UKIP move up to third in polls....
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Caporegime
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Just as an aside, holding Australia up as this great ideal of an immigration model completely fails to consider the inherent issues of race and immigration the country has nor the ongoing issues the country faces. A skill based point system does not on its own provide a perfect solution and there are one or two posters in this thread who seem to think it does just this.
Actually what we need is a system that educates and teaches skills, not one that simply rewards skills.
Indeed, I personally feel it is a great opportunity, it will lead to a more fulfilling teaching role and a much better IT education. With open source support it can also be done relatively cheaply.
Are you being serious, or trolling?
I learned nothing in IT that I didnt already know, and resorted to spending my free time at school sat reading Tom's Hardware to gain just a basic understanding of computer hardware that absolutely no one else understood.
I had absolutely no option to learn 'computing' and didnt even know what this was, the only thing I knew prior to university was that if I wanted to study computers, all that was available was ICT, and that was ****.
Well that is not entirely true...ICT provision costs money anyway, changing that provision doesn't neccessarily come with increased costs, in fact it could very well be cost effective if done in association with local and national businesses and utilising the projects that RDM has highlighted...and in any case just because something may cost more to implement doesn't justify keeping a substandard and largely worthless system in place. Value for money doesn't mean something is simply cheap.
Soldato
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Actually what we need is a system that educates and teaches skills, not one that simply rewards skills.
The Internet basically does that better than any education system ever could. The role of the education system in the 21st century shouldn't be to compete but to supplement where it's needed (and it is needed).
I agree with you bhavv, i did the entire course in like two terms and all but two people in the class got distinction. It serves no purpose.
The education system isn't in competition with wikipedia....
If anything, you have the whole thing backwards, the internet is a great tool to support and suppliment formal education, not the other way around.
Agree.
Anyway..
I remember choosing GCSE ICT because I was in to computers, wanted to program and all that jazz (this was in 03 or so). Learn real computer stuff.
Turned out to be dull and really lame. We had four pieces of coursework, one was make a spreadsheet, another a website and I can't remember the other two. How...fun.
It was really silly. Luckily for my A-levels I was wiser and went for computing. Turned out to be a bit better.
I think Michael Grove is doing a decent job (even if he is a neo-con, shudder). Education needs to be fixed and some sort of quality returned. I say this as someone within the education system.
The internet taught me significantly more than I ever learned at school.
I didnt even know what the holocaust was until I Googled it at age 22 after hearing negative references to it in an online video game.
I was rather shocked that studying compulsory History up to age 14 didnt include a single thing about WW2, Hitler or the Holocaust.
No doubt some will but there seem to be enough schools out there already doing good work and an awful lot of support from various charities, universities and other organisations to start making a significant difference to ICT teaching.
Soldato
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The education system isn't in competition with wikipedia....
If anything, you have the whole thing backwards, the internet is a great tool to support and suppliment formal education, not the other way around.
I disagree, i don't believe the education system can sufficiently cater to all different forms of teaching and learning in a way that's going to get through any amount of material in time or just turn half the kids off learning for life.
Also, who mentioned Wikipedia? It's a great reference but for actually learning something from scratch? Meh.
They'll do the cheapest and easiest thing and then blame the government to push their socialist agenda.
All of that was removed from pre GCSE History when I went to school then.
I had to use it to learn a lot of things from scratch, like the topic I have already referred to. Beats going to a library and wasting time looking through all the books.
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It isn't meant to, it is meant to teach you the skills you need to move on and learn for yourself.....it is about giving you a sound base from which to progress.
You certainly will not get the majority of under 16s to learn anything off the internet that doesn't revolve around what their favourite pastime of the week is.
The internet can support and inform, but it cannot teach the skills needed to utilise it properly or to make sense of the gamut of information available. If you cannot understand it, you cannot learn from it.
In order to learn from the internet, you first need to be taught how to learn.....In other words...School.
The internet is great for reference, but learning something from scratch?...meh. I would like to see a child teach themselves the basics from scatch using only the internet........if they can even operate a computer without being taught that it is.....
The internet is only as good or useful as the person using it....it can also teach a whole gamut of nonsense and rubbish if you do not already have the skills to decipher what is true and what is not.
Like I said, it is a great tool for supplimenting your knowledge or as Bhavv as done to learn things about history that he didn't know before...but it cannot and should not replace or even take precedence over formal schooling.
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Serious. Their manifesto says they're against HS2 and wind farms as major items. I happen to think HS2 is vital to improving our rail system and investment of money outside of London. I also think off-shore wind farms and wind farms in lightly populated areas has huge benefits for the UK when compared to other renewables based on our weather.
I'm not going to vote for a party which is firmly against things I believe in.
Soldato
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Is that necessarily a bad thing? Why shouldn't people be allowed to explore the world by taking their own path? Their own curiosities? At the very least that way you know you'll actually learn something. If you have something you aren't interested in in the slightest crammed down your throat every day of the week then what are you going to learn? What key skill does that teach you?
More often than not it's the skill of not paying attention and knowing the minimum amount of work necessary to get through. And personally i think a lot of it is because it's being crammed down your throat. If your curiosities happen to take you to that same place then you're far more likely to understand and enjoy it, because you know how to get there - you know what purpose it serves, where it is relevant to you and how it all fits together.
Partly, which is what the education system needs to supplement. That and personal relationships. That isn't to say that the current rushed stress-fest of a system we have now is anywhere near a good way of doing that. There are ways of doing that without compromising a child's creativity, which is effectively what we do now.
You're just not looking in the right places. That may have been the case say five years ago, but the sheer wealth and quality of the material that has cropped up lately really shows promise for what is to come, and the potential of where that could take us.