Tag Archives: digital making
Educating Silicon Valley
Ben Williamson Image credit: Steve Jurvetson A reality TV show in the UK has documented what school life is like in different geographical parts of the country. Starting in 2011 with Educating Essex, the format has since included Educating Yorkshire, … Continue reading
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Tagged analytics, data, digital making, silicon valley, venture capital
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Free schools and computing skills
Ben Williamson On 5 February Nicky Morgan, Secretary of State for Education, announced plans to open two new free schools that will focus specifically on computer programming skills. The schools are being founded by Ian Livingstone, the videogames entrepreneur who … Continue reading
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Tagged code, digital making, education policy, government, learning to code
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Educating smart cities
Ben Williamson Computer code and digital data have become powerful influences in the social organization and governance of education. At the same time, cities are being reconceived as composed of code, driven by data, and made ‘smart’, ‘programmable’ or even … Continue reading
The laboratory life of innovation labs
Ben Williamson New ‘labs’ for public, social, government and policy innovation have proliferated widely in recent years. Many of them seek to apply new technological solutions to identified problems. To date, though, little research has traced the ‘laboratory life’ inside … Continue reading
Cultures of coding – BBC Micro Bits and Young Digital Makers
Ben Williamson The notion that young people should learn to code has exploded from a minority concern into a mainstream agenda in just the last five years. In March 2015, the BBC announced that it is planning to give away … Continue reading
Programmable schools? Governing education through code in the smart city
Ben Williamson I recently presented some work in progress on the idea of ‘programmable schools’ on invitation from the Programmable City research team at the National University of Ireland Maynooth. The presentation sought to investigate how education has been positioned … Continue reading
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Tagged big data, code, digital making, learning analytics, learning to code, smart city
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A hidden computing curriculum? How ‘learning to code’ campaigns and edtech industry helped shape school policy
By Ben Williamson In the last few years, the idea of ‘learning to code’ and ‘digital making’ has grown from a minority focus among computing educators, grassroots computing organizations, and computer scientists into a major global educational concern. In England, … Continue reading
code acts in education 