A transcript of the keynote speech I gave at the MITA IV conference held at the American School of Milan on February 2nd 2019 and that I presented in revised form at the IB Global Conference in Abu Dhabi, on October 25th 2019.

In the Zen monastery, in a monk’s daily life there is time for meeting with the master of the temple, the Roshi. This meeting consists of a single activity. The Roshi will give the monk a koan, a cryptic phrase of question, a sort of paradox or puzzle, about which to think. The sound of one hand clapping or trees falling, unobserved, in the woods.

A lot of students come to philosophy without ever having studied the subject before, certainly not in any rigorous manner, and I felt it was important to show them what the subject is all about, what is valued and prized in philosophy, and to give a rough idea of the lie of the land that they would be forging out across. Many thanks to all those friends and colleagues who gave comments on this piece.

A few years ago I started logging my reading on www.goodreads.com so that I could look back over what I had read, but also so that I could try and keep some sort of handle on my book buying. All too often I was coming back with a new purchase only to find I’d already bought the book weeks, months or years ago – I’m willing to admit that this aspect of things has only been a partial success.

Making the most of some time in the holidays, I found myself in Bath with my other half and my in-laws. Whilst everyone took the chance to roam around Sydney Gardens I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to head inside of the Holburne Museum and take a look around the Impressionism: Capturing Life exhibition.

This one has been hanging around on a bookshelf for a while and whilst I’ve grabbed a page or two I hadn’t sat down and read the whole thing until recently. I’d intended to read it and use it with some students as an unseen text but having gotten to the end I’m not sure it’s quite right for that purpose. Having said that it is a very interesting text and gives an idiosyncratic yet deeply scholarly approach to the title question. 

I was fortunate enough to be invited to speak at BETT - the global Education Technology show in London. I was asked to speak on behalf of Google, as one of the educators speaking at Google’s Teaching Theatre. I’ve long been a vocal advocate of Google Apps for Education and have seen its transformational effect in my own teaching practice and in that of my friends and colleagues – at my own institution as well as on-line.

I gave a talk that focused on what might seem like a pretty dull aspect of education technology – being efficient. Being efficient is not exciting. Being efficient isn’t attention grabbing but, I hope I argued, everything that is exciting and attention grabbing becomes possible when you become more efficient.

I saw this great infographic posted on the Wayfaring Path blog, and I think it provides a lot of stimulus for thought and reflection. It covers issues of learning technologies, of course, but also much more within teaching practice. I’m not sure I can hold my hand up proudly and say that I do all of these, certainly not all the time, but they are all things I would say I would hope to do and hope to develop. Some are scarier than others and I imagine different teachers are going to have very different ideas of which are the difficult ones.

I’ve been working an awful lot lately on the educational technology front. In particular I’ve been working within my institution to manage some of our transition to the use of Google Apps for Education. I’m an enormous fan, advocate and enthusiast of these apps and have been working with them for the best part of a school year now so I was very pleased when I heard that Google were overhauling their entire Certified Educator system.