Mike Kent

Using a lifetime of knowledge and experience of our education system, Mike Kent looks closely at why it so often falls short, failing both teachers and children. With much humour and a wealth of experience and insight he looks back at the last fifty years of schooling, critically examining the changes, the questionable theories, the inability of most education ministers to do anything worthwhile, and the huge cost of failed initiatives. He also suggests how things can be made better. 'Please Sir, Skool Isn't Werking' is a book which will be enjoyed by anyone with an interest in education and a lively sense of humour!

Shortly before Mike Kent retired after thirty years as a London headteacher, the visiting educational psychologist attached to his school sat chuckling helplessly over a coffee as Mike related tales of school life. ‘You know, people would never believe what your job involves,’ he said. ‘You should keep a diary for a year and turn it into a book.’ Mike thought that was a great idea… and here it is. Read about Emma who wasn’t, the invisible plumbers, Eddie the Terror, the Vicar’s Rolo, Samesh’s spectacles, the shoe in the fence, Joseph and the eels, the lift that wouldn’t, staffroom secrets, serious pigeons, the diplodocus, persistent salesmen, the mums up for a scrap, and a host of other jaw-dropping tales… all in the line of duty!

Disability and New Media examines how digital design is triggering disability when it could be a solution. Video and animation now play a prominent role in the World Wide Web and new types of protocols have been developed to accommodate this increasing complexity. However, as this has happened, the potential for individual users to control how the content is displayed has been diminished. Accessibility choices are often portrayed as merely technical decisions but they are highly political and betray a disturbing trend of ableist assumption that serve to exclude people with disability. It has been argued that the Internet will not be fully accessible until disability is considered a cultural identity in the same way that class, gender and sexuality are. Kent and Ellis build on this notion using more recent Web 2.0 phenomena, social networking sites, virtual worlds and file sharing. Many of the studies on disability and the web have focused on the early web, prior to the development of social networking applications such as Facebook, YouTube and Second Life. This book discusses an array of such applications that have grown within and alongside Web 2.0, and analyzes how they both prevent and embrace the inclusion of people with disability.

Disability and New Media examines how digital design is triggering disability when it could be a solution. Video and animation now play a prominent role in the World Wide Web and new types of protocols have been developed to accommodate this increasing complexity. However, as this has happened, the potential for individual users to control how the content is displayed has been diminished. Accessibility choices are often portrayed as merely technical decisions but they are highly political and betray a disturbing trend of ableist assumption that serve to exclude people with disability. It has been argued that the Internet will not be fully accessible until disability is considered a cultural identity in the same way that class, gender and sexuality are. Kent and Ellis build on this notion using more recent Web 2.0 phenomena, social networking sites, virtual worlds and file sharing. Many of the studies on disability and the web have focused on the early web, prior to the development of social networking applications such as Facebook, YouTube and Second Life. This book discusses an array of such applications that have grown within and alongside Web 2.0, and analyzes how they both prevent and embrace the inclusion of people with disability.