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Thursday evening saw your correspondent in Birmingham, staying overnight so as to be present on time at a morning meeting. I stayed in a pleasant hotel, but its situation – at the intersection of two dual carriageways on the ring round – left something to be desired. I decided that I (or rather, the institution…

I took my car for an MOT this morning. The woman who runs the garage is very efficient, but she has a really irritating vocal tic. Her answer to virtually any inquiry is “not a problem.” It’s a variant of the increasingly common “no problem” spoken, for example, when you are given change in the…

Stephen’s Web ~ by Stephen Downes ~ Welcome Here’s someone with lots to offer those of us exploring online and distance education. A fascinating site, and I’ve only just scratched the surface.

The Observer | Review | Observer review: Urban Grimshaw and the Shed Crew by Bernard Hare According to this book, there is an underclass of feral children in Britain. I trained as a teacher in Leeds nearly thirty years ago, and in the tough secondary modern where I did my teaching practice, I could have…

Normblog on the Name gameThe very great and good Norman Geras – an honorary Mancunian – has the excellent Roosevelt Brighton as his West Indian cricketer name, and the very exotic Lambretta Metformin as his Star wars name. Actually, I’m a bit in the dark on Star Wars as I am one of the three…

There’s an entertaining thread on the Mark Radcliffe show at the moment. He’s playing that game that we’ve all done where you create a name from certain elements, and the name is then your porn star name or somesuch. My porn star name (my first pet plus the street name of my first address) is…

EducationGuardian.co.uk | Research | How The Waste Land was done You’d have thought it would be difficult to say anything new about The Waste Land but Prof Rainey appears to have done the impossible. In doing so, he has managed to confirm what I suspect many people have felt – that the poem is not…

CultureSpace: I Blog, Therefore I AmThis is interesting – suggesting how identities in cyberspace are being shaped by the blogging phenomenon. I read today that there are about 4 million active blogs and millions more that have been started but then fallen into disuse, rather like the diaries we all used to start on January…

Easily Distracted � Sample syllabi Just came across this – it looks like it could be a great course. I’d sign up…

Memex 1.1 The great John Naughton shares my frustration with corporate slogans. As he points out, consultants are paid huge wodges of money for this dross – you wonder why the companies concerned never seem to follow up by asking their clients if the slogans made an impression.