Loads of offered help for e-learning

I get the newsletters of various organsiations, some of whom are trying to sell me things.
I've noticed just how important "white papers", "reports", "analysis" is in e-learning. There are just so many people who have the answer (so it appears).
So why don't we all just do these things and solve all the problems of engagement - it seems more is spent on discussing than doing.

Is doing something important, or proving it's been done?

In coversation with a college yesterday and this came up.

Is it more important that a student does some work, perhaps e-learning work that helps them learn, or is it more impoatnt that the student and college can prove that the work has been done.

In other words - is it enough that work has been completed?

I'll leave that one with you ......

Schools understanding

A significant opportunity exists with Functional Skills to get schools thinking along the same wavelength as College.

At the moment, the majority of schools focus exclusively on finding the 30 or so marks to get a students past the GCSE pass post. With the first trials of Functional Skills starting this term, we should see more emphasis on underlying learning and teaching in 14-19 rather than simply focussing on passing exams.

Be intersting to see how schools react to the demands of functional skills and whether it will impact throughout the curriculum.

Recognising how important it is

The East Midlands Dev Agenecy has a put out a tender that essentuially is for a company to "sell" functinal skills to employers in the East midlands area.

Fantastic - that's what i say!

It has a £500K budget over 4 years as well - not a huge amount but it's a start so well done to the Dev Agency.

The speed of life

We've just had another discussion in the office today - about the speed of life.
I guess the comparision is between me (late 40's) and teenage daughter. She'll sit on her computer with 20 or 30 different MSN conversations all going at once - it's completely bewildering to me who seems to have to focus on just one or perhaps a couple of things. She seems far more capabale of handling many tasks.

Then the conversation got onto speech - have you noticed how teengagers speak more quickly, maybe the age gap is actually a speed gap?

Building Schools for the Future

I've been talking to a few people about BSF recently as I expected the Functional SKills programme would already be incorportated as a key part of the projects.
I was a bit disappointed to discover they weren't - or are least aren't yet, and one of the key reaons given was that no-one in BSF knew much about them.

BSF is a long term project and as I understand it, once the initial capital spend is made changes in the first 4 years are quite limited, especially in the ICT infrastructure and software.

Maybe we're missing a trick here?