Waraku Education

XO-3 OLPC Tablet

2012-01-09T08:30:00.001+10:30

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9223242/OLPC_s_XO_3_tablet_to_debut_at_CES

News of a cheap robust tablet peaks my curiosity. Recently I was talking to Bill Kerr which rekindled my interest in trialing the use of the OLPC in the APY Lands.

My recent observation visit to Ernabella, on the Lands, indicated that a number of families had tried computer purchases but they did not last due to the harsh conditions. This map indicates that some neighbouring settlements to Ernabella may be having a go with the OLPC.

There are a couple of things that are of special interest with this tablet.

Charging and power saving options
The literacy trials that are part of its release and the fact that MIT Media Lab (behind the development of Scratch) are part of that trial
The testing of ways to promote self learning and critical thinking

I think that I will settle into Ernabella at the start of the year, keep an eye out for the release of the tablets and purchase one to check out as soon as I can.

I wonder if the work I am doing with the development of a Pitjantjatjara spell check dictionary for Libre and Open Office can mesh with the tablet in some way?

Match sound with word

2011-12-20T12:49:00.003+10:30

I've created a prototype game that can be used to reinforce the association of a sound with the appropriate written word. This is a game that could be hacked and used for the teaching of literacy in any language but my interest is for the teaching of minority languages like Pitjantjatjara.

The sounds could be someone saying the words in the list.

http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/watiwara/2228356

Outback Aborigines in no rush to log on

2011-07-22T09:59:00.004+09:30

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/outback-aborigines-in-no-rush-to-log-on/story-fn59niix-1226098609732

"Only about one-third of the 48 people involved in the research had been online -- despite the potential for the internet to help people live on remote traditional lands while still having access to information and services."

From 2012 I will be teaching in Ernabella and one of my roles is ICT. Seems that there might be some work to be done but first I have some questions.

Are there cultural issues or other issues with older people learning from younger people?
What sort of bandwidth and access is there currently in the APY Lands?
How is this current capacity being utilised?
What is the potential for growth (eg. dual ISP)?
What are other agencies currently doing (eg TAFE)?
How much and what sort of collaboration exists between DECS and TAFE?
What is the driver for people accessing the internet? To what extent is curiosity the driver for indigenous people currently accessing the internet in these remote areas?
Would some sort of variation of my recycle scheme work or be helpful?

Course Design for Indigenous Students

2011-03-30T09:41:00.003+10:30

The paper "Design for a Culturally Affirming Indigenous Computer Literacy Course" provides some good advice for the design of courses for Indigenous students.

The key points

The hidden curriculum is alive and well. Indigenous students feel it and react to the assimilationist nature of our courses, even though we do not plan it to be that way.

The use of ICT in all courses can be a great asset because it can be used to facilitate

greater use of visual-spatial learning assets
tactile
patient (activities can be repeated without anyone needing to feel frustrated) and with lots of positive reinforcement
can have lots of multimedia
allows teacher to become coach on the side and removes the temptation to be judgmental and so students getting more 1 on 1 attention that delivering to the group style of teaching
learning materials can be more easily customised to suit.
learning can be more easily negotiated.
opens the door to my project based learning
can be used to facilitate collaborative activities
facilitates lots of options for creative expression
feedback without shame - basically a computer delivering a quiz result is better than a teacher doing it.

Strong case for eLearning I reckon.

SA TfEL and Anangu schools

2011-03-07T07:21:00.009+10:30

South Australian schools have recently received a lovely new glossy "South Australian Teaching for Effective Learning Framework Guide". More information about this is here

The actual framework is here.

Our glossy is 88 pages.

The first part (domain) of the framework deals with "Learning for effective teaching" and it was element 1.3 that caught my attention. Element 1.3 states "Participate in professional learning communities and networks" and of all the 6 elements in this domain I see this one as the one that facilitates the others.

I've been participating in online education communities since the early 2000's and have been teaching since the late 70's. I've had a go at establishing some niche communities over that time. What I have learned since my involvement in these online state, national and international communities make all of my professional learning prior to that look pale.

This involvement has facilitated

1.1 - Understand how self and others learn
1.2 - Develop deep pedagogical and content knowledge
1.5 - Discuss educational purpose and policy
1.6 - Design, plan and organise for learning and teaching.

Having taught in a very isolated school at the start of my teaching career (Fregon Anangu School) I wondered how this might translate for them.

When I was there we had a single radio telephone for the entire community. The school got one after a while. The mail plane flies in each Tuesday and Thursday. Alice Spings was the nearest centre and was a seven hour drive. That's it.

It was this experience that inspired the title for my blog - 'Waraku Education' which in translation means the education belonging to the tall man.

These days the communities have broadband and phones, and some even have mobile phone coverage. However, teachers in the area perform in a way that is different to the main stream and so I wondered where the opportunities to immerse themselves in professional communities might exist.

The OZTEACHERS list is where I began.

I made the following post

Hi
Can anyone point me to some functioning online ESL teacher communities please?
Thanks
Peter

Within 5 days I had 7 responses. Some to the list and some private. The following is a collation of the ideas that I got.

--------------

Australian education and training professionals with an online networking and profile space...
http://me.edu.au/c/ESL

About Me.edu.au...
http://www.edna.edu.au/edna/go/me

ESL Community Australia ... Google Search...
http://www.google.com.au/#q=esl+community&hl=en&biw=1579&bih=704&prmd=ivns&source=lnt&tbs=ctr:countryAU&cr=countryAU&sa=X&ei=x-xtTfCSCoSecK-O7O8M&ved=0CAcQpwUoAQ&fp=2a63e5032ee47a81

ESL Worldwide... Google Search...
http://www.google.com.au/#hl=en&source=hp&biw=1596&bih=704&q=esl&aq=f&aqi=g10&aql=&oq=&fp=5305acaac95b6150

--------------

Here is a good one
http://me.edu.au/c/ESL

and another one (not sure how active this is)
http://www.edulists.com.au/mailman/listinfo/esl

--------------

this may well be a good place to start
http://evasimkesyan.edublogs.org/2011/03/05/songs-to-teach-grammar/
along
with the #tefl community on twitter.

--------------

Here's a list of Edu-Qld emailing lists. One is simply called, 'ESL' and currently has 246 subscribers so i guess it's a fairly vibrant community.

http://discussions.eq.edu.au/cgi-bin/wa?INDEX

Many of these email-communities look interesting and maybe of assistance.

They're free for everyone, anywhere and have a great professional spirit.

--------------

Links of Interest to Students & Teachers of English as a Second Language
http://iteslj.org/links/

--------------

Even in geographically isolated places, teachers need not feel professionally isolated anymore.

I wonder if an APY teacher community is worth thinking about as well?

Adding a language/locale for Pitjantjatjara Dictionary

2011-02-28T20:05:00.004+10:30

http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Adding_a_new_language_or_locale

This link itemises what I need to add a language/locale

The numeric Microsoft® locale identifier (LCID), here informally usually referred as MS-LangID, for attribution used by the core code and also needed for import and export of MS-Office document file formats.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/0h88fahh(v=vs.85).aspx

There does not appear to be one.

The ISO 639 language code

Here it is - http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/documentation.asp?id=pjt

PJT

The ISO 3166 country code

Here it is - http://www.iso.org/iso/english_country_names_and_code_elements

A mapping between those two.

No idea what this means

A language list box entry.

This is also Greek to me

Whether the language uses complex text layout (CTL).

NO - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_Text_Layout

Whether the language is written from right to left (RTL).

Pitjantjatjara spell checker

2011-02-28T19:12:00.004+10:30

I've started work on making a Pitjantjatjara dictionary for LibreOffice/Open Office. On Friday I met with a linguist by the name of Paul Eckert. He has been working on a bible translation for the past 25 years and gave me a list of words that appear in that translation project. This provides an excellent starting point.

Some of the letters have an underline and so we need to use Unicode fonts that support these characters.

I have joined the languages mailing list for LibreOffice and asked for advice about what to do next.

The best things in life are free - Software Freedom Day

2010-09-23T06:56:00.004+09:30

Sometimes people say in response to free software, you get what you pay for. They are thinking about free beer and not freedom. The best things in life are free and often free in both senses of the word, free as in beer and free as in freedom.

We had a nice article in todays Borderwatch. In fact we have had quite good media coverage about Software Freedom Day along with the visit to Mount Gambier by Richard Stallman, the Free Software Foundation founder. Each year interest grows in the event and the idea of free software. The numbers we have come to our event increase each year. We know that 500 visitors this year is ultra conservative as a library person indicated that the figure could be as high as 1000.

It concerns me the number of people that talk to us that are not aware that there are these free (as in freedom but also as in free beer) options. They are keen to hear about them and keen to give them a go. We heard about vulnerable older people going to computer shops to find out why they could not access attachments from their grandchildren to be sold expensive proprietary software when their needs could be met with free software. They were not aware of their options and the thing is that school is all about giving people options.

I was proud to overhear people on the day talking very positively about the free software that we give out at Grant High and saying that it made good sense and was a good idea.

This SFD event is a timely reminder for us to think about using the free software in our classes and encouraging its use. Richard Stallman advocates that schools should only use free software. While he has a very good point, the softened stance of 'Learning with the free software first' means that students can continue with their learning beyond school unencumbered and the door is open for other software to be introduced later if needs be. For many people, the free software serves their needs well.

The language that we use is also important. We use a wordprocessor not word, a spreadsheet not excel, a graphics package not adobe, etc.

Please consider

How to completely kill sharing

2010-08-26T17:19:00.001+09:30

The old SSABSA email lists worked but were becoming slow with limited conversations. There was not much happening but there was a glimmer of action. A little mouth to mouth could bring it back to life. At the start of 2010 we got the new SACE website and to support sharing they have a clear link to 'Connect'. Good, they were seeing the importance of this sharing and it was right there on the front page. The system however changed from an email list to a forum based service. With this new service we can get email updates if we know how to make that happen in the forum settings. I suspect that teachers by and large do not know how to do this. This means that these teachers would have to actually go to the website, login, go to the forum to see if there had been any action. We can no longer post via email but instead must log into the SACE website and go to the forum to do this. It has become too hard and too complicated and what conversations there were are now silent. It is dead. It is no more. Deceased. Gone to see its maker. Es ist kaputt. Fix it dear Henry.

--
Free and Open education for all

Why is it important to share?

2010-08-26T10:10:00.001+09:30

I'm watching the Ewan McIntosh Masterclass "Professional Learning and Productivity". I couldn't attend and so it is good to be able to download the session. He is currently creating a blog post using email via Posterous in his presentation. I've had a posterous account for some time and not really utilised it. [putting that on the to do list and intending to post this via posterous]. My blogging has dropped off of late because 'I've lacked time' (and he has made an issue of this that has stirred my pot) and he has made the point that this professional sharing is really important in finding ways to improve our practice. This improvement in practice is the single biggest factor that impacts on student learning.

So, why is it important to share? Is it the sharing as such or is it the consequent conversations. I could lurk around teachers that are sharing and learn a lot, so why share myself? Isn't that sharing risky for me? I wonder what motivates the other educational professional sharers? Sharing is the way that we learn best.

How to share? I'm back to thinking about blogging more regularly. Must also think about class blogs. I'm really interested in ways to bring parents back into the school, like it was 30 odd years ago, this time virtually. One of the key things here is that leaders need to be doing this and showing by example so Principal blogs are very important.

Making it easy. I must more use of posterous to make this task easier or just use email to send my blog posts maybe.

Getting others involved. I'm currently making a presentation for Reidy Park Primary school about online collaboration. I wanted to say that everyone should have a professional blog. Ewan has reminded me that I need offer invitations. [makes modification to presentation]

--
Free and Open education for all

Virtual Staffroom - the future of professional organisations questioned

2010-08-20T07:23:00.008+09:30

It was rather impromptu but last night I was once again part of a discussion that today is published on the Virtual Staffroom. It was interesting the way that this happened. About a half hour before the recording Chris Skyped me to indicate that it was happening and come along. I was, at the time, in a training planning meeting for a school where the focus was on web2 and collaboration. My planning partners reckoned, in jest, that I set this up but felt that it was a great example of what we had just been talking about.

The podcast discussion was all about the use of free software in education. I had to leave the discussion early as I had another online meeting to attend to discuss arrangements for Richard Stallman visiting my city in Sept 17th. He is one of the founders of this free software thinking. His statement about "Why schools should exclusively use free software" is a worthy and very quick read.

It felt like dominoes falling, the celestial bodies were aligning.

The dominoes keep on falling.

This has got me to thinking about the place that professional organisations have in the education food chain.

One of the things I've been struggling with for some time is the value of professional organisations now that we have access to the 'big thinkers' and 'movers and shakers' in our fields via Twitter, blogs, podcasts, vodcasts, .....................

For people that are connected in this way, when was the last time you learnt something new via a professional organisation? and if you did, was the cost of membership and attendance at the event worth it?

My guess is that the professional organisations are struggling more than ever with membership and conference attendance. Perhaps one of the key benefits of these events is the chance of meeting F2F some of the characters you have been mixing with online, but I notice that people are doing this via Twitter now as well with broadcasts like - I'll be in [location name] tomorrow, catch up for coffee at [venue name] at 2:00pm.

So, professional organisations, what is their future? Are they really dieing? Should we persist or let them die?

Scratch - The Ducks Guts

2010-05-05T07:17:00.001+09:30

I have posted previously that I think that Scratch is fantastic. It’s now the Ducks Guts. I downloaded the latest version in preparation for Scratch Day (http://limestonecoast-scratchers.wikispaces.com/Scratch+Day+2010)

It now has string manipulation commands, command to gain input for variables via the keyboard and commands to control lego.

