james-greenwood.com » thinking

A return to your (semi) regular programming…

James — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 21:04:59 +0000

In the second leg of my plan to come up for air after a manic few months, I’m hoping to kickstart the blog back into action, after my recent return to Twitter. I now have the time to focus on the things I’ve had to neglect for a few months, so here’s a brief taster of what’s incoming:

A major update to the content of Some Rights Reserved is incoming over Easter, now improved with the hindsight of a year’s use in my school. The assignment has gone down extraordinarily well, and we’re seeing significantly higher grades coming through when assessing work. If you’re looking for a well-resourced, refined model assignment for unit 1 of the OCR Nationals, have a look.
I was reliably informed by our web developer that my unit 8 (innovation & e-commerce) Moodle course was by far the biggest drain on the web server a couple of months back. I’ve been having a blast teaching this open-ended jaunt into the theory side of ICT that I felt I’d been neglecting, and have masses of resources to share. I’m hoping to host some of them separately in order to make them available for download, but until then feel free to have a look on my school’s VLE by logging in as a guest.
And in the final dose of what some might consider OCR Nationals overload, I’ve redesigned our materials for unit 23 (video editing), and intend to share them once I’ve had the chance to polish them off over the Easter holidays.

I have to say I’m pretty happy with the ~300 hits per day this site has been getting, considering no new content has been posted since September, but it’s time to blow off the cobwebs and get back down to the stuff I’m here for.

Link roundup: September

James — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 16:13:54 +0000

From Now On

I really have to start the first roundup of useful links with the first site that got me really thinking about the role of technology in education. Jamie McKenzie takes a cautionary role, looking for the good in applying technology rather than evangelising. He provides excellent food for thought, and was quoted several times in my dissertation.

Key posts

Ending the War on Sharing: Richard Stallman

I described Richard Stallman in my famous faces in tech poster series as an “open source evangelist”. Here, he makes an excellent argument against the war on piracy & file sharing.

Stephen Fry on the history of copyright

Stephen Fry speaks on the history of copyright, and talks candidly about his own attitudes to file sharing. An excellent talk on the subject from someone who makes money by virtue of his intellectual property. Downloadable m4a podcast.

News roundup

Key questioning: don’t skip steps

James — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 12:47:28 +0000

From firm foundations…

When I was training to teach, one of my tutors had a section on his lesson plan proforma entitled “vocab”. At the time, I wondered what possible reason there would be to have a vocab section for an ICT lesson plan – the kids know the vocab, right?

Early this year, my department ran a survey for all key stage 3 students (11-13 year olds) to find out attitudes and opinions on ICT. I would say I picked the first answer at random, but as the student’s first and second names both began with A I’m not sure that’s entirely accurate. Regardless, here’s what we saw:

Question one: is ICT important?

Yes. ICT is everywhere so it’s very important to understand it.

Question two: what do the letters ICT stand for?

I’m not sure.

So she knew that ICT was important, yet didn’t know what it was? This student was in year 9, so had been receiving two lessons a week for over two years at my school – not to mention the years she spent studying it at primary school – without covering a simple definition of terms.

Saying that she didn’t know what it was is a little harsh, granted, but after realising this good student didn’t know what the fundamental acronym stood for, in a subject littered with abbreviations, acronyms and a raft of otherwise alien words, that vocab section I derided as a trainee started to make an awful lot of sense.

According to this blog’s stats, the most popular resource on this site (by a considerable way) is the Bloom’s taxonomy document. I have to say that I’m glad about that… posters have their place, sure, but they’ll never have the kind of impact that really thinking about how you teach your subject will.

I was responsible for the year 7 scheme of work this year, which I put together largely over the summer, but after reading this girl’s insight into the role vocab has to play in truly understanding ICT concepts I opened it back up to add a vocab section to every unit. Key words were flagged up with definitions, and time built into the scheme for what some might think was a step backwards: vocab tests.

I went to a grammar school which taught very much as tradition dictated, and out of my three French lessons per week, the first ten minutes of the first lesson was dedicated to a simple, ten question vocab test – completed in the back of our vocab books, mere tantalising pages away from the answers which we’d written in the front. Under the keen eye of either of the stern Mr Wilby or the frankly terrifying Mr Ryder, we would learn our vocab in preparation for the test, do it, swap books with a neighbour, mark them together and by show of hands the teacher would determine… something.

What I didn’t know at the time was what exactly they were determining. Check your taxonomy – they’d just assessed our knowledge. What was next? Comprehension of this vocab (applying different cases & genders) & application (forming into gramatically correct sentences).

