JDMcDsblog

Dorothy Coe, , has picked up on the comment I made on “ACE” in which I referred to an article by Professor Lindsay Paterson in TESS, which criticises some aspects of “A Curriculum for Excellence” Her comment is worth reading and it has prompted me to look further at the kind of curriculum design (architecture)we want to develop in our schools. In my reply to Dorothy I made the point about how schools should manage the transition from the kind of general/integrated curriculum of Primary and lower secondary to the subject specific demands of an SQA led examination system of which the Highers are, largely, the end product. The SQA has just completed a seried of stakeholder meetings to flesh out its idaes for an examination system for S3 and S4 while various schools have explored new models of timetabling, some with apparently greater success than others, acording to the HMIe.

In my readings about curricular matters I came across Read/Write Web, which is a blog that provides news and comment on web technology. The  Post on 22nd June on e-learning is particularly interesting. In it, author Richard Mcmanus contasts  traditional e-learning with that of E-learning 2.0, which  takes a ’small pieces, loosely joined’ approach that combines the use of discrete but complementary tools and web services – such as blogs, wikis, and other social software – to support the creation of ad-hoc learning communities. The post goes on to give specific examples of how this might work, but to me three  key questions are

 (a) Is e-learning 2.0 a “good thing”?  (On what evidence?)

 (b) how we convince colleagues that  e-learning-2.0 is worth developing?

 (c) how can we evaluate its effectiveness as a means of enhancing learning and teaching?