Ali's Blog

Colleague David directed us to this book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, by author Daniel Pink,  which looks at how staff can be motivated to produce their best work.

As Pink discusses in the book, humans are biologically wired to specific factors that can help them be more productive: autonomy, mastery and purpose.

Key things which resonate with me and reminded me of how CORE Education works included:

• Autonomy – a person’s desire to direct our lives in the direction we want, instead of being told what to do, or where to go. At CORE we believe in empowering our staff- providing what we hope is a safe and supportive environment, but also one in which creativity and innovation are recognised and valued;
• Mastery (the urge to learn new things and master new skills)- CORE tries to work at the cutting edge of new technology and our IT Team work hard to find new and exciting tools for us to use. CORE also places great value in professional development, and all staff are encouraged to utilise the time and money allocated to PD to extend themselves personally and professionally. We also have six-weekly whole company Prof Learning sessions run by staff members, which explore key topics of interest or areas of our work;
• Money isn’t everything- which CORE tries to match comparable salaries in the sector many of our staff could earn more and have longer holidays if thy remained at schools or universities- CORE offers something (maybe intangible) that encourages staff to stay despite these market pressures and we are blessed with a very low turnover of our staff.
• Innovation- Pink notes that start-up companies have more opportunity to innovate and to operate on non-traditional ways- whilst CORE has been in operation for 7 years now I hope we can continue to encourage and support our staff to keep thinking outside that square.

I have only had time to read the highlights so far, but have added this book to my growing list of must reads- have some long plane journeys coming up so might even get a chance in the near future.

May 16th, 2010 | Category: CORE life, Educational bits and bobs | Leave a comment

The benefits and risks to children’s wellbeing and learning associated with playing computer games have been highlighted as an area for urgent research by the Byron Review. The Children’s Plan and Becta’s Harnessing Technology strategy have also identified the importance of parents and families on children’s learning and development.

Over the past year, Futurelab has sought to guidance for parents in order that computer games can be used beneficially in family settings.

The final gaming in families report details the key results from the project research, findings from interviews with gaming families and the outcomes of three family gaming workshops. The report is intended for policy-makers. However, the report also contains recommendations for parents and industry and may also be of interest to educators.

For more information on the project and to download this report, please visit check out  www.futurelab.org.uk/projects/gaming-in-families

May 6th, 2010 | Category: Educational bits and bobs, The internet and techie toys | Leave a comment

The UK  Daily Telegraph reports that Facebook has taken its chat system offline while it repairs a security hole that allowed users to see other people’s private chats. The security flaw relates to a feature on Facebook that allows users to preview their own privacy settings. Using what sounds like a simple trick, a user can also access their friends’ latest pending friend-requests and which friends they share in common.

Since being informed of the problem, Facebook has disaplyed a message that says “chat is down for maintenance at this time”.

In a statement, Facebook said: “For a limited period of time, a bug permitted some users’ chat messages and pending friend requests to be made visible to their friends by manipulating the ‘preview my profile’ feature of Facebook privacy settings. When we received reports of the problem, our engineers promptly diagnosed it and temporarily disabled the chat function. We also pushed out a fix to take care of the visible friend requests which is now complete. Chat will be turned back on across the site shortly. We worked quickly to resolve this matter, ensuring that once the bug was reported to us, a solution was quickly found and implemented.”

This incident follows recent changes to the way Facebook shares its users information with other users and third parties which have drawn criticism from privacy watchdogs.

However, Facebook insisted that privacy was its “highest priority”. Elliot Schrage, vice president of global communications at Facebook, said: “These new products and features are designed to enhance personalisation and promote social activity across the internet while continuing to give users unprecedented control over what information they share, when they want to share it, and with whom.

