By Rob Watson. The Independent is reporting today that “Too many teachers have no respect for authority and are hampering schools’ attempts to improve standards”. Chief schools inspector, Sir Michael Wilshaw, warned that “head teachers are being ‘undermined by a pervasive resentment of all things managerial’ by some of their teaching staff’, and that “some teachers simply will not accept that a school isn’t a collective but an organisation with clear hierarchies and separate duties.” More...

By Shelley Wright. Academics. Most of our current school system revolves around it, and yet, I think it falls miserably short of what our kids need. To be honest, I think our academic system of education is highly overrated, at best. At worst, it destroys a number of our kids.
Hear me out. I’m not saying that our kids shouldn’t learn to read, or do math, or develop other valuable skills. But too often, the focus of our kids’ school day is Content with a capital C, with little connection to why it matters. Instead of learning together, many of our students spend hours filling in worksheets or copying down lecture notes that they could google in 30 seconds. More...

By Donald Clark. Data, in the wrong hands, whether malicious, manipulative or naïve can be downright dangerous. Indeed, when big data goes bad it can be lethal. Unfortunately the learning game is no stranger to both the abuse of data. Here’s six examples showing seven species of ‘bad data’.
1. Data subtraction  
Don’t let the selective graphical representation of data, destroy the integrity of the data. A good example of blatant data editing is the memorable ‘ritalin’ image used by Sir Ken Robinson in his TED talk at 3.47. More...

By Jenny Mackness. Openness does not mean that anything goes. Even openness of mind does not mean this. In our work on emergent learning, we (Roy Williams, Simone Gumtau, Regina Karousou and I) have in the papers we have published (see here  and here) suggested that constraints are needed for emergent learning to occur. I have been thinking about this further over the past week or so in relation to the work of two artists – Jackson Mac Low, the American poet, performance artist, composer and playwright and Edmund de Waal, the British ceramic artist and author. More...

By Niall Winters. Only projects that work with existing education systems will improve learning and cut poverty, says Niall Winters. 
You've no doubt heard of the mobile phone revolution sweeping Sub-Saharan Africa — perhaps mobile money transfer, or mHealth. The hope is that mobile technologies will transform lives by improving health, education, finance and women's position in society. 
However, as knowledge management expert Piers Bocock notes, there is a vast disconnect between the companies that produce and market these technologies and on-the-ground implementers — with the hype perhaps best exemplified by former US President Bill Clinton. More...

Mark November 2013 as the first crack of the current 2011-2013 EdTech Hype Bubble.  In the same 30 day span that saw Chegg chip away at its eggshell with an amended S-1 filing in its eventual emergence as a public company, Chegg’s co-founder Osman Rashid was dismissed from his follow-up act Kno as its financial investors turned it over to strategic investor Intel for “pennies on the dollar”.  This now brings to three the number of casualties amongst the current, over-hyped Silicon Valley EdTech Darlings. 
Regular correspondents of Educated Ventures will be familiar with my highlighting of the “Seven Sisters” of EdTech (originally just “Five Horseman” before the addition of two MOOCs), but for new readers, there are seven start-ups which have each raised capital from at least two of the top decile returning venture funds: Grockit (Benchmark / Atlas); Knewton (Accel / Bessemer); 2U (Bessemer / Highland / Redpoint); Edmodo (Benchmark / Greylock / NEA); Altius Education (Charles River Ventures / Spark); Coursera (KPCB / NEA); and Udacity (CRV / Andressen). More...

Recent Pedagogy Ideas 
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