About this website

HildaRuth and Torben have been working together in D&T education, on and off, for over 15 years. Our hope is that this website will allow us to bring together in a single place the things we are working on and thinking about, both together and individually.

In particular by doing some of our work and thinking more publicly we hope to draw in other colleagues from the D&T education community. The core things we plan to use the site for are:

• Blogging; we’ll use the blog to share our thoughts on various things in the broad areas of D&T and education as well as drawing attention to interesting things we find elsewhere on the web.
• Noting courses and other CPD activities such as network meetings that we are involved in running. We’ll also mention other events, such as conferences, that we might be either speaking at or planning to attend.
• Making available resources we have developed for teachers and|or pupils. We’ll also use this part of the website to share our plans for resource development and seek both commentary on these plans and support for the development work – such as help with trialling.
• Discussion around and publicity for other projects we are involved in.
• Sharing the reading we are doing. We have found, over the years, that discussing and sharing our reading has been an important route to developing and keeping fresh our thinking about D&T and education as well as helping us keep (each other) current with new developments. We want to share this reading and thinking more widely and we’ll be noting the books, papers, reports and articles that are stimulating us. You will also find, at the lower end of the right-hand column, on every page, links to some of the news sites and blogs that we find to be particularly useful sources.

We’ve included a section about us that also includes notes on some of the other colleagues in D&T that we work particularly closely with. And, although the site has the ability to comment on content built-in throughout, we’ve also provided the ability to contact us directly should you wish to discus something more privately or, for example, talk to us about consultancy possibilities.

To the top of the right-hand column you will find tools to help you follow activity on the site via email and|or RSS feed and, in HildaRuth’s case, a Twitter feed. In addition Torben’s posts are sent to Twitter and you can follow these @tsteeg,

As noted above, the site encourages readers to comment. This not a moderated site, but you will have to be registered with WordPress and have logged into the site to comment – and your first post will have to be approved by a moderator; after that your posts will appear immediately unless WordPress’s own filters detect suspected spam or abuse. We hope this provides a reasonable balance between ease of use|access and preventing the site being submerged in spam.

These are interesting times for D&T and, though the claim that this is an ancient ‘Chinese curse’ seems dubious, the subject’s future can seem precarious. However we believe that there are opportunities in the current curriculum and political landscapes for D&T education to be revitalised and for fresh approaches to content and pedagogy to be explored. We hope to use this site to gather together with colleagues who are interested in joining us in, and helping to guide, this exploration.

HildaRuth & Torben, January 2013