More Digital blog

First AQA (Assessment and Qualifications Alliance) change the GCSE assessments for many subjects, then they plan to drastically alter ICT lessons. Now the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted)  are looking to change the language they use in school inspections. The idea is to toughen up on the standard of education across the UK, and push the lower performing schools into bettering themselves.

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CES can be very interesting, or very uninteresting, depending on what sort of tech you’re into. Personally, I’m fascinated by most stuff, so it doesn’t take much to keep me glued to the screen during CES. Here’s my five highlights from this year’s show in Vegas (isn’t it oddly suitable how new tech is showcased in a city known for gambling?):

The Sony Concept Tablet – Oh my god, this was a nice bit of kit. Separate keyboard (not a fan of keys I can’t actually push down into the chassis, but hey), nice looking chassis, and a series of coloured styluses. The highlight, without having seen it in motion, was definitely in the design. Sony make fantastic-looking technology without copying Apple (a first, lately), and although it’s likely to be expensive (it’s Sony), and this will likely pull in more than a few punters come release.

3D printers – One of them could even manufacture most of the parts required to replicate itself. What is this?! It’s certainly a nifty idea – 3D printing, in the home. My guess is that 3D Systems’ Cube will probably take home the gold once they’ve all launched, even at a whopping $1,299 for the printer itself. Still, if you want to make plastic objects, you could do worse!

Chromebooks – Yep, still going – they’re pretty divisive, though. A complaint I heard is that it’s as heavy and large as a laptop, but only runs the bare minimum of apps and other tools, compared to a laptop with an OS such as OSX or Windows (yes, or Linux, calm down). It does look sweet, though, and as a Chrome fanatic, I can totally see it working – especially with major game releases popping up more and more often for the Chrome platform.

Smart watches – It’s a tiny Android tablet, with a strap to anchor it to your wrist like a watch. Good lord, do I want one of these? Yes. The idea of having Spotify, Twitter and SMS as my three apps would mean… well. I can do this on my phone already (an HTC Desire HD), but god damn, do I want to use a watch face instead? Of course! Bring on the future! Flying cars for everyone!

Super smartphone battery life – I like my phone – it’s big, it’s powerful, and it does what I need it to do. So, the downside to that is battery life. Mine’s not too shabby, but iPhone owners must be sick to the back teeth of watching the little green bar vanish all too quickly. iPhone tribute act (zing!) Samsung have stepped in and offered all-day battery life. If they can make good on this promise, they’ve got a winner. It might even push Apple to finally get its good battery tech (currently sitting in the Macbook and iPad region of its product catalogue) into the iPhone. Then I can switch! Maybe.

Those are my favourites. So it leads me to ask – what are yours?

The world of technology is moving at a fast pace at the moment, with continuing developments and innovative thinking. It looks as though this is set to continue, but what will the future look like unless we keep up? According to Education Secretary Michael Gove, it all depends on Information and Communication Technology classes in schools being updated. This is exactly what he thinks needs to happen. The country’s ICT curriculum needs a major shake-up, Gove announced recently in a speech at the BETT information technology show in London.

Let’s have a look at the reasons why we need to keep up with the changing technological environment:

• For a start, education needs to keep up with the students themselves. One of the main reasons why children get bored in class is that they find that the subject matter too easy. If they already know what they are supposed to be “learning”, then they won’t pay much attention. And many teachers are finding that this is the case now, as many students have already learned a lot about computing and technology by using their own computers and mobile phones.
• BBC News has reported that, while preparing for his GCSEs, a 16-year-old London schoolboy has created an app that simplifies internet searches. He spoke out about how inspired he was by web design lessons and how he believes that if such lessons were introduced across the country, many more school children would be inspired in the same way as he was.
• Companies are complaining that there is a shortage of graduates that actually understand computer science. According to The Guardian, many current computer science courses are just not good enough, and this is causing many companies to have to train new recruits extensively, before their computer knowledge is up to scratch.

What specifically should students be learning in their ICT lessons?

• A group of scientists including Nobel prize winner Paul Nurse have voiced their opinion that the current content of ICT education in the UK is not satisfactory. They say that lessons make people feel comfortable with technology around them, however it is also important for some to develop a deeper understanding or computer science.
• Primary school students should learn how to code, and those aged 14 years and over should be offered a recognised computer science qualification. The subject needs to go into more detail so that today’s students can become tomorrow’s technology experts who actually know how to create instead of simply learning the ropes.
• At the moment, teachers are concerned because the ICT curriculum is centred around office-based applications. Students are learning how to use Word, Excel and Powerpoint, which do not prepare them for the wide variety of jobs that will be available when they graduate. We need to ensure that the world will have a new generation of computer creators and developers, and this will not be possible if young people of today are not comprehensively educated in this.
• There are only 150 schools in England that offer computer studies at GCSE at the moment. Here, they learn about Microsoft’s Visual Basic and JavaScript so that they can gain the skills to go on and develop websites, games and online tools. The opinion among many is that more children should learn about computers in this amount of detail, so that they can begin to create things such as apps from a young age, and then grow into the next generation of computer software developers.

