SteveBentley

The plot thickens.

This might create a few headaches for your IT teachers - OCR have declared some controlled assessments void because worked answers have appeared online. OCR assessment shock hits GCSE Computing students If the article is correct and they are using the same assessment each year, it's astounding that they didn't expect that this would happen and have something in place to mitigate.

This is JISC's take on it How does the copyright examination exception apply to coursework and student shows? (10 February 2011) > Jisc Legal > View Detail

I've heard various interpretations of this one - 32(3) states Some people say that it is strictly formal exam only, others argue that coursework is part of an examination. I'm not sure it's been tested and I'm not volunteering to be the test case!

Welcome to the world of Higher Education IT

Not convinced some of them know what a phone is.

Beware their latest new thing - if you don't book an allocated seat (€5 or €10 depending on the flight I think) you can't check in until 7 days before the flight. So if you go away for 7 nights (which is 8 days) you're potentially going to need to check in and print the boarding card while you're away.

Round here I wouldn't take a taxi driver's endorsement of driving skills as counting for anything!

Unfortunately getting a real human to translate doesn't always work out well BBC News - E-mail error ends up on road sign

I agree up to a point, but the relevancy of what exams measure needs to be considered. If you introduce tablets to prepare students for life in a world where obtaining information is easy and so the emphasis is on how to apply that information*, an exam which is conducted in isolation from the outside world that relies on students being able to recall facts is, arguably, unfit for the purpose of either assessing students' learning performance or their ability to perform in employment. So yes, it needs to be measurable, but the means of measuring has to be relevant, and exams in their current form are not. * See Bloom's Taxonomy

The thing with iPads is that they are very much designed as a device for use by one person, there are no user profiles etc. Anything other than 1:1 becomes a hassle in my experience.

There's an argument, certainly with pencil cases and calculators, that if kids have to provide their own they're more likely to look after them than if they were provided by the school on a per-session basis. I think lower income families get help with uniform costs? (I know none of that really constitutes a "view", I'm not sure I really have one)

To my mind, the only controversy here is who is paying. The big benefit I see, in time, is that all kids will have a device that can get them online, and that will mean that we can totally revamp the curriculum. If we (grudgingly) accept that a large proportion of what happens in education is teaching for the exam, then we can move to a position where the exam is "open net" - all candidates have access to the net via their device. The questions on the paper then become far more complex and have a greater emphasis on researching, evaluating sources, applying knowledge and problem solving rather than regurgitating facts. This makes the exam more relevant to the real world and makes qualifications a more useful barometer of how useful a candidate for a job is going to be. This Guardian blog post about how iPads and iPods have revolutionised year 6 science at one school makes for interesting reading How we used technology to develop student-led learning in science | Teacher Network | Guardian Professional

I guess the starting point is "what (if anything) are they using instead" and from there "why is this so much better that they will want to change". Assuming the answer to the first question is Dropbox, is the answer to the second question about safeguarding or data protection etc? If it is then park the issue in management's hands to issue the appropriate edicts. If it's just the case that it's your in-house solution to a problem that the commercial world has solved adequately then I guess you may need to take a hard decision about whether it was needed in the first place and whether moving those two users to Dropbox and closing your service would be more cost effective thing to do overall.

That URL looks like an SQL Injection attack waiting to happen.

AIUI the words "none of the above" cannot appear on the ballot paper. Somebody tried to stand for the "None of the Above Party" in 2010 and was told he couldn't.

I'm going to have this problem next time round. The current MP, who I didn't vote for, has proven himself to be very effective locally, but I don't like what his party are doing nationally. A simple reform that would make Parliament much more democratic would be to abolish the "party whip". Make each vote a personal vote for each MP based on how their constituents have urged them to vote, rather than them being threatened with consequences for not voting with the party line.

Which is generally a good way to throw your deposit money down the drain. We're getting more and more towards a stage where only the big parties have any sort of media coverage of their campaign, and so only those who are really interested will have taken the trouble to even know who is standing, let alone what their policies are. Independents don't even get their name shown on captions on the news any more, just a "for a full list of candidates look at our website" mention. The televised debates between the three main party leaders were, in my view, an affront to local democracy, making it even less likely that anybody other than a candidate standing for any of the those parties would be elected, because they put it into people's heads that they only had three choices.

So two massive security bills is better than one?

By "fully serviced" you would include the massive security bill that such a place would require? Surely it would be a prime target for those planning terrorist activities.

It looks to me like it's £400 at today's prices rather than £400 when purchased - the exchange rate for BitCoins seems to have risen dramatically

I have one of these and can definitely recommend it.

Unis would generally be more interested in a 48 week sandwich placement in my experience. But some students may be interested in the opportunity on an informal basis aside from their course.

Not heard anything about it - got any info?

OCR PDFs would be my tool of choice here too. Acrobat Pro does a decent job of keeping the original format while making it searchable. This is one of the few occasions when I'd recommend leaving the content as PDFs rather than trying to convert it to HTML to put in a wiki directly, to maintain the historical value.