fly/was gigantic/ covered in grass/ made out of a gas/ you could drive it/ could live in it/ it was microscopic/ 2,000 years old/ furry/ made for people with no hands/ to be used by fish-people/ worked by magic/ was free/ could only be used once?
Okay, no actual, useful results come out of thoughts like this – but that is left-brain thinking! The result is that you can start to think more flexibly, more creatively. and that is the kind of result you are looking for (it’s not a ‘left-brain’ result because its ‘soft’; not measurable or quantifiable). I’ll bet it feels pretty good, though!
There’s also an interesting exercise somewhere, about reading out the names of colours that are coloured in the wrong colour, e.g. black, red, blue, green, orange. Now go back and say aloud the colours of the text for each word. if that makes sense.
Anyway, that’s what I’m going to do. I’ve got to find an image to match the word ‘product’, but al I can think of is ‘iPhone’. Appalling!
Cheers,
Philip
Okay, I want to meet teachers and students and anyone who can help me understand why education isn;t working (IMHO) and what we can do about it!
So I went to Becta-X and that was fun and techy and information overload but I didn;t feel that it really hit the mark for, just identified that there was a mark that was being missed.
It may have been there that I picked up the habit of writing really long sentences with no punctuation but I guess hey thats just speculation.
So anyway, there seem to be these things called Teachmeets, they are a type of ‘unconference‘ that you organise yourself and then people come along and you all talk and there’s no agenda and thats it.
This sounds perfect I just want to meet other people who think differently to everyone else and can kind of see there’s a problem and want to DO something and not just wait around for someone esle to do it and then complain that that wasnt what should have been done.
Does anyone out there want to join me? I have no idea what I’m doing, othere than the speaking to other people thing which i believe i already mentioned – i’m going to need a date a venue and a sponsor to start and somewhere along the way there’ l be people invited nad then it’ll happen and who knows what.
We also need a title – i was thinking of something like ‘SATs: Secret Agent Teachers’ as one that would bring together people who see that there is a deficiency in our current system but who also see that change will not come from that top, we have to be agents of change ourselves – hence secret ‘agents’.
This is for people who are in the system and want to change it from within.
So, are you with me? It would be really cool if you could join in, like I said, so just let me know or stay keen and then maybe I can eventually get to the end of this incredibly poorly-structured blog post.
You will hear more about this!!
Cheers,
Philip
PS: I’m looking at Friday 11th June as the date. We’ll do it in the evening, its after school, its the week after half term so teachers may have a chance of still being fairly fresh and we’ll keep it small and tidy and fun. Normal syntax will resume in the next post
Reading this book at the moment “What’s the Point of Schools?” by Guy Claxton.
Very interesting, so much so that I want to spend the whole day reading it, neglecting the renovation of my campervan that i was going to do.
My wife tells me that I always do this, it’s like OCD or something, but then I lose steam after exhausting my interest and go on to something else.
Something tells me I should listen to her. I think this is important enough for me to take it slowly and let the interest build, so I’ll just post my impressions so far.
What I’m feeling at the moment is that it is extremely annoying that education in this country is not better. There are so many quotes, anecdotes and solid statistics over the last century, that for us to be in basically the same position is a joke.
It is a joke that makes me very angry, to be honest.
What i want to know is, what are we actually going to DO?
The whole system feels like its in gridlock – schools, students, parents, governments – no one can do anything because they are all tied up together in a vicious-circle, self-fulfilling prophecy state of affairs.
So this is what I’m thinking of doing.
At Becta-x the other week, I was talking to Kate who basically challenged me to run an unconference about education.
Damn it, it looks like that’s what we’re going to have to do, because I just don’t see any action out there at the moment to suggest otherwise.
I have no idea how to do this, so if anyone feels like coming on board, please give me a shout. We’re going to need people to turn up, too, so get prepared to spread the word.
We’ll start off small in a central London location, of an evening, so that teachers can attend. This will happen by the end of the school year.
I want to know what other people, face to face, have to say about education – any part of education – and what we can actually do to improve it.
That is all for now. I’m off to read my book – no, work on my campervan!
Cheers,
Philip
Click for a closer view
Loved this amazing video by Ken Robinson – almost brought a tear to my cynical eye!
It really is time for a systemic change in the education system. I’m going to work out how to do it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of their lives.
Cheers,
Philip
Hi there blog,
There’s a lot going on at the moment, so I thought I’d get it all out of my head and put in the compost bin to stew.
Projects-wise, we have the following:
So what to do first? Well, I think this morning could productively be spent making some phone calls – lawyers, clients, collaborators. I’ll then have a coffee and proceed to stare at the script for the DVDs [should that be DVD's or DVDs?] to see what falls out. A spot of lunch (we’ll be having pancakes later!), and I might have a look at that page on my website. Or maybe I’ll go to the shed and make some bookends. Or maybe i’ll go to lynda.com to learn how to use all that software. We’ll see!
Hope everyone has a good day, despite the rain!
Cheers,
Philip
The reasons for the population explosion of the 19th and 20th centuries became clear shortly after society crumbled, sometime in the 21st century.
It was at about this time, sadly just too late for many, that a power source both clean and immeasurable was discovered. Such was the depth and beauty of this source that engines for harnessing its power could be built with the simplest tools by anyone half conversant in the new technology.
The ready availability and exceptionally low cost of this power source had an equalising affect on the population of the Earth at that time. All material goods, personal gain and one-upmanship became something of a misnomer, once any person could produce as much of any item as they desired. There suddenly seemed to be no point to it all.
And, by and by, this lead to the invention of the time machine. It behoved people to return just a short time in the long history of this planet, (you could only stay on this planet; travel to other solar systems or even other planets was clearly a complete waste of time, due to the ridiculous distances involved), to the period perceived as the ‘boom-time’ in the long story of the Earth – the industrial and technological revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries.
It must have been a great time to be in, went the reasoning, as there were so many people around at the time…
As you may be able to tell by now, what actually happened is that almost half the people on the planet at that time were in fact not from that time, but from a short time in the future.
The situation was such that you had people leveraging their knowledge and savvy to become the oligarchs of that famed period in hostory, whilst certain ‘thrill-seekers’ spent time in the most overcrowded and inhospitable areas of the world – living life on the very edge of survival.
It got to such a point that these people, somewhat foolishly, did not keep track of the date. Hence, society duly crumbled, due to obvious reasons, and the majority died with the rest of humanity.
Those that were left after that horrendous time had a different perspective on it all, and promptly invented the new power source – and so it went on.