Stephen Powell, thoughts mostly about learning

Taken from the Smithsonian Institute HistoryWired Project
“Nose Cone, Pigeon-Guided Missile
1944
From Pavlov’s dogs to Skinner’s pigeons
This experimental device was developed during World War II by behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner, who experimented with harnessing pigeons’ pecking movements to steer missiles. Skinner divided this nose cone into three compartments, and proposed strapping a pigeon in each one. [...]

Pursuing my thoughts around Google personalised home pages pages I was reminded about some software that Alex (I think) introduced me to a couple of years ago. It was called the Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus and a Alex was musing on how it might prove to be a useful approach to navigating online [...]

I have just set myself up a Google Personalised Home Page. I was interested in this because the idea seemed to have lots of potential as a tool for lifelong/professional learning if they get it right. At the moment the features are limited in that I can only select from 11 pre-determined RSS [...]

I came across this whilst ‘blog browsing’ and it seems to me to be a radical approach fro the BBC to address copyright issues for all the right reasons. Put simply, the BBC makes available to Brits its archive of things that it has commissioned (copyrights cleared) to re-mix and reuse, and generally [...]

A follow up workshop proved to be very illuminating as we began to delve into some of the nitty gritty of the enterprise solution. I have no experience on running such projects so my observations are from the end users perspective and no doubt miss some of the complexity. However, there were two [...]

ICT enterprise solutions is a term that encompasses large and complex networks that span multiple sites and may include both intranets and outward facing internet services. Clearly this is a complicated and challenging problem from a technical point of view, but even more difficult are the complex issues surrounding the people who actually have [...]

I was thinking the other day about how I could best explain what the difference is between digital learning object and an asset. First, as many people already do, I would drop the prefix digital as it distracts from the important principals that are involved.
When I used to work as a geography teacher in [...]