I realise I’m way over-egging this particular pudding, but in thinking back to my experience in my formulaic but effective French lessons, I saw what I’d been doing wrong as a trainee. Expecting students to understand the difference between a database and a spreadsheet is more than a little unreasonable when you haven’t provided them with a definition of either. I see this all the time with new students in year 7. “What’s a spreadsheet?” “Microsoft Excel.” “Okay, that’s an example of spreadsheet software, but can you tell me what one is? What does it do?”

I’m not sure whether this is something only I have had to deal with, but sometimes we feel like we’re regressing too far. “These kids have had ICT lessons virtually from the womb… why do they need to start from scratch when they arrive in my room?” was an interesting question from a high school ICT teacher I met at a conference. Just as interesting was the question “Do you have to complete the database task in Access, or can you do it in Excel?” from a qualified ICT teacher.

Students with a firm foundation in vocab and definitions go on to form confident opinions, and apply their understanding. By starting lesson one of spreadsheets with =A1+B1, there’s a hell of a lot that you (I) just missed.

Encouraging higher level thought

Equally important is what comes next. At the end of year 7, all students completed a project in small groups where they came up with a vision of some form of information technology they would expect to see in ten years’ time. Here’s how we broke it down:

What can computers do?

Pick a current example of some kind of ICT – mobile phone, games console, PDA – and list what it does. Everything that it does.

What could computers do ten years ago?

Sticking with the same genre of technology, pick an example from ten years ago. If you chose the PS3, pick the original Playstation. Write down what that could do, and note any differences you see.

So what can you expect in ten years time?

Think about the context you’ve just discovered – think about what’s next. Think about input & output devices. How will you control your invention? How will it relay information back to you?

In three manageable chunks we covered past, present & ideas for future technology, with the likelihood being that they’d only really experienced the present examples. Understanding.

Short assessment tasks were prepared – students had five minute interviews with me as an industry expert (eyes rolled) in which they describe their product and I give feedback. Often the ideas were along the lines of “It’s like an iPhone, but with more memory.” Or “It’s a PS3 that can play Xbox & Wii games.”

With that last example, we got into an interesting discussion about why Playstation, Microsoft & Nintendo would allow their games to be played on one console. We also discussed what the controller would look like – they presented me with a kind of Frankenstein’s monster of a games controller – chunks of all three console controllers Photoshopped together, but with a little discussion they agreed it wouldn’t work so moved on to another idea.

While giving current examples, I used the Nintendo Wii (again) as a key example of the kind of change we’ve seen in recent years. I started my lesson with the key question:

Why might it be surprising that Nintendo is having one of its best years on record? And why do you think that is?

As expected, nobody volunteered an answer – those are two difficult questions, and take some thought. So I left it on the board with the promise of a praise slip for anyone who came up with an answer before the end of the lesson. I did this with three separate year 7 classes, and in each one the answer came at around the 30 minute mark.

It’s surprising because we’re in a recession, and they’re making so much money for two reasons. Firstly, the Wii is a lot cheaper than the Xbox or Playstation 3, and secondly it’s a very different interface. You have to be more active to use it, and a lot of the games involve more than one person so parents are buying them to play with their kids.

A question like that digs a little deeper than a vocab test, drawing on awareness of current events as well as understanding the appeal of different consoles to parents – the ones who hold the purse strings. A games console no longer means hours of solitude locked away in a darkened bedroom.

After some thought, these students got that – but it only came after setting those firm foundations in vocabulary & encouraging them to build upon these themselves.

I feel awfully preachy having read this post through, but please don’t imagine me standing atop my soapbox trying to preach to a choir of grandmothers about the virtues of sucking eggs – this is more a description of the issues I had with building competence in my students.

It’s all too easy to fake understanding in ICT lessons: doing doesn’t necessarily mean understanding. By introducing key questions teachers can assess what’s actually being learnt. My resolution for next year is to do more digging in order to assess genuine understanding.

Expectations & user interface design

James — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 08:15:24 +0000

The Human Oriented Technology Lab at Carleton University’s website reads “As technology becomes increasingly sophisticated and pervasive in people’s lives it is important to foster research and innovation that remains closely linked with the needs, wants and capabilities of people.”

Sure, but whose needs, wants and capabilities were taken in to account before now?

For decades, gadgets marginalised people who didn’t understand them. In the 1980s programming your VCR was as much a standing joke as airplane food. In the 1990s, nobody over the age of 20 could send a text message in less than half an hour.

