August 2015

  • More on the BBC, the Met, and August rain

    No, not the police, but the Office, which I wrote about last week.  Here are a couple of other perspectives: from Christopher Booker, and from The Conversation, which a colleague in New Zealand alerted me to.  Oddly, I did not...

  • Pandanomics and Pandamonium

    This video about the birth of giant panda twins in Washington is X-rated stuff, and almost beyond satire.  Surely any species that needs sperm donors, artificial insemination, and multiple midwives is beyond saving.

  • Wind and Air and Earth and Rain

    The BBC is about to dispense with the services of the Met Office for its weather forecasting.  This high profile divorce has money, maths and technology at its heart.  The BBC says that the Met couldn't come up with a...

  • Outdoor learning in [school] gardens

    The USA's National Wildlife Federation encourages outdoor learning in school gardens and habitat areas and is active in 8,400 schools. As such, it is interested in the academic and broader learning effects of school garden programs, and has recently tried to summarise what the...

  • A storm in a G and T

    There was a piece in the G last week about a recent article in the T which had gone out of its way to praise England's tax-funded schools in the great pre-university [A-level] qualifications race, comparing them favourably with 'independent' schools – that is,...

  • Outdoor Learning in 1915

    This is from The Spectator on August 21st, 1915: "War is a time in which a shortage of labourers can least be borne with.  The land must not go untilled, the seed must not remain unsown, or the crops unharvested....

  • Why it matters how we frame “education” in ESD

    This is the title of a new paper by Kerry Shephard and Pete Dulgar in Applied Environmental Education & Communication [2015, 14:3, 137-148, DOI: 10.1080/1533015X.2015.1067577] You can access it here. For those who cannot, a limited number of copies are also...

  • Graduating from Destitution

    A recent Free Exchange column in the Economist was a feature on helping the world's most poor people to help themselves.  It begins: "THE poor do not just lack money. They are also often short of basic know-how, the support of...

  • WSSD-U-2016

    For all those who've still got withdrawal symptoms from WEEC 15, along comes WSSD-U-2016.  I know it sounds like a WW2 submarine, but it's another conference (as if the poor Earth hadn't had enough already).  So, if you're anywhere Boston next September,...

  • Another thought for August

    A (kind) colleague in the US sent this to me wondering about the state of our education system.  As a mix of credulity and ignorance, it is almost beyond comment.