You can create and manipulate lists (arrays)

Linux version now also available along with PC and Mac.

Release notes - http://info.scratch.mit.edu/Scratch_1.4_Release_Notes

I believe that there is now no better tool to teach programming available.. Impossible to make syntax errors, only logical errors and programming is about thinking and creativity so it’s the Ducks Guts.

I would love to work with someone who is an authority on the new SACE curriculum statement to determine if we can use Scratch for SACE2.

I would not be surprised if more tertiary/unis pick up Scratch as a way of introducing the thinking around programming via Scratch.

Pupils 'must manage online risks'

2010-02-17T21:03:00.003+10:30

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/8505914.stm

Pupils given a greater degree of freedom to surf the internet at school are less vulnerable to online dangers in the long-term, inspectors say.

This is not rocket science.

"Managed" online systems were more successful than "locked" ones at safeguarding pupils' safety, they said.

I would like to find out more about what a 'managed' school looks like.

Into 'Flow' but not going with the flow

2009-10-31T07:44:00.004+10:30

We recently had a visit by Stewart Von Itzstein, Computer Science lecturer from Uni SA. He talked to the students regarding some myths around the IT industry and options for courses and careers. He then launched into a mini lecture so that students could get a feel of what the learning might be like, the subject, game design.

Very enjoyable but the concept of 'Flow' has stuck in my mind. Game designers want gamers to get into a state of flow. I want students to get into a state of flow. I easily get into a state of flow and find it hard to emerge from it.

Basically flow is where you are totally absorbed in an activity, to a point that outside stimuli is often ignored. It's a fantastic place to be and I'm going to research this a little more and use it as another of my coaching tools along with 'The Shark and the Sponge Story' and 'The Learning Curve Story'.

PAGES liked FOSS

2008-10-28T19:06:00.006+10:30

Today I spoke with the PAGES group which is a group of Employment Service organisations in our community.

The seed for this came from Penny Richardson of 'Employment Access' here in Mount Gambier. She attended our regional Software Freedom Day event in Penola. Penny felt that FOSS might be of interest to clients of the various Employment Services.

My presentation took all of 15 minutes and I gave each of the attendees a copy of the OpenDisc. Some people wondered what the catch was. My approach was to talk about removing the blocks to learning and to talk about access and equity. We have been doing this at Grant High School for the past 6 or more years where each enrolment gets a copy of FOSS software and we also ensure that this software is installed on all computers in the school. General consensus seemed to be that FOSS was of use to the Employment Services clients.

I posed the question of whether we should approach the City Library to perhaps have copies of the OpenDisc available for loan. Helen Strickland indicated that she would take the disc to the council with the view of them distributing it to citizens for free. She felt that it would be consistent with the council vision of building a 'learning community'.

On the new libary page of the City Council website is this quote - "The Council’s Strategic Plan 2007 – 2012 incorporates a ‘Lifelong Community Learning’ strategy"

Software Freedom Day report

2008-09-21T19:01:00.002+09:30

Last year we held Software Freedom Day at my school, Grant High School. This year we held it at Penola High School - another FOSS oriented school in our region about 50km away.

I think that many of the SFD events across the globe happen in capital cities. Ours is regional and in a country where we have some large distances.

WE had about 50 visitors with a good percentage of those travelling 30km or more. Of those there were a number that travelled 100 km or more. I think that maybe the biggest might have been from Kingston which is about 130km.

This provides evidence to the success of the emails that Jason from Penola (Event team leader for 2008) sent out to schools and also to the work that Robert did in drumming up interest in the radio and paper news media. Nice work.

Schools can be regarded as societies agent for conformity. They are also societies change agent where we want people to conform to new directions or values. Making schools aware of the choices that they have regarding FOSS is really important in that context.

A feature of the event was the number of school teachers who came and travelled some distances for. When I talk to teachers about FOSS I invariably get HUGE agreement on the philosophical reasons why we want students to have access to this stuff. They are BIG on access and equity and invariably ask why so much money is paid for other software when there is this stuff available that they can just give to the kids. People from the broader community ask the same question but often in the context of why so much public money is spent on software that may not be necessary, as they look around the computer lab classroom that then event is run in.

I think that there will be a number of new schools who will be giving away the OpenEducation Disc to students soon as a consequence of our work on the day.

I did notice that none of the ICT coaches in the region showed up and so perhaps we need to target these sorts of people who carry some regional influence next time with special invitations.

The people who came, often also asked "Why haven't I heard about this before?". They sounded almost like they had been cheated out of something. This was a question asked by teachers as much as other visitors. In response I generally asked them the question "how do you find out about what you can put on a computer?" Many came to the conclusion that it was through sales people and so they were able to draw conclusions from their answer fairly easily.

From some I got the question 'So what is in it for you?'. Being a teacher I could rant about the access and equity thing for students and how I wanted to create an environment where students could continue with their learning outside of school unencumbered. They invariably saw the sense in that and felt comfortable with the explanation.

The other thing that I heard a lot was thankyou. I felt that these words were very geniune and sincere. Thanks for putting on this event and thanks for showing me this stuff. Thanks for giving me these options.

Last year, being the event organiser, I did not get to feel and observe these things as I was too wrapped up with making the event happen. My sincere thanks to Jason for being the event organiser this year.

Software Freedom Day - 08

2008-05-26T08:20:00.001+09:30

I am on the SFI board that organises “Software Freedom Day”, a global event that supports local communities to celebrate and educate how Free Open Source Software can benefit people in their area. This year it is on September 20^th.

FOSS fits well with the ideal 'Free and Open Education' by being able to give the learning tools to students so that they can use, share and build upon them. Collaboration and sharing fits well with this ideal and FOSS.

One of our objectives for 2008 is to better support schools to host Software Freedom Day events. For schools already making use of FOSS, it is a great way to help their community understand what and why they are doing this and to involve their FOSS communities in the process.

I would like to start some conversations about this so that we can better understand how to help schools participate and to share stories, resources and experience. If you want, you could put these ideas straight onto the SFD wiki

http://softwarefreedomday.org/Resources_to_support_schools

Schools give communities options

2008-05-09T07:45:00.001+09:30

Reflecting on the parent teacher night last night I am filled with satisfaction. Having predominantly taught at year 11 and 12 levels, I was given a year 9 class this year. I was filled with fear at this and that fact that it was all boys. It is now the class that I would fight to keep. Their enthusiasm and curiosity fills me with joy.

Last night I explained to parents that the course is structured around various activities that last about a fortnight. The entire content is on my Moodle site (www.watiwara.org) and so there is flexibility for students to spend more time on topics of interest to them and dig deeper and to also work through topics of less interest quickly. I explained that I have chosen, in all cases, to use software that is free for students to take home and continue with their learning there.

Parents were thrilled with this and each had a story of something that their son had taken home and was almost obsessed with. In one case the student had hooked his mother into the activity and she spent time talking about how much she loved it.

One parent asked 'How does one find out about these things?' and then proceeded to answer her question with “I suppose that's why we go to school”. Schools have a responsibility to show students and our community options.

LinkBlip ur Yakkle - chat, VoIP, file and screen sharing

2008-02-28T20:08:00.005+10:30

The following Yakkle link makes use of LinkBlip. It sends me an email when someone clicks on it. If that is a problem for you then use the full URL link at the bottom. I am thinking that LinkBlip might be a method that I could use to test the effectiveness of the communication of the resources I share with staff at my school.

Yakkle is a tool that allows you to chat, make VoIP calls, send files and receive, and has a built in screen sharing facility. Its free. I wonder how many people we can simultaneously communicate with or is it 1:1. The FAQ states that it integrates with Google Chat and Jabber. This seems to be worth a look.

http://www.yakkle.com/whatsyakkle.html

Google Apps for schools demo

2008-02-23T22:36:00.013+10:30

A search for videos using the criteria 'google apps in schools' produced some interesting results. One was the Google@school - Google Apps Technical Q&A but the more engaging and informative for me was Chris Iremonger speaks at Google@school - Google Apps Demo

Chris Iremonger is a very skilled presenter and comes across as confidently representing Google Inc. I felt that he could be trusted. I was encouraged by the many and consistent references to the importance of open standards. It was more than clear that Google wants to make open the possibility for people to integrate their solutions with them and so open standards are central.

This particular video was posted 2 years ago and has had only 673 views. This video needs to be viewed by every education technology strategist/coordinator/CEO/? within education sectors. There are surely more than 673 of them. As we are thinking about the future and options for our schools, this would have to be one of the options we explore.

There are lots of questions and considerations for us to consider but some of the questions that could be asked include

Is it technically feasible to offer this to the staff and students in our schools?
What would the transition look like?
What are the pros and cons?
Could offering the basic apps in this way allow us to make use of lower spec machines for longer?
Are there security or privacy issues that need to be considered?
Would administering this be easier than edumail, ms office, ..........?

I appreciated the fact that the Google Apps solution provided options and choice and it was clear that the developers had a grip on the needs of educational institutions and the protection of their students.

I was hit with the notion - what if they decided that education had to pay sometime down the track? Provide the service for free for now to produce 'lockin'. Hmm. The whole time that education had made use of the free service they were also eliminating the alternatives from growing. Students should not be presented with hurdles (legal and/or financial) to continuing with their learning outside of the school and we need to approach this with vision so that we can achieve this in the short and long term. I guess that the use of open standards throughout the Google Apps means that 'lockin' is less likely to be an issue.

I like the way that collaboration is built into all aspects of the suite of Google apps. This was very evident in the video and begged the question, why would a school pay for Groove?

The video runs for about 60 minutes and at the 51 minute mark Chris talks about the upgrade process. He states that when they update software it allows the user to continue with their operations. When they log out and then log back on they then take advantage of the upgrade. Seamless, nice.

Scratch with Year 9 boys

2008-02-22T12:50:00.002+10:30

I have a class of year 9 boys doing IT. We decided to have a play with Scratch and are well into it. I asked them to write down three words that best describes their experience with Scratch to date.

The following words were used more than once
Boring 3
Cool 4
Exciting 2
Fun 11
Good way 2
Interesting 7
Learn 3

36 of the words used were positive and 6 were negative.

The psychology of apology

2008-02-15T21:26:00.004+10:30

The recent sorry day has created some curiosity in me about how apology works and the psychology of apology. The video of the sorry speech can be viewed on the ABC website.

Using the simple search term 'psychology of apology' some interesting links were uncovered that are useful in fleshing this subject out. There is a brief statement titled "Group-based Guilt and Apology in Australia" in the School of Psychology ANU website.

collective or group-based guilt is a real phenomena which seems to produce real consequences. Despite the views of some prominent political leaders Australians can and do feel sorry for things for which they are not personally responsible for even though their group is. The research also shows that group-based guilt predicts support for apology. These findings is consistent with the social identity approach, an approach which has many leading exponents in the School of Psychology at ANU.

A conference promotion scheduled for Feb 2002 titled "Apologies: Mourning the Past and Ameliorating the Future" is great for the questions that are posed. For people who want to really flesh out this topic, these questions are great conversation starters. Some of these follow

In what ways is apology related to acknowledgement and forgiveness?
To what extent is apology an admission of guilt and responsibility?
What is the difference between apology and atonement?
Apology and repentance?
Forgiveness and redemption?
What roles do victims, perpetrators, and larger moral communities play in the negotiation of apology and forgiveness?
In what ways is apology a perpetrators act?
In what ways is it a victims act?
What psychological models help us to understand the transactions that lie at the core of apology?
How do apologies affect victims and perpetrators?
What are the psychological costs of apology?
What have empirical studies taught us about apology as a strategy for conflict resolution?
What place have religion and theology given to apology?
How well do recent acts of inter-group apology fit with religious understandings of restorative justice?

Pick the brain blog has two posts of interest

5 Steps to an Effective Apology which is basically dealing with what makes a good apology.
How to Learn from Mistakes post basically states that learning involves making mistakes and sometimes those mistakes come at a cost to others. Good learners may therefore need to be good at making apologies.

If you’ve made mistakes that harm other people, it is important to offer a dignified apology. Be clear that it was an unfortunate incident that will not be repeated. A good apology can go along way to restoring trust.

Electronic forms and surveys

2008-02-11T20:08:00.000+10:30

Collecting and analysing data is a critical step in the improvement cycle. Doing this electronically has the potential of shortening this stage so that we can more rapidly move into the action stages where the actual improvement happens.

There are a range of tools available for this including

I like the idea of Google Docs because it is free and integrated into their overall application service. Google Docs provides an online wordprocessor, spreadsheet, presentation tool, and free storage. JotForm also creates forms in this way but these are not integrated integrated into other applications.

Google Docs
Using Google Docs, online survey forms can be created that allow for a variety of questions types including

text
paragraph text
multiple choice
checkboxes
choose from list

You will need a Google login to start creating a form but the people that you want to fill out your form or survey will not.

Once the survey is prepared you enter the recipient email addresses and wait for the results to flow back in.

The results are automatically added to a spreadsheet ready for further analysis.

Video showing how to create a survey form

Written instructions

Some written and easy to follow instructions can be found here and also here
For those that are fairly literate then these very simple and brief instructions from Google are great.

Upping the anti

2008-01-28T13:53:00.000+10:30

The Linux.conf.au started today in Melbourne. The Education Mini.conf had two presenters that were to deliver via Second Life. Leigh Blackall from Otago Polytechnic in New Zealand and myself from Grant High School in Mount Gambier, South Australia. There were three different Second Life Venues to be used and the presenters at the live venue in Melbourne were going to present at the venue simultaneously with Second Life. DNS issues in Melbourne meant that the Second Life participants and the Melbourne venue could not come together.

Image 1 - My avatar is in the foreground of the image as I waited to hear news of what was happening in Melbourne.

