Knowledge Centre blogs

By: Bob Harrison
On: 6th July 2012

Badges mean lots of things to lots of people but Tim Riches, the man behind DigitalMe, sums up their meaning:

“They have the power to motivate learners to produce work they are proud of and provide meaningful recognition for their achievements”.

I met Tim at the recent Whole Education conference in Leeds and he filled me in on his journey so far.

Co-founder of the successful Radiowaves project, he is committed to supporting learners to make the transition “from content consumers to creators”. One of the first sets of Mozilla Open Badges is being developed out of the successful DigitalMe project “Supporter to Reporter ” (S2R), a sports website created by young people. more >

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Young People, Employment and the internet - the bigger picture

By: Kieron Kirkland
On: 5th July 2012

So last week Dan Sutch and I were lucky enough to be invited by the wonderful Giulio Quaggiotto and Denisa Papayova over at the UNDP in Bratislava to give a presentation on technology can support digital inclusion, and particuarly econimic inclusion, for young people. You can see our slides here

Addressing this question first means understanding the changing context of participation in employment. We drew on some research from our recent State of the Art Review on Employment and the Internet to give a sense underlying influences we should be aware of: more >

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Evaluation - 10 reasons why you should

By: Kieron Kirkland
On: 28th June 2012

People always seem to post pictures of rulers or tape measures when they talk about evaluation, which, frankly, have to be some of the dullest objects in the world.

image Wikimedia Commons

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Digitally-edged data-diving...

By: Ed Anderton
On: 28th June 2012

Splashing around with open data can result in more questions than answers, but perhaps that's the point...

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Assisting in accessing the internet

By: Simon Knight
On: 25th June 2012

Accessing the internet

Back when I started these blogs I wanted to think about how we could use technology to support learning in a variety of settings. A recent thread on the ALT discussion list regarded Assistive Technologies, and how specific access needs are addressed. Ideally, all websites would follow ‘Universal Design’ principles – they’d be designed for easy access by everyone – and there are tools to assist designers in doing this. But for whatever reason, sometimes that doesn’t happen, sometimes users n more >

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Perspectives on technology and vulnerable young people (4/4)

By: Dan Sutch
On: 19th June 2012

In this brief series, Terry Waller talks with four leading researchers to gain some personal perspectives on the role of technology in the education of vulnerable young people. The interviews aimed to provide an insight into existing practice, research gaps and potential future areas of investigation, highlighting the challenges and opportunities provided by the internet.

This final article presents the views of Dr Chris Abbot, Reader in E-inclusion, Kings College London.