Never mind the quality mark, feel the myth

Sitting on a train on the way home, I've been reading the TES on-line where one of the headline stories is about the Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm (which somewhat coincidently is located near Bristol which is where I've been for a JISC meeting,) controversially receiving the Government-backed Council for Learning Outside the Classroom's “quality badge”, a kitemark developed last year to accredit outdoor activity centres, museums and stately homes as suitable for children's education.

Hopefully the institution's name ought to be a clue for any educators wanting to broaden the mind of their charges, but the presence of an official badge might sway the unwary into inadvertently exposing enquiring minds to religious propaganda presented as fact.

Now leaving aside problems which are presumably issues of faith, such as where did all the water come from and where did it go, or why did Noah leave all the marsupials in Australasia, the likelihood of the story having any actual, and therefore significant, educational basis can be illustrated with simple mathematics.

Ignoring what we actually know to be the highest peaks on earth (Everest, K2, etc) and instead using Mount Ararat as reference point since that's where the biblical story says the ark ended up, we're left with water covering land at an elevation above sea level of to close to 17000 feet (to be precise the elevation of said mountain is 16945 feet). Since the story says it rained for 40 days and 40 nights, that means in each twenty four hour period the water rose an average of 425 feet (17000/40), or to put it in another way, 17' 9" each and every hour all around the world for nearly 6 weeks, not just local to wherever Noah's menagerie was floating around.

That's an awful lot of water in anybody's (good?) book, and if the family who run the zoo want to believe that it really happened and put on a show about it then that's up to them, but handing out an official educational endorsement is surely not something that's going to help anybody involved in the planning of school trips now that we know there's no apparent care taken in deciding which organisations can be trusted to deliver objective supplements to the national curriculum.

Mad Mullahs Mullets Matters

News today that Iran is going to ban "decadent cuts" such as mullets, spiked-tops and ponytails as part of a crackdown on "Western hairstyles" after an organisation devoted to Islamic fashion issued a list of what they claim to be culturally appropriate haircuts for men.

The list, endorsed by the culture ministry, includes pictures of models with short hair (curly and straight), long sideburns and in one case a 60s-style quiff, but none of collar-length locks. The "... proposed styles are inspired by Iranians' complexion, culture and religion, and Islamic law", and will be promoted at the Modesty and Veil Festival, the organiser of which, Jaleh Khodayar, said "We are happy that the Islamic Republic of Iran's government has backed us in designing these hairstyles."

Wonder how many more new persecution categories could need adding to the world's asylum claim forms now that even skipping a visit to the barbers could result in a visit from a coiffeur copper cluster?

Monkey Business

In the middle of what are always my busiest two weeks of the year, I'm now in a Peterborough hotel with a copy of the regional weekly newspaper where the main story is about a local woman who went to Thailand in an attempt to overcome a fear of monkeys.

Apparently, 56-year old Dee Darwell was trying to overcome a lifelong primate phobia by travelling to an area near Phuket called Monkey Island as a way of "confronting her fears". The story doesn't say whether the indigenous crab-eating Macaques could smell Dee's fear, or could just detect utter stupidity and found the temptation to mischief too hard to resist, but within minutes of her getting off the boat they attacked "like a pack of animals" (as opposed to????).
Now recovering at home after treatment for bites in a Bangkok hospital, Dee says she owes her life to the intervention of local fishermen after the other sunseekers on her boat trip fled in panic, adding that at the time she thought "This is it, I'm going to die, I'm going to be savaged".

Now personally, although psychoanalysts and motivational speakers might say that this is the way to go, I can't see that in her case it was even remotely necessary. Obviously there are many things round here that having an irrational fear of would be more than worth the effort to cure.
Fens for instance.
Or shoe shops.
But monkeys?
I've only been here for about four hours, but unless the city centre resembles a safari park on weekends, or gibbons plague the bingo, it seems to me that the best thing to do if you have a fear of monkeys and live in Peterborough is to forget all about finding a cure and not go on holiday to somewhere called Monkey Island!

Close, but no cigar....

On my way across London this morning for a conference where David Willets will this afternoon talk about the value, heritage and future of technical skills at FE and HE level, I picked up a copy of one of the free papers distributed outside Underground stations which today contains a report about an article in yesterday's Daily Mail (lazy journalism part one) regarding the alleged censoring of Winston Churchill's cigar from a poster outside an exhibition near London Bridge by anti-smoking zealots.

