Elly Williams’ Weblog

A school could help restore the reputation of the notorious hooded top after making it part of its uniform.

Richard Haigh, principal of Coombeshead College, Newton Abbot, Devon, has criticised “hysterical” stereotyping of ‘hoodie’ wearers as thugs.

Bluewater shopping centre, Greenhithe, Kent, last week banned hooded tops.

[Mr Haigh] added: “If you know how young people’s minds work, the best way of encouraging them to do something is to ban it.

“The more fuss we make about hoodies and baseball caps, the more a certain type of young person will want to wear them.”

In a letter that he described as “tongue in cheek” to the Times on Wednesday, Mr Haigh wrote: “I am disappointed by the lack of subtlety in dealing with the hoodie problem.

“Follow our example and make them part of school uniform. How uncool does that make them?”

Well said sir!

BBC NEWS | England | Devon | School adopts ‘hoodie’ as uniform

While stumbling around the BBC News, Technology Section I came across this piece from about 6 months ago. Someone has created an email client and browser for toddlers.

The idea is to protect them from sex and drugs spam and other unsavoury aspects of the internet, while at the same time give them access to the web’s more useful and entertaining sides.

OK, so that’s all very nice but I’m wondering, If children are being taught to use a mouse, before they use a pen, taught to use a virtual paintbrush, before they learn to use a real one, how long will it be before computer literacy tests are usurped by ‘paper literacy’ tests….?

No, really.

Fair View Junior School, in Gillingham, Kent, teamed up with the makers of Sim City, which lets users play around with computer-generated cities.

A special Medway version was created to include recognisable local landmarks.

Children use the game to learn about environmental and transport issues while redesigning their home town.

The education-by-computer-game is part of a Medway Children’s University course called Design A Town.

The four-day courses have been run at Medway schools since 1998. BBC

I’ve always loved the Sim City games (ever since I was little and had to go round a friends house to play because we didn’t have a copy) Every aspect from terraforming to laying out nice little strips of land to watching the little cars whizzing about. And it’s highly addictive because stuff always goes wrong. The fire station catches fire, the nuclear power plant blows up, people complain about you putting up taxes to build the schools that they’re complaining they don’t have (there’s a political lesson there… take heed) … and then just when you think you’ve got is sorted, aliens land and start zapping things.

While I there’s a great deal of value in teaching children about city planning/government/attack-by-aliens (yes children, if you want a National Health/Education Service, you’re going to need some money from somewhere) I have to say I’m not wholly sure where the value in a special version showing local landmarks is. Beyond the initial “I can see my house from here” gimmickry, surely the class is just going to elect to put a sewage plant on top of the headteacher’s house…

A thought that occurred to me while wandering around the technology section of a bookshop…

A book on CSS/HTML/XHTML/other-web-design that doesn’t mention web standards is like a book titled “DIY Loft Insulation” where the first chapter is all about asbestos.

Not only is it the longest place name in Britain (with its 58/51 letters - depending which alphabet you use), but it’s also the longest registered domain name.

www.llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.co.uk

I’m so glad I spent time learning to pronounce it

The BBC have an excerpt from an interview with Jakob Nielsen, talking about ten years of usability and improving web design.

The web looks very different today than it did 10 years ago.

…

“Roughly 80% of the [usability issues] we found 10 years ago are still an issue today,” he said.

“Some have gone away because users have changed and 10% have changed because technology has changed.”

Some design crimes, such as splash screens that get between a user and the site they are trying to visit, and web designers indulging their artistic urges have almost disappeared, said Dr Nielsen.

Which is all very nice to know, although I would have to disagree that designers are less indulgent or that that splash screens have all but disappeared.

4 years ago, a web design unit (for an online CV) was included as part of my architecture degree, and we were advised (by this gentleman, who was teaching the unit) to add splash screens (as animated .gifs in most cases) and to be indulgent. We were also told not to use stylesheets, that table layouts were the way of doing things (ok, so 4 years ago they were) and cross-browser compatability was a footnote.

4 years ago, this made me angry. I had already waved a relieved goodbye to font tags, and as the only person in the year who knew any HTML, I did not see why I should be disadvantaged by having to unlearn anything.

