You might have noticed that there hasn’t been a new post on this blog for a while.

Why?

Well, it’s because the ode beta is, from today, being shut down.

After a strategic re-think we have been asked to build a bigger and better version that can take full advantage of the Pearson global network. But to do that ode development as a brand/blog/beta platform has to be stopped.

This means goodbye to ode as you know it. So I guess all that’s left is some thank yous.

  • Thanks to all our beta users and 3rd party content and platform partners for your support, energy, feedback and encouragement.
  • Thanks to all the bright and passionate folks we have met over the last year or so: you have opened our minds to any number of exciting challenges and ideas.
  • Thanks to Eylan Ezekiel for being first to find us.
  • Thanks to switched on people like Mark Berthelemy, Ewan Mackintosh, David Hicks, John Davitt , Dr Martyn Farrows and Ian Usher to name but a few for noticing us. People like them are true 21st century educators – it was a thrilling moment to come into the office to find we’d popped up on their radar. We always took it as the highest compliment. Like us they are people who have stepped up above the parapet and said: there are better ways to deliver technology to the modern student. They don’t accept mediocrity and they don’t expect it to be easy. But they do all share one common belief: positivity about the future of technology in education. And for that, we salute them.
  • Thanks to Jon Hicks for his tree.
  • Thanks to those people who took the time to talk to us at BETT, at conferences, at Teachmeet and most importantly in schools and colleges.
  • But most of all thanks to the team who have worked mightily hard on this project and had fun doing it. You can’t ask for more than that.

So what’s next?

ode as a brand, as a singular idea, is over. We have learned an enormous amount about how schools are entering the web 2.0 space.

To that end the team will now concentrate on building the new platform. This blog will re-emerge soon enough, probably with a different name but it’ll be the same old esoteric ramblings as before.

I hope anyone who followed us will step back into the conversation when I re-start it later this year – bigger, bolder and more “elearningy” than before.

Love,

The ode team

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.“

Theodore Roosevelt