Congrats to @theozaurus, @kern…
Congrats to @theozaurus, @kernowsoul, @fatelvis for http://wuzlr.com/ and to @spyou for http://planettoaster.com/ Two #railsrumble apps.
‘Conversational’ Q&A
As part of our ongoing assault on the barriers between ‘people who know’ and ‘people who want/need to know’, we’ve been working on an update to that hoary old chestnut: the Q&A site. Part of our approach is to create something that’s truly conversational. After all, if you’ve got a question that needs an answer, how many times does a single, straight answer give you what you looking for? Too often, there’s a bit of clarification etc involved, more like Q&A&Q&A…
So we’ve been taking a good look at Q&A 2.0, or more like Q&A 2.1, and I’m really please to see that’s it’s a lively area of development on the web at the moment, with our friends at Aardvark, Hunch doing some really interesting things. As is so often the case, simple problems are sometimes the hardest to solve and we’ve been really grafting hard to produce something that’s as simple to use and robust as possible. Usability is everything. We’re more than interested to talk and share with anyone in the field, so feel free to get in touch. As usual, our starting point is education, tutors and tutoring, but we don’t expect it to end there.
Who’s right here?
Some of you may have already noticed that as a company, we are strongly rooted in our hometown of Bristol. It’s a city where there seems to have been a vogue in the last few years for changing the name of schools in an attempt to shake off associations with an underperforming past. The most recent victim of this process is my old school, Monks Park; soon be carry the significantly more up market moniker of The Orchard School. This lumps my old school into the same category of name-changers as a nuclear waste recycling plant and the singer Prince, or Symbol as he wanted to be called, or AFKAP, as he ended up being called.
As a newly disenfranchised former pupil, I wonder why such name-changes are considered to be an answer in the public sector, but not for their private sector cousins. After all, the newly minted Orchard School will have the same staff, pupils and premises; so can a name change really make a difference? My time at business school and an exhaustive poll of five former pupils suggest not, but do they know something I don’t? And is it an exercise that should be watched with interest by the chief executives of our once mighty financial institutions? If Monks Park can underperform for decades but escape its past with a mere name-change, why shouldn’t our banks erase a few years of mal administration in a similar way? Why can’t RBS become the Orchard Bank? Or maybe it should be the other way round and schools should adopt a more private sector approach: fail and your premises, staff and pupils get sliced and diced into new organisations; taken over by your better performing peers.
Glad to hear from anyone with the time to run this thought experiment.
@Marthalanefox do you know whe…
@Marthalanefox do you know where or when the Robert Peston interview is going out?