Bugger. The good side is that I met a bunch of people, got a lot of experience in playing within second life and Leigh got to present to the group that dropped in via this virtual medium. The people at the venue in Melbourne would not have got this, bugger for them.

I've been thinking about Leigh's presentation which was about institutional change, largely from the top down. He talked about changing the way that the institution dealt with IP so that the rules facilitated openness and collaboration. He is encouraging teachers to have a strong online presence which was helpful for credibility, collaboration and improving the institutions Google ranking and public profile. He is looking for a mass of about 15% of the staff initially to be active and believes that when this is achieved that there will be significant changes to the organisation that follow. In the mean time there are communication issues within the institution. He stated that the changes where prohibitive to many teachers - too much of a shift.

My presentation ended up going ahead. Melbourne could hear me, I couldn't hear them. Janet did a great job of text chat which gave some feedback to me as I was speaking amongst all of the ums and r's. I imagine podcasting and radio broadcasting to create the same feelings. It is very difficult to speak when there is so little feedback.

My presentation was aimed at tackling this issue of creating more openness with the students and so bottom up. Providing collaborative infrastructure and support for students to use gives power to the students to learn despite the methods used by their teachers. I have seen on numerous occasions that where students are using tools or showing preference to work in certain ways then teachers want to take notice and optimise on it because they can see the opportunity for better learning. This is upping the anti and might even work better in conjunction with Leigh's plans.

Good on the organisers of the education.miniConf for giving this method of delivery a go. Nothing ventured, nothing gained and while everything did not work I personally gained a lot. I found that I need practise talking to an imaginary audience if I do more of this.

In the second image my avatar, Wati Voss is presenting to the audience in Melbourne via Hazelbyte Hax.

We're in for a hard time

2008-01-28T07:20:00.000+10:30

Economic oversteering is the latest Mark Shuttleworth post. He does a great job of explaining the current economic climate and it is clear that the next few years are going to be painful. This is a time of finding ways to improve productivity and reduce expenditure.

With the issues around Vista (instability and resource requirements) and Office 2007 (interoperability) there are many saying that the effort to roll out these products is not worth it. Pain without gain. In this article "Windows Vista, Office 2007 Expelled From British Schools" they report

The agency said U.K. schools can consider using Vista or Office 2007 software only when they are buying new batches of PCs. Even then, however, they're advised to take a long looked at alternatives based on Linux and other open source products, such as the OpenOffice.org desktop package.

Makes sense.

At the end of 2006 the following report was published, commissioned by the EU as I understand it. Study on the: Economic impact of open source software on innovation and the competitiveness of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector in the EU

It is 287 pages long. The main recommendation relating to education is found on page 216.

9.5.5. Education: avoid lifetime vendor lock-in for students
The reason it seems desirable to promote the use of FLOSS in education (ICT education and more generally all educational activities that have a bearing on the cultural relationship with information technology) is threefold:

1. It is obviously likely to have a strong impact on the future usage of FLOSS products and the build-up of the related skills.

2. It builds up essential ICT skills rather than the knowledge of specific applications from specific vendors (leading to the current locked-in-for-life situation, where vendor lock-in applies not only to organisations but to individuals who have typically not chosen their software but been provided it for free by schools).

3. It is likely to install an attitude towards information technology that favours the ability to create and actively participate rather than just consume – i.e. the scenarios under which FLOSS is most likely to deliver a strong positive economic and societal impact, by encouraging collaborative prosumer usage and a reflexive attitude on usage and the technology that supports it.

There are some specific references to productivity gains here. "It is likely to install an attitude towards information technology that favours the ability to create and actively participate rather than just consume" is clearly one of those. The technology on its own will not do this IMHO but we are talking about a creative attitude, a thinking process of can do and how can we make this work. Is it my hobby horse of hacker thinking?

There are short term and long term economic advantages. The short term is that schools spend less on software. As the students use this software and leave school, the long term advantages are seen in businesses around the country.

So there we have it. Economic and productivity improvements possible for Australian Schools - doing our bit to reduce the hard time ahead.

All the best for Linux.conf.au starting today in Melbourne. I am sure that the Education Mini.conf happening today will be talking about openness in education not only in terms of software but more broadly in terms of content and collaboration.

I feel like an ant

2008-01-19T19:29:00.000+10:30

I love TED and the presentation "How do ants know what to do?" by Deborah Gordon affirmed that once again.

Bill Kerr is sceptical about Web2.0 but I reckon that it is the best thing since sliced bread. The last few years has seen my professional learning simply soar. I am frustrated with school workshops where they bring in highly paid presenters where we could be accessing international level ideas for free whenever. What a waste of school finances, state finances and my time. Various conferences are not much different although the F2F networking is cool. Web2.0 connects me with a network of ants that let me know what is going on in small byte sized packets that are easy to digest.

A bit like the ants in "How do ants know what to do?" I touch antenna and crudely determine what people are talking about and this guides me in what direction I could be looking in and what task I might need to perform. A bit simplistic - fair enough. I don't read anywhere near all of my email or RSS feeds. I look for trends and things that are out of the ordinary.

Is the FOSS debate null and void?

2008-01-19T13:23:00.000+10:30

George Siemens posted "Is the IT department Dead?". He pointed to a review of a book written by Nicholas Carr titled The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google.

I am interested in this from three perspectives.
How this thinking impacts on

ICT in schools
IT as a subject of study
skills and careers in my community

Some comments from the review

"The IT department is dead, and it is a shift to utility computing that will kill this corporate career path."

Carr's rationale is that utility computing companies will replace corporate IT departments much as electric utilities replaced company-run power plants in the early 1900s.

Carr explains that factory owners originally operated their own power plants. But as electric utilities became more reliable and offered better economies of scale, companies stopped running their own electric generators and instead outsourced that critical function to electric utilities.

I reckon that Carr has a point and that this thinking has implications for the skills debate we have going at the moment.

He says even IT professionals are indistinguishable from one company to the next. "Most perform routine maintenance chores — exactly the same tasks that their counterparts in other companies carry out," he says.

Maybe the job of IT professional has become just plain dull?

Carr offers a grimmer future for IT professionals. He envisions a utility computing era where "managing an entire corporate computing operation would require just one person sitting at a PC and issuing simple commands over the Internet to a distant utility."

The nature of software programming is evolving and morphing. We are currently lamenting the shortage of high level ICT skills but the future need for these skills does not seem to be there. The number of people involved does not seem to be a need in the future. The smarts will be few and involved in managing these large utilities it seems.

He not only refers to the demise of the PC, which he says will be a museum piece in 20 years, but to the demise of the software programmer, whose time has come to an end.

If nothing else, this supports my previous posts "The return to mainframes and terminals" and "Google releasing package for office". The PC will be dead and the terminals will be very portable. This also points to the importance of having and developing sound connectivity infrastructure.

In some ways it makes the FOSS debate in schools null and void. Certainly Linux OS with Firefox because they are free and provide that terminal like apparatus needed to access the online services. So where is the need for other productivity software like Open Office, GIMP, Inkscape, Thunderbird, etc when the technology is emerging for us to just do it online?

To me this also confirms my opinion that MS Vista is a non-event. What are these buggers thinking over there in lala Redmond land?

The Ellsberg Paradox, school and trust

2008-01-19T11:54:00.000+10:30

Leigh posted "Fear paralysis, Ellsburg paradox and what’s in a name" and referred back to a previous post "What’s in a name? Why some succeed and others fail". Basically the Ellsberg Paradox means that we will tend to choose in favour of things that we know about, hence Leigh's words 'Fear paralysis". He believes that this is a factor that inhibits people choosing FOSS. I agree. People tend to favour the things that they know about and have learnt with which is why it is important that schools provide the chance for students to experience FOSS as well as the proprietary products in school. I think that we should be learning with the free stuff first so that the risk is in taking up the stuff that costs a lot.

As I watched the short video that Leigh pointed to about the Ellsberg Paradox it triggered some thinking about one of the fundamental things we are trying to teach in school. We have this innate mechanism which inhibits our ability to go into the unknown and yet education is really all about taking people into the unknown. Taking a risk, moving into the unknown, conducting experiments and the like. This to me points to the importance of teachers being trust worthy.

In my post "Play with Stuff" I talked about challenging kids and the whole post was about taking risks. I think that having seen the video, the Ellsberg Paradox is the mechanism that we are wanting to play with and learn to control so that we can get to a point where we are more likely to venture into new ground.

As my grandfather often said, "Nothing ventured, nothing gained".

Students as volunteers

2008-01-09T11:22:00.000+10:30

Adrian Bruce has a posting in response to his reading of Stephen Covey's 'The seven habits of highly effective people'. He uses a graphic talking about treating others as volunteers. It states 'Imagine what we could achieve if management treated every person on staff as if they were a volunteer'

Adrian's spin on this was ‘ Imagine what an organisation could achieve if every person on staff was treated as a volunteer rather than a subordinate’.

What about this? 'Imagine what we could achieve if teachers/schools treated every student as if they were a volunteer'.

The root of this comes from my experience teaching in the Pitjantjatjara Lands some 25 odd years ago. The bottom line was that while students had to be at school by law, the reality was the students voted with their feet.

Playing with stuff

2008-01-09T07:43:00.000+10:30

Two related posts

Bill Kerr - 5 dangerous things you should let your kids do. The 9 minute TED Talk video is worth watching. How do kids learn how to be safe when taking risks?
Chris Betcher - School 1977 vs. School 2007 Makes the point that we are possibly over reacting to some things.

This conversation is very much about developing creativity or hacker thinking

Things I like to do:

Have students take apart old computers. I do not allow

CRT monitors and computer power supplies to be disassembled because of the electrical charge that could be stored in the larger capacitors in those devices.
disassembly of computers with leaking capacitors
stress that capacitors are not to be bashed

Have students try to making working computers from old computers/bits.

Students get a real kick out of the disassembly of FDD, HDD and CD drives. The magnets and shiny platters in HDD are particular points of interest.

Removing the cover on a HDD and seeing it work on a live computer

Doing things with kids that are psychologically and physically challenging. eg. Taking young kids down the side of the Valley Lake from the the Potters Point Lookout (Mount Gambier). It is very challenging for kids and sometimes we get tears. The realisation that turning around and going back could be as hard as continuing on down is a hard lesson. Understanding that the only way of succeeding is for us to make it work. When we have completed this descent kids generally feel great pride in their achievement but do not want to do it again and then after a while generally/always change their minds and want to do have another go.

Letting my kids drive the car.

Taking my grandson camping and playing with the fire.

FOSS in education prediction for 2008

2008-01-03T21:10:00.000+10:30

Why 2008 will be a bad year for Microsoft’s Ed Tech market share, January 1st on ZDnet.

The author makes the following points

FOSS provides a solution for students to continue with their education outside of school unencumbered by cost and legal issues
School administrations are looking for ways to cut costs and FOSS may help
There are a growing number of people familiar with FOSS and Linux and these tools are becoming easier to use making the management issue more manageable
As students become accustomed to using FOSS in school, they will demand its use in the workplace

The last point is important and reinforces my thinking for the past few years. We should be filling our school networks with the free stuff. I'm happy for the proprietary products to be there as well but I think it is poor form that schools are paying for it.

In addition to filling the school network with the free stuff, consider giving away a copy of the OpenEducationDisc to all students as they enrol. This facilitates students being able to freely and seamlessly continue with their school work at home and helps our young people and their families stay legal.

NZ Ministry of Justice discussion paper

2007-12-20T09:50:00.000+10:30

http://nzoss.org.nz/system/files/moj_oss_strategy_1.0.pdf

Two of the quotes from this paper are of particular interest

The Ministry has stated its commitment to be an 'employer of choice' for skilled technical professionals. Adopting OSS in development and deployment is consistent with such a commitment. (Put bluntly, technical professionals want to keep their skills sharp and current; in 2007, working with open source tools and contributing to OSS projects are the way that's done.)

Broader issues within NZ government related to economic development. More widespread adoption of OSS is a form of 'Buying Kiwi' by means of encouraging growth of NZ-based software and service providers.

Could it be that a contributing factor to the high level skills shortage that we are facing is government sector preference for the use of proprietary solutions where the high level skills are effectively imported?

Education Revolution

2007-11-25T06:22:00.000+10:30

Labour has won the election and so it would be reasonable to think that their election promise of 'education revolution' by ensuring that every Australian student in Years 9 to 12 has access to their own school computer will be implemented.

I like Bill Kerr's comments about this not being a revolution.

No surprises from our pollies here. Their thinking is entirely quantitative - more computers, faster broadband, more information. There is not the glimmer of a hint that computers might be used to transform education in a qualitative sense, to create new sorts of powerful learning experiences that are much harder to create without computers.

I'm not aware of a single Australian politician who understands this issue.

There are all sorts of logistical issues with the Labour plan including the physical space to put computers as well as the power, network and human resource requirements to run them.

The revolution aspect is what really interests me and I am remembering some on my past posts, the latest of which was Talk of revolution which also references previous and connected posts to this topic.

Schools are not well positioned for the revolution that is being talked about in these posts. Rightly or wrongly, we have schools embedded in our culture and so I will assume for the foreseeable future they continue to play a part in this game. Soon we will have lots more access to computers and more important connected via the internet with fatter pipes which could help facilitate the sort of revolution being talked about.

I wonder what the characteristics of a school would need to be to optimise on the this sort of revolution?

Small
Organised on the basis of students not subjects
Good access to specialised facilities - drama, music, materials technology, art, HPE
Useful links with relevant community groups and businesses
Excellent access to information resources
Focus on information processing rather than acquisition of knowledge
Capacity to improvise on the fly - significant use of words like 'lets try/play with this'

Multi-national software house to blame

2007-11-22T19:19:00.000+10:30

Lets put the blame where it belongs. A multi-national software house needs to take responsibility for the unfortunate goof of the Australian Liberal Party election campaign where an 'Islamic' pamphlet flyer was handed out in the seat of Lindsay in the name of the ALP.

