Everyone’s an educational expert, but it was ever thus

How to be an expertHave you noticed how everybody seems to be an expert on education these days? In fact, you only have to pick up a newspaper more or less any day of the week to find some minor celebrity saying something asinine like “Schools should teach kids how to stay safe online” (Really? What a great idea. How come we  didn’t think of that?!). I don’t take much notice of these people, but it does annoy me when they somehow get on to conference programmes.
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Should we welcome the nanocams?

I’m reading a short story by Ian Creasey called “The Edge of the Map”. In the world depicted by Creasey, automated cameras called “nanocams” take photos and newspapers (and other media, presumably) source their illustrations from the pool created by them. In other words, there is no need for specialist photographers.

This raises a number of interesting questions.

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