Harnessing technology local authorities survey 2007

The report presents and analyses the findings from the 2006-07 survey of local authorities covering their provision and support for ICT in schools

Personalised Learning: Developing a Vygotskian Framework for E-learning

Personalisation has emerged as a central feature of recent educational strategies in the UK and abroad. At the heart of this is a vision to empower learners to take more ownership of their learning and develop autonomy. While the introduction of digital technologies is not enough to effect this change, embedding the affordances of new technologies is expected to offer new routes for creating personalised learning environments. The approach is not unique to education, with consumer technologies offering a 'personalised' relationship which is both engaging and dynamic, however the challenge remains for learning providers to capture and transpose this to educational contexts. As learners begin to utilise a range of tools to pursue communicative and collaborative actions, the first part of this paper will use analysis of activity logs to uncover interesting trends for maturing e-learning platforms across over 100 UK learning providers. While personalisation appeals to marketing theories this paper will argue that if learning is to become personalised one must ask what the optimal instruction for any particular learner is? For Vygotsky this is based in the zone of proximal development, a way of understanding the causal-dynamics of development that allow appropriate pedagogical interventions. The second part of this paper will interpret personalised learning as the organising principle for a sense-making framework for e-learning. In this approach personalised learning provides the context for assessing the capabilities of e-learning using Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development as the framework for assessing learner potential and development

Harnessing technology review 2007. Progress and impact of technology in education. Summary report.

This is the summary of the first review of the use and impact of ICT in the education system following the publication of the Government's e-Strategy for the education system, known as Harnessing Technology. The Review drew upon Becta's surveys of schools and FE colleges as well as other research to assess the impact of technology within the education system and the progress made in achieving the system outcomes of the policy

Harnessing technology review 2009. The role of technology in education and skills.

This is the third review of the use and impact of ICT in the education system following the publication of the Government's e-Strategy for education, known as Harnessing technology. The review drew upon Becta's surveys of schools and FE colleges as well as other research to assess the impact of technology within the education system and the progress made in achieving the system outcomes of the policy

Adding Value to Statistics in the Data Revolution Age

As many statistical offices in accordance with the European Statistical System commitment to Vision 2020, since the second half of 2014 Istat has implemented its internal standardisation and industrialisation process within the framework of a common Business Architecture. Istat modernisation programme aims at building services and infrastructures within a plug-and-play framework to foster innovation, promote reuse and move towards full integration and interoperability of statistical process, consistent with a service-oriented architecture. This is expected to lead to higher effectiveness and productivity by improving the quality of statistical information and reducing the response burden. This paper addresses the strategy adopted by Istat which is focused on exploiting administrative data and new data sources in order to achieve its key goals enhancing value to users. The strategy is based on some priorities that consider services centred on users and stakeholders as well as Linked Open Data, to allow Machine-to-Machine data and metadata integration through definition of common statistical ontologies and semantics