Dropping the old ICT curriculum with it’s much maligned emphasis on M$ Office is a brave move by education minister Michael Gove. It could be argued that from purely a learning point of view this one action is more important than any of the recent decisions on increasing education cost. Sending children back to where it all began – the formulation of grammars and statements thereof into machine-readable instructions that produce new computing tasks rather than just learn old ones by rote – is in many ways fundamental to getting a British engineering discipline back on track.

But it’s easy to get carried away here. The gaming industry has long had luminaries making the case for radical change to computing education. But it isn’t as simple as replacing building a spreadsheet with building a bouncing red ball. Spreadsheets may be boring but real world spreadsheet skills are one of the most essential skills in office jobs of all hues in the world today. Replacing that with an app that does something ‘cool’ is not what ICT is about either.

Reducing things to the bare minimum, programming has two innate parts – the design process and the act of realising this design in code. To design effectively, a student must be aware of what has gone before them, whether to use as building blocks or to pick holes, improve and iterate. How many people would be familiar with Excel prior to their job if they didn’t use it at school? Similarly how do we expect programmers to create something better if they have not experienced what went before?

Purely dropping perceivably boring essentials is not the answer – it’s akin to removing addition from maths or spelling from English – but we do need a better balance between application and creation. Far from being opposite ends of the spectrum, both must go hand in hand to rebuild our design culture.

The cinema language happened by experimentation – by people not knowing what to do. But unfortunately, after 15-20 years, it became a commercial industry. People made money in the cinema, and then they began to say to the pioneers, “Don’t experiment. We want to make money. We don’t want to take chances.”
Coppola, Marrakech International Film Festival, Morocco

Although he was referring specifically to the film industry here what Coppola says holds true in the general case – during a time of disruption, as the moving pictures obviously were to therather staid arts world of the time, there will be great advances, but at a cost of predictability. There is a human need to reduce risk. Particularly once a disruption has turned from something inexplicable and chaotic, into a neatly boxed and apparently understood ‘thing’.

Take the disruption around the dawn of the welfare state. Another time of great change, moving from a previously very set class system of society to one where merit not background decided what you could accumulate in life. Pretty soon though this ceased being ‘new’, ceased being the perpetual revolution. The new set who emerged from this in good standing – the baby boomers – were now the new film industry bourgeoisie. They want guarantees, hard and fast rules that can protect what they have gained.

We don’t want to take the chances ourselves. Get someone else to stand up and be counted, someone else to take the responsibility.

When Coppola sits down to say this about film to Moroccan schoolkids it is bohemian, profound & inspiring.

Maybe we need Francis Ford Coppola to sit down and talk about society in the UK.

btw, read the rest of Coppola’s interview from the link above – impressive railing against the howls of protest over artist rights we get laboured with today. Thanks to cimota for highlighting the interview

A grand title, considering the relatively niche aspect of government communications that piqued my interest in the subject. But it’s something that should perhaps be given much greater emphasis as society increasingly interacts with the state online.

I got the link to my regional government’s draft budget on twitter via a url shortening service run by the department in question. Nothing radical about that except for the fact they chose to use ‘.me’ as the top level domain – a snappy TLD that is utilised by many url shorteners no doubt (including a friend’s) but also one that is run by a foreign government – Montenegro in this case.

I’m not about to suggest Montenegro, a superbly sunny state similar in size to NI and one which I’ve had the good fortune to visit, is about to turn rogue. But there are potential issues with using foreign TLDs, sufficiently to warrant a second opinion by government on whether they should be relying on such a service.

And this is the point about info flow for government online. Links are obviously the lifeblood of the internet and anything aiding the sharing them is to be encouraged. URL shorteners are predominantly used for temporary communication. But surely it’s important for government services that they can guarantee their links will not go stale, whether due to shortener natural ‘overwriting’ or overseas issues beyond their control?

In the real world, lost communications cost government and people money. The same is true online.

I had initially hoped to keep my Big Society posts on the positive end of the political spectrum. Unfortunately there is a wide dearth between it’s high ideals and the complete and utter self-absorption espoused by vast swathes of the media and public at large. This is a post about why this self-absorption is wrong and who is at fault.

The end of the last World War marked the dawn of a generation who had high hopes for the future, scant respect for the old guard and inside whom a kind of perpetual cultural revolution was embellished. Embellished but not realised that is – for instead of enlightenment we got the welfare state – a raging Juggernaut that has for years systemically stripped the revolutionary zeal and replaced it with a deep rooted sense that government owed society a living. The unprecedented rise in living standards since the war cemented such feelings, fostering a sense of entitlement while the healthy questioning of old methods has morphed into a disdain for any call to collective responsibility.

The result is a disconnect between the current standard of living and our true worth as individuals. The only way to pay for this disconnect is to borrow from the future.

But don’t just take my word for it:

“It appears we have left those who come after us with nothing.”

“Ultimately, the extent of these adjustments depends on how we choose–either explicitly or implicitly–to distribute the economic burdens of the aging of our population across generations.”

“The projected deterioration in public finances over the period 2010-2050 is particularly significant in advanced economies and emerging market economies in Europe – the relevant characteristics of this group of countries…are a relatively high level of existing social security coverage and a rapid worsening in demographic profile.”

As someone who hopefully has most of his life left to live, I would like to flick a massive V sign to all those idiots whinging/protesting/rioting about their dear little government subsidies and payments.

I fully support the oncoming Age of Austerity.

The Derry~Londonderry bid has won the right to host the UK’s first City of Culture in 2013. Apparently one of the organisers trumpeted on the night of the announcment that she wanted to see ‘every child with a musical instrument’ by the time they get round to hosting it.

And that’s what irks me most about this notion of ‘Culture’ being bestowed on a city for a certain period:

Culture is surely one of the most incorrectly used words in the English language today.

What is Culture? Culture is ubiquitous. There is football culture, geek culture, urban culture and a truckload of subcultures in between. Culture is a description of society not a judgement on it.

Yet we keep seeing this crap debate about whether one city is more cultured than another.

The word these lunatics are really looking for is art. Use that phrase and they can then go round in circles arguing over which is more deserving of awards and luvvie attention all they like. As it stands we get creative fascists telling us how one social tradition has more merit than others, which seems to me to be wholly inappropriate. Is Birmingham’s R’n'B subculture more deserving of awards than the parading culture in Londonderry?

It’s an absurd notion. You might as well argue over who’s better, Blacks or Whites? And then further add to the damage by boxing the winner in a twee one-off event that gives their ‘culture’ – what should be a complicated & inate social structure and value system – some kind of artificially elevated status promoting nothing more than it’s commercialisation.

I guess we’re lucky Culture gets misinterpreted as art. At least then real culture will not be put at risk of contamination and freak show celebrity while the Marie Antoinette’s of this bid can get on with their instruments for every child gimmicks as the world trudges on regardless.

Opened my thoughts on ‘big society’ with this as it’s exactly the sort of government promoted social-engineering a society at peace with it’s own responsibilities should be avoiding.