Chalk face

LOOSE CHANGE, LOOSE TALK

You can but admire the minister for state for life long learning or whatever title Kim Howells has which makes him nominally responsible for the disaster that is UKeU. His appearance before the House of Commons

Committee chairman Barry Sheerman did give him a gentle warning about being too long-winded in his replies. (No cheap cracks about Welsh windbags in this column.) But that was practically the only area of conflict during the whole session. Howells had two points of which he was clearly proud: first he had a coloured spreadsheet which purported to show the time line of events. And if anything got sticky, he merely pondered whether the spreadsheet could provide an answer- usually it couldn't. The other point where he thought he was onto a winner was in his preparation for the grilling he was undergoing. His only research seemed to have consisted of reading the minutes from the Select committee previous hearings. Which suggests that within the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) apparently nobody knew anything about what had been going on, or nobody could be bothered to brief the minister. And frankly he was clearly shocked by some of the things the Committee had unearthed. he was shocked by the question of bonuses, he didn't like the name UkeU (all very dotcom to his way of thinking) but most surprising of all he was telling the committee that the next big thing in the whacky world of education was something called 'blended learning'. Whatever will they think of next?

His only slip came when he said the higher education sector was funded to the tune of ?9 billion. Officials had to lean over and whisper that the true figure was nearer ?6 billion. If you can mix up ?3 billion, then frankly the few tens of millions of taxpayers money poured out by those in charge of UkeU starts to look like loose change.

BIN THERE

Now we don't like giving plugs but in the humble opinion of chalkface this is what e-learning, the internet, the web and all that stuff was invented for. just got to http://game.panlogic.net and try out what is on there. And if you don't have a whale of a time, then we just think you're a boring killjoy. While we're not prepared to disclose how good we are, if this month's chalkface is a little short on copy, that's cos we've have been practicing our aim - all in the interest of learning.