How will ICT lessons be updated in schools?

• First of all, the knowledge of the teachers must be improved. In his speech, Gove points out that teachers must feel confident enough in their subject in order to pass on their knowledge to students. So the government must invest in individual teachers by giving them the best possible training in the use of education technology, both in ITT and CPD. Their pupils can only benefit once they have the skills to deal with and adapt to new technology.
• The new way of approaching ICT education in schools will be to give teachers much more freedom. Schools will be able to follow open-source online resources that have had contributions from experts, universities and businesses and new Computer Science GCSEs will be developed.

These new plans promise a long-awaited shake-up in the ICT system. If the improvements go to plan, hopefully it will encourage authorities to think about the whole education system in general. Perhaps all subjects should be updated in a similar way, after all, in his speech Gove says that while there have been countless new inventions and developments in the world since Alan Turing’s time, the same cannot be said for education. Teachers still stand up in front of a class, talking and testing, in the same way as they did in Victorian times, and even as they did when Plato established his “akademia”.  Maybe wide-spread change is in the offing.

Now, I understand that asking why more people talk about the Oscars than CES sounds like a pointless question, as most people’s answer would be “because it’s The Oscars, Christos.” But if you take a few minutes to read through the following post, you may realise that the aforementioned response is at best misinformed and at worst completely ignorant.

The Iron Lady came out last week, a biopic of Margaret Thatcher, the first and, so far, only female Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Played by Meryl Streep, it will no doubt go on to clean up at various film award events across the globe, because it’s a film that offers the precise amount of grandeur and historical scale to tip the favour of the critics in its own direction.

On the other hand, CES is in full swing this week, and features a range of new electronic products, some of which millions of us will be using by the summer. Some of the announcements made at this event will change the way you ring your partner, watch television, or play videogames. But people don’t often discuss this event at all in most circles.

This strikes me as odd. People will comment on the various political events of the day, despite rarely (if ever) watching the Prime Minister’s Questions, because they effect us as individuals, through rising taxes, budget cuts, or new laws.

Yet the technology that powers our day – indeed, the technology allowing me to write this post, and you to read it – doesn’t seem to be celebrated and followed with interest by the vast majority of people who use it. We have, at times, been blessed with some tech-celebrities, in the form of Bill Gates, the late Steve Jobs, or Mark Zuckerberg, and they do draw the collective consciousness of the media-hungry human race towards the technology field for brief moments. It’s telling when even your strange uncle can tell you of his high scores in Angry Birds.

Yes, people are discovering games like Angry Birds, as well as Android apps and iProducts, at an alarming rate. Technology has swiftly and in a way never before seen, I think, turned into a fashionable concern. CES should be a catwalk, down which the latest hardware struts, hoping to wow the assembled masses with increased memory and more apps than the competition.

In an ideal world, we’d gather around the TV and catch the Microsoft keynote, in much the same way we’re content to do with other events more centred around showbiz. I hold out a small hope that we can engage with technology in the same way many of us engage with the topics of commuting, politics, religion similarly stimulating jump-off points for conversation. We’ll just have to make sure that the Android and iOS users aren’t sitting next to each other.

As we reported earlier the PR Company Bell Pottinger have got in trouble with Wikipedia – and earned lots of negative PR – after they supposedly went about improving their clients’ public profiles on the website using methods that the site’s co-founder Jimmy Wales has deemed unethical and unacceptable.

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The ethics of PR companies have been called into question after the co-founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, criticised the PR giant, Bell Pottinger for having “ethical blindness” when editing pages on the open source encyclopaedia he founded. In this two-part article we will discuss the scandal that has rocked the internet in part one, while we analyse the grounds of the argument in part two.

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Ben Rudolph is what tech companies like to call an “evangelist”. Personally, I think a more realistic term is “paid fanboy”, but there you go. He works for Microsoft, specifically focusing on the Windows Phone 7 brand. But why’s he appearing in the news this week?

Well, it’s because he’s giving Windows 7 handsets to those who tweet their Android issues at him, and use the hashtag #droidrage. Yes, that’s correct. Tell him why your Android phone sucks, and he’ll send you a Windows 7 phone. Doesn’t sound like a bad deal. Unless you’re Google.

This is essentially the equivalent of being at school and offering anyone who calls Jimmy “fat legs” a chocolate bar. Few people are actually doing it because Jimmy has fat legs; they’re doing it for the free chocolate. But regardless of what their motivation is, Jimmy gets a load of bad press.

#droidrage could potentially become a trending topic in the United States today, and that’s going to cause Google a fair few PR problems. But what’s the right response? Offering Android handsets to those who tweet using the hashtag #wp7hasnoapps? Or being a little more mature and weathering the storm of bad-press anecdotes, some of them potentially fabricated?

It might be a new approach Microsoft are testing to see whether they can shake things up a little bit. Given that as I write this, news is going out that the head of Windows Phone 7 has been replaced, a new direction might actually be on the cards.

