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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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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.

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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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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Developing a new products can be difficult especially if you are trying to gear it towards a specific market, which most companies are. There is one area that some people overlook, and this is the growing world of social media. We would do well not to overlook it as most of our customers use it on a daily basis.

Online presence

As customers become better versed in Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Google+ and the rest, they will expect companies to be doing the same. In 10 to 15 years’ time, most customers will be within the ‘Facebook generation’, and have grown up with social media as a prominent part of their lives. These sites are where they will share experiences, socialise with friends and most importantly they will talk about products and services, and recommending them too. If businesses want to get ahead of the game, then infiltrating that world and building an online presence is essential. Keeping in touch with customers in a more personal way, providing them with useful updates and facts to keep them interested is invaluable. Adaptability is key to keeping a business successful in this day and age.

Know your market

Social media is really useful not only for keeping in touch with customers, but for conducting product research and development. If businesses keep track of conversations and comments on social media sites, then they can gain an impression of the way that their customers think and plan accordingly. The Social Media Examiner expands upon this idea with some great tips for ways to use social media can help make a business seem more accessible to customers and if they feel able to communicate with it on a more personal level, then they are more likely to remain loyal.

Getting your recruiting right

If a company is looking for new additions to their team, chances are they will want to find people who are in touch with the modern age of technology and the web, who can move with the times and bring something fresh to the company. Where do you find these people? Well, chances are they are all using social media sites already. If you are looking for a certain type of person, one who is proficient in internet use and social media language, then look for them in this way as well. If the company uses their Twitter page of LinkedIn to advertise a vacancy, then the only people who will apply will be those who know how to use these sites already. This raises the chances of finding the right person for the job.

At the end of the day, everyone should be aware of the rising interest and use of social media. Recent research has suggested that a surprising number of CEOs do not use social networking sites and as this article on CNET shows, “the most admired CEOs had a greater online presence…than those who were less admired.” Social media is not going anywhere and those who keep up with it will be able to keep up with the marketplace.

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve posted, and this is primarily due to a lot of very big projects we’re working on here at MoreDigital, much to the benefit of our clients. We tend not to do something by halves, and are extremely, extremely fast when it comes to getting a client what they need, while maintaining high standards in terms of quality and research. If it means pizza delivery to the office front door and a constant hammering of keyboards and yelling into phones coming from my team’s desk, that’s not because we’re tweeting away instead of blogging, just holding down the fort.

While I’ve been away from the MoreDigital CMS, there’s been a lot of stuff floating around the web, none of it particularly important in the wake of what’s going on in Japan. The competition to win Jason a honeymoon didn’t go brilliantly, and the winners I’m sure are celebrating the viral prowess of their own media, but I’ve learnt a lot about what it takes to win big on the web, since then, and from what I’ve heard, he’s hard at work crafting the perfect wedding regardless; a graceful and admirable reaction.

There are a lot of different Twitter and Facebook accounts floating around the office, all of them used by either us, personally, or to just chat to people as a company, and it’s been interesting to watch people’s reactions to our various endeavours (such as the Jason-Stephanie campaign). In the next week there’ll be posts going up regularly again, and I’ll be back to covering a range of topics that centre around social media and technology that can help small businesses become big (or successful) businesses.

That’s the key, really – a great social media presence may help you to double your yearly revenue, but ultimately that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to upgrade, or get a dedicated tweeter. There are countless companies who’ve employed perhaps a couple more people since hitting the big time, but that’s it. If you can still do everything you want to do with the same amount of people, why splurge out on in-house consultants or social media experts?

For every in-house pro, there are a hundred agencies that can do exactly the same thing, minus the cost of a yearly salary, and if you’re working on a project with a window less than twelve months, don’t bother – save yourself the cash, even if it ends up going towards a team-building paintball session, though hopefully your employees don’t find the idea of shooting you more appealing than, say, going for drinks, but you never know.

It’s also spring, as evidenced by the weather getting ever-the-more wonderful as time slowly progresses, and of course the inset of looking forward to the various big media releases and second-quarter gadgets making an appearance, so there’s lots to talk about whether you’re into music, films, games, phones, computers and other bits and bobs. So there’s a lot to look forward to, and I’ll be behind the keyboard for most of it. Welcome back, readers.

Recently, I came into possession of the monolithic handset that is the HTC Desire HD. It’s big, but extremely powerful, fast, and the screen size means that typing in landscape is a breeze.

But has it made me better at my job, or at communicating in general?

Well, that’s a question I’ll answer in several parts. The first is the fact that I’m writing this post on my phone, underground, on a train. I do this often now, as I find it relaxing to hash out blog posts when commuting.

I can also schedule emails to be sent, catch up on tweets, play games, read books and edit word documents. Bar the internet connection, it’s a laptop. Even better, it’s allowing me to do my job better by cutting down the time I lose when commuting to and from the office.

Some would argue that it’s also a distraction, but I’d tell those people to learn some self-control. I come to work, I plug it in, and I use my computer, picking up where I left off. For small businesses, where offices may not be in desirable or close locations, this is perfect.

I’ve also found that I’m generally more efficient in my day-to-day-life. I text faster. I shop faster. I read my Google Analytics data easier. If you feel like you’re just not in the right place for a long laptop session after work, just work on the phone. I’ve done that a lot this past fortnight, and I feel like I’m enjoying the web a bit more.

I suppose the most exciting part is the Android Market, the crazy, open-source beast that it is. If I can’t do something or don’t want to take the long route, I find an app for it. For those taking yonks to type a report and bit.ly and tweet it, switch machines and app that task!

I’m a convert, and all the rumours about battery life are not a problem if you know how to do a proper first charge and regular drain. So stop moaning, ditch the retro gear and get all 2011.

Well, it’s been a big rush, but after a brief chat today, me and Jason have accepted that convincing the many, many people who viewed the video of his proposal to fiancée Stephanie to actually vote for the happy couple to enjoy a free, luxury honeymoon was just too difficult. The three of us made an effort to make this work, but unfortunately there are some people out there who have colossal resources when it comes to click-happy online friends who don’t mind a five-minutes-or-less registration process when voting for someone they care about.

I commented earlier today that it says a lot about people when there’s 4,104 views on the counter, and only 570 votes. Sure, there were quite a lot of people who would’ve viewed it to double check (I probably account for almost a hundred visits to that page, not so sure about views though) but that’s not the point. It’s, if anything, a commentary on how unwilling some people are to spend a few minutes registering or logging in via Facebook to help a friend towards their dream honeymoon.

Am I disappointed that our little Twitter and Facebook campaign failed? Yeah, of course I am, and I feel bad knowing Jason and Stephanie are going to have to work out what they’ll do instead. But it’s taught me that there’s a lot more to social media campaigns than I previously believed. You can’t just say “jump” and expect trampolines. You need to own a few, first. Internet users are like children – if you want something from them, you have to give them an incentive and a means to claim their reward all within a minute or less, or they lose interest.

I don’t know if I’ll ever do a Twitter campaign of this kind again, but I will say that it was definitely nice to use a few tools to help someone and make them happy. I think you can offer a lot to someone in today’s economy – vouchers for HMV could be domain-name registrations, if you’re geeky enough. But a nice wedding present would’ve been the honeymoon. For anyone who’s been following the progress on this blog, don’t lose heart, because it is possible for these things to work. You’ve just got to really take it on as a full-time job, and that’s something neither myself nor the happy couple were able to do.

Until the next time, and once again – congratulations to a happy couple who may not have won, but are still happily planning a wedding and the rest of their lives together, because the latter is really the thing that matters.