Tag: Leadership

RSA Education Charter on learning and creativity.

Very occasionally I write a post for Thriving (my hat tip for this one), I’m a school governor and also a Fellow of the RSA.  The 250 year old organisation for ideas and social action is just opening its first school in Tipton in the Black Country. As I’ve written before I sometimes find myself astonished/cross by how cautious some of our major institutions are about something as important as education. So I’ve signed up to the RSA’s new educational charter (which you can do here). If you sign it this is what you’ll be supporting:

The Charter

It is the primary purpose of education to awaken a love of learning in young people, and give them the ability and desire to carry on learning throughout life. We need to recognise that education has many aims

Education must nurture creativity and capacity for independent and critical thought.

Young people should leave formal education equipped with the confidence, aptitude and skills they need for life and for work.

Education should help young people to understand how to be happy and to develop and maintain their own emotional, physical and mental well-being.

Every young person has the right to develop to their full potential

Ability comes in many forms and learners need to be supported to enjoy success no matter where their talents lie.

The educational success of learners should not depend on their background. Schools, communities and families must work together to close gaps in attainment.

The curriculum in schools and colleges should balance abstract and practical knowledge so that every learner can access high quality academic and vocational opportunities.

Education should engage the learner with exciting, relevant content and opportunities for learning through experience and by doing.

Education must be a partnership

Learners have a valuable role to play in contributing to the design of their own learning, and in shaping the way their learning environment operates.

The education of young people should be a partnership of schools, parents and the wider community in a local area.

Schools should be inclusive, creative communities which build tolerance, respect and empathy in young people.

We must trust our schools and education professionals

Every teacher should be a creative professional involved in the design of curricula and learning environments, and should be supported and developed to fulfil that role.

Every school should be different, every school innovative and we must find ways of holding them to account for their performance that rewards rather than stifles this creativity.

CarrotMob or Save the environment by drinking beer.

There are different ways to tackle climate change. In the last month I’ve written about the focussed and globally ambitious cquestrate. Now recent Birmingham Blogger Jonathan Melhuish (and also here) who’s relocated to London tells me you can also do it by drinking beer.

Carrot Mobs work by finding the local business which is willing to devote the largest portion of an half days takings to green upgrades. When a store commits to divert the dosh into making changes you organise to provide as many customers as possible in that afternoon

CarrotMob is a fun community action which rewards businesses that become more energy efficient. The concept is to take several businesses in a community and start a bidding war find the one prepared to invest the most in improving their energy efficiency. We then all flashmob the winning business at the agreed time and make our purchases there. The business then spends the agreed percentage of revenue it took during the CarrotMob on replacing appliances with more energy-efficient models. Everybody wins! 🙂

[youtube:https://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=LUz0kM1u_jk&e]

It sounds fun and makes a huge amount of sense for each business. Fan Page.

Crime Mapping from the British Government based on a West Midlands example

Tom Watson , William Perrin and the Power of Information taskforce shows off some mock ups for crime mapping by neighbourhood and the whole social media story makes it onto the Telegraph’s front page with a couple of subsidiary articles – including one mentioning West Midlands Police mapping site.  Practical and political! Crime mapping has been useful tool in the US for a few years now, some of it inspired by tracking gun crime and is seeing growing use in the UK.

Cquestrate: Can we crowdsource a carbon solution.

Cquestrate Intro Video from cquestrate on Vimeo.
Last week I met Tim Kruger. He’d asked me to do a little bit of work on a very bold plan that he hatched today.

Cquestrate is an organisation and a website which plans to crowdsource technical solutions to the huge problem of recapturing the CO2 pumped out since the industrial revolution began.

He’s working with some financial backing from Shell, but critically he has a legal agreement which means that all the ideas generated through cquestrate remain open source.

Why should Shell care? Well partly because he wants to use lime as a means of capturing CO2 by adding it to seawater. Producing huge quantities of lime could be a viable (money making) use for the energy wasted in oil/gas production.

For more information see the site. As cased puts it:

… well, the site explanation actually then continues onward by answering the very question about to drop from my smug yet woefully uneducated lips :

One of the questions I often get asked is: if this is so simple why hasn’t it been done before? The idea has been around for a number of years. It was first suggested by Haroon Kheshgi in 1995, but it was considered uneconomic as the process uses a large amount of energy. What we are interested in doing is using stranded energy to drive the process.

Aha- well, that explains it. Its all down to stranded energy.

Well, I think it sounds like a wonderful idea – a bit of open sourcey, crowdsourcey goodness… if only I knew more about stranded energy and limestone…. hm.

Thank goodness for scientists! Please forward on this post to people who know what stranded energy is!

Other mentions:
Neural Transmissions
UmLud
Physorg
Juno