http://milesberry.net A personal perspective on education, technology and culture Sat, 24 Oct 2009 07:16:47 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en A personal reflection on my 'learning journey', written as an exercise for Roehampton's PG Certificate in Learning and Teaching in HE. Education is something I care passionately about.  I love to learn new things, I love to share the things I learn with others; I feel fortunate to follow a career ... http://milesberry.net/2009/10/a-learning-journey/ It was a great pleasure to attend last Tuesday's Mirandamod to hear Etienne Wenger discussing communities of practice (CoP), with particular relation to education, both in schools and, particularly, in relation to teachers' continuing professional development. I'm sure that the CoP approach to CPD is both more fulfilling for the ... http://milesberry.net/2009/09/open-source-projects-as-communities-of-practice/ Moving between Windows computers in my new office and teaching rooms, my Ubuntu netbook and my MacBook Pro, I find myself relying more and more on web-based tools, particularly google mail, calendar and docs. I also find myself valuing ever more highly Mozilla Firefox’s rich armoury of extensions, which are ... http://milesberry.net/2009/09/firefox-is-my-ple/ An article in today's TES about ways in which schools might encourage more pupils to take up places in science, technology, engineering and maths, including comments from me and others involved with Computing at School: "With an extra 10,000 undergraduate places in 'Stem' subjects, how can teachers encourage sixth formers ... http://milesberry.net/2009/09/tes-on-10000-new-undergraduate-places-in-stem-subjects/ Some notes written as introductory material to this year's primary PGCE course What is meaningful learning? It is learning with a purpose, learning which allows those who engage in it to attach more meaning to the world around them, learning in which things make more sense. Jonassen's exploration of this area ... http://milesberry.net/2009/09/meaningful-learning-and-ict/ Originally published at http://opensourceschools.org.uk/michael-k-lling-greenfoot.html It's great to see Open Source Schools community member Michael Kölling's new book, an Introduction to Programming with Greenfoot published. Greenfoot is one of the new wave of graphical programming environments written with learners in mind. Like Scratch, Alice and E-Toys, it's open source software, and as with ... http://milesberry.net/2009/09/michael-kolling-on-greenfoot/ The BCS have published their response to the Rose review recommendations, which I was pleased to have contributed to: Members of the BCS (British Computer Society), including those on its Education and Training Forum and Expert Panel, have studied Sir Jim Rose’s recommendations for changes to the Primary Curriculum and associated ... http://milesberry.net/2009/07/the-bcs-response-to-the-rose-recommendations/ From http://opensourceschools.org.uk/schooltool-v10-released.html Those who've been following the recent Open Source Schools discussion thread on open source MIS systems will be pleased to learn of the release of SchoolTool v1.0 after what developer Tom Hoffman describes as a long and winding road, stretching back to 2000. SchoolTool, whose development has been supported by ... http://milesberry.net/2009/05/schooltool-1-0-released/ Sugar, the operating system and GUI for OLPC's truly innovative XO-1 laptops is now available, in beta at least, as a bootable USB stick, allowing any netbook, laptop or desktop to run this amazing re-interpretation of educational computing. Sugar is built on the idea of activities rather than programs, with an ... http://milesberry.net/2009/04/sugar-on-a-stick/ Written for Open Source Schools Ofsted’s report on The Importance of ICT was published over a month ago, and was met with perhaps a degree of surprise at some of its criticisms about aspects of ICT provision in schools, most notably for higher attaining and older pupils. There’s much in the ... http://milesberry.net/2009/04/ofsted-and-open-source/