Pete's Eats

My son is 10 years old and in the last year of primary school. Last week he was due to have one of the very rare ICT lessons they are given. The whole class look forward to these sessions probably because it breaks them out of their classroom for a while, enables them to work in small groups together and allows them to drop the pens and notebooks in exchange for a keyboard. On this particular day their regular form teacher wasn’t present and the class was being taken by a classroom assistant instead (I’m not sure if there are differing grades of classroom assistants so I can’t comment on her training nor seniority) and the children, having spent a great deal of their day doing religious education, were quite excited about doing ICT. Kids being kids, they were all chatting and the classroom assistant got quite annoyed at this apparently so decided to cancel the ICT lesson in favour of more RE instead.

I don’t know what I’m more angry about to be honest. The fact that a classroom assistant made this questionable decision or that the kids missed a very important lesson for the most spurious of reasons. For a school to be treating information technology lessons as a ‘treat’ to be taken away at the first sign of childish exuberance is simply wrong and will put them at a disadvantage in years to come. I can only surmise that the person in question has issues in teaching ICT and therefore jumped at the chance to avoid the lesson because the kids were chatting and being noisy.

I feel a letter to the governors coming on…

So E-Tech is shaping up to be a cool event… I’m seriously thinking of going but I’m concerned that the event may have lost it’s magic a bit. I didn’t go last year but I spoke to a few people who did attend and got some very mixed views… It ties into another event that I’m speaking at in April (just) so I could stretch my trip out a bit maybe…

So, anyway, my question is: Are you going? Any thoughts that would help make my mind up? Any good parties that would really clinch it?

Floating Logos is a working title for this project… Basically, they’ve taken images of signs, flags and logos in high places and removed the support structure so the focus of the image appears to float in the air… Sounds like total arty bollocks but actually turns out to be a really cool idea

Seen on (and subsequently snarfed from) Antipixel…

It seems that Flash-lite doesn’t play well with SVG-t after all… Ouch…

pspwned

Originally uploaded by dragonwhacker.

I wonder if the ratio of Nintendo vs Sony handhelds in the picture is telling? I can’t help thinking the Sony will win out despite Nintendo’s handheld gaming pedigree…

Michael Paulus has drawn the skeletal systems of some well known cartoon characters. Or at least how they would be if they had skeletons of course…

“I decided to take a select few of these popular characters and render their skeletal systems as I imagine they might resemble if one truly had eye sockets half the size of its head, or fingerless-hands, or feet comprising 60% of its body mass.”

Amazing work. The Kitty-chan drawing is particularly brilliant…

(seen on Tom’s blog (plasticbag.org))

Have you seen the new ‘Listening’ and ‘Flickr’ buttons to the right? How cool are they!? Also, the comments page has a ‘live’ preview thing going on too… A big thanks to Boris for the sweet coding action

More changes to come…

Also, Adam has written his thoughts on some of the recent Design Engaged presentations. As usual Adam’s work is total quality and highly thought provoking. Well worth a read.

In the past week it seems that most of my current favourite sites are experiencing ongoing difficulties…

Last.fm has been up and down like a whore’s yo-yo (just got this -> The error was: “bad server response” (NSURLErrorDomain:-1011) <- when I tried to access it…) iScrobbler seems to be having major issues reporting as well.

Flickr has been having problems too. From about Monday night I couldn’t load any images. This was quite a problem I think as there was a forum topic devoted to it. It seems that it only affected some people and not others. From today, however, I can’t access Flickr at all… Nuthin’, nada, zip.

Hope it all gets resolved soon… I *need* these sites man. I could give up whenever I wanted but… </shake>