Archive | April, 2009

Rose Primary Curriculum report

30 Apr

The Independent Review of the Primary Curriculum headed up by Sir Jim Rose has produced a final report.

It recommends that the new primary curriculum should be reorganised into six areas of learning:

  • understanding English, communication and languages;
  • mathematical understanding;
  • understanding the arts;
  • historical, geographical and social understanding;
  • understanding physical development, health and wellbeing;
  • scientific and technological understanding

While early reports suggested that pupils would be taught about using Twitter and Wikipedia – the reality is that ICT will be embedded within the curriculum, with an emphasis on ICT use in all subjects, as well as teaching pupils about e-safety.

The overall emphasis is on slimming down the prescriptive nature of the current curriculum, with more cross-curricular studies aimed at making the most of  good quality subject teaching – as stated by Sir Jim Rose on the Today Programme this morning.

A public consultation on the recommended programmes of study and guidance will be led by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA).

Find out more about the review from the accompanying press release on the DCSF website, the Executive summary and recommendations of the report itself and explore examples of cross-curricular teaching at Teachers TV.

Intute: Social Sciences features more Internet resources on Primary Education.

Twittering the Budget

22 Apr

How will you be keeping track of the Budget?

It’s pretty unlikely that you would have been following it on Twitter this time last year – but that’s one of the ways that you can follow the Chancellor’s statement later today – via the HMTreasury Twitter channel.

treasurytwitterApparently they will be providing links to background material, supporting documents and other items while Alastair Darling is speaking – sounds like a great use of the real-time commentary benefits of Twitter.

… or you can track the reaction from the rest of the Twitter-verse by following the Budget via the Twitter search engine – although early indications are that it will be a hot topic and you may have difficulty separating the wheat from the chaff – in the time it’s taken to write this blog post – there have been over 450 new Tweets about the Budget!

For the political angle the 10 Downing Street Twitter channel is pointing users to a “live debate on the Budget” at their website – which is making use of Cover It Live – a nice way of producing live reports of an event that does not lead to a huge number blog posts.

Although there may not be as many Government Social Media experts contributing as there could be – unless they are very good at multi-tasking! Alas the Budget is clashing with the OpenGov event which Andy Powell is covering over at the eFoundations LiveWire blog.

For those who are more reflective then the Budget 2009 microsite and the more formal HM Treasury Budget page will have all the supporting documentation, data and figures, where you can make-up your own mind on what the Budget means to you.

Heather Dawson, our Politics and Government editor has already produced a nice round-up of links to some Budget information and coverage over at the LSE Library website and we will be rounding up some of the post-Budget reaction once the media have produced their soundbytes and there’s been some real analysis of the figures.

Intute: Social Sciences features more Internet resources on Macroeconomic Policy, Public Administration of the Economy and Economics plus you can follow Intute: Economics on Twitter for all our blog posts and new Internet resources.

Royal Economic Society conference 2009

21 Apr

Royal Economic Society logoThe Royal Economic Society conference 2009 is the leading gathering of academic economists in the UK and it is under way at the University of Surrey.

This year the conference features keynote speeches from:

The Press Centre features a range of research papers that will be presented at the Conference, including:

Widening Participation in Higher Education

Poor attainment in secondary school is the biggest barrier to going to university among socio-economically disadvantaged students – not barriers at the point of entry to higher education such as borrowing constraints.

Key UK export industries suffer most from the recession

Can credit crunch-hit economies rely on overseas trade to pull themselves out of the current downturn? The answer depends on the kind of things they export, and for countries like the UK, the picture looks troubled.

We are living beyond our means

The UK has failed to save adequately in the past 20 years and our current patterns of consumption will only be sustainable if drastic changes are made. There are two alternatives: either people finance their old age by relying on support from their children or they settle for spending less in old age than current patterns suggest.

Further items will appear on the website addressing some of the conference themes with research on education, happiness, families, housing and work.

Intute: Social Sciences features more from previous RES conferences including podcast interviews with economics researchers.

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Budget week with Intute: Social Sciences

20 Apr

It’s a big week for economic news, with the UK Budget looking to set the agenda.

Normally the Sunday papers would have been full of selective leaks from the upcoming Budget statement – but given that they were still full from the fallout of the email smeargate scandal, Alastair Darling had to make do with a brief appearance on YouTube and the launch of the Budget 2009 microsite.

