A recent newspaper article talked about how special educational needs are being excluded to boost exam results and how exams are outdated and UK governments' obsession with them is misguided. Exams do not educate children. A reader commented: Children are being...

John Wanamaker was a US merchant who died in 1922 and is believed to have said: Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is I don’t know which half. Others reckon he was wrong, and say the vast majority of ad-spend is wasted. So how do advertisers,...

I’d encourage kids to explore the internet, to make the most of everything that’s on offer to help them live the best, happiest, most fulfilling life they can, whatever that is. To visit only or largely GAFA-owned sites (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) is the online...

Google bots do three things: they crawl, index and rank webpages. But when we Google something, we're only scratching the surface of information online. Google reckons their search results draw from as little as four or five per cent of what's available across the...

A bootstrapped unicorn. I recently read that in an email I received. It’s possibly the most ‘internet’ phrase I’ve ever read. Was it the beginning of a joke: a bootstrapped unicorn walks into a bar... Then I wondered what it actually means. Come on, I thought, I know...

I was in a pub one evening, standing at the bar, and the bloke next to me started telling me a story: I was in a pub one evening, standing at the bar, and the barmaid came to serve me. ‘What would you like?’ she asks. ‘A pint and a sandwich, please.’ ‘Ok,’ she says,...

I read a book one weekend, with my younger daughter Good old Dr Seuss. Read his stories? You ought to. This book in hand, containing four tales in all Full of wordplay, full of lessons For me, for us all.   About the Sneetches we were reading Our knowledge we...

Inspiration can come from anywhere and I love the fact that YouTube exists not because it means I can watch cats on skateboards but because I can revisit old TV ads that I remember fondly and struck a chord with me. Below is an old TV ad for the Prudential...

Over the years, I’ve heard people talk about a need for schools to teach people knowledge for life, or ‘life skills’, such as: How to fill in a form The most cost-effective ways to buy a car How banks make a profit How to cook a healthy meal, rather than biscuits or...

It’s not that I’m rubbish at playing Pictionary, more absolutely terrible, which is why my daughters enjoy watching me play it. I know in my head what my picture should look like but what emerges on the paper when it’s my turn rarely matches the image I’m seeing in my...