I am setting up this Blog as part of a course I am taking looking at the educational potential of Web 2.0 tools and the issues raised by using these tools in educational contexts.
I now work as a teacher trainer in the UK, after many years working in Adult and Further Education as a teacher, curriculum manager, and Head of Department, specialising in adult literacy, numeracy and language teaching and learning. More about my work can be found at www.bluesky-learning.com
I imagine that most of my posts to this Blog will concern aspects of education that I am most interested in, which include policy on assessment and accountability, effective teaching and learning using formative approaches to teaching and learning, and the integration of learning with work. However, the issues raised by these topics, for example on accountability in public service areas of professionalism, have relevance far beyond a narrow educational focus, so my lucubrations (look it up) are likely to range wider than this. Hopefully this will make the blog interesting to a wider group of punters.
Although very interested in the potential of Web 2.0 tools to enhance educational activity, I tend to take a sceptical view at first, partly because so much that people write about digital technology tends to be over-enthusiastic, gushing, and idealistic, and also naively technocratic, as if everything about life can be improved merely by regulating it more heavily. Much of what I read about the new technologies, particularly on the web itself, makes me react the same way I do to a door-to-door insurance salesperson, ie negatively.
I have called the blog 192 192 as a reference to old technology, a reminder that technology doesn't necessarily bring improvements just because it is new, and that sometimes good things are lost when old technologies or platforms become extinct. 192 was the old number for directory enquiries on the analogue landline phone system. I admit it, I'm a collector of interesting aspects of life in the past which are now gone: this one might as well have disappeared a million years ago - in fact it was only a decade or so since it was replaced by 118.