May 6th, 2010 | Category: The internet and techie toys | Leave a comment

After Sony announced this week it was halting the production of floppy disks the BBC News Magazine set out to discover who still buys and uses this computer storage medium. More than 1,000 readers e-mailed in response to the Magazine’s request to explain their attachment to the once universally popular 3.5″ diskettes. Their top 40 is published online, but here are my favourites:

1. I regularly buy floppy disks. I own a pub with a retro theme and I use them as beer mats (Ashby de la Soul)
2. I am an artist from London and I use floppy disks to produce my paintings. I tile them up as canvases. The personal information on each disk is forever locked under the paint, but the labels are left as a clue. I use the circular hubs on the reverse for eyes! (London)
3. In the aviation industry they are still used to update firmware on ticket printers (Germany)
4. Not as much a user as an owner of a great many floppies, I was planning to tile the roof of my shed with them (using the two existing corner holes to take the nails) until my wife forbade it  (England)
5. I work for a national high-street based business. We still use floppies in many sites for back-ups. Believe it or not we are still running MS-DOS on most of our till systems. We get through hundreds if not into the thousands each year (Birmingham)
6. Have you seen the cost of clays for skeet shooting? Pull! (St.Helens)
7. A huge number of CNC [computer numerical control] machines for metalworking and manufacture use floppies because their instruction sets are small enough to fit on the disks. In these areas a floppy is far hardier than a CD or even a USB pen-drive (Wirral, UK)
8. Drilling holes on four sides and interlocking them with industrial clips, I have created a retro futurist sliding curtain for a client’s loft. Monochromatic colour floppies with occasional accents of bright red and yellow give different moods on sunny days or ambient lighting by night. On them are stored formulas and theories of leading edge scientists… (Montreal)
9. Believe it or not, most if not all ATM (cashpoint) programming is installed direct to the machine from a floppy disk. With all of the ATMs available in just the UK with many additional copies made to support each machine in a region… this could amount to a huge stockpile of disks hanging around for each bank and/or private ATM manufacturer (Northampton)
10. My band released our first single on a floppy as a gimmick last year. It took us quite a while to find somewhere that actually sold them anymore. (Manchester)

otehr ones from the top 40 that caught my eye include

• I buy these little beauties for a quite different reason. The floppy disk costs an average of £3.66 for 200, however they have a resale value of £5.50 at any good computer recycling centre, so I buy them in bulk and simply sell them directly at a profit. Take that, Bill Gates (Tamworth)

• I put handles on them and sell them as spatulas. I sell thousands of them a year (Delaware – USA)

• I buy about 100,000 floppies per year as I have a business that makes them into drinks mats, fridge magnets and toast racks (London).

• I’ve always used an old floppy disk as an ice scraper for the car, just the right combination of rigidity and flexibility (Swindon)

• The Ministry of Defence and all three armed services use them for HR purposes on each individual’s annual appraisal report (London)

• Many aircraft use the floppy medium to transfer the monthly navigation database updates to the aircraft’s navigation systems. Also to update software on non-critical aircraft systems. There’s lots of aircraft out there and the floppy has to be a new one for each data transfer. So still a lot of demand (Sharjah UAE)

So seems there still life in the old dog yet.

April 30th, 2010 | Category: The internet and techie toys, UK | Leave a comment

From one of my favourite authors:

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. “ – Maya Angelou

April 22nd, 2010 | Category: Odds & Ends | Comments (1)

Today is the 33rd anniversary of my father’s death.

Thomas George Wright 6th August 1909-20th April 1977

This photo was taken in 1946 and Dad is wearing his demob suit. He was an engineer in the Royal Artillery and met Mum (a nurse) whilst recupertaing after being shot at Dunkirk. He died when I was 16 and it feels like forever since he was around. Yet since we had our Thomas (named after him) I miss him and Mum (who died in 1986) even more. I know that they would have been so proud of Thomas and we are determined he will grow up understanding his British heritage and knowing his grandparents from there as best as he can, through our memories.

