Sticking to the Plot

I’ve been working on a seminar for teachers called “Snow White and the Seven Reading Strategies”, which is an exploration of the processes we automatically engage in as sophisticated readers, but which are not always made explicit to developing readers. It’s my contention that if they were, and if they were rehearsed often enough, they would provide [...]

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Alice in Multimedialand

You’ve read the book, you may have seen the film. Now read/watch the “vook”. The digitisation of books began with the advent of e-readers like Kindle and Sony, which can hold dozens of books in one hand-held device, but which largely reproduced the format of a traditional, print-based book with occasional illustrations. All of that [...]

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Edinburgh International Book Festival

Had a really enjoyable day yesterday at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, where I was taking part in a panel discussion, and making a presentation on Technology and Literacy. My co-presenters were Judy Robertson, a computer scientist at Heriot-Watt University, and Lili Wilkinson, an Australian cyber-journalist (no, I had never heard of it either) and the [...]

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Bowmore or Bust

I’m just chilling out today, as we younger dudes say, after a very enjoyable cycle trip to Islay to catch up with my good friends Ian and Andy. The visit was the ideal way of seeing a part of Scotland which is so significant to our cultural heritage, including the production of some of the finest malt whiskies [...]

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To Run or Not To Run

Every now and then you read a book which makes you think “I wish I had written that” or even more arrogantly “I should have written that”. Thanks to my good friend Mike Coulter I was introduced to one such book recently, the enigmatically titled What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by [...]

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The Future Has Arrived

How refreshing it was to read again Sir Ken Robinson in last week’s TES, reflecting on the 10th anniversary of the All Our Futures report on creativity and educational policy in England and Wales, and to consider some of his comments alongside the discussions which are going on around Curriculum for Excellence . Robinson was bemoaning the [...]

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Moving Images in Musselburgh

Had a really good day yesterday at the Brunton Theatre in Musselburgh where I was making a presentation to the MIEast network on Curriculum for Excellence and the New Literacies. Despite a few technical glitches in setting up when the laptop and projector seemed to have failed to get the message about digital media and communication [...]

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Film Shorts as Literacy Texts

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the re-definition of “texts” in the context of Curriculum for Excellence, and indeed in the context of the 21st Century! For anyone with responsibility for developing literacy skills in young people it is no longer appropriate to think of texts simply as books, important as books are, [...]

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The Dog Ate My Homework

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To the Immortal Memory of Robert Burns

Happy 250th birthday Rab.
Statues have been raised to the bard from Denver to Sydney. American presidents sing Auld Lang Syne, Russian children chant A Man’s a Man for A’ That. His verse has been translated into all the major languages of the world, including Chinese. Google “Robert Burns” and you will find something in the [...]

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