Brendan Wightman

Brendan Wightman taught for seven years before moving into a small ELT publishing start up. When that crashed and burned after two years, he joined Cambridge University Press in their joint venture with Hitachi Software (Cambridge-Hitachi) in 2004, an even bigger start up that sought to redefine the role of an old-school publisher in the wake of Tony Blair’s massive investment in education technology for British schools. He then moved on to Cambridge ELT, where he has worked in digital publishing for the last nine years, currently as Schools Digital publisher. Apart from the usual stuff a Digital Publisher does (commissioning, digital product design, etc.) he has also run hundreds of teacher-training workshops on technology throughout Europe and North Africa, presented at numerous conferences, and recently written an online technology course for Cambridge English Teacher. Importantly, any views expressed by Brendan are his own. He is guest writing this blog as an individual, and not as a representative of his employer.

Narratives of change in education

January 30, 2020May 12, 2014 by Brendan Wightman

A doctor and a teacher from the 19th century climb into a time machine (possibly built by a Silicon Valley dude trying to disrupt the past) and travel to the 20^th/21^st century. The doctor visits an operating theatre, where he witnesses triple-bypass heart surgery. He emerges from the experience in a state of rapturous wonderment at the achievements of modern science. The teacher finds himself, coincidently – this isn’t a set up – in a modern classroom, where he sees a chalkboard, some desks and books, and a fellow teacher in front of rows of children, dictating notes to them. However, he questions whether he’s really travelled in time at all – for surely, this classroom is almost identical to the one he left behind in a smog-filled Victorian metropolis?