becta

It must be true. Consider; the Enterprise's computers never blue-screened... even under attack (did you know Vista still reports a BSOD message when it crashes?...who said MS did not do irony?) and its engineers were always telling the bridge that it was not possible to do whatever it was no matter how simple in the time allocated...hah proof!

It's February, it's raining and I'm in Coventry. Unsurprisingly the time of year lends itself to epitaphs.

Coventry, once a proud industrial city was bombed flat during the Second World War,  now it is home to a race of 'quangocrats' once powerful Government employees who have now been exiled from London for crimes we do not know. 

Huddled among the diaspora are: the QCDA (nee QCA..Qualifications and Curriculum Authority), The Family Courts Welfare Dept, the National Probation Service and of course dear old BECTA, the schools ICT body...our old sparring partners.

PM Gordon Brown has finally used the word 'cuts' last week with regard to public sector spending. He is determined, in his words, to cut unnecessary spending. M'thinks this must include school ICT unless of course enough money is saved by sacking senior teachers.

Magic, training and education

Scott Adams the author of the Dilbert Strip cartoon series expounded in an early book the concept of a personal stupidity threshold. In a nutshell, depending on just how dumb you are various aspects of modern life, technology figuring highly amongst these, become 'not understandable to you'.

At which point, all activities that you carry out above your stupidity threshold are only accessible (cognitively speaking) through the time-honoured behaviours humans have employed to cope with the magical.

I am writing this late at night not too far in the future; Google is refusing to send my e-mails until I answer some dumb maths questions and my Sat Nav is so critical of my driving that I dare not venture out in my car. Thus confined to my laptop how about a simple blog on why Becta, the UK's ICT quango will embrace Open Source software? Now that would be unbeliveable.

Actually, why shouldn't our Government's quangos start the shift to Open Source software? It's crisis time after all. We are officially in recession, we should all pull together now and save money, let the Gov lead the way.