UK government threatens education sector

'Thursday 11:00 newmedia students' by Goodimages, issued under licence (CC-BY-NC-ND)

I'm assuming that readers of this blog are a fairly open minded bunch and would thus be on board with what I'm about to ask here.

The UK government is currently considering proposals to massively restrict the amount of international students applying to study in the UK. The most damaging of these proposals is to restrict non-EU students to those that meet an equivalent language level of B2 on the CEFR or above (roughly equivalent to IELTS 5.5-6.0, or higher 'A' level standard). In a nutshell, this means that students who wish to come to the UK to develop their language level enough to be able to study here will have to speak English well enough already. Study Group believes that this would have an effect of the loss of £180 million to UK universities after three years and could run to potential UK job losses as high as 20-30,000.

The UK Border Agency has a survey (click on link to visit) open at the moment where it is garnering opinions about these proposed changes. I urge anyone that thinks these changes would be a bad idea for a sector that is supposedly worth £40 billion annually to fill out the survey and add their voices to the opposition for these measures.

The survey expires on Monday 31st January. If anyone is interested in some suggested responses for the survey, let me know in the comments section and I'll post a link to a document with some suggestions.

Thanks

Data > Information > Knowledge > Wisdom

Image issued under licence > CC-BY-NC > David McCandless 2009

A weird thing happened today.

A couple of weekends ago, I was reflecting on some of the stuff that I'm teaching at the moment while reviewing material for the GCSE ICT exam I'm preparing my students for (one particular thing that they've struggled with, at least at the beginning of the course, is the difference between data and information). At the same time, I was also having a bunch of random thoughts about Wikileaks as I'm intending to write a longer piece on it in the not too distant future.

While these thoughts were running around my head, a shape gradually formed in my mind. It was a pyramid, with data at the bottom as the raw basis for things that we know. Information was above data - information can be described as what we have when we combine data with context and/or meaning. The learning of information leads to knowledge, whether of a subject, a situation or an idea. The pinnacle of this hierarchy is wisdom - to be wise is a high-status aim of many individuals and societies. I was quite pleased with having come up with this visualisation of...what? Couldn't quite figure out what it was a visualisation of. Human knowledge? Understanding? Aspiration? I left the pad I'd drawn it on alone for a while and came back to it to find T (my wife) had turned the pyramid into a Christmas tree.

Today, I was stumbling around on the 'Net inbetween classes and looked up David McCandless's data visualisation site (having recently bought the book and wanted to dig a little deeper). To my surprise, I came across a pyramid structured in exactly the same way, as shown above. By the looks of it, he too had not quite managed to articulate all of his thoughts about this hierarchy and had left some of the meaning open to others. Reading the comments on McCandless's blog, it turns out that the 'DIKW Hierarchy' has actually been around for quite some time - decades, in fact.

Perhaps I've come across it in the past myself and forgotten about it, thinking that it was an original thought. Either way, I think it'll help when I start with my second cohort of GCSE students later on this year!

'My Blackberry Is Not Working!' (WN0035)

A little bit of comedy here - BBC stalwarts Ronnie Corbett and Harry Enfield banging on about tech. The sketch is reminiscent of a different era, but the subject material is bang up to date.

Wordplay at its best!

Data loss

This little baby died on me this week. Particularly foolishly for an IT Teacher, I'd been carrying around most of my day-to-day critical data around on it without a full backup of the most recent stuff on it. Last Sunday, I was working late as usual and all drives briefly disappeared from view on my desktop. When they returned, the USB device I was using seemed wiped of everything that was on it.

I tried what I could to get it back, jumping immediately to Google to look for help, then whoever was on Facebook at the time that might have a clue (via my wife who was urging me not to panic). Eventually, I got hold of an evaluation version of a piece of software that enabled me to dig deep down into the recesses of the disk and find that files did actually still exist - some of the folder structure was even there - but I needed to pay for the privilege of extracting them.

What price information? My faith in the possibility of there being a freeware version out there somewhere took over and I carried on the search. An indictment of our times maybe - whatever the value of the digital goods to me, why pay for something when it can be downloaded for free?

The options that I did come up with didn't seem that much more appealing and my data was still at risk, so I dragged through the week bizarrely traumatised by the event yet still attempting to avoid paying for a download (admittedly I was suspicious of the reviews I saw of the one that allowed me my first deep look inside).

In the end, I made my way to the IT helpdesk at work and tried my luck. Fortunately, there was a piece of software languishing within a laptop hard drive and it managed to flush out almost 1,800 files. The folder structure was wrecked and I'd lost all the file names in the data that was recovered, but at least I had a load of it back. The software was called Recuva and it turns out that it's freely available on the Net anyway. So that's my tip for recovering from the trauma of data loss.

A big thanks to all who helped try and get me my digital admin back and to the people giving that software away. I ended up turning my data loss into a lesson for all of my students. Whether they follow the advice to regularly back up or not I don't know, but I certainly will be!