The crass wordart 'Ala Akba' at the bottom of the pamphlet is one of the obvious tell tale signs. The authors clearly having no idea of the C.R.A.P. design principles is another clue.

The nameless software company must take responsibility for putting this software within the reach of amateurs and extremists. This is yet another example of where things have gone horribly wrong and it is clear that the act of publishing needs to be left to the experts.

Shame, shame, shame.

Online vectorising tool

2007-11-11T21:03:00.000+10:30

Vectormagic is an online beta tool where you can upload an image and it comes back to you vectorised. Your images are stored on the site and your work can be published and shared.

Vector graphics are infinitely scalable without becoming pixelised. Various programs offer this including Adobe Live Trace (Illustrator CS2) and Corel PowerTRACE (CorelDRAW X3). Inkscape is a free open source program that is capable of this as well although I found Vectormagic easier to use. Inkscape is a good choice of tool to further manipulate the vectorised graphic. My experience of Inkscape has been very positive.

The comparative review of vectormagic with Adobe Live Trace and Corel PowerTRACE was very favourable toward Vectormagic. The fact that it is online and free to use is of course an asset to educators.

Clutterbake

2007-10-07T15:33:00.000+09:30

Adam Clutterbuck's mum has shared her potatoe bake recipe with us via Adam. It is the best.

The Clutterbake Recipe

Ingredients:

Sliced Potatoes
Sliced Sweet Potatoes
400ml Thick Cream (approx)
1xOnion finely chopped
100g Butter (approx.)
Blue Vein Cheese (approx. 150g)
Salt & Pepper

Method:

Put potato and sweet potato in cold water and bring to boil for a couple of minutes.
Drain.
Place sliced potatoes in alternate layers in a grease casserole dish.
Fry onion in the butter gently until soft – Do not allow it to brown!
Add cream and Blue Vein Cheese and stir gently until cheese has melted. DO NOT BOIL!!
Add salt and pepper.
Pour mixture over layered potatoes.
Bake in moderate oven (180°) for about ½ hour and is lightly browned on top.

Positive image, positive action, positive result

2007-09-24T18:53:00.000+09:30

The Affirmative Basis of Organizing
Appreciative Inquiry in Organizational Life

Traveling back from Adelaide, my wife read a paragraph and then we had a chat about it. The nearly five hour trip passed quickly, for a change, as we digested these two chapters.

Basically the messages are that

if you have a positive picture for the future this will lead to positive action by yourself and others and the results will be good. The good thing about this article is that it points to research that supports this idea.
the picture that others have of/for you will influence the outcomes and visa versa. People will tend to rise to meet the expectations implied in the picture you have of them.
look for the good in all situations and people and focus on these
it pays to be optimistic
the problem solving approach to organisational improvement sends out negative deficit images that might be better directed to appreciative inquiry

Appreciative inquiry

The basic idea is to build organizations around what works, rather than trying to fix what doesn't. The approach acknowledges the contribution of individuals, in order to increase trust and organizational alignment.(source: Wikipedia)

ie. appreciative is focussed on what works, problem solving is fixing stuff.

So much of these papers resonated for me, despite their difficult academic language mumbo jumbo style. I did however especially connect with the following

the simple logic underlying almost every formal performance-appraisal system. Stripped to essentials, the theoretical underpinnings run something like this: "If you want to evaluate performance (P), then you must evaluate the individual employee (E); in other words, 'P = E'." Armed with this theory, many managers have entered the performance-appraisal meeting shaking with the thought of having to pass godlike judgment on some employee. Similarly, the employee arrives at the meeting with an arsenal of defenses, designed to protect his or her hard-won self-esteem. Little genuine communication occurs during the meeting and virtually no problem-solving takes place. The paperwork is mechanically completed, then filed away in the personnel office until the next year. So powerful is this subtle P = E equation that any alternative goes virtually unnoticed, for example the Lewinian theory that behavior (performance) is a function of the person and the environment (in this case the organizational situation, the "OS" in which the employee works). Following this Lewinian line, the theory underlying performance appraisal would now have to be expanded to read P = E ´ OS. That is, P ¹ E. To adequately assess performance there must be an assessment of the individual in relation to the organizational setting in which he or she works and vice-versa. What would happen to the performance-appraisal process if this more complete theory were used as a basis for re-designing appraisal systems in organizations throughout the corporate world? Isn't it possible that such a theory could help shift the attribution process away from the person-blame to systems analysis?

This reminded me of the my earlier post that referenced the idea that the way that we attribute success or failure impacts on our ability to do well. In that post it stressed the importance of attributing causes to things that we have some control over. In the P=E formula above, the employee and the supervisor are perhaps thinking that they do not have control over the environment. Their images do not include this and so they are unable to influence it.

Thumb tribes

2007-09-19T12:35:00.000+09:30

A student walked into class today and out of the blue said "Check out my thumb mucsles Mr Ruwoldt, from playing Xbox. I've been playing Xbox for 12 hours straight." This was interesting as I remember reading about how thumbs are being used differently some time ago. We took a photo.

http://ojr.org/japan/wireless/1094780193.php
Thumb tribes

The young generation that utilizes the keitai functions of phone, e-mail and Internet frequently as part of daily life.

The name stems from the quick motion of a thumb pushing buttons on a cell phone.

I think it all started when people began to play games only with their thumbs (Nintendo and so on).

Thumbs take over for text generation

"Discovering that the younger generation has taken to using thumbs in a completely different way and are instinctively using thumbs where the rest of us are using our index fingers is particularly interesting."

In her research, Dr Plant noticed that while those less used to mobile phones used one or several fingers to access the keyboard, younger people used both thumbs ambidextrously, barely looking at the keys as they made rapid entries.

For the record, the lad in question uses his index finger to press the door bell.

Online presentation tool - spresent

2007-09-17T21:40:00.000+09:30

spresent is a web application that allows me to create a presentation and then use that in various ways including embedding in Moodle resources, Wikispaces, blog posts, ...
This is a good tool to include in my 'Experience Lots' course

Creativity

2007-09-13T19:56:00.000+09:30

How to Write Remarkably Creative Content
While this post is focussed on writing, creativity is creativity in whatever field and the concepts are transferable. The following quotes connected for me

Inspiration from other sources is what creativity is all about. It seems that many people believe creativity involves pulling a completely brand new idea out of thin air. In truth, creativity is an adaptive process that consists of looking at the same existing thing everyone else is and thinking about it differently.

A uni lecturer left feedback on one of my assignments many years ago that went something like "few of us are able to say truly original things" and then went on to say that i had done this and it was a very good piece of work. This has always tickled me. It was a psychology assignment of some sort and as I was also studying biology. I was able to see some connections between the subject areas and use them in that assignment. I would not see this as original but it was creative.

Look in unlikely places for connections and angles that can enhance your content. If only one aspect of another subject area meets your needs, roll like Michelangelo and get rid of the parts that don’t belong.

Couple this thinking with some of the thoughts of Mark Shuttleworth in his talk for SFD. He made it clear that he looked at the areas of the world that were changing for opportunities and for opportunities to make a difference. These are places where new connections are being made - ie creativity.

Lindy McKeon Masterclass

2007-09-12T18:57:00.000+09:30

Lindy McKeown Masterclass - 12/9/2007
Lindy provided a two hour presentation that has got me re-thinking the potential for 3D worlds in education. This comes at a time where I feel I have my head around Web2.0 and comfortably use bits and pieces as i need in my work.

She suggests that I need to learn how to operate in a 3D world like Second Life so that when the time comes to use this technology in class I am comfortable with it.

I gained two immediate and useful ideas that could be fun, educationally relevant and achievable.

Google sketchup plugin for Google Earth - I went to the 3D Warehouse where people have contributed Sketchup Drawings for use with Google Earth and there are quite a lot of Adelaide but non for Mount Gambier. Making a contributing drawings of buildings in our town, historical buildings, facilities and so forth would be a great venture for students to undertake. (Side Note - I noticed that I also had blue dots all over the place in Google Earth that I could click on to see pictures taken at that location. Again what a cool thing to be doing.)
Lindy pointed to a demo of Photosynth on TED talks. The video lasts for 7 minutes and it is a must see. The scenario could be in the near future - I take my photos and upload them to the likes of Flickr. They are now available for everyone to see but also for machines to include my photo with the others taken of the same thing, from different angles and so on. This amalgamation allows a much richer view of the object where my photo provided my starting point to this view. How cool. Creating a photo gallery of our town would be another great student team project.

The AliveX3D open source project is worth keeping an eye on.

The main objective of AliveX3D is to apply the open source and Web 2.0 ethos to future e-Learning applications. Through the use of the rich internet application, the AliveX3D Scene Editor, both students and academics will be able to collaborate on the creation of 3D environments which will be interoperable with other applications complying with the X3D standard.

Finally a quote from Albert Einstein that she started with
"If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research would it?". I've got some researching to do.

How to maintain creativity

2007-09-09T21:00:00.000+09:30

I've not long posted "How to rejuvenate IT Studies" where the key seems to be to focus on creativity.

Then by magic is this post Staying Motivated and is all about developing and maintaining creativity. The site is for website developers but what is being said is transferable to other creative endeavours.

Whether your chosen medium is pictures or language, food or formulas, everyone has the capacity to be creative in their work. But we can often lose our motivation to create, making it difficult to stay focused and excited on a project. So how does one keep their creative well from drying up?

The post is divided into two sections.

Getting started with creativity
Maintaining creativity

This could be useful for those coaching jobs in class where you are trying to keep things moving as well as maintaining my own health in this area. I think I need a cheat sheet on the wall for this.

Take charge of your learning with Web 2.0

2007-09-09T20:33:00.000+09:30

Terrance Online is this post points to a great 20 minute video from Stephen Downes about making use of Web 2.0 tools to take charge of your own learning.

Who it is pitched at is a bit confusing. It is pitched at teachers in some areas and then at students in others.

A couple of quick things that stick for me

Don't try to remember stuff. Focus on having quality information flows. IF you have these quality sources then you are likely to be hit with similiar concepts and information in a variety of ways and from a variety of angles that you end up retaining the important things anyway
Filter ruthlessly. A lot of stuff coming through in my subscriptions to email lists and RSS feeds gets a quick glance. Sometimes it doesn't even get a glance except for the subject line. Sometimes, down the track I discover that there is a sort of thread happening, a buzz. I can use the search facilities to go back to these posts that I skimmed and get the detail if I choose.
Shun traditional classes. Just in time learning is the go. How do I resolve this for myself as a teacher? In my last post I pointed to a Community Studies syllabus and how this helped create a useful learning environment where a traditional syllabus statement in Information Technology did not. It still appears to be a traditional class. With schools the way that they are it is difficult to conceive how I might be able to go much further than this.

How to rejuvenate IT Studies

2007-09-09T19:53:00.000+09:30

IT Studies or in some quarters, Computing Studies. Mark Guzdial has recently conributed two posts to his views about "Software Engineering and the Cause of the CS Enrollment Crisis"

Mark's posts are to do with tertiary level education.

Part 1
Mark's diagnosis

It seems to me that the cause of the student's disdain for "programming" and for the decline in CS enrollment lies there. As civil engineers need armies of construction workers to build their designs, and as mechanical engineers use armies of factory workers to produce their designs, so do software engineers use armies of programmers or coders, people who are explicitly not software engineers, to produce their designs. Few students go to college to become construction or factory workers. Why should it be surprising, then, that few Western students want to go to college to be the Information Age equivalent workers?

Boring and mundane - lack of creativity.

Computer scientists do not need to write good, clean code. Science is about critical and creative thinking

No fun

Our students want to be creative, not mundane. Many want to push hardware to do things that no one has ever thought about. Many want to explore new forms of expression. That is what computer science is about. That is not necessarily what software engineers need.

Part 2

Creativity

Realizing one's designs is motivating.

Summary.
He argues that we take care with the language that we use to teach programming. Use C based languages is a no go. Translating this to secondary school. Programming needs to be fun and encourage creativity.

I run a course called 'Negotiated Computing'. Students come to this class wanting to learn something about computers. For many that's as detailed as it gets but for others they want to learn HTML, Javascript, PHP, ..........

Students negotiate their learning contract and away we go.

The interesting thing is that I have a range of 'traditional' tutorials for these sorts of things and they are not particularly popular except for lesson 1. For example, in lesson 1 of PHP, students get a login to the LiveLAMP server, find out about the ftp settings and that's about the last I see of them in that course.

They are downloading code that others have made, uploading it to the server and trying to get it to work. This is particularly challenging for me as there is inevitably things that don't work and so we are looking at line 45 wondering why? It is hard because I am looked on as the expert and I should know the answer. I guess I get to model how I solve problems, offer an hypothesis and try out some solutions. Sometimes we win quickly, sometimes it takes longer and at other times we don't win at all and have to move on. We end up with chat, picture galleries and all sorts of things. They love to then get others to use the thing that they have got to work and then we see some modifications being made.

I guess I did the same thing 25-30 years ago. I used books with code, copied these and tried to get them to work. It took some time before I felt OK about trying to create something original.

This approach does not fit in with the formal senior secondary Information Technology syllabus. It does fit very nicely with Community Studies.

Danah Boyd - implications for Online IT Student community

2007-09-09T15:07:00.000+09:30

The audio of the Danah Boyd presentation for the Education.au series of seminars is broken into 3 parts each of about 20 minutes in length.