"It seems the man who steered Britain through the most dangerous period of its recent history may have fallen victim to the modern curse of political correctness," says the report (of the report!).

Oddly enough, the story goes on to describe that the disappearance of the Churchillian havana is "something of a mystery" with the ubiquitous, un-named spokesman for the visitor attraction "astonished" that such a thing could have happened and denying that the museum has been contacted by any anti-smoking lobby group, and was quite unaware of the airbrushing until a visitor drew it to their attention.

Anway, despite the Daily Mail (or the Metro) being unable to identify who was responsible for the airbrushed image (lazy journalism part two), typing "Winston Churchill Images" into Google gives a listing of which one the higher ranked results is Fanpix, an on-line image gallery. So, on the assumption that Fanpix isn't responsible for removing the cigar (why would they?), presumably someone creating the War Experience display went on to the Internet in search of suitable Churchill pictures and, not knowing that it was digitally altered, selected this one.

A bit more research using Google's advanced search facility gives what is probably the ultimate source of the doctored picture, a 2006 blog about a Washington Post story about politically-correct anti-smoking fanatics censoring old pictures. In this case, the story concerned Hanna-Barbera apparently removing scenes from Tom and Jerry cartoons after a complaint to Ofcom that the scenes were "glamorising" smoking. The blog suggested that "they’d have to go back and edit all the old pictures of Winston Churchill to remove his cigar" and mocked up an image poking fun at the excesses of Political Correctness to illustrate the point, which four years later has ended up getting used as "proof" that PC has, once again, "gone mad". So, as we now know that it's not (in this instance at least), maybe something else is going on: an attempt to attract publicity to the Britain at War Experience, perhaps? Or am I just too cynical?

Hoop, hoop and away (with the money)

I'm now in Blackpool at the end of my first ever staff development day just for school teachers where the principal topic of conversation has been the hoopla stall owner prosecuted last week for breaching gambling laws by making his game almost impossible to win.

Although none of us were in the least surprised that the blocks were tilted at such an angle the chances of success were calculated by academics at Lancaster University to be over 2,600 to 1, nobody could even begin to comprehend why one complainant to Trading Standards lost nearly £1,500.

According to court reports, secret filming showed punters losing around £1 a minute, which made us all wonder what kind of person would want a shoddily assembled cuddly toy enough to spend what must have been about 3 days vainly throwing money away?

So yes, the operation was crooked, but this particular idiot was always likely to get separated from his money pretty quickly one way or another. Now if only the bbc report had mentioned his name and address, I could forward an e-mail from a Nigerian chief anxious to deposit £5m in a British account, then all he'd have to do to recoup his losses would be to send his complete bank details without delay....

Leicester 2 Colin 20

This repeat visit to Leicester College (we were there in June 2009) was the 20th Colin Beard Experiential Learning Day put together for lecturers delivering HE level education programmes in a FE environment.

Even though there's been 19 similar events around the country over the last 4 years, and there'll be more in the North and on the South coast later in the year, recommendations from previous attendees meant that delegates were willing to travel from as far away as Brighton and Greenwich, with two of those present making the effort to "experience the difference" for a second time in less than twelve months.

As usual, a full day and an engaging facillitator meant that nobody's attention was diverted from the activities in the room, although our venue on the second floor of the Freemen's Park campus has such an excellent view (from the window to the right in the picture above) of the magnificent rubgy ground which is home to the Leicester Tigers that we should probably have included a mention of it in the programme for the day instead of just alluding to it in a post title...

Space (centre): the no-Phil Frontier

Having been asked to help coordinate a "Creative Assessment to Help Eliminate Plagiarism" workshop as part of the joint JISC/HEA e-asy Assessment day at the National Space Centre, I arrived in Leicester late last night to be told by the organisers that Professor Phil Race, the advertised keynote speaker, was ill and unable to attend, so "could I step in"?

3 beers, a glass of wine and a pizza-full of persuasion later, meant sleep was postponed while I re-purposed a collection of resources and wrote a presentation to make up a (hopefully!) coherent 2-hour session around the day's theme of "engaging with innovative ways of assessing learners to make assessment e-asy".

Fortunately, when the moment of truth arrived, adrenaline overrode the effects of having had only 3 hours worth of sleep, so my delivery was something close to normal, but after an afternoon workshop, a plenary and three hours to get home, the effects of "boldly going where no one (well me anyway) has gone before" has left me feeling very tired....