The Ellsberg Paradox, school and trust

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

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

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.

MELTing away

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.

Teach like a rockstar

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.