She provided

a great insight into the history of online social networking, starting with usenet. So this social networking technology has been evolving and morphing since 1980.
an understanding of social norms so that we can relate this concepts to the online spaces
information about the three main components that make up a social networking space - a profile, friends (a public display of our connections) and comments.

In the past youth were free to hang out with each other in all sorts of physical places that is not happening these days. Parents fear that their kids will be kidnapped, assaulted and so on. Online social networking provides kids with the place to hang out and socialise. She sates that there are four main differences between the old hanging out in physical places and the new online social spaces.

Persistence - what you say sticks around. It is my view that once something is said it can not be unsaid. What you say has always been persistent but the online persistence is in a more physical sense.
Search ability - information about you is search able by anyone from anywhere
Replicability - what you say in one online space (eg chat) can easily be replicated into other spaces
Invisible Audiences - what you say can be seen by people you have no idea about and used in ways that you have no control of

She is saying that youth are learning to deal with a public life that only mega stars had to deal with in the past, only in a scaled way. What happens in these online spaces impacts on what happens at school.

It was interesting that the way that adults are dealing with this is different in the Western world vs Asia. The key seems to be the consequence of what she calls 'Age Segregation'. In the western world we encourage people of similar ages to hang out. It is generally seen that there is no real reason why a young person would hang out with an older person and visa versa. This has implications for online social networking whereas in Asia people of all ages are welcome and part of a persons network and this is seen as acceptable and correct.

In Asia social networking is being embraced and in the western world it is being banned.

This phenomena could have implications for the thinking around making an online IT student community. In this idea I have suggested that it would be good to have senior secondary, post secondary, industry, teachers, lecturers, etc all involved in the community. The social norms built around age segregation will certainly create issues for successful implementation of this concept.

Danah suggests that it would be better for us to embrace online social networking and open up the conversations that promote the growth of ethical and moral learning.

We don't want your money!

2007-08-23T18:30:00.000+09:30

Got a problem, buy a solution. Simple. Next problem please. See, I'm good at solving problems.

The more important a goal is the more money you pour into it. Right?

How do we teach children to read? We spend time with them and listen to them read. The children that have supportive parents learn quicker and better by and large. So by investing care, interest and enthusiasm, not money, great outcomes are achieved.

Can the same result be achieved by resourcing someone else to do the listening? Well yes, to some extent but you also forfeit your influence in many others areas. Schools are doing this all of the time where parents are not able to provide support to their children.

So how does an industry attract youth to their profession? Advertising? Speak to them? Lecture them? It is really simple and it is based upon the same idea as listening to them read. Not literally but follow the principle - be supportive, invest your time and care, be part of their lives, develop relationships.

That's what I would like to see come out of an IT Student online community

I think it's a win for everyone involved.

The future of senior secondary ICT

2007-08-23T16:50:00.000+09:30

Published by The Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts
in June 2006 is a document called 'Building Australian ICT Skills - Report of the ICT Skills foresighting working group'

Page 10 of this document is in the 'Key findings and recommendations' section and deals with ICT in Schools.

The Working Group expressed concerns that the quality of ICT teaching in schools, and the outmoded image of ICT work presented, may be deterring students from considering ICT as an option for further study at university/TAFE and as a career choice. This was an issue that also received considerable attention at the partICipaTion Summit.

In particular the Working Group raised concerns about the teaching of ICT as a specialised subject in the later school years. The Working Group considered that the focus should be on teaching fundamental ICT principles, useful as a foundation for further study, rather than on specific programming areas.

It then goes on to make the following recommendation

Recommendation 7
The Working Group recommends that action be taken to review and enhance the teaching of ICT in schools. The working group suggests that:
• government fund detailed research on school ICT teachers to assess the characteristics (e.g. gender, age), qualifications and challenges of ICT secondary and high school teachers; and
• ICT industry bodies and leading ICT vendors work with education agencies and professional bodies to assist and support school ICT teachers and teaching staff in universities and TAFEs.

As a current 'later school years' ICT teacher I have an interest in the implications of the above statement. They say that the focus for my work 'should be on teaching fundamental ICT principles, useful as a foundation for further study, rather than on specific programming areas.' They reckon that schools "may be deterring students from considering ICT as an option for further study' because of 'the quality of ICT teaching in schools, and the outmoded image of ICT work presented'.

At this stage I just want to note this and reflect on it for a while. My gut reaction is that

fundamental principles have always been what I was after
programming areas is important for accessibility reasons - industry standards are bit like bathing costume seasonal fashions - important but doesn't need to prevent you from taking a dip.
it adds weight to Bill Kerr's thinking and work around the advantages of using Squeak in secondary education (and mine in the related Scratch)
my ideas for an IT student online community have had significant reinforcement

Final thought
A department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts?
Struggling to see the relationship. Why not stick Immigration in there as well? Or should it be called the Department for bits that we couldn't put anywhere else.

Picture story

2007-08-22T22:07:00.000+09:30

Thanks to Ellen of the csteachers list for this link to a cool picture story.

MELTing away

2007-08-20T20:44:00.000+09:30

I've touched down after another great MELT conference (Middle Years Engagement and Learning Team) in Penola this last weekend. Well done to the organising team.

I presented a workshop that was really a presentation on making the best of wikipedia, some free online mind mapping tools and finally using del.icio.us. I forgot to show the video relaing to delicious. Participants were asked on registration what they would like to be the focus and so the above order was resolved from that. Session notes for the presentation are on my wiki.

I would not have documented this here if were not for a couple of events over the last few minutes.

One of the MELT organisers posted a note on the forum about staying in touch and continuing the debate and learning. Very nice, I liked that, but I wondered how successful this ongoing discussion via an online forum was going to be.

I was also cruising TeacherTube and came across the following video.

I thought it would be cool if we were to also encourage conference participants to tag relevant things on del.icio.us, blogger, flickr ..... with 'MELT07' or something like that. Oh crap, then I woke up. A great weekend.

Reluctance to invest in our people.

2007-08-19T20:16:00.000+09:30

The article of Graeme Philipson that I referred to in the previous post has some ring of truth but there is also some tension with it in my view of the world.

Two years ago, and three years after the Graeme Philipson article, I recorded an article that stated the there was a huge ICT trade deficit except for Open Source which was producing an export income.

There is not doubt in my mind, from personal experience, that there is a HUGE skills deficit in this FOSS area, so much so that South Australians, on the whole, may well have the idea that there is no choice but for proprietary software. By and large schools perpetuate this view by the mere fact that proprietary software is generally the only software on the computers in their classrooms. The perpetuate it in other ways as well.

So why would we perpetuate something which is contributing to our trade deficit rather than invest in something that is earning us exports? Graeme possibly hit on an answer -

They do not wish to train people, even graduates, because this costs money.

What sort of legacy are we leaving for our children?

Surely we are not that short sighted?

Is there a shortage of IT skills in Australia?

2007-08-19T18:22:00.000+09:30

This article was published in June of 2002
http://www.philipson.info/files/f020618skills.doc

Graeme Philipson, the author, begins with

Is there a shortage of IT skills in Australia? It depends who you listen to.

He argues that the 'skills shortage' is a myth, created by business to justify outsourcing overseas and to get consent for work visa's in this area. His main evidence comes from asking people looking for work in the industry, not from employers.

Problem is, this consensus come from industry, not from people looking for IT work. There is a school of thought that says that many in the IT industry are manufacturing fears of an IT shortage to get handouts from government and to be able to hire cheaper immigrant labour. IT companies. They do not wish to train people, even graduates, because this costs money.

I know that it is hard for schools to find suitably skilled IT people to look after their networks. Maybe that is because the pay is poor? Maybe there really is s skills shortage.

Soooooo

Is there really a shortage of IT skills in South Australia?

The importance of hacker thinking

2007-08-18T12:08:00.000+09:30

The word 'hacker' has evolved from a desirable trait to a word that implies evil and bad yet hacker thinking is so vital to creativity and innovation.

Watch the following set of videos that make up a documentary about the History of Hacking.

Part 1 of 5

Part 2 of 5

Part 3 of 5

Part 4 of 5

Part 5 of 5

Then lets add some FUD

Image source

Is it any wonder that we have an ICT skills crisis?

Learning involves making mistakes, improvising, trying things out, experimenting. A good education is going to be messy. (some insight to that here).

Is a mono culture of proprietary software conducive to creating such an environment?

Are school networks and computers which are locked down so that kids can't 'break' them helping?

What about using programming languages that are not as accessible because of the cost?

Remember Wordstar

2007-08-16T18:31:00.000+09:30

This article in The Australian, "StarOffice part of Google's plan", reminded me of Wordstar.

It wasn't the word 'star'. I love a good stoush.

Remember Wordstar being queen and then Wordperfect and then ...? Can you go back before Wordstar?

In all of these cases a new comer superseded the existing queen. However, during the transition of power, it felt like we mere mortals had a choice. People were talking about data format and compatibility.

Once the new queen had exerted her power there was not a choice and we seemed to be locked into the new regime. Talk of data compatibility became heresy. People were locked into a tool.

I hope that we don't see a repeat of this when Google and Sun knock MS for a six. It's been a long time since I've felt we have had a choice.

Talk of revolution

2007-08-14T17:56:00.000+09:30

It seems that both the Liberal and the Labour governments have an educational vision for our country that looks like the rear of the dog in front of them.

Professor David Loader in this 17 minute interview about Schools for the 21st Century makes this point. The interview starts at about the 15 minute mark in this 'Life Matters' program. His title of Professor indicates that he is well recognised in the profession. He has been a school principal and teacher and is aged in his mid sixties so his experience is extensive. He is advocating a revolution in education, an idea that I am wanting to entertain.

He talks about loosing the cyber-generation if we don't. His ideas have the potential for disrupting power in our society and placing it back into the hands of small flexible, dynamic units.

He challenges the idea of class groupings, the hierarchical structure of schools, and the need for school Principals and formal leadership structures. He talks about having parents more involved and with much greater responsibility. He talks about perhaps adopting a paradigm of a shopping center or somethings else to replace the current model.

While listening to this interview I made a number of connections with some of my previous posts and reading.

Sardines and the Whales
He acknowledged that he was swimming in a different direction to most like the sardines that get the school to change direction. The other relationship is that I believe that he thinks that the current education system is like a whale and he is proposing that the revolution of education results in it becoming a school of agile sardines.

Geetha Narayanan
Geetha Narayanan's presentation titled “A Dangerous but Powerful Idea - Counter Acceleration and Speed with Slowness and Wholeness” published in The Knowledge Tree. Geetha thinks that school reform is impossible. She thinks that schools need to be broken up into small units as one part of the revolution of education globally. This needs to be coupled with a range of other changes.

Geetha made reference to the “Lifelong Kindergarten Research Lab” which involves the use of Scratch which I documented here and here. The principles underpinning their Computer Clubhouse are worthy of attention.

supporting learning through design experiences
helping youth build on their own interests
creating an emergent learning community, and
working always in a climate of trust and respect.

She states

The Project Vision hypothesis breaks the form of schools, moving from that of a cathedral and/or large corporate monolith into small places eg. shop fronts. They are not purpose built but occupy spaces/crevices that integrate with, and operate, at various levels of scale in a city. The structural form advocated is that of community learning centres and ateliers or studios, not that of the contemporary modern schools

Only one laughing
If educators or ignorant and uninvolved with the tools that students are using, then they are also going to be blind to where things seem to be heading and why there needs to be change.

David Loader briefly discussed the education policies of both major political parties (Liberal and Labour) as we approach the federal election. Nothing inspiring there. He argues that both of these parties are caught in the past and are too far back in the pack to see anything but the rear of the lead dog. What vision.

Not rear of lead dog solution

2007-08-10T21:45:00.000+09:30

Clinton has announced a significant event in his post Edubuntu terminal client getting there. A lone edubuntu terminal client in the corner. My thanks to Clinton for his persistence and to the people that have helped him.

We have some observations and improvements to make and slowly expand this service. There is no doubt in my mind that this technology will be the answer to us making some improvements to what we can do with our limited ICT budget.

The services that this provides should cater for a significant proportion of the needs of student learning and at reduced cost. It should also give us some space to deal with some more specialised needs.

This is not a rear of lead dog solution and that is also something to be proud of.

Hmmm - what's next?
Maybe Google apps.

Only one laughing

2007-08-10T21:20:00.000+09:30

I am liking what I am reading from Confused of Calcutta and his latest post is a gem.

Supermarket 2.0 video is a bad!

I can see myself showing this to a staff meeting. There is a small group of us in the corner giggling because the rest think that tagging is what you do to cattle or factory walls!

The rear of the lead dog

2007-08-05T19:29:00.000+09:30

Confused of Calcutta has a great post called "Build versus Buy versus Opensource".

His advice-

For common problems use Opensource.
For rare problems use Buy.
For unique problems use Build.

and his closing comment had me in stitches

Maybe this way we can all stop building solutions that look like the rear of a lead dog….

Wiki Mindmap

2007-08-05T11:44:00.000+09:30

A mindmap tool that uses the content in Wikipedia and some other public wiki's to generate a mindmap to explore a concept quickly.

In this example, I selected the English version of wikipedia and uses the search criteria of DRM. This mindmap was the result.

I would be good if I were able to click to go to the article and it would also be good if I were able to embed a mindmap into a wiki, blog or Moodle page.

Scratch Day

2007-08-04T20:25:00.000+09:30

Last weekend was partially devoted to playing with Scratch and the result of this effort is a little game to help students familiarise themselves with the Computer System Block Diagram

Learn more about this project

There are two sprites in this game that have not been scripted yet. Students can download the game and use the code from the other sprites to make these unscripted sprites operational.

