I was invited to give a short opening chat at a think tank for ICTEV with a Principal from a primary school. I threw together a small Wiki both as a means of doing the show bit of the show n tell and also to demo a little bit of Web2 software.

I had toyed with the notion of writing a commentary on VELS as if it was a student assignment. The text reads like one. But time in the end stopped me. Probably a good thing given some of the folk who were there with vested interests in VELS. VELS, I should say is a good move, as any curriculum reform ought to be in terms of how it tries to shift thinking away from disciplinary spaces. But, to my grumpy eye, it is, in the ICT space, really unimaginative, banal... It may well be a huge step forward compared to what was there before but...

There was some useful discussion and perhaps some of it might be turned into a podcast (editing out the few words from an OS visitor who insisted on discussing IP before we proceeded! I resisted the urge to refer him to John Perry Barlow's 'the economy of ideas' paper. If interested here is an interesting chat with Barlow.)

The depressing part was the recylcing of issues/problems about doing computers in classrooms. Some folk just don't want to move their heads out of the 1980s. Still there were signs of the odd mental shuffle and shift. It's not as if anything that I was trying to argue was that difficult or that it wasn't bleedingly obvious. Sigh. Some possums were stirred a tad. But for all their good intentions these gabfests are not that useful unless they actually produce something on the ground.