The Ernst and Young ITEM Club latest forecast sees signs of a stabilising financial situation and confidence returning, but warns of a tricky 12-18 months ahead. Particular attention is paid to this report as it uses the HM Treasury model of the UK economy or you may wish to compare it with the latest HM Treasury summary of independent forecasts about the UK economy.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies in their briefing note Budget 2009: Tightening the squeeze says that the Chancellor will need to make key decisions on whether to go for any additional short term stimulus spending and how to recoup the extra spending in the medium to longer term. Look for post-Budget analysis from the IFS Budgets and Pre-Budget Reports section.

There will be more on the Budget from our Politics / Government and Economics editors throughout the week – or follow the BBC News Budget site, with commentary from their Economics Editor Stephanie Flanders – who forsees a messy week ahead – or if that is all too much for you, the Axe the Beer Tax campaign site may be more to your liking!

Intute: Social Sciences features more Internet resources on Macroeconomic Policy, Public Administration of the Economy and Economics.

Will Easter Eggs make your kids smarter?

9 Apr

With the Easter break fast approaching will scoffing all those chocolate eggs help your children gain brain power?

Or should you be feeding them something much more healthy instead?

See what the latest Economics research has to say …

Feeding very young children a high-energy, high-protein supplement leads to increased educational attainment in adulthood, especially for women, according to a study published in the current issue of the Economic Journal.

Girls who received the supplement, known as atole (the Guatemalan name for porridge), in the first three years of life completed one additional year of schooling than those who received an alternative low-energy supplement. Both men and women who received atole as children achieved higher scores on reading comprehension tests and on non-verbal cognitive tests.

By following the same individuals from childhood to adulthood, this study provides some of the strongest evidence to date of the effects of early childhood nutrition on educational attainment in adulthood.

The research was conducted in Guatemala by the Institute for Nutrition in Central America and Panama, Emory University, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), the University of Pennsylvania and Middlebury College.

The Economic Journal is published by the Royal Economic Society and each issue features a freely available article and press release style summaries of other pieces of economics research.

Intute: Social Sciences features more Internet resources on the topics of the Economics of Education, the Economics of Food and chocolate – Happy Easter!

Image credit: YIP Day 72 – Creme Eggs from Auntie P on Flickr

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Why create metadata

9 Apr

Which is a better summary of the content?

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

Genesis 1:1 first 50 words

The Bible is the central religious text of Judaism and Christianity. The exact composition of the Bible is dependent on the religious traditions of specific denominations. Modern Judaism generally recognizes a single set of canonical books known as the Tanakh, or Hebrew or Jewish Bible. It comprises three parts: the

Wikipedia entry for The Bible first 50 words

The Bible is the central religious text of Judaism and Christianity. The Jewish Bible comprises: the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings. The Christian Bible consists of the Hebrew scriptures or Old Testament, and later writings known as the New Testament which includes the life and teachings of Jesus Christ.

Summarised from the Wikipedia text

Social Media for the Social Sciences

2 Apr

A little later today, I will be speaking at the ALISS Web 2.0 in practice workshop at the University of Bristol.

I’ll be looking at how Social Media sites such as blogs, Delicious, SlideShare, podcasts, YouTube and Twitter are being being used by Social Scientists, information professionals and Intute.

The slides are available via SlideShare, should be embedded below and form part of a blog supporting the event – while the links mentioned in the talk are available via Delicious.

Social Media for the Social Sciences

View more presentations from cfbloke.

Some questions worth considering:

Blogs – are blogs set to replace the academic conference in terms of providing access to an “invisible college” of smart people to bounce ideas off of? Can you learn as much from blog comments  – say the commenters at Crooked Timber – as you can from blogs posts?

Try this selection of Our Favourite Social Science Blogs from last year.

Delicious – do you send and receive links via email? Could you benefit from establishing a network on Delicious and taking advantage of what everyone else is finding online?

Try the Economics Network or ESCalate pages on Delicious to see how HEA Subject Centres are using it.

SlideShare – how useful are slides in isolation? Are audio tracks or SlideCasts more useful? And do you trust SlideShare after their April Fool’s prank? After all – other services are available.

SlideShare has more presentations from and about Intute.

Podcasts – is audio a viable medium for transferring knowledge or have people moved on to video? Are “heroes of dissemination” those who can talk about their work in arenas such as VOX Talks and elsewhere?

Explore our archive of podcasts and audio related articles from this blog.

YouTube – online videos from educational sources are all the rage with the appearance of YouTube EDU and Academic Earth – but is an hour long lecture the best way of teaching people or using the video format?

Try our selection of educational YouTube content for the Social Sciences.

Twitter – all the world is a-quiver with Twitter at the moment – but what educational potential does it have and is it being used by students or others beyond the IT crowd?

Try our write-up of our experiences using Twitter or sample Intute: Economics on Twitter.

… all of this and possibly more in just 60 minutes – hopefully!

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