Addiction to technology harms learning

Their report concluded that modern gadgets worsened pupils' spelling and concentration, encouraged plagiarism and disrupted lessons. BBC News.

Researchers at the Cranfield School of Management, Northampton Business School and academic consultancy AJM Associates have suggested that young people addicted to the use of technology, including mobile phones, are performing badly at school and that their attention levels were poor.

Dr Kakabadse claims that "For their homework, instead of reading the book, they go on the internet and lift it, rather than reading it and understanding it and putting it in their own words."

I would suggest that educators are partly to blame. New information technologies are fare more effective tools for finding information than books and educators should change their focus and concentrate on the important information management skills which will enable young people to use the technology wisely and responsibly.

Time is saved by copying and pasting. This time should be used to develop analytical and summarising skills, so that the information copied and pasted is critiqued, analysed and reused in a sensible and educationally effective way.

Rover rip-off

A report into the collapse of carmaker MG Rover will say that five executives took £42m in pay and pensions from the troubled firm... Independent inspectors said the men behind the takeover and the executive they appointed enriched themselves as Rover headed for insolvency.  BBC News.

Spend a tenner, get 42 million back. Nice work if you can find it.

I find it difficult to understand how people can rip off pension funds and get away with it. Then again, Brown has ripped off more than 100 billion. Our laws seem designed to protect robber barons.

Extremism is the UK. Who's to blame?

Britain has to take responsibility and they have to look into the issues which are driving these youth to extremism, which is the third-generation British – they weren't born and bought up in Pakistan, says a Pakistani diplomat. The Guardian.

The spat about the source of Muslim extremism in the UK continues, with the UK blaming Pakistan for not coming down hard enough on extremists based in that country.  While this may be true, it is difficult to keep track of the number of groups and individuals who are attracted by the anti-crusader talk put out by extremists.

Personally, I blame Blair, Campbell and the other politicians who lied and schemed to take this country into Iraq. Had we done the right thing, we would not have had bombings on the underground, or threats to our aircraft or our boys being blown to pieces in Afghanistan.

Government incompetence

They applied for permission to marry from the Home Office more than a month before her visa ran out.

However, the authorities lost their passport photographs causing delays and when permission did come through it was days to go before her visa expired and their wedding was not arranged in time. BBC News.

A young Canadian woman who married a British man has been the unintended victim of Labour legislation to combat forced marriages in the Muslim community. Alan Johnson refuses to use his discretion to allow her to stay has personally written to the couple to order her to leave Britain or be forcibly deported. The Home Office claims that "the benefits of the new rules in helping prevent forced marriages outweighed the drawbacks."

I wonder what would have happened had she married a Labour politician?  I wouldn't trust Johnson to stick a stamp on a letter. Time to get rid of this mean-spirited, small-minded and incompetent government. People are more important than laws, one would think.

Private schools dominate...

...more than 50% of A-levels taken by privately educated pupils scored an A compared with 20% of those in state schools, widening the gap and prompting claims that attempts to break the middle-class stranglehold on entry to higher education have failed this year.
The Guadian.

Put simply, private education is much better than state education. Anyone serious about their children's education goes private - whatever the cost. This will remain the case until government go back to providing 'specialist' schools for the more able, where they can concentrate on their academic work without being disadvantaged by those who, deliberately or not, cause havoc and disruption. We are NOT all the same and the attempt by our namby-pamby, politically correct,  nanny-statist government to socially engineer a classless society is doomed to failure.

Furthermore, it is fucking the country up.