April 20th, 2010 | Category: Family stuff | Comments (2)

Found in a report from BBC News:

Playing a video game before bed appears to have only a mild effect on how long it takes a male teenager to fall asleep, a preliminary study suggests.
Those who played a relatively violent video game took only marginally longer to fall asleep than those who watched a relaxing nature documentary.
The Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine study pitted Call of Duty 4 against March of the Penguins.
There is little scientific data on the effects of video games on sleep.
But anecdotal evidence has long suggested that playing such games at night could have a detrimental impact on sleep because the stimulation keeps one awake even after the game has ceased.

To test the theory, researchers at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, recruited 13 males between the aged of 14 and 18 with no existing sleep problems. On one night they sat beneath the covers playing Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare for 50 minutes – a game in which the player takes on the role of an SAS recruit among others carrying out various violent missions.

On a second night a week later they spent an equal amount of time watching March of the Penguins, the award-winning French documentary which follows the yearly journey of the emperor penguins of Antarctica across vast swathes of ice to their breeding grounds.

Three fell asleep while watching the film, while none dozed off while playing Call of Duty. The majority of the teenagers did take longer to fall asleep after playing the video game, but most were asleep within seven-and-a-half minutes – only four minutes longer than when they watched March of the Penguins.

“We purposefully chose a very tranquil film to contrast against the very stimulating effect of playing a violent video game in the hope of producing the greatest effect on sleep,” said Michael Gradisar, a senior lecturer in clinical child psychology who led the research.

“We were surprised that playing the violent video game did not lead to a much longer time taken to fall asleep.”
However he acknowledged there were limitations to the small study, notably that very few teenagers who played would limit their playing time to just 50 minutes a night.

“With greater time invested there could be a greater emotional investment in the game. What happens to the teen’s virtual character could begin to evoke feelings of anxiety or frustration that could have larger effects on their sleep.”

And however tranquil March of the Penguins may be, some sleep experts urge no screen activity before bed – be it computer, game or TV. There has been increasing focus on the quality and length of young people’s sleep, in part because of the impact on concentration but also amid mounting suggestions that poor sleep may be contributing to obesity levels.

A French study published this week found that young men ate 25% more calories a day when they had four hours of sleep the night before compared to when they had slept for eight hours.

April 15th, 2010 | Category: The internet and techie toys | Leave a comment

A UK village which raised £37,000 to offer 200 homes the super-fast broadband that BT could not deliver has launched its network. Rutland Telecom will offer the residents of Lyddington speeds of up to 40Mbps (megabits per second), after other telecom firms had said it was not economical to provide fast services to the village.

Getting fast broadband to rural areas is back in the spotlight as the UK government shelves its funding plans. It is estimated that around 2.5 million homes in the UK cannot get broadband speeds of more than 2Mbps.

Rather than accepting the situation, the Rutland Telecom scheme was a joint effort between villagers fed up with slow broadband speeds and a local ICT firm that was reselling BT’s broadband. They discovered that there was nothing to stop them becoming a telco. “We found that any company could do, on a smaller scale, what Carphone Warehouse has done and take over BT’s network,” said Dr David Lewis, managing director of Rutland Telecom. They asked Openreach, the BT spin-off that has responsibility for the UK’s telephone network, to supply fibre-optic cable to a street cabinet in the village.

It was a slow process and required the intervention of regulator Ofcom but two years later the telco is up and running and already has 50 customers. “For the first time in UK telecommunications history the telephone lines of customers are completely cut off from the local BT exchange,” said Rutland Telecom director Mark Melluish.

Rutland Telecom has since been approached by 40 other rural community groups to see if a similar solution is possible in their area, and is on the verge of launching similar schemes in neighbouring Leicestershire and one in Wales.

The British government has pledged to offer all homes a minimum speed of 2Mbps (megabits per second) by 2012, however  critics say these speeds are far too slow for the ever-increasing demands of web users. There are concerns that up to one third of the country will not be served by next-generation broadband – offering speeds of over 25Mbps.

For commercial firms such as BT and Virgin Media fibre rollouts in rural areas are not cost-effective. In their place community solutions are springing up and it is estimated that there are 40 such schemes currently laying fibre or planning to do so.

