It’s a London thing

Posted on by primaryt
I set off to London on Friday at 4am after getting no sleep at all, I landed at the FOTE09 (future of technology in education 2009) conference and really enjoyed it (see my blog posts). Although I was really tired I then headed to my friends house in Acton and had a great Friday night eating pizza and crashing watching the TV. 40 hours after getting up I finally got to sleep…
Saturday was slow to bring to the boil but we got up and went to watch Surrogates (See review) then headed to Mr Jerks for Jerk Chicken rice and peas. So good, so full, but never the less I battled on to head to Clapham to meet a friend we call “STI“ for a quick drink. After being hit on by a girl of Brazilian decent we decided it was probably best for everyone if we headed back home to get a reasonably early night.
I woke up on Sunday to the piercing tones of an Auzzy or NZ skype conference call in the room next to me. Safe to say I didn’t want to stick around too long so I walked around to the bus station with my mate P whilst discussing how eager we are for the release of Diablo 3….
Leaving my friend “P” behind after a few great days I headed on bus to Wilesden Green to hang out with my aunt for the day. The bus was great and I got from Acton to Wilesden Green in 40 minutes or so. We had a great lunch then headed to see my cousin, her husband and their two children who I have barely even met! Seeing them was great, the kids are great and we had a great time. I wish I remember to get some pictures of me with the kids, especially Charlie who has similar hair to what I had when I was his age. I didn’t want to outstay my welcome so we left at about 9:30 and headed home for more food and tea. I rang my friend Fuxtonius at 10pm and told him I was crashing at his house, an idea he was not opposed to which was good because I didn’t have anywhere to stay on Monday night! Last thing I did was prepare for Hand held learning 2009 (See review) which I had to be at by 10:30..
Monday came and I was eager to get to HHL to meet some of the twitter folks and to see what people had to say, especially about the wilsden project and also to see if I could persuade anyone to get behind my “Not a VLE project”. Met a lot of people and really enjoyed the first presentation of the day. Met some friends and family for lunch then headed back to HHL, unfortunately some of the presentations were repeats from Friday and the exhibition didn’t have any interesting companies showing anything new. I think with the stands costing £3000 this year a lot of smaller innovative companies weren’t interested. Anyway, read my review if you are interested in HHL.. After the do I headed out drinking with some friends till about 11 at which point I walked up to Angel to stop at Fuxtonius‘ flat.
Woke up on Monday morning and tried to persuade a train guy to not be a douche bag and to let me get an earlier train but he wasn’t having it so I jumped onto Macdonalds wireless network and enjoyed a cup of tea while slowly authoring some blog posts and thinking about where to eat breakfast and how to kill 3 hours…
Thanks to my aunt, my cousins and their kids, P, STI and Fuxtonius for everything, I had a great time and I will be back in January probably. 🙂
Also thanks to the Bradford massive (EB) for the entertainment factor 😉 You do realize the pub we were in was completely empty? Was that something to do with us cause everyone left when we went in! Do I smell?

FOTE09 Conference review #fote09

Posted on by primaryt

The future of technology in Education is obviously a very hot topic at the moment.

I took a few key things away from the conference:
  1. The future is on a huge range of devices
  2. The future is very “open” when it comes to sharing resources and content (This I’m 100% behind)
  3. FOTE is more for FE however it was worth while my attending (being that I work mainly with primary schools)
To the planners
The conference was very well organized and the food/tea breaks were perfectly placed. My thanks goes out to the hosts and the presenters.
Presenting the twits
Some of the presenters were great, some, not so.. I think the real time feedback during Twitter was fantastic and this lead to some very open, honest and sometimes heated debates.
Being offended
Apologies go to people who found some of the content on twitter offensive but this includes a very important reminder that you can chose to ignore comments you might like that. A few times during the conference people “devalued the degree”. Be it presenter or a tweeter this was not well received and I think that FE people may need to look at why some people (usually those working in IT) come to this conclusion.
Virtual insanity
I wish the talk on “Virtual Worlds” had some more real life opportunities for people in none FE to explore, I didn’t get what I wanted from the talk other than a sense of “it’s cheap but not as good as the real thing”. Most of the time in Primary the real thing isn’t “that” expensive
Will I be attending FOTE09 next year?
If the topics fall in my line of interest then yes but I wouldn’t expect anyone else in Primary Education to attend. I could also look at possible sponsoring with School Email which would be of interest to the secondary/college leaders.
Thanks to everyone who was involved, attended & tweeted. I was awake for 36 hours before sleeping… ouch

Weird wordpress page..

Posted on by primaryt

I just found this code in a wordpress page…

<a href=”http://www.mycialistadalafil.com/tadalafil-generic-cialis/”>tadalafil</a></div><script language=”javascript”>function setOpacity(a,b){ a.style.opacity=b/10; a.style.filter=’alpha(opacity=’+b*10+’)’; } setOpacity(document.getElementById(‘begin_3′),’0’); document.getElementById(‘begin_3′).style.display=’none’;
</script>
If anyone knows how this managed to make it onto the page please let me know!
Even though wordpress had been updated it didn’t removed this old bug. Jumped into mysql admin and removed it manually, no big deal..