Anyway, it was ages ago, the web has moved on, and I hope I have too… except that I (along with the rest of my year) have just graduated, and started getting jobs and I expect a number of my year will be going back and updating the online CVs that they built then, and as designers trying to make a first impression they are going to be indulgent and working to standards that were out of date when they learnt them.

A year after they annouce that they’re scrapping one degree Cambridge University are planning on closing down their entire Architecture Department (don’t forget to go to bugmenot first)

This is a scary, scary thing. Cambridge is the top Architecture school in the UK(according to The Times anyway.) Oxford doesn’t have an Architecture course. A number of other architecture schools have closed down recently too.

Basically, the General Board of theUniversity of Cambridge are “recommending closure because the department has failed to meet Cambridge?s high research standards.”

Why? Possibly because there is very little academic research (compared to other departments in Universities) which can be carried out in architecture. Most of it is carried out by specific manufacturers or specialist centres like the Centre for Window and Cladding Technology at Bath Uni.

And if other universities take Cambridge’s lead and close down their schools too who knows where we’ll end up.

I was reading this article on the BBC about a week ago and it kinda seemed important (although obviously not important enough to write about straight away ;)). The Children’s Laureate has said many teachers are failing to enthuse their pupils with a love of reading. The main reason given for this is that the teachers do not love reading, or fail to show any enthusiasm for reading, literature of the material being covered.

I can see straight away how this happens seeing as it happened to me. In second year of secondary school (so, when I was 12) we had an English teacher who didn’t seem to care about teaching English - especially not English Lit. This became particularly apparent when she picked a book that she hadn’t read and didn’t intend to for us to study one term. And my grades plumetted (I still blame her for the fact that English was my worst subject at GCSE - by quite a way)

However there is another level to this, which was certainly employed at my school. For English class, before I hit about 15, one lesson a week was a “reading lesson”. You took in a book, and for that hour, you read it. And then, once a term you had to hand in reviews of the books you had read, and you had to have read a certain number of books. Which killed reading, because it became a chore. As soon as reading became a chore people started coming up with ways to cheat. One girl made up books under her own pen name, someone else would write up chapters of one book as separate books, other people just wrote up books that they had read at some point rather than recently.

I’m not quite sure where I’m going with this. On the one hand there’s the argument that if it’s a chore and not fun then kids will try and find a way out of reading, and on the other hand you have to have some system for checking that kids are reading or they won’t.

However, it’s quite noticeable how much worse English people’s English is than most people who’ve been taught English somewhere where it’s not necessarily the main spoken language (admittedly most of my experience is northern europe and I have no idea if this is exceptional or not, but it’s certainly noticeable) And we’re worse at learning other languages too. Meri can speak 4 languages fairly fluently and bits of a couple of others. I’m fairly sure Mili is fluent in at least 3 languages. And yet I’m exceptional (at my school at any rate) for attempting to learn both French and German at GCSE.

Anyway, I’ll leave you with a couple of quotes

“Two languages in one head? Who could do such a thing”

“Well the Dutch speak 4 different languages and smoke marijuana…..”

Eddie Izzard - Dress to Kill - ~1998

“If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it ought to be good enough for the children of Texas.”

Texas Governor Ma Ferguson - ~1924

I found an article on the BBC website. Apparently, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix has been giving some kids headaches.

I’m not sure why anyone has found this particularly suprising. One of the main factors is that the kids refuse to take a break from reading the book.

If you spend all day staring at a computer screen you are encouraged to take a break. I can clearly remember being told, by various teachers, to take breaks in exam revision. So why should reading a book be treated differently?

So is it the books that cause the headaches?

Well, I can’t think of any other children’s books of that length. And I may not be eight years old, but I’m certainly gripped by the series.

So the problem is - it would appear - that chilldren have found a gripping, can’t-put-down-til-you’ve-finished series that happens to be a giant hype love-it-or-loathe-it debate.

So what’s the solution? Discourage children from reading? or just discourage them from reading anything long and gripping. I don’t think so. I wish I’d had something that enjoyable to read when I was a kid.