The government had proposed to raise £170m a year via a broadband tax, which would have seen all households with a landline phone charged an extra £6 a year. The money would have been used to fund broadband to rural areas but the Tories opposed the tax and it was shelved in last-ditch negotiations to get the Finance Bill through parliament before the general election.

April 14th, 2010 | Category: The internet and techie toys, UK | Leave a comment

March 16th, 2010 | Category: CORE life, Educational bits and bobs | Leave a comment

Life is short, Break the rules, Forgive quickly, Kiss slowly, Love truly, Laugh uncontrollably, And never regret anything that made you smile..

March 12th, 2010 | Category: Odds & Ends | Leave a comment

For our only time off during our visit to Singapore we took the 10 minute walk from our hotel to the outside bar in the courtyard of Raffles Hotel. We resisted the temptation of their world famous “Singapore Sling” (the price at over $30 helped our resistance!) and settled for a lime and soda!

Raffles Hotel is a colonial-style hotel dating from 1887, and named after Singapore’s founder Sir Stamford Raffles.  It now costs over $800 per night to stay in the hotel, hence we only got to the bar!

Some facts about Raffles Hotel (from Wikipedia)

• Raffles Hotel is reputedly where the sole surviving wild tiger in Singapore was shot and made extinct. Some stories place this event in the Long Bar. Raffles itself claims the tiger had escaped from enclosure at a nearby “native show” and chased underneath the hotel’s Bar & Billiard Room (a raised structure) and shot to death there on August 13, 1902.
• Raffles is where the Singapore Sling was invented. The cocktail was invented by bartender Ngiam Tong Boon between 1910 and 1915.
• Raffles is the setting for Murakami Ryu’s novel and film titled, Raffles Hotel. The film was shot on location.
• The site of the hotel was originally the location of the oldest girls’ school in Singapore (1842), now called St. Margaret’s. It was founded by Maria (Tarn) Dyer, the missionary wife of Samuel Dyer.
• The hotel was featured as a Japanese stronghold in Medal of Honor: Rising Sun.
• Raffles Hotel was the subject of Paul O’Grady’s Orient for Carlton Television.
• The hotel featured in episodes of the BBC’s Tenko.
• Long Bar is featured in Peace Arch Entertainment’s “UberGuide” television travel series as one of the top ten bars in the world.

March 8th, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

March 8th, 2010 | Category: CORE life, Educational bits and bobs, Travel | Leave a comment

March 6th, 2010 | Category: CORE life, Educational bits and bobs, Travel | Leave a comment

Coming up on March 26th at Te Papa is a one-day “EDtalks Symposium – Leading Minds, Creating Futures”. This symposium features sixteen 20 minute presentations focusing on “current trends in learning enabled through the smart use of technologies, and the related interface between education and business”. Thought Leaders can ignite imaginations, stimulate fresh approaches, and challenge assumptions. We have assembled a wide-ranging line up of presenters drawing on the university and schooling sector, business entrepreneurs, and telecommunication representatives, who will each provide a powerful idea, challenge or trend. The day will be divided into four themed sessions, with four presenters and a short plenary for each theme. Each speaker gives a 20 minute presentation, and presenter details are published on the Symposium website. John Drummond, Blair Professor of Music at the University of Otago, will invite us to consider how we can open up our minds and find once more the creativity we had as kids, and how technology can stimulate our creative juices. Ernie Newman from TUANZ will be reflecting on the importance of education in the government’s ultra fast broadband project. He will emphasise the opportunity to re-define the interface between school and home, and identify some of the “people Issues” that need to be addressed so that ultra fast broadband truly ushers in a new paradigm for NZ schools. Register now for this event, and join us for a stimulating day of dialogue and discussion for you and your staff.

Registration Contact Us

March 3rd, 2010 | Category: CORE life, Educational bits and bobs, The internet and techie toys | Leave a comment