Benjamin Ellis

Teentech – Showing What You Can Do

The ultimate cure for jetlag? Well, spending the day with 300 teenagers, obviously. On Friday I joined Maggie Philbin, the afore mentioned teenagers, and a dedicated team of grown ups at The Madejski Stadium in Reading, Berkshire, for Teentech 2010. The number of children studying science and maths has been in decline for many years in the UK, prompting government intervention. Less that 60,000 students sat Maths ‘A’ level in the UK last year. That’s in the whole country. There are signs of improvement, but as someone who is a technologist and engineer by education, it is distressing to hear them described as “Vulnerable Subjects” in education reports. Just down the road, Reading University closed its Physics department this year. Continue Reading…

Thames Valley Social Media Cafe – Reading

I’ve tweeted it, but it deserves more than 140 characters! After the Reading Twestival, a number of tweetups in Reading have happened, but I’ve been hoping for a full on Tuttle Club style event.

Finally, after a few tweets between Drew Benvie, Matt Brady, Neville Hobson and myself, it is all systems go…  

Drew has written a post about his hopes for TVSMC, and Neville gives a good background on Tuttle/SMC. There are a number of people out this way who regularly trek in to London Tuttle, so that gives a great start. It is wonderful to have something local to the Valley here, which will hopefully open up the opportunity for many more people to experience what happens when on-line and off-line merge.

As Matt Brady says, “[Reading] and its environs is chock-full of digital talent“, so it is time to show your stuff, if you are in the area sign up on the Thames Valley SMC  wiki. Any problems signing up, catch me on twitter or drop me an email and I’ll sort you out. I’ve built three RSS feeds into the site so far:

• RSS feed of the Wiki pages, to keep up with changes/sign ups.
• RSS feed for TVSMC blog (first post pending!).
• RSS feed from the calendar to keep track of dates.

The first gathering is at 10AM on Friday 13th of March. I’ll be there in spirit (since I’ll be in the thick of South by South West Interactive), but there is a healthy crowd going along!