Nice NOT doing business with you -- a consultancy I would not wish to work with

I run a small consultancy business. By "small", I mean that there is only myself going out and doing the work. That means that sometimes I need to partner up with others, join a consortium, or get myself on a larger company's database.

I recently applied to be placed on the books of a large company, and I learnt a lot about what not to do.

If you are trying to get educational ICT embedded in the curriculum, what you need to do is forge partnerships, because teamwork, in the usual sense of the term, is irrelevant here. (I explain why in another article).

Here is how not to do it.

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Partnerships, not teamwork

If part of your role is to get others to use educational technology in the curriculum, then what you need to do is forge partnerships and not, as is commonly surmised, focus on teamwork.

The differences between the two need to be understood if you are to stand a reasonable chance of being successful in effecting large-scale change.

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Photographing the curriculum

Digital cameras have been with us now for a decade. But three things have changed in that time.

Firstly, you get a bigger bang for your buck, in terms of image size and quality.

Secondly, cameras on mobile phones have become good enough to mean that people are now starting to dispense with the camera as their means of taking pictures.

And thirdly, cameras have now become inexpensive enough to start to make class sets viable.

So what does all this mean for using ed tech in the curriculum?
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Discussion about "Go On, Bore 'Em" -- Students set the agenda

In my book "Go On, Bore 'Em: How to make ICT lessons excruciatingly dull", I looked at the ten most common sources of the problem.

This week: Students set the agenda.



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An example of poor use of technology?

Amazon has recently announced the electronic book reader called Kindle. I read the announcement a day after I had met with a client who had one of the new ultramobile PCs, which actually costs less than the Kindle.

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Business thought leaders and their relevance to educational technology leadership 01: Abraham Maslow

A few days ago I posted a message in Twitter to the effect that anyone who quotes a statistic like "The number of geniuses in China outnumbers the total population of our own country" does not understand the nature of genius. I believe that genius has much in common with creativity, about which the psychologist Abraham Maslow had particular views. He also had views about human needs.

In this series I should like to explore what the educational ICT leader can learn from Maslow and others when it comes to performing the educational technology leader's role, especially that of encouraging other teachers to incorporate the use of educational technology into their curricula.

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Is there a skills gap in the UK?

I recently gave a talk at the Westminster e-Forum on behalf of Naace. Here is the text of that presentation, which had to last no longer than four minutes. The audience was composed of Members of Parliament, journalists, and high-ranking representatives of skills organisations, companies and educational bodies.

The sub-text of the brief I was given was, no doubt, that schools should be doing more to encourage young people to take up careers in the IT industry (possibly via a university computer programming course of some description).

I have issues about that. For example, is it schools' job to do what the IT industry itself seems to find difficult to do, ie make IT-related jobs seem exciting and non-"nerdy" (especially to girls)? As often is the case, schools were taken to task by some of the speakers for the fact that ICT lessons are boring -- as proven by the fact that one of the speaker's daughter says so.

Actually, many ICT lessons are boring, but I like to feel that my own evidence for saying that (inspections, school visits, and general reading and discussion) is rather more robust. As I said in a comment from the floor at the end of one of the sessions, the phenomenon is well-established enough for me to feel moved to write a book about it (see the article about that).

More importantly, any subject can be taught in a boring way. The challenge is to identify good practice and then find ways of disseminating it.

But there is another issue. According to the Leitch Report,

"Today, over 70 per cent of our 2020 workforce have already completed their compulsory education."

That being the case, isn't it a bit late to be focusing on schools?

Anyway, read on to find out what I actually said, which had to take no longer than 4 minutes. I did it too :-)

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