UK Reviewing the new Design & Technology Curriculum
Reviewing the new Design & Technology Curriculum
Westminster Education Forum National Curriculum Seminar Series 2013
Timing: Morning, Wednesday, 13th February 2013
Venue: Central London
"As the Government concludes its National Curriculum review, this timely seminar focuses on the content of the new curriculum for Design and Technology (D&T) for each Key Stage, due to be introduced into schools from September 2014 - as well as the implementation challenges for schools. It will bring together key policymakers with school and college leaders, teaching unions, universities, employers and other stakeholders.
Delegates will assess the opportunities and challenges presented by D&T's designation as a 'foundation' subject, with a much less prescriptive Programme of Study, as well as the level of teaching time required to deliver the new Programme and whether it meets the needs of employers, colleges and universities.
Sessions also focus on wider issues in D&T including the quality of facilities available in both primary and secondary schools in England, the profile and CPD opportunities for D&T teachers and the role that industry can play in the delivery of D&T in schools."
(Westminster Education Forum, UK)
Fig.1 Chicago Middle School students participate in an invention school workshop led by James Dyson as the James Dyson Foundation begins its mission to encourage more American students to become future engineers and inventors, at the Sir Miles Davis Academy in Chicago, May 5, 2011 [http://momandmore.com/2011/05/james-dyson-foundation-just-launched.html].
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Open Courses are upending the higher education paradigm
"Open Courses will definitively shift the power from content to community in Higher Learning. The second coming of knowledge is firmly associated with free connections, inquiry and conversations, something that textbooks implicitly discourage. Textbooks, for all they stand for, are the industrial age contraptions that dominated learning for most of last fifty years; Open courses bring a much needed, paradigm shifting update.
In summary, then, Open Courses are eating the publishers' lunch, and that's where the resentment comes from. These masters of the learning universe already had enough trouble with the culture of Internet, and Open Courses represent everything they feared: the communities, the conversations and the knowledge commons. This isn't a battle which is over yet, but we may just be witnessing a passing of an age."
(Supriyo Chaudhuri, 05 November 2012)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Learning Communities: new students sharing common experiences
"In their most basic form, learning communities employ a kind of co-registration or block scheduling that enables students to take courses together. The same students register for two or more courses, forming a sort of study team. In a few cases this may mean sharing the entire first-semester curriculum together so that all new students in that learning community are studying the same material. Sometimes it will link all freshmen by tying two courses together for all - most typically a course in writing with a course in selected literature, or biographies, or current social problems. In the larger universities such as the University of Oregon and the University of Washington, students in a learning community attend lectures with 200–300 other students but stay together for a smaller discussion section (Freshman Interest Group) led by a graduate student or upper division student. In a very different setting, Seattle Central Community College students in the Coordinated Studies Program take all their courses together in one block of time so that the community meets two or three times a week for four to six hours at a time."
(Vincent Tinto, 1997, p.2)
1). Vincent Tinto (1997). "Universities as Learning Organizations", About Campus 1(6) January/February 1997, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/abc.v1:6/issuetoc]
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
UK Times Higher Education: education news and resources
"Times Higher Education is the UK's most authoritative source of information about higher education. Designed specifically for professional people working in higher education and research, Times Higher Education was founded in 1971 and has been online since 1995.
We cover policy issues and intellectual developments worldwide through a specialist staff of reporters and many contributors from within the academic community. Times Higher Education provides high-quality information and analysis as well as a forum for debate for the academic community on higher education policy issues - public funding, tuition charges, quality assurance, institutional governance, student assessment, postgraduate training etc - and on intellectual developments, personalities and debates. Coverage includes a large number of book reviews of both specialised texts and books of general interest to an academic audience."
(TSL Education Ltd.)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
The UK Higher Education Statistics Agency
"The Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) is the official agency for the collection, analysis and dissemination of quantitative information about higher education.
It was set up by agreement between the relevant government departments, the higher education funding councils and the universities and colleges in 1993, following the White Paper 'Higher Education: a new framework', which called for more coherence in HE statistics, and the 1992 Higher and Further Education Acts, which established an integrated higher education system throughout the United Kingdom."
(Higher Education Statistics Agency)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
