This week I’m working on book proofs. And right at the start, in “prelims”, I noticed an acknowledgement I’d made. I’d written: Charlie, our surly and eccentric elderly poodle, needed to be put outside at regular intervals; she ensured that I did not end up with completely overwhelming back and neck troubles from too much […] … learn more→
Author Archives: Kevin
Dogs and cats and rabbits and..
Debate: Secularism at school, historical dead ends
In a letter addressed to the President of the Republic on February 4, 2020, the president of the Les Républicains party, Christian Jacob, renews his request , made in November 2019, for “an act II of secularism with reference to the initiative taken by Jacques Chirac in 2003 when he installed the commission chaired by Bernard Stasi ”. […] … learn more→
Rethinking the sanction, a challenge for the school
It is never by deciphering the great and beautiful principles written in gold letters on the frontispiece of schools that we understand what educating means, at a given time, for a given society. It is rather by examining what one could call “the suburbs of educational work”, these margins which surround the transmission of knowledge, and […] … learn more→
If you’re preparing students for 21st century jobs, you’re behind the times
Every year, the Australian Taxation Office releases a report that includes the highest earning occupations in Australia. These are mostly in the medical, legal and financial sectors. This information is commonly used by school career advisers, together with other career development material, to help teenagers make career choices. But the nature of work is changing rapidly under the fourth […] … learn more→
Who oversees journal editors?
Editors and reviewers are the most important authorities in academic publishing because they read, examine and ultimately decide the fate of a submitted paper. This work is often not paid, making the commitment to it even more admirable. However, this fascinating process becomes suspicious when the editorial board of a journal refuses to publish a […] … learn more→
Confessions of a former digital champion
My university email account got hacked last week. It happened at 10:00 in the morning. I was still in bed. Thankfully, several colleagues were awake and at their computers. Ten minutes after the attack a phishing email had been reported and my account closed down. Nevertheless, emails purportedly in my name had found their way […] … learn more→
Chinese students offer the West an unrivalled learning opportunity
With the coronavirus monopolising headlines across the globe, the huge numbers of Chinese students at Western universities has once again come into public focus. In the UK, 130,000 Chinese students were admitted in 2019, up from 110,000 in 2018. Application data indicate that the figure may well rise even higher in the coming year. Accommodating […] … learn more→
Trump’s big bet on career and technical education
President Donald Trump has proposed one of the largest increases in funding for career and technical education in recent history. As a education policy researcher who studies the economic and employment impact of career and technical education in high school, I believe this proposal has a lot of potential to open up new job opportunities, especially for students who […] … learn more→
Designing artificial brains can help us learn more about real ones
Despite billions of dollars spent and decades of research, computation in the human brain remains largely a mystery. Meanwhile, we have made great strides in the development of artificial neural networks, which are designed to loosely mimic how brains compute. We have learned a lot about the nature of neural computation from these artificial brains […] … learn more→
Schools should heed calls to do lockdown drills without traumatizing kids instead of abolishing them
Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund, an advocacy group, has joined with the American Federation of Teachers and the National Educators Association, the nation’s two biggest teachers unions, to produce a report on lockdown drills in schools. The report calls for drastic changes in how these drills are conducted today. They say that drills shouldn’t be a surprise, […] … learn more→