I love Scratch and I love the fact that I can so easily upload and share it. It is not hard to embed it in blogs or I suspect Moodle. I like the way it then plays in the browser. There is a problem uploading Scratch games to the Scratch site from school as there is no way that we can adjust Scratch to our required proxy settings. This is an issue for many schools I would think.

Then I added TeacherTube to the mix. I created a screen capture movie of me explaining how this game worked using CamStudio. I'm very impressed with CamStudio as a free tool for this job. Then Super C was used to reduce the filesize from 108MB to 10MB by reducing the resolution to 640x480. I tried Videora first and while this was easy to use, it produced a product with a resolution that too low to be useful. Thanks to Leigh for his advice on using Videora or SuperC to compress the video. Both of these tools are also free.

I reckon that I could teach SACE 1 Information Technology Systems - Multimedia Programming and Computer Conepts units in an integrated way. Students could use Scratch to create Learning Objects relating to Computer Concepts.

CamStudio

2007-07-25T06:21:00.001+09:30

I have become quite impressed with CamStudio as a tool for me and students to create tutorials and for students to demonstrate their skills. A number of useful online videos for teaching students and teachers about CamStudio exist.

How to use CamStudio

Using Camstudio to Screen Record Video Tutorials
Play time 6 minutes and 14 seconds

Two miles an hour Camstudio tutorial
Play time 3 minutes and 17 seconds

Teach like a rockstar

2007-05-11T19:14:00.000+09:30

If we are looking at the traditional methods of teaching, (contrasted with my previous post) this could be relevant from lifehack.

Presenting can be scary to many people, and for others, it comes quiet naturally, but even the best presenters have to break free from their “tried and true” methods and shake up their audience. You know who understands this very well? You know who can change up their act and get people moving? Rockstars!

Replace the word 'presenter' with 'teacher'.

The post then lists, with a brief description, the following steps

Make First Contact With Emotions
Play Favorites
Kick Over the Podium
Wave Those Lighters
Go Home Singing

Teacher talk for this is engagement.

"banking education” and “problem- posing education"

2007-05-11T19:08:00.000+09:30

A recent Flosse Posse post had the following quote

Brazilian educator Paulo Freire made a difference between “banking education” and “problem- posing education”. In the first someone is trying to tell people what they should do and how, when the later one is asking people to define problems in their everyday life and join with other people to solve them. Problem-posing education does not only require dialogue among the people, but teaching of each other, co- investigation and joint responsibility of the process.

I find this attractive. My sense of an ideal world is being aroused and noticed that after reading it I looked away and up trying to picture how this could work. I wonder how we could make this happen?

1865 Red Flag Act

2007-05-07T21:37:00.000+09:30

When we are presented with new technology we look for all of the things that can go wrong and try to engineer to protect everyone from all of the bad things that could happen. The idea of having someone walk in front of a motor car to warn drivers of horse-driven coaches was very sensible. I wasn't alive at the time so maybe I am not in a position to judge either way but I can't help thinking that we might have much fewer road related fatalaties and serious injury if we had only continued with this practice. Wouldn't that be sensible?

The post of Miguel Guhlin titled Institutionalizing Fear reminds me of this in many ways. Filtering technology will become more sophisticated and we will become more skilled with driving these wretched things and soon it will be all different.

In a couple of years we will be saying things like - 'Remember when schools got plugged into the internet and .........."

Sardines and Whales

2007-05-06T10:55:00.000+09:30

Ian Dukes has a fantastic explaination of why he was titled his blog 'The Committed Sardine Blog'

He compares how whales and school of sardines are able to change direction. The role of a small group of committed sardines swimming against the rest of the sardines are critical for changing the direction of the school.

Brilliant analogy.

Using technology to do old things

2007-05-06T10:37:00.000+09:30

Interesting video of Ian Jukes talking about how we initially use technology to do things we have always done. Then we start using it to do new things and this is where reformation happens. It has done this to the business world and is still to happen in education.

This is a goal of the OLPC.

I also see a connection with a recent posting on Weblogg-ed introducing a book written by David Weinberger. A quote from this book

One thing is for sure: When our kids become teachers, they’re not going to be
administering tests to students sitting in a neat grid of separated desks with
the shades down.

clearly demonstrates that David is of the same opinion and that significant reformation is coming.

My Notebook

2007-05-04T17:31:00.000+09:30

I've just discovered the Google Notebook extension for Firefox and I'm in love. I now have a little link at the bottom RH of my browser window that can open the Notebook. I can highlight bits of a web page and then click on 'clip' in the notepad. The notebook entry that is made has a link back to the source. I can have various notebooks and I can have sections in each notebook. It all seemed rather useless until I considered a student doing research and suddenly it became brilliant. FAQ's for Notebook here.

Why don't we use Google apps at school? Every student and staff member could

have 1gig of space for their email
use the notebook for their research hack work
make use of the Google wordprocessor and spreadsheet for documentation and other school work
have their own calendar and then subscribe to their subject calendars

Then there are the various other Web2.0 applications available and bingo, just about all a student needs through a browser window.

It's all free and IT admin could get away with having no virus ridden Microsoft stuff to maintain. Students can continue their work from any place with an internet connection. The computers that students needed to do their work would not have to be anything flash making it affordable to families. It would have the same benefits for a school.

Peer produced knowledge sharing in education

2007-04-27T07:01:00.000+09:30

What are the practical and philosophical challenges in using technologies for ‘peer produced’ knowledge sharing?

A response to the Jimmy Wales seminar in Adelaide, 'Challenging how knowledge is created', 23/4/2007

If we were to leave the practicalities out of the picture for a minute I reckon that we could agree that core to teacher's hearts is unencumbered learning. We would all connect with the idea that we want to remove the encumbrances to learning for all children. So the idea of free access (free in both senses of the word – free as in beer and free as in libre) would resonate with teachers everywhere.

We can categorise the issues around peer publishing for educators into two main categories
1. The first is the classroom where we make use of peer produced materials and have students involved in the peer publishing process
2. The second relates to peer publishing for professional sharing

Classroom use

Teacher's technical skills.
Just as our teachers vary in height they vary in their technical skills. Generally speaking, the skills required to make web 2.0 peer publishing tools work are fairly minimal. So this is good news.

Infrastructure
Education system filtering mechanisms generally eliminate online or peer publishing. The one size fits all filtering systems can fail to recognise the different needs of children as they grow and develop.

Infrastructure in schools tends to be focused on desktop applications with mainly web one level access because of the filtering system. School systems tend to be locked down rather than trying to build a community based on trust in our schools. We often think about systems from a systems perspective and so we want to protect the system and forget about the fact that education is trying to help us build a better society. Two of the core values for this is trust and respect. The accountability model rather than the gate keeper model that Jimmy Wales talked about is a key concept to making schools a better place and in so doing, make our society a better one. Acknowledging that children will make mistakes and this is important for their learning, having methods to easily undo or fix the damage is critical for system design.

We are at a time where we can provide an excellent learning environment where most of what we do is through a browser interface and using FOSS on the desktop. There are considerable advantages to this, one of them being cost.

Costs of bandwidth are still far too high for schools and the pipe is far too narrow.

Concerns about the accuracy of the information being published and shared.
Teachers often feel the need to ensure that all of the information presented to students is correct.

Concerns about being able to control the communications.
Student peer produced knowledge sharing involves publishing that can be used for inappropriate goals. A phrase that I have been hearing more of lately is that a good education is going to be messy and peer publishing certainly can be messy.

Nature of information is changing
We don't need to keep everything in our heads anymore. Information is disposable, used to complete current goals, probably document what we did and then move on.

Constructivism
Peer publishing offers students the possibility to learn about things that are of interest to them. The variety and depth of the information on Muppet Wiki is a great example.

As a final comment on classroom use, I like the idea of students preparing resources for other students.

Use for professional sharing

I have been intimately involved in the establishment of cegsa.org. It is a wiki for SA and NT senior secondary IT teachers to share learning and assessment resources. Working on the setting up of this has highlighted a number of issues relevant to this discussion.

How do we avoid copyright issues?

Should we enforce logins and only allow teachers into this space?

Why should I contribute when others aren't?

Feelings that my work is not complete and polished enough for sharing is a barrier to contributing

Some people feeling that the wiki markup is too hard to use.

It actually takes effort to share resources. Wouldn't it be good if we had a button on our browsers that said, 'Remember this Delicious,SACSA and SSABSA' and then presented us with a range of relevant tags that we could pick from.

There are too many places to log into these days and this takes time and too many credentials to remember.

The open sharing approach of peer publishing is somewhat chaotic and messy. There are not necessarily answers for everything on the wiki and for other things there is an abundance. Some teachers feel that we are doing the wrong thing and just want a text book – forget the wiki just point me in the direction of the approved text please.

As a closing remark, when you are working with others publishing your work in this way you develop a commitment to each other. It is a shared obligation and it is enjoyable. Peer publishing is great news for country folk where we have often felt left out of the PD loop. Now we are interacting with people in our fields globally. This of course has implications for our professional organizations like CEGSA and our employer.

Internet filtering system broken

2007-04-26T15:08:00.000+09:30

John Travers has put his two bobs worth out there regarding internet filtering in response to some of the discussion that happened at the Jimmy Wales seminar in Adelaide. Sure administrators can upblock a site ATM, and they do, but the current filtering model starts from a negative position and that is not good. It is a deficit model that is not built around trust.

I want a better filtering system for schools that

respects the different needs of children as they grow and develop
promotes values of respect and trust
facilitates unencumbered learning
is respectful of the work of teachers

So what if we had a filtering system that

a teacher could turn on and off for a student for periods of time (ATM it is only administrators that can do this)
had various levels of filtering from very strong to none
where students could be assigned a level for filtered access that was consistent with their percieved trustworthiness and maturity
where this level was reviewed on an annual basis involving teachers, parents and students
displayed all access logs for all members of the school community to all members of that community
where community action was taken where people breached our expectations for appropriate conduct

I am not totally happy with this as a model but I have to start somewhere and it certainly better than the one size fits all model that we have. I also expect that the needs for filtering models will change with time just as the need for a person to walk in front of the early motor cars with a red flag disappeared with time.

How do you get to Grant High?

2007-04-07T15:42:00.000+09:30

Wouldn't it be cool if you could customise an online map and send the link to visitors so that they knew who to get to a certain location?

What about students being able to place waypoints and markers on a map identifying important locations to their current research project.

We are going on a school excursion and want to allow parents to see exactly what our itenerary is?

I made one for getting to my school

The tool is Google Maps

Goodnight Sue-ellen, Jimbob ........

2007-04-07T15:34:00.000+09:30

I've been playing with Jimdo (reminded me of Jimbob) and I reckon that it is the easiest online and offline web creation tool I have found so far. The free version is limited by two text based advertisements being put on your site and 500mb of space.
For a student to make and publish a site for a school project - fantastic. It can even include RSS feeds. I made a small site to test it out.

Scratch, mobile phones and Podmo

2007-03-25T13:16:00.000+09:30

South Oz E-learning: Explore the potential

Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art -- and share your creations on the web.
Scratch is designed to enhance the technological fluency of young people, helping them learn to express themselves creatively with new technologies. As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, and they gain a deeper understanding of the process of design.

I downloaded it and had a quick play. Certainly has potential. Putting this into the context of my recent posts, I wonder what this would look like if the playing could happen on mobile phones and the sharing via the Podmo network?

Garry’s Rambles » Mobile learning or learning in a mobile age?

2007-03-25T12:38:00.000+09:30

Garry’s Rambles » Mobile learning or learning in a mobile age?
This has led me to the Kaleidoscope site and that has led me to a project mGBL – mobile Game-Based Learning

The result of this project is a software platform which enables the cost effective development of learning games on mobile phones. Different ways to connect the real with the virtual world are implemented e.g. graphical codes on buildings which can be read by camera phones. These games can be used stand-alone but also as support for traditional classroom-based learning processes.

The mobile phone is the portable device that students will use to connect to elements of the real and virtual worlds and to the game machine.

I wonder if the Podmo development might link in with this. Certainly the Deb Polson work does.

Sun Mobile Phone Emulator

2007-03-25T10:49:00.000+09:30

In 'The kids meet PODMO' post I noted that I needed to find out about the Sun Mobile Phone Emulator so that students can test their artifacts without having to have a mobile phone and bluetooth. The Emulator provided to be a bit hard to find but I think I have it.

I reckon we need the Sun 'J2ME Wireless Toolkit 2.2' and the update

I have installed this. The actual toolkit involved a simple 'spouse mode' installation. The update involved checking out the readme in the update zip file. There are 4 or 5 files in there that have to be manually copied into the stated folders where the toolkit is installed.

From the start menu run the 'KToolbar' program. This vanilla installation already contains the Mobile Media API which I think might be required to do this testing with students.

Now I need to work out

where to put the media that the students create
how to access it from the emulator

I will ask the PODMO people about this.

Deb Polson workshop/masterclass

2007-03-25T09:33:00.000+09:30

Last Wednesday I was part of two events led by Deb Polson

Mobile Learning: Student Workshop
Deb Polson – Masterclass (Mobile Learning: Designing Learning Experiences for the Natural Born Cyborg!)

Game Genres
Deb talked about game genre’s which led me to find a resource that might document these. The best that I could come across was
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_genres
Unfortunately this article only focuses on video games and did not include the situational games that Deb was describing to us.

Scoot world
Scoot world, is where a number of games are hosted that require groups to navigate around an environment eg.

Explore some great Melbourne locations while on a secret SMS mission as an Agent of Scoot!

This is talking about a game made to play in Melbourne’s Federation Square.

Cipher cities
Cipher cities is like Scoot World but it is a tool where people can be the ‘dungeon master’ as Deb so nicely labelled it. It is a place where people can make our environment into a game, comment on games, rate the games and develop and online profile. Cipher Cities has not been launched yet.

