40thiev.es Backup Blog

KISC Part 4: Winter Is Coming (And Gone)

2012-01-28T21:27:00.001Z

Where I was skiing on Christmas Day. Jealous much? ;)

First of all, I have to apologise for that awful title... I couldn't resist (Here's where the reference is from, if you're wondering)

So yeah, I was back.... again. Pretty much the same as last year - 2 weeks, one week working, one week off. The big difference this year was the lack of guests. Unfortunately there were only 9 people booked on Ski Weeks, compared with about 200 last year. That meant I wasn't able to get any Ski Guiding this year, which is a real shame because it's possibly my favourite job at the Centre. No matter though, I still love being back and seeing all my friends :)

It meant that all of my work this year was in the Chalet, either in House (cleaning the Chalet) or Catering. Bit different to my normal Programme day. And a lot more tiring - big props to those who do it all day, every day.

Anyway, enough of my whining. Below are all of the photos I took (I know there's only a few - I kept forgetting to grab my camera). The first few are just from one of my lunch breaks skiing at Oeschinensee, and the rest are from A day off in Shilthorn.

See the full gallery on Posterous

I managed to get a quite a few lunch breaks and a day or two out, and the snow was pretty excellent most of the time. I really enjoyed skiing during Christmas Day lunch break - the snow was pretty nice, and I was skiing off-piste (which I'm still terrible at) with a few ridiculously good skiers. I didn't hit any trees which was a definite possibility.

I also went to Shilthorn for the day - a resort best known for it's revolving restaurant at the top of the hill, as seen in On Her Majesty's Secret Service. It's right opposite the Eiger-Mönch-Jungfrau range which you can see in the background of some of the photos. It's not until you see the North Face properly do you really get a real sense of what it must be like. Truly awesome. The snow on the Shilthorn was epic. I genuinely lost my left ski for about 20 minutes after faceplanting (I told you I wasn't so good with the off-piste) just before I was about to pop back onto the piste. The off-piste area at Shilthorn is really nice, especially compared to where I've been most of my life (the 3 Vallées in France) where every inch of mountain is pisted to within an inch of it's life. My legs were pretty dead after a few hours of that...

Thanks again KISC for being so damn awesome. Not sure when I'll next see you, but I'm already looking forward to it.

Posted via email from Ali's Kandersteg Adventure

Untitled

2012-01-17T21:44:00.001Z

(Image credit: x-ray delta one on Flickr)

I'm cautiously optimistic about Michael Gove's reform of ICT to become more like Computer Science. It's deperately needed (and has been for about 10 years) as outlined in these articles in the BBC and the Guardian:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-16493929
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/jan/11/michael-gove-boring-it-lessons

I personally feel like I was massively let down by IT lessons when I was at school. I never felt like IT lessons were remotely fun or interesting - they were typing lessons merely that taught us how to be good worker drones. I was far more interested in science (which I still love), and so I started Biochemistry at Cardiff. I found that this wasn't the subject for me, and started to become more and more interested in the web and it's possibilities. Now I'm studying Web Technologies and I love mucking around with code. I'm extremely lucky to be able to do switch like that, and I'm sure that there's others out there who aren't.

The revamp is great news as it seems to focus much more on creating rather than only consuming, a path that I think has dangerous consequences.

However (you knew it was coming), I'm not convinced about the so called "open source" curriculum. Feels very much like a buzz word to please the geeks, rather than a concerted effort to change across the country. If "schools and teachers [have] freedom over what and how to teach" what's to stop a school that is unmotivated and/or incapable of updating the curriculum from doing so?

If we're serious about creating a new generation of makers and hackers then the government needs to step up and provide a concrete curriculum. I realise that this top-down approach is very much against the hacker mentality, but I worry that we've neglected technology education for so long that we've lost the skills to teach it.

I'm also skeptical of how the government will handle this guidance, and only listen to the huge corporations that have pushed hard for this. While we must thank them for bankrolling this change Microsoft, Google, IBM and others should have equal input as (real) open source initiatives and small scale hackers. Raspberry Pi springs to mind. As does Apps for Good. And Codecademy.

So that's education sorted. Now we just need to overturn the Digital Economy Act and invest heavily in internet infrastructure, and we'll be golden :)

40thiev.es Backup Blog

KISC Part 4: Winter Is Coming (And Gone)

Untitled

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3 months of awesome