back to article Schools minister strikes elegiac tone at Bett

Minister for Schools and Learners Vernon Coaker kicked off this year's Bett today, in a reflective speech that offered very little insight into what the current government plans were for the future of IT in education. Instead Coaker reminded the audience what the Labour government has done for getting technology into schools …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    skills employers need

    "he mentioned "millions on Facebook", 95 per cent of 15-year-old kids using mobile phones, and the use of iPods and Macs in the classroom"

    I know where i work we are just crying out for people with good facebook skills, the ability to use a mobile phone and the be owners of an ipod....

    One skill that is lost to the depths of time is the concept of not putting spaces in file names. I know its old school but it makes dealing with that file so much more straight forward across different filesystems and OSs.

  2. JWS
    Stop

    Mince

    What a load of crap! They're chucking down a black hole as usual. Most schools now have a good IT setup but IT classes are few and far between and don't teach anything useful anyway, they are far to basic and the staff teaching know less than the kids. It's a joke.

    Not everyone needs to know how to use a PC, we still need tradesmen to fix things and this is being missed out on.

  3. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    FAIL

    Enabling technology.

    How about reading, and encouraging the *habit* of reading. this merely indicates the proles have been given a form of prolefeed to passively consume.

    Otherwise is it my imagination or is the spirit of Nathan Barley very much alive?

  4. Luther Blissett

    To fule about

    The verb "to coco" is interesting syntactically, morphologically, and etymologically. For one thing it is highly degenerate in its tenses, and also its modality. There is little use for example of the indicative "I coco" or "cocoing the night away", and it mainly occurs with the modal auxiliary, so much so that one might wonder if the verb is really "to should coco", which in theory yields the expected conjugation "I should coco", "you should coco", "he/she/it should coco", etc. However, there is no use whatever for "it should coco", and while "you should coco" is intelligible to an English speaker, there is not a lot of evidence of its widespread occurrence, especially as a native speaker invariably prefers the shorter, better known, and perlocutionarily more effective idiomatic phrase "fuck off".

    A further point is that the verb is invariably transliterated incorrectly, and in this matter history is no guide, as the verb does not occur for example in Dr Johnson's dictionary of English of the 18th century. The explanation for that will become apparent when its technically correct transliteration is revealed: "koko". That this is the correct spelling is evident from its etymology as an acronym. being short for "knickers off, knockers out". The absence of knickers from the 18th century and later of course explains its being unknown to the good Doctor, while the context of use self-evidently favours speech rather than e-mails, and accounts for the transliteration error. Unless of course there is something about cocoa and the English that this writer is not aware of.

    1. Peladon
      Coat

      On the ends justifying the meaning...

      With due note of and respect to Mr W Churchill and those things up with which he would not put, perhaps " ...that this writer is not aware of." might be " ... of which this writer is not aware."

      Or... not

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Pint

    Open access

    great stuff: maybe soon I can buy one of those "free PCs" handed out to disadvantaged youths for a bag of weed at the back of the pub car park. Seeing as 2nd hand netbooks fetch ridiculous sums on ebay right now, I might finally get one after all..

  6. Chris Hunt

    Erm...

    What's "Bett"?

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