Cipher Cities is a toolkit for participants (in this case, students, parents and teachers) to build creative social networks by creating and distributing dynamic mobile content to groups of people via simple web interfaces. The product provides them with simple web interfaces that give them easy access to a custom application and a dynamic database. These interfaces support users in the creation of either simple mobile narratives or complex location-based games.
Source

Deb talked about Cipher Cities leading to the development of a version specifically for the education sector. Mobile Informal Learning Kit – MILK. One of the discoveries that she talked about was that the HOTS were achieved through the students designing and creating the games (being the Dungeon Masters) not the teachers.

This was supported from my experience with the workshop that we had with students in the morning. It was interesting to reflect on the role of the teacher while creating one of these situational games.

For the students and teachers involved, this was the first time that we had created a game using this technology and we had a very short time frame to achieve it. (Grant High School’s team report of this event) So getting any game happening so that the language of the clues and so on was precise enough for another group to play it was an achievement. I have no doubt that students left to it would achieve this without the teacher but I think that there is a strong case for teachers to interfere without taking over. The teacher

brings a lot of knowledge about lots of different things. This can be important to challenge students to develop a higher level thinking solution. A teacher might be able to see trends and themes in an environment that students may not be able to because of their life experiences.
brings questioning skills. These questions were important to overcome paralysis – making a decision about where to go next for a clue, thinking about trends and themes in the environment, etc.
can support the students to work as a team and become productive more rapidly. The student group had not worked as a group previously. Part of the teacher’s role here was to ensure that all of the team members were included. Directing some of the decision making initially helped to move them along. Withdrawing later was possible once some momentum was achieved.
knows when to withdraw because they can see that the ball is rolling now. There is the chance the ball will roll off course but maintaining some checks from a distance can achieve this.
is important for ensuring that all students were participating and getting benefit from the experience. This participation might mean that all students get to be heard but could also mean that we ensure that there are experiences in the game that involved a range of senses other than sight.

Some of the issues of this game for schools

Cost and access to mobile phones

Get SIM cards that only allow SMS (not calls) for students to put into their phones. This requires student phones that are not locked to a particular telco.
Ask parents to donate old phones
There was some talk about being able to purchase SIM cards for $2 and then just pay for credits. I went down to our local Allphones dealer yesterday and they did not know of such an arrangement. He has taken my details to investigate further. The other issue that rural people in particular may face is that we might find that the telco that can provide such an arrangement does not have the coverage to be functional

History has been a subject that has struggled of late with student numbers but this subject might be able to provide an excellent context for these sorts of games
These situational games could provide opportunities for strangers to interact. Deb cited a situation where game players were required to enter a certain area and on return to document a conversation that they had with a person from that zone.
As this becomes more sophisticated in our heads we will deploy the fact that mobile devices allow us to document or be creative at the time and place that you think of it

Flash animation of building development
This was a simulated environment that reminded me of the Lemonade Stand game. It also reminded me of Sim City. Games and simulations that the teacher or others have made provide an excellent tool for facilitating the conversations that are so important in the educational processes. There is certainly a place for these things. Deb stressed that these things support the learning process and should not be considered as the sole teaching tool.

The kids meet PODMO

2007-03-24T10:58:00.000+10:30

I took three students with me to Adelaide to check out mobile technologies including Podmo. My thanks to the DECS Learning Technologies people, especially Paul and Karen, for their support and assistance. The information that I got about Podmo is a bit jumbled.

We met Holly and some of the key words that I recorded don’t make sense when I try and use Google to help to get to the bottom of them. ‘Champagne of the ladies’, pixel play and pixel art. That’s fine because I will be bumping into Holly again in a couple of weeks when she comes here to run a workshop with a bunch of year 9 and 10 students re making multimedia artefacts for mobile devices.

Karen wore a Podmo T-shirt. She gave us some good hints regarding multimedia design constraints for mobile phones. Some of the key points were

- Screen sizes will increase over time

- Wallpapers and screen savers

- 72dpi for images

- 3:4 image ratio although some phone screens re square

- the Podmo server resizes images on the fly based upon the phone type it is serving – nice

- The GIMP was recommended as a good program for manipulating images for the mobile medium

- screen savers need to be a 3-5 frame animated gif

- videos need to be 30sec-1minute in duration - short attention span

- longer video stories need to be broken down into short episodes

- videos need to be in 3gp file format

- There are different video encoding settings and basically it is a process of experimentation to come up with the best settings for each video artefact. Key frame rates should be about 10-15. Bit rates make a difference to file size but basically the greater the bit rate the better the product looks. Some video does not compress well and is a result of too much colour data and too much movement in the frames.

- Data transfer via Podmo is free so file size is really only an issue for storage on the phone.

- Mp3 is supported for most phone ring tones

Che talked mainly about game design for mobile phones. Some of the points I noted were
Java is the programming language and the development of these games sounded complex.

- Have graphics based on 100 x 100 pixels and then to vary the size of the background to suit the phones screen

- We saw some sprite strips and I understood better how they were used. The key thing about a sprite strip is to base them a consistent grid size.

- Given the smallish storage on phone devices, programming needed to be like it was in the Vic20 and C64 days – very memory conservative. Now that I can remember with great clarity

- Use index colours – keep colours used to the 32 colours

- Images need to be in png8 file format (I assume that PNG8 means 8 bits per pixel or a bit depth of 8 pixels)

- Do not use semi transparent pixels as many phones do not support them

- PNG crush can be used to compress images

- Paint and Fireworks are two of many possible tools that can be used to create images and sprites but turn anti-aliasing off

- Photoshop adds to much to the size of the images for this application

An important resource for validating artefacts created for mobile phones is Sun’s mobile phone emulator for PC. I need to find this. Efforts so far have been in vain.

A recommended site for checking out and comparing phone features http://www.gsmarena.com/

I also need to keep an eye out for the Podmo developers pack

I was encouraged by the fact that all presenters referred to their extensive use of FOSS and this included the GIMP. Teachers in the graphics area seem to be fixated on proprietary software usually citing ‘industry standards’ as one of the key reasons. I felt that a hacker mindset enabled the Podmo people to be very creative because they were comfortable with picking up different tools and using them in sometimes usual ways and combinations. Relating to this, today I was alerted to the release of Ubuntu Studio next month.

Ubuntu Studio. A multimedia creation derivative of Ubuntu. Ubuntu Studio is aimed at the linux audio, video and graphic enthusiast as well as professional.

The Podmo people gave me the impression of wanting to ensure a fair go for all parties involved. Where artists want to sell their artefacts via the Podmo network they will receive a huge 50% of the takings. It is good that they want to build respect and a fair go for artists into their business model.

We have some bluetooth dongles and the Podmo server software coming soon so we will be able to have a play. I am going to find out if the Podmo mob will sell me a XL Podmo T-shirt.

Electronic Publishing

2007-03-15T21:41:00.000+10:30

I like the way that Cory Doctorow in the article "You do like reading off a computer screen" puts this arguement in context. So many times I hear people saying that they can't stand reading from computer screens and yet they do lots of it like someone shovelling "Mars Bars into his gob while telling you how much he hates chocolate".

It is smart to talk about the current technology of the time for publishing print and music and then to discuss how it impacted on the products produced. Did they make novels in the days of papyrus?

It puts it all into perspective.

FOSS in South Australian Public Schools CD

2007-03-11T19:43:00.000+10:30

A very interesting and promising project is unfolding in South Australia. It is a grass roots innovation that has achieved a lot in the last week. A group of educators and technical support people in South Australian schools are collaborating to produce a FOSS CD specifically for use in South Australian public schools. Well it is not quite a true FOSS CD as there are programs being considered that are closed source but free.

The collaboration is happening via the technical talk list and wiki . CD iso's are starting to appear for sharing and various people are working on ways to make the customisation of a CD possible for schools that struggle with skilled technical support. Consideration is being given to a core group of programs and then making it possible for schools to choose from some elective options.

I am wondering how central office will work with this. Will it be supported by them? Will they encourage this software to also be installed on all computers in schools?

User/Student control

2007-02-14T18:59:00.000+10:30

This blog post is about user control in the sense of software programming. Read the post and where the word 'user' is used, replace it with the word 'student'. What do you think????

A good discussion about Featuritis as it is a term I had not heard of before and is used in the discussion about user control.

Implementation of FOSS across the region of Extremedura - Video

2007-02-13T22:39:00.000+10:30

This video is very powerful. It provides an excellent statement about why we should be looking to FOSS as a key educational tool right here in South Australia. I lament the fact that the decision makers are taking as rapidly away from this to what i think is the long term detriment of our communities.

The video describes the implementation of FOSS across the region of Extremedura in Europe. The video also points to other countries and regions that are adopting a similiar path. Video length is about 8 minutes.

A good teacher sells the learning - engagement

2007-02-13T22:19:00.000+10:30

This link is from a blog focussing on creating passionate users of software. I subscribe to it because there is so much there that can be translated into creating passionate people about all sort of things. It, of course, relates well to the learning environment and the craft of teaching. Well this post about teachers learning from marketers to improve their craft has really pressed some buttons for me. I think the author, Kathy Sierra, has nailed some really good points. It reminds me of a conversation that I had with my then curriculum senior somewhere over 20 years ago where he was telling me that a good teacher sells the learning. He was talking about engaging students and so is Kathy.

It's just like learning how to cross the road

2007-02-11T11:18:00.000+10:30

Plakboek has alterted me to an interesting story

It seems that a female relief teacher has been convicted of 'of four counts of risk of injury to a minor, or impairing the morals of a child'. There are a series of popups that she did not know how to stop and did not appear to have considered pulling the plug on the computer.

This case will be used as an arguement for rigid internet filtering in schools with out thinking about what is best for the students and our society.

I would like to use my anaology of learning to cross the road.

Roads are a very dangerous place. You can get killed crossing the road if you are not experienced at it and that is why lower primary teachers have very rigid structures when taking students out of the school. They bring along more adults, train the students to walk around holding hands and so on.

As students get older, they have more experience with using the road and so by the end of secondary school students can be trusted to negotiate roads on their own.

We need to educate about the internet in a similiar way.

Crickee and PODMO

2007-02-03T18:43:00.000+10:30

By chance I come across Crickee the day after learning about PODMO. Crickee is a little Java program that is downloaded to your mobile phone. It provides the facility for the user to SMS but the data is transmitted and received via the Mobiles Internet data connection.

This opens the door for very very cheap SMS

phone to phone
computer to computer
phone to computer
computer to phone

PODMO already has IM but only between Mobile Phone PODMO network users.

PODMO

2007-02-03T08:51:00.000+10:30

Yesterday I attended a meeting at Uni SA, Magill Campus. Members included delegates from Open Access College, Glenunga International School, Marden Senior Secondary, Aberfoyle Pk, Grant High, DECS Learning Technologies, Uni SA and PODMO

PODMO technology is scheduled for a release date of 20/2/2007. It is a South Australian innovation and it looks very cool for education. I am disappointed that Adelaide is so far away and will mean that I can't be at the launch :-(

PODMO works with bluetooth mobile phone devices. Access to the PODMO network and content is free provided you are within a ‘blue zone’ which effectively means you are within the bluetooth communication range of a PODMO server. A very small program must be downloaded to the users phone to access the PODMO network.

Setting up a PODMO server is also virtually free. You can download the server software, and as it is written in Java, can be run on Linux, Windows or Mac. The server needs to be a bluetooth device which can be achieved with a $20 USB dongle for want of a better word. This server needs to be plugged into the internet so that it can communicate with PODMO central. One of these dongles can support seven PODMO users simultaneously within that blue zone. Want to cater for more users then plug in more dongles. A blue zone is restricted by the properties of bluetooth and can be about 100m radius depending upon environmental conditions. Yesterday I saw this working where the connection to the internet was via a 3G mobile phone instead of an ADSL connection. It was just a bit slow. I wonder if I could have a PODMO blue zone for a field trip where there is no mobile phone access – eg down on the Glenelg River somewhere or in Antarctica?

Content can be uploaded to PODMO central or to a local PODMO server. Certain content can be restricted to certain ‘blue zones’. Content can include text, images, audio and video. Downloading of this content is free – the user is not paying the Telco for the download data as it is arriving to the users phone via the bluetooth PODMO network. NO data costs. [very big smile]

There is a slight exception to this with some phones. Basically, phones that do not have JSR82 have to use the Telco network to send the request for the data which is a cost of less than a cent. The data file, which could be large and cost mega bucks via the Telco, costs nothing via the PODMO network.

So basically PODMO establishes a network within the internet with free data to users.

Other things that can be done within a ‘blue zone’ (all free) include instant messaging, fill in online forms (data acquisition tasks), access maps, RSS feeds, and soon free VOIP calls. How cool is that – free phone calls from a mobile phone.

PODMO gets its money via advertising but the advertising model is absolutely non intrusive. The user chooses to access this material via menu items.

Grant High School will be part of a trial of this technology to see what educational outcomes might be able to be achieved using it. We would be in partnership with the PODMO developers, Uni SA and DECS Learning Technologies.

Not only can this be used for the delivery of learning materials and activities, it is a way for students to develop and publish materials in a contemporary way. Just when we had the idea that www and web2.0 publishing was a contemporary way, along this comes.

Youth are using mobiles and are more likely to make use of a mobile than a notebook. So the delivery of educational materials and activities via this technology seems worth experimenting with.

We could make treasure hunt activities where answers are entered via the mobile and with that the next clue is delivered.

Remember that this is free. No mobile phone costs, no sms costs. A student potentially could do this on a prepaid plan with NO credit left (provided the phone had that JSR82 thingy).

