foolfillment: the blog

So, I was in uni today, talking with my supervisor about my project (it’s going okay, thanks) and we got talking with the course leader, who shares the same office, about the future of subjects in CDT. More and more schools are going down the route of teaching only Craft and Design, and Graphic Communication. The point that came up was that these subjects are the ones that are (apologies if this hurts any of you) easy to teach and easy to learn. This is because essentially these courses only offer up skills, there is not really any academic aspect to them, they require pupils to learn how do perform some tasks but do not require much understanding or learning to occur.

This post is a bit of a ramble and there are no fully thought out ideas here, so feel free to chip in with your ideas of CDT, or to tell me that you disagree. It’s likely I will edit this if I get more of an idea of what I think should happen.
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Ewan writes today about access restrictions to certain websites in schools, about how the filtering systems is different in each school. He makes the point that there should be some sort of guidance to enable progress:

So what are the main issues halting progress?

1. Fear of…
* Inappropriate material
Yet, teachers will use Google Images (unmoderated by a community) instead of (the blocked) Flickr.

Source: Ewan McIntosh, Dear Head of Education: Please don’t check my briefcase when I come to school

I came across this on my last placement. I was helping out a class in my last week that needed emergency cover. They were given a task of looking for examples of projects that they could make when they come to do their Craft Project in fourth year - looking for things like small tables, jewellery boxes, mirror stands, that sort of thing. I was told to use google images.

I didn’t have time to query if flickr was accessible, I would have first had to explain to the PT what flickr was, then explain to the pupils how to use it (it could have been the perfect lesson to introduce ideas about copyrighted material and how to find usable materials but that wasn’t what I had to get them to do).

Anyway, I got them sitting down infront of a pc and searching for images. A couple of them wanted to make snooker cue cases, ‘fine’ I said later to have a minor uprising when they discover one of the top results is of an injured 11 year old boy. I’ll not explain the injury, rather leave you to see it if you want. Google Search.