Facebook - puerile and pointless waste of time.

Youtube - love it. As long as it remains as unfettered and unregulated as it is now.

Lack of territorial limits on commerce - contributor to harmful, nasty globalization, destroyer of the environment, undermining sovereign power of nations and destroying national democracy? Maybe those 'with' the divide are lucky.

Music. I can no longer bring myself to pay for it. Ultimately this will change the music we hear - probably for the worse. Still doesn't stop me, mind..

This forum - wonderful.

Sharing resources? These should be personal to reflect the persona and strengths of students and teachers, so I don't use other peoples, very often. Don't like 'worksheet' culture. Think teachers should smell sweaty at the end of the day not have spent all of it on their arse at the front of the classroom.

johnbrown:

Facebook - puerile and pointless waste of time.

Millions of people would disagree with you.

johnbrown:

 

Youtube - love it. As long as it remains as unfettered and unregulated as it is now.

Agree totally

johnbrown:

 

Lack of territorial limits on commerce - contributor to harmful, nasty globalization, destroyer of the environment, undermining sovereign power of nations and destroying national democracy? Maybe those 'with' the divide are lucky.

I suspect that you would be of a different opinion if you were one of those 'with the divide'

Destroyer of the environment? I think not. Sure, it impacts on the environment, but the real destroyer is the apathy / fear by politicians to take any real action.

Lets face it, the Internet isn't going anywhere, so the way we do certain things is going to have to change. The internet essentially (not right now, but it will in time / theory) gives a level playing field. No bad thing in my book! You can't blame the medium of the Internet for the world's problems!

johnbrown:

 

Music. I can no longer bring myself to pay for it. Ultimately this will change the music we hear - probably for the worse. Still doesn't stop me, mind..

I dont think it will change music for the worse. On the contrary, I think it will get better. The charts right now are full of manufactured rubbish. Its Simon Cowell who should be worried. Music fans will always pay to watch live music - that's not going anywhere. Massive production companies that make huge profits from artist's talents should be worried. Using the internet its possible to release albums for free. You dont NEED a record label any more. I think we'll see this more and more. Radiohead released their last album for free and gave people the option of 'paying' however much they wanted. Because none of the money went to the record company, Im sure I read that they actually made just as much as they have done for their last couple of albums. 

johnbrown:

 

Sharing resources? These should be personal to reflect the persona and strengths of students and teachers, so I don't use other peoples, very often. Don't like 'worksheet' culture. Think teachers should smell sweaty at the end of the day not have spent all of it on their arse at the front of the classroom.

haha agreed - but its useful sometimes to get ideas. Especially as a student teacher.

kris90210

your overwhelmingly positive attitude to all things ICT does you credit.

I agree with JB however that not all "progress" is necessarily progress, or good. If you are to teach ICT to students I think you need to be aware that it's not all great, and get them to discuss the impact of technology openly.

As has been discussed on this forum many times before, the ICT subject largely divides itself into a) computing and programming; b) the ICT curriculum (databases, spreadsheets, impact of ICT on society etc); and c) media.

By and large most of the basic stuff in the ICT subject hasn't changed much, nor should it need too. There'll always be a need for people to use all the boring ICT applications that aren't really cool anymore as part of their jobs.

Much of what is claimed to be ICT you may find is actually "Multimedia". 

kris90210:

Web design has transformed business and culture. If web design doesn't "do anything" then god only knows what Ive spent the last 6 years doing!

It is important to differentiate between Web Design and Server side activities and/or Javascript and/or Plugin Technology (Applets, Flash).

Without Server side code, or Javascript, *all* Web Design can do is look nice and present things in an attractive fashion.This is, of course, useful, but it doesn't do anything other than impart the information, albeit in a nice way. Without the backend, no Amazon, no Web2.0, no nothing really.

kris90210:

When I talk about web design, I am in effect talking about building web pages. How you could possibly say that spreadsheets do something while web design doesn't is quite beyond me

Spreadsheets do something constructive ; they are not just presentational.  Web Design per se does nothing. It's like drawing a pretty picture. It may well be worth while, it may help sell things, but it doesn't actually *do* anhting.

kris90210:

Computing is not evolving? What would you call twitter, facebook, youtube, google (including open source software), blog development (wordpress etc), search engine optimisation (a massive area in business that doesn't even seem to be achnowledged in school), content managment systems, evolving photo manipulation software, evolving vector graphic software, flash, 3d modelling, input technology... the list goes on.

No, there are very few real things of evolution, as opposed to minor developments. (I did miss out Cloud computing from the earlier list as pointed out). You and I probably differ about what "computing" means.

Twitter : just an easy to use individual messaging system but just a development of a forum.

Facebook: pretty chit-chat with very little real use ; fancy development of remote messaging which has been in existence since the dawn of time, back before the Internet. I take your point that it is very popular ; so is EastEnders but it is still total and utter c**p.

Youtube: Collection of videos, most of which are illegal or rubbish. Big deal.

Google:   A search engine.

Google (including O/S software): A variety of products produced by a company, varying degrees of success.

Blog Development: Prior to things like Blogger people just did this on individual web pages on the net, updating them and uploading them. Blogger just makes it easier and adds RSS/Atom feeds and the like.

Search Engine Opts: Hacking the search engines to produce the result you want. System specific hacks go back to ENIAC.

CMS: Something genuinely useful, which derives from Web & Postback (e.g. the Server loopround) which I did say was one of the evolutions. But not really an evolution.

Photomanipulation SW / Vector Graphics / Flash (Animation) / 3D Modelling / Input Technology:

Do you really think these things are new ? These things are ancient in computing terms ; the tech. improves gradually and the apps look nicer.

kris90210:

As things stand, I agree with you. I am just thinking is there a way to turn it around so that it becomes educational.

The problem is once the initial "fun" wears off, you either have to develop it, which requires effort, or you get the same problems again. Having said that, I agree with the general concept.

kris90210:

I think the reaction of pupils to the 'game club' in my previous school shows that they are certainly attracted by the notion of learning about games. And you seem to agree with me on this point. All the same,  I will be conducting some research to try and gather evidence to support my opinion on this matter.

Depends what is meant by "learning about Games".

kris90210:

I am most likely going to go for that as a general theme for my essay.

How to use Games in ICT ? Sounds like a good idea to me :)

clumsy1974:

autismuk:

Google:   A search engine

Ahh... but how does it work? Now that's cool. And it opens up a discussion about regular expressions, pattern matching.. then there's there the features such as contextual searches, location relevant searching, issues with privacy (Phorm etc), issues with how MS embeded IE into the OS and the trouble it caused them... Just that one thing opens up a mass of discussion and consideration, as well as the chance to make something practical, like a database, to illustrate simply how it works.

I can't wait!

Agreed, but it's hardly evolutionary.