Other possibilities that we quickly thought of might be
Roll call (down the track)
Daily notices
Student news
School magazine (OK u still have the paper for the oldies)
Careers information
Photos and video for download

There will be PODMO blue zones at the following Adelaide events
Adelaide Film Festival
Adelaide Fringe Festival
WOMADelaide
2007 World Police & Fire Games
Fringe Benefits

I can see our local tourism industry getting a great deal of benefit from this.

I would like to see the facility developed where users within a blue zone are able to take photos, video and audio with their devices and upload them to a PODMO server for sharing. In an educational setting I would like that facility to be able to be moderated.

This to me is another Google startup. It is highly innovative and IMHO has a big future. It is South Australian and fits nicely with my motto of “Free and Open Education for all”. Very nice work PODMO.

If we must have an exam

2007-01-31T19:09:00.000+10:30

If we must have an exam, then this is great way to do it. The students contribute questions via a wiki. This blog post reflects on the effectiveness of the strategy and some possible opportunities for improvement

No more blocked sites - psiphon

2007-01-26T10:18:00.000+10:30

http://psiphon.civisec.org/how.html

What is psiphon?
psiphon is a censorship circumvention solution that allows users to access blocked sites in countries where the Internet is censored. psiphon turns a regular home computer into a personal, encrypted server capable of retrieving and displaying web pages anywhere

Hmm, is that a way that students could access blocked sites from behind the firewalls of education facilites?

Can psiphon be blocked?
With publicly accessible circumvention systems one must assume that the censors can also discover and subsequently block access to these systems. The difference with psiphon - a personal system - is that the web address is only sent to a few, trusted, people. In that way, the censors cannot easily find and block the location of the psiphon server.

The only way for this to be blocked by school systems might be the use of white lists

Can a psiphon user be monitored by their government or Internet Service Provider (ISP)?
Yes, your government and/or ISP can always monitor which web sites you visit. When you use psiphon, your government and/or ISP can only see that you connected to another computer, not the sites you visit. psiphon makes it difficult for anyone to determine that you are using psiphon

What will be the impact of white lists on "free and open education for all'.

Create 3D character - Meez

2007-01-24T21:49:00.000+10:30

Create your own 3D characters

Remember this SACSA

2007-01-22T20:24:00.000+10:30

I love my del.icio.us and the button on my Firefox browser that reads “remember this delicious” is one of my best friends. When I find something of interest I bookmark and tag it quite easily, whether at home or school. I am also part of the wiki, sharing resources for the Senior Secondary IT curriculum here in South Australia. Many of these resources are online. I usually bookmark these resources in del.icio.us and then add them to the wiki when I remember.

What I want is a button on my chosen browser that says ‘remember this SACSA’ and when I press this button, an entry is made in a SACSA oriented site as well as my other chosen social bookmaking sites like del.icio.us. The interface should make it easy to tag resources to areas of learning, curriculum bands and essential learnings.

More on Mainframes and terminals

2007-01-22T18:04:00.000+10:30

More to add from TerenceOnline
This adds to my previous post comparing online image editors as well as
The return to mainframes and terminals
Google releasing package for the office

Terence points to some other tools as well as the Google tools

Online Image Editors Compared

2007-01-21T19:05:00.000+10:30

A great review of online image editors. These are free online tools where you can upload an image and then manipulate that image in various ways. For most people, these tools offer what is needed. No need to install anything on your computer and no need to purchase a product.

For school this means that students can manipulate images at home and at school with no need to install and maintain any software except for their browser and internet connection. It really is a return to terminals and mainframes. This trend also means that we really need to do something about the internet connection bandwidth and slim quotas in schools.

With such a wide variety of tools and the number forever increasing it further reinforces the point that the key teaching needs to be around process not how to use a particular product. I would love it if all students were put into a position where they were required to use a variety of these free tools and so gained lots of experience with transferring skills from one tool to the other. It also puts them in a postion where they are able to conitnue with their learning unencombered.

Leave Photoshop right out of the scene until maybe senior secondary.

Pivot Stickfigure Animator

2007-01-20T21:34:00.000+10:30

Pivot Stickfigure Animator

Pivot makes it easy to create stick-figure animations. You can build your own stick figures and load your own backgrounds. The animations can be saved as animated gifs to be used on web pages.

It is a great little free tool that could be used to do the following at school

introduce students to animation
create little animations to explain a concept or idea
have fun
give to students (484kb file size) to take home for some creative homework exercise

This really could be me

2007-01-18T21:29:00.000+10:30

Which Programming Language are You?

Thanks to Leigh Blackall for this bit of fun. Anyway, while i was there i looked around a bit further. Now I also know what OS I am

Which OS are You?

I also enjoyed the Microsoft purchases evil from Satan article.

BBC report - FOSS and improving business efficiency

2007-01-18T20:33:00.000+10:30

A BBC report from Europe indicating that Open Source Software

could offer considerable savings to organisations with little effect on their business.
The report found that in "almost all" cases long-term costs could be reduced by switching from proprietary software produced by firms such as Microsoft.
However, it warned that a move to open source could increase short term costs.

Could that be another confirmation of the fact that education systems need to be actively teaching students with this software first so that businesses are in the box seat for taking advantage of this cost saving?

Memorising

2007-01-18T14:13:00.000+10:30

Quizlet

You enter words and their definitions
Quizlet gives you a specialized learning mode, flashcards, randomly-generated tests, and collaboration tools for classmates to help you study those words.
Quizlet keeps track of the words you know and only retests you on the ones you don't.
You can share your word sets with classmates and get email notification when others make sets for you.
You can import words from a file without having to retype them into Quizlet.

This is not a good tool for higher order thinking but fantastic for ensuring that students have some foundations they need for entry into the higher order stuff.

Workrave

2007-01-17T21:23:00.000+10:30

Workrave is a program that you install on your computer/s so that it tracks your usage prompting you to take breaks with suggested activities.

I wonder if it can be used as a minor big brother tool on a school network, providing some information about user activity like, total time working, total rest time will logged in, etc

It is a free open source tool available for windows and linux.

Freedom Toaster

2007-01-17T21:09:00.000+10:30

A Freedom Toaster is a vending machine for dispensing free open source software. Users bring along their media (CD's and DVD's), select the product that they would like and it is burnt to their media.

There are instructions for how to make the machine, install and maintain. It would be good to see one of these in our public library.

The instuctions seemed to be very good and it might be useful to hack for things like a student timetable kiosk in a school

Open Source in SA Parliament

2006-12-12T19:16:00.000+10:30

Thanks to Bill Kerr for pointing me to the blog of lucychili. The entry providing a speech made by The Hon. D.G.E. HOOD providing some convincing reasons to parliament about why our state should be giving Open Source software more attention. In my opinion he should also have included some more depth to the reasons why this software should be used in public education.

The monopoly that proprietary software has in schools is of concern and this should be mentioned at these political levels as well. Teachers are using words like – “Make a powerpoint”, “Create a Word document”. By and large, students could well leave school believing that Microsoft and Adobe are the only options for their operating systems and application software. For the pleasure of indoctrinating our students we, the tax payers, spend large sums of money in licensing fees.

In addition to that, humans tend to resist change so the tool that we learnt with is likely to be our tool of choice in the future. So our students not only could think that they have no choice, but should they get wind of alternatives, they are going to be reluctant to change anyway. We would call that cornering the market.

Public schools should have the free software on all computers in schools. Proprietary companies might choose to have our students exposed to their product for which they should pay a fee to assist with maintaining their product on the schools’ computers. At the very least, it should be made available to schools for free so that teachers can ‘teach with the free stuff first’ and then expose the students to the costly alternatives later.

Schools should also be teaching students about the value of open data standards so that the products that they create now and into the future are transferable and unencumbered.

Finally, Government groups that are making products for educational use, like learning objects, should be developing these so that they work independent of the program being used to run them. For example, a learning object that will only work with Internet Explorer is not as good as one that will work with any compliant web browser.
Thanks for bringing this speech to our attention.

Tux may have some friends after all

2006-11-30T08:23:00.000+10:30

Tux may have some friends in spirit. Open content seems to be abundant here.

Free unencumbered learning
I am seeing lots of learning resources being developed by various levels of the education system, a lot funded by government and some produced by teachers for sharing. All of these resources are free for teachers and students to use and modify. Tux has a friend here.

The purpose of this government investment is to reduce the costs to families of private tuition. Families spend considerable amounts on private tuition and I suppose that this indicates some degree of failure of the public system. These resources are abundant and seem to be very good quality. It feels like students could possible achieve well just using these resources and not showing up to school. When this question was asked it was made very clear that school has a social role and the humanistic goals of education were once again reinforced from the day before.

Tests coming out of their ears
Not only are their learning resources developed at various levels but also test questions. Students are able to log onto sites and test their understanding of the curriculum and determine their areas of weakness. They can then use the various free resources to fix this and of course test themselves again. Korean children are taught how to do well in multi choice tests from an early age and most of the tests seem to be multi choice. On the second day we did see a place where students could write and essay on a given topic and select from a list the teacher they would like to assess it.

Essays are beginning to be used in tests to try and measure creativity. Improving creativity is a clear system goal for improvement. Essay topics are structured to include all subjects so that the student is forced to integrate their understanding of their subjects in some way. We were told that these essays were very very challenging and the fact that the education system was delivered in discrete subjects was not helpful for this.

Student help line
I have noted that students are able to ask questions online on various sites devloped at various levels of the education system. At some levels the people answering the questions are volunteer parents and teachers. At other levels the teachers are specifically employed to do this. Again these are resources that are available freely to all students.

Redundancy of resources and tests
Why have them all? So there is choice for the students.

What's in the bag to take home?

The idea of one sector of a government school system to be producing resources that the other schools then have to purchase is nonsense. Lets make them all freely available and establish infrastructure for this to be expanded by teachers being able to systemically share their resources.
Lets develop lots of questions. The nature of these questions need to be developed with curriculum statements on one side and blooms taxonomy on the other. This might be harder for non senior secondary areas however if we collaborate on developing and classifying banks of these we can use modify and share these as well.
This is the most important one in some respects. A school kids help line. Get assistance from expert teachers and parents. Yes, there are potential child protection hazards with this but I think that these can be managed. I think that this could include welfare questions which is something that I did not notice in the Korean model.

Talent and humanism

2006-11-29T08:38:00.000+10:30

There were three things that really stood out yesterday. The first one was a website where students from the region could obtain additional resources and assistance. Students could access tutorials and learning resources, undertake quizzes and so on that are made by the education system and teachers. A shared resource. Students can ask questions and teachers and approved parents could answer these questions. These helpers are all volunteers. Students could even write an essay and select from a list of teachers who they would like to assess it and provide feedback. There is a huge volume of learning resources that have been prepared by the education system and are totally free.

The second thing that really stood out was the idea that good questions meant good knowledge and understanding. There is a noticeable effort at providing lots and lots of good questions that teachers can use and adapt to suit local needs.

Finally there was a consistent message across the visits that we made of the mission to have an education system to promote 'talent and humanism'. I have felt nothing but safety and welcoming in my visit here so that humanism is very evident. Everyone has been extremely helpful. An example of the empathy that seems to pervade the place is evident in the sharing of a story by our interpretor.

She was in a taxi that was driving fast in a very heavy traffic jam and made her frightened. She said to the driver "You must hate these traffic jams?" His response was along the lines of wanting to get her to her appointment on time.

The groups observations of our second day.

Tux is depressed

2006-11-28T08:39:00.000+10:30

Tux has decided to stay at the hotel today and miss out on the meetings. Yesterday he went to the Ministry of Education and KERIS and found no friends to talk to. Jae Duk at the Ministry of Education was friendly in that the schools administration system was running on Linux servers as best we could tell. Mary-Jane at the Australian Embassy seemed to be able to see the sense of some of the Tux arguements. Other than that there were no Tux friendly faces. Curriculum delivery and ICT use by teachers and students seems to have no place for Tux.

We could have been in South Australia for what we were seeing in many respects. Similar challenges are being faced with the need to change learning and teaching methods. There is a repository of learning objects being developed. Class sizes are bigger but there was a indication that they wanted to make improvements on this.

The schools administration system was centralised with a web interface. Parents can access their students academic, behaviour and other information via the administration system NEIS. Apparently it has been successful because of the better information and time savings for teachers and schools. It would be great for the transition from primary to secondary as the data is on this centralised system.

The bandwidth to schools is impressive.

While the computer student ratio is about 1:5.5, this resource seems to be provided centrally. Some schools are using their resources to improve this ratio. I need to find out how they are doing this. Maybe Tux is having a role there somewhere???

One of the standout features of Edunet was the forum/faq that presented teachers with a place to ask questions relating to their work and get some expert advise. The part of this that struck me most was that teachers could use it as a place to ask questions relating to classroom management and methodology. Most of the forums and email lists that I am involved with seem to cover content well and the idea of having a centralised place to ask these method and mangement type questions seemed to be a good idea. Although any teacher could make a response, their was a commitment by Edunet that questions posed there would be responded to within 24 hours.

There is a growing number of students coming to Australia for some of their schooling. The key reasons cited were to learn English and to have a happy childhood. Australia is seen as being able to achieve this while still achieving high academic results. This spoke to me the loudest and the work that we are doing to further improve positive relationships in our school is worth it.

Our group's observations for our first day of visits

Bandwidth

2006-11-27T09:53:00.000+10:30

Well I have just arrived in Seoul and checked into the 'Koreana' . I had this idea that I would get here and have bandwidth leaping out into my computer. I thought that the connection at the hotel would be either very very cheap or free. How does 300 won a minute sound but no more than 18000 won for a day. That works out to around $0.42AUD a minute sound but no more than $25AUD for a day.