flynn002

The Royal Society has been celebrating the 350 th anniversary of Philosophical Transactions, the world's first scientific journal, by holding a series of meetings on the future of scholarly scientific publishing. I followed the whole event on social media, and was able to attend in person for one day. One of the sessions followed a Dragon's Den format, with speakers having 100 seconds to convince three dragons – Onora O'Neill, Ben Goldacre and Anita de Waard – of the fund-worthiness of a new idea for science communication. Most were light-hearted, and there was a general mood of merriment, but the session got me thinking about what kind of future I would like to see. What I came up with was radically different from our current publishing model. Most of the components of my dream system are not new, but I've combined them into a format that I think could work. The overall idea had its origins in a blogpost I wrote in 2011 , and has points in common with David Colquhoun...

The Early Years Foundation Stage Profile was developed by the government's Standards and Testing Agency " to support practitioners in making accurate judgements about each child's attainment". More specifically: The EYFS Profile summarises and describes children’s attainment at the end of the EYFS. It is based on ongoing observation and assessment in the three prime and four specific areas of learning, and the three characteristics of effective learning, • Prime areas: communication and language; physical development; personal, social and emotional development • Specific areas:   literacy; mathematics; understanding the world; expressive arts; and design of effective learning • Characteristics: playing and exploring;   active learning;   creating and thinking critically … for each ELG, practitioners must judge whether a child is meeting the level of development expected at the end of the Reception year (expected), exceeding this level (exceeding), or not yet reaching...