Tags: education

The Institutions of Science With Lord Martin Rees

I love just about every answer that Martin Rees gives in this wide-ranging interview.

The Great Distractor — Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy

James has penned a sweeping arc from the The Mechanical Turk, Sesame Street, and Teletubbies to Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.

The History of the Future

It me:

Although some communities have listed journalists as “essential workers,” no one claims that status for the keynote speaker. The “work” of being a keynote speaker feels even more ridiculous than usual these days.

Design Can Change the World - But It’s Up to Us to Make it So by Daniel Burka

There is a huge world out there where design isn’t embraced, where designers are clawing for resources, and where design isn’t prioritized. Most of the organizations that are changing your world don’t know much about design, aren’t looking for designers, and won’t even understand what designers are talking about when they show up at the front door.

99 Good News Stories You Probably Didn’t Hear About in 2019

The goal in putting these stories together has never been to create a warm glow, or lull anyone into a false sense of complacency. The challenges facing the human family right now are big and scary and there’s no guarantee we will overcome them.

As millions of people have demonstrated in the past 12 months though, action is possible, better solutions are available and a better future can be built.

Offline Page Descriptions | Erik Runyon

Here’s a nice example of showing pages offline. It’s subtly different from what I’m doing on my own site, which goes to show that there’s no one-size-fits-all recipe when it comes to offline strategies.

In support of MakerClub | Clearleft

Declan from MakerClub came by the office week and told us all about this great initiative for kids in Brighton that we’re supporting through the BrightSparks programme.

A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages (PDF)

Alan Kay’s initial description of a “Dynabook” written at Xerox PARC in 1972.

prettydiff/wisdom: Building better developers by specifying criteria of success

I frequently see web developers struggling to become better, but without a path or any indication of clear direction. This repository is an attempt to sharing my experiences, and any contributions, that can help provide such a direction.

It’s broken down into four parts:

• 10 Domains of Web Development
• • Accessibility
• • Architecture
• • Data
• • Events and Interaction
• • Internationalization / Localization
• • Presentation
• • Security
• • Semantics
• • Transmission
• • Understandability / Content
• Interviewing for Web Developers
• Productivity for Web Developers
• Web Training Hierarchy
• 1. Level 1 - Writing Code
• 1. Level 2 - Accessibility and Security
• 1. Level 3 - Architecture
• 1. Level 4 - Innovation

I don’t necessarily agree with everything here (and I really don’t like the “rockstar” labelling), but that’s okay:

Anything written here is open to debate and challenges are encouraged.

The New Digital School - An Alternative to Design Education by Tiago and Cláudia Pedras — Kickstarter

You can back Tiago’s excellent New Digital School. It’s a fantastic project with the web at its heart, and I really hope it gets funded.

My first public speaking experience by Charlotte Jackson, Front-end developer

I felt a great swell of pride watching Charlotte give an excellent presentation at the Talk Web Design conference at Greenwich University.

Powerful Ideas Need Love Too!

Alan Kay’s written remarks to a Joint Hearing of the Science Committee and the Economic and Educational and Opportunites Committee in October 1995.

An Hour of Code spawns hours of coding

Here’s a heartwarming tale. It starts out as a description of processing.js project for Code Club (which is already a great story) and then morphs into a description of how anyone can contribute to make a codebase better …resulting in a lovely pull request on Github.

Kids can’t use computers… and this is why it should worry you - Coding 2 Learn

This is a really well-written and worrying piece that pokes at that oft-cited truism about kids today being “digital natives”:

The parents seem to have some vague concept that spending hours each evening on Facebook and YouTube will impart, by some sort of cybernetic osmosis, a knowledge of PHP, HTML, JavaScript and Haskell.

The causes of this lack of digital literacy can be traced back to school:

We’ve mirrored corporate networks, preventing kids and teachers access to system settings, the command line and requiring admin rights to do almost anything. They’re sitting at a general purpose computer without the ability to do any general purpose computing.

Also, this article has the best “TL;DR” description ever.

Code Club Queens Park

Josh has been teaching HTML and CSS schoolkids. I love the pages that they’ve made. I really mean it. I genuinely think these are wonderful!

Ten tips guaranteed to improve your startup success by Anil Dash

It’s a big ask, but if you can action these ten tips from Anil, your startup will crush it.

Support Scrunchup

If you’re coming along to the Responsive Day Out and you’ve got some tech books you no longer need, bring them along. We’ll collect them and distribute them to schools.

Hacking the Future: Clare Sutcliffe at TEDxBrighton - YouTube

A great short talk from Clare about Code Club.

TEDxToronto 2012 Talk - Ryan Henson Creighton

And this is why Code Club is such a great initiative.

dConstruct 2012: the alternative theme was Education - andrewjohns.net

I like this! Andrew Johns found a thread in this year’s dConstruct that ran parallel to its official tagline of “Playing With The Future”: Education.