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Who invented the WWW? How did the son of 2 mathematics teachers change the world?

The Practice of Simplicity by Jakob Nielsen. I have read a lot of Nielsen’s “Alert Box” usability articles and I like most of what I read there. I was interested to read further.

This is an excellent plausible and scary thriller about how to shut down the US, without firing a shot.

This is a manual on how to end your own civilisation – by ruining the environment.

The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration James Risen, ©2005 To better understand how the Bush adminstration got itself into such a mess in the Middle East, this book is a must-read. Almost every page contains yet another extraordinary scandal. To me, one of the biggest scandals is the way Bush and [...]

“Weaving the Web into Teaching and Learning” Cunningham, C and Billingsly, M © 2006 Pearson Summary Review I’m not going to write much about this book because basically, I was not impressed. The problems: The book is disorganised – it is neither a coherent treatise on Web design nor on teaching and learning. It mixes [...]

“Confronting Cognitions in Computer Supported Collaborative Learning Environments” Volume 1, Andriessen, J., Baker, M., and Suthers, D. (Ed) Kluwer Academic Publishers, ©2003. Summary Review We do not learn much by just listening to a teacher. We learn more by: Solving relevant, challenging and interesting problems By teaching others By having to defend a point of [...]

“A Reflective Case-based Approach” © Kauffman, J. et al, 2006 Summary Review Teaching ain’t easy – you could almost say that a good teacher requires super-human talents. Included in those talents is the ability to control classroom behaviour. All students in a class need to have a safe environment where they can get on with [...]

Paperback, ©Roger Dunn, Continuum, 2005 (147 pages) Summary Review Dunn’s extensive experience as a school disciplinary officer is obvious throughout the book Dos and Don’ts of Behaviour Management. His practical advice is valuable whether you are about to start a teaching career or whether you are one of those jaded teachers that experience great frustration [...]

The ideas in Sydney Finkelstein’s book “Why Smart Executives Fail” could also apply to educational institutions. In a recent article, he described a company that was very positive and where divisions were very supportive of each other, but said they could be heading for disaster, since: [The] company has created an insulated culture that systematically [...]