Mssv

The vision: Eager teens, listening quietly and attentively as I led a discussion about alternate reality games.
The reality: Thirty seconds into my prepared spiel, there were four hands waving in the air and the kids at the back were already talking. “Oh boy,” I thought, hoping to make a quantum leap out of here, but […]

At my school, all students were entered into the English Literature GCSE. What this meant was that a couple of times a week, we would take out copies of ‘English Literature’ - things like The Crucible, A Passage To India, various Shakespeare plays, poems - and take turns reading them out.
There is nothing that kills […]

Like many others, when I was kid, two of the games I had the most fun with were Lego and Meccano. It would be trite to go into the reasons why, and it’s enough to say that construction kits like these offer kids a unique place to use their imagination to build anything they want, […]

If you’ve ever visited Oxford, chances are that you’ll spend some time in Radcliffe Square, admiring the University Library and the round Radcliffe Camera building. Along the east side of the the square is a long wall with a black metal gate set into it; people often poke their heads in to see an immaculate […]

Interesting article from today’s New York Times, What a College Education Buys:
Moreover, if you’re not planning on becoming, say, a doctor, the benefits of diligent study can be overstated. In recent decades, the biggest rewards have gone to those whose intelligence is deployable in new directions on short notice, not to those who are locked […]

Once again we are at that special time of year when the GCSE and A-Level results are announced for secondary school students here in the UK. There’s almost no point reading the newspapers since they always run the same stories. If the results for an exam improve, that’s because it’s getting easier. If they get […]

“… You should aim for a total text length of 6000 words. Other than in exceptional circumstances, you should not exceed 8000 words.”
That’s a typical guide for a dissertation at Cambridge. When I read that, I think to myself, ‘Okay, in that case I should aim to write around 6000 words.’ Seems straightforward enough.
But apparently […]

International Space Centre for Merseyside - bit of a bizarre idea, putting it in Wallasey, and I’m not sure how many visitors it’ll get, but on the whole I think that more space centres are always a good thing.

If and when I ever leave the world of academia, I will be very sorry. Not because of the usual reasons, but because I will no longer have free access to thousands of academic journals on the Internet. It’s simply a wonder to be able to go over to Pubmed, type in any keyword, and […]

Putting webcams in classrooms to catch problem pupils - seems like a great idea to me, you wouldn’t believe the number of parents who think their kids can do no wrong. As for privacy concerns, I think maybe some kind of key escrow agency might be a good idea, wherein (say) at least two out […]