It started today with the Sun. Keir is comfortable writing about education for heavyweights such as Holyrood or the Times Higher Education Supplement, so when he said he might have an article in the Sun newspaper I was open-jawed with surprise. But here it is in today's newspaper!
Now The Sun doesn't resemble Keir's normal publishing genre. For a start, it gives you 96 pages for 30p! Also, its paragraphs are short and its sentences even shorter. Even its words are short!
Impressively, Sun journalist Graeme Donohue had not only talked to Keir about the issue of pupils using computers in exams, but also had let him read what he intended to attribute to him before publishing it – a journalistic discipline that isn't easy to maintain on a weekly, let alone daily. And although it's mostly in Sun-speak, you can still hear Keir's authentic voice in the breakout quote "when I was a pupil, the introduction of the biro pen was deemed controversial". Quite.
The heart of the issue over whether using laptops, calculators or other aids leads to cheating is well summarised:
What constitutes cheating depends on what it is you are trying to test.
Anyway, half an hour later I was hearing Keir's authentic voice again, this time on Good Morning Scotland, which had obviously picked up this story from this morning's Sun and phone-interviewed him. The questions ranged over calculators and laptops, and felt less coherent than his Sun article, but perhaps I wasn't fully awake.