The legality of the issue is a little hazy, because neither the fans or Rudolph are saying anything libellous. But I think anyone who’s not waiting for Google’s reaction with bated breath clearly doesn’t have much interest in the future of the smartphone market. Android has a whopping market share (51%) simply because it’s not tied to one brand, as iOS is, and that’s its primary advantage. But if it starts to appear flawed in any way, all it will take is the average user becoming aware of the flaws, and Android’s grip on the market may begin to slip.

It’s a dangerous approach to marketing Windows 7 phones, but who knows? It just might work, provided Microsoft can get away with it. Thoughts?

Are you bored of carrying around credit cards and money? Well it looks like you are in luck as Near Field Communication, or NFC, could be set to revolutionise the world of retail. NFC works by allowing two devices to communicate with each other via wireless connections, at short distances of only a few centimetres. This principle is already a big part of the lives of all Londoners who use contactless technology found in the Oyster card, electronic ticketing system used in the metro (or Tube). Commuters just touch-and-go, making travelling a seamless process, at least where ticketing is concerned. This is even more advanced in Japan, where mobile phones are used in the place of Oyster cards and tickets.

There are advantages and disadvantages to this technology. It makes things run a lot smoother, and is threatening to make paper tickets obsolete. This is not the only thing that the technology will threaten, as credit cards and even physical money are likely to come under threat. The main area for development of NFC is in retail. This technology is being increasingly developed for use by shops, allowing their customers to use their smartphones in a similar way that Londoners use Oyster cards.

Customers will their credit card information stored on their smartphone with an embedded NFC chip, then they simply tap on the NFC Reader at the cash register to pay wirelessly and quickly. The advantage of this is clear, it eliminates the need to carry around credit cards and even money, and makes the payment process really simple and fast.

However, storing all of your information in one place can have its drawbacks. NFC technology gives us a gigantic reason not to lose our smartphones, and another reason to panic if you do. If this does happen however, the NFC-enabled phone can be cancelled and if found, the services can be re-enabled. So it looks like it will come down to whether the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.

One of the big pluses for retailers, including small businesses as well as large, is that they will be able to tie into existing loyalty programs for NFC smartphones and gather useful customer data. This will enable businesses to study store trends and product preferences, as well as performing demographic analysis and other analytical tasks. But what about the application that allows shoppers to scan barcodes and automatically search for better deals elsewhere? Surely this will not be advantageous for businesses, especially if they are small and cannot afford to slash their prices.

However we feel about Near Field Communication, it is on the rise. While at the moment  only about ten percent of shoppers use NFC in the United Kingdom, this figure is higher in other countries, especially Turkey and the United States and it is surely only a matter of time before everyone follows suit. Will this mean the sad end to the Royal Mint in the United Kingdom that has been making money since the 9th Century? Or will it mark the beginning of a technological revolution that makes our lives much more simple and fast-paced? We will have to wait a few years to find out.

We all wish that our businesses was talked about as much as the headline news or the next big election. The key to getting noticed, of course, is to increase publicity – to somehow wangle our brand into the eye of the public. One good way to achieve this is  by becoming a popular and trending topic on Twitter. But how can we reach these heady heights?

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So, if you toddle off down Soho’s fashionable Dean Street in central London in the next several days, you’ll pass a shop that you probably never thought you’d see in real life. An eBay shop. No, really. It has second-hand stuff in it, and you pay using your smartphone. There are weird ideas, and then there’s this. And I think it’s pretty original.

“But I don’t have a smartphone!” you cry. No problem – HTC have provided the shop with tablet computers for you to use.

“But I don’t have an eBay/Paypal account!” Why? What century are you living in? I’ll admit there’s always going to be people who feel a little unsure about Paypal, but realistically one could argue they’re a damn sight more open to helping you than your bank is.

“But I don’t want second hand stuff!” Then don’t worry. There are plenty of shops with new things in. But if you’re looking for a great deal on something you might not be able to find new, then this is a good idea.

It’s not often I go all voluntarily gung-ho on promoting an idea that’s not mine, especially a corporate one, but I really like this – I walk in, use my phone, pick up my item, and walk out. There’s no messing around, I operate my own till, and I can finally see the eBay auction in person, which, if you buy expensive stuff from the online auction house, is pretty important.

But it proves that a great business on the internet is fully capable of actually making the 2011 transition in reverse – moving from the digital to the physical space. It’ll be interesting to see how this would work on a larger scale – if professional eBay sellers would “rent space” within the shop, or whether or not they’d remain on the high-street or aim for an IKEA-sized warehouse.

But is it worth it? One of the main reasons people like eBay is because of the sheer range of rare and cut-price goods to be found there, and all without leaving your house, or worse, actually visiting a flea market. Or even a shop. The horror.

It’s an idea that’s going to have to be test-run several times – this is by no means the first eBay shop in the UK, and this one only runs till the sixth of December (future people, it’s 2011 at the time of writing, so don’t send me hate mail if it’s not there just before the Mayan-predicted apocalypse next year). But if it goes well, we may just see a whole lot more of them. I’m totally up for it – what are your thoughts?