These gadgets didn’t meet our expectations. Tapping dozens of buttons, scrolling through list-based menus or trying to work out what two circles joined by a line at the top aren’t natural ways of interfacing with the world. That’s not to say they weren’t popular, but rather than them being used intuitively their owners had to sit down and learn how to use them. Not quite man-machine synergy.

I am 24 years old, and for 14 of those years I have been the technology expert in my family. My dad, an intelligent, articulate, savvy man, has not only been confused by his gadgetry, but has sometimes been so flummoxed by the thing that he’s been unable to describe the problem.

Why? Because they don’t do what he expects them to do. My nan’s first mobile phone didn’t have predictive texting on it. Her second one, bought after a year of practicing with her first, did – and did by default. She couldn’t work out how to turn it off, so she stopped texting again. Are we born with the innate knowledge that hitting the hash key twice switches from predictive to normal texting? I’m no neuroscientist but I doubt it. Is not understanding the intricacies of these gadgets her fault? No.

If anyone’s to blame, it’s the guy who designed the phone, but we have to bear in mind the limitations imposed on mobile phone designers over the last ten years – size, cost, performance, hardware limitations, battery life… when you really start to think about it, there’s little wonder the things have been such a chore to use.

There is an awful lot that we do innately understand, though. Bobby McFerrin demonstrates this brilliantly in the video below:

Did you know that he was demonstrating the pentatonic scale? Even if you did, did you need to in order to sing along? Thankfully, we’re now at a point where technology has advanced enough to meet us half way in rising to these natural expectations within us all.

The two examples that leap to mind are the iPhone and the Nintendo Wii.

Give someone an iPhone (even, shock horror, someone over the age of 40) and just through playing with it they will very quickly learn how to use it, initially being impressed by the clever little touches like swiping to scroll, pinching to zoom & twisting to rotate up to typing on the qwerty keyboard & noting the changes in interface when the accelerometer detects it has been tilted. It’s outselling most other phones in most markets, and not just because it’s cute.

The majority of Nintendo Wii games are cute, with oodles of the fuzzy anime-like charm Nintendo does so well, but the real reason behind the blinding success of the console is in its revolutionary, pseudo-real movement-based interface. Demonstrating this with my year 11 top set, I mimed my way through several different games with a Wii controller in my hand (baseball, tennis, shoot ‘em up, golf, etc) while dragging a hapless volunteer to stand beside me and mime the same genre of game using a PS3 controller. Smirks all round, but they got the point. These inventions make sense.

“Who here has a Nintendo Wii?” Hands fly up. “Keep your hand up if you have ever needed to read the manual.” Hands snap back down.

So are we there? Have we truly reached the technological nirvana of seamless human-computer interaction? Not quite, but over the last few years we have seen some considerable steps in the right direction.

“What else do we need?” was the next question for my class. Here’s what they came up with:

Voice recognition & commands: lights on, music, coffee
Gesture recognition: wave, point, stop/go, nod/shake
Further developments of touch technology: integrate with PCs, not just phones
Develop movement recognition: Xbox Project Natal is another step in the right direction
Biometrics: fingerprint, iris scan, DNA recognition

Quite an extensive list, really – I was impressed by the last one. The guy who suggested it had been reading up on the ID cards that have been causing a furore since they were announced several years ago. The idea of biometric integration with technology reminded me of the closing section of an excellent lecture given at Huddersfield University last year by Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys, inventor of the DNA fingerprint.

In the lecture, he described the effect technological progress had had on the process of identifying a sample for DNA fingerprinting – identification of a person, or even a person’s relatives, by using samples of skin, hair or bodily fluids.

When he invented the process in 1984 it took two weeks in a laboratory in order to get a result. In 2008, it took about an hour with a kit that could fit into a briefcase.

And so he revealed his vision for the future; a Britain where nobody would ever worry about losing their keys. A nation of doors without locks or handles – when you get home you wouldn’t have to put your key into the lock. You would spit on the door, it would analyse the DNA contained in the sample and as if by magic open before you.

A utopian vision of the future; millions of homes with phlegm-covered doors.

Yeah.

Key questioning: don’t skip steps

Searching the web & information literacy

James — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 04:29:59 +0000

One of the big rubs in this brave new world of technology-assisted education is getting students to realise that not everything posted online is true. With young children, even getting them to realise that search engines don’t actually provide you with information – rather, they link to websites that do – is very difficult. This is made easier with the introduction of Wolfram Alpha, which rather than linking to websites that contain the information provides the user with a nicely-formatted cribsheet of information related to the search topic.

I was recently asked with very little prior notice to run a taster lesson for year 6 children who were in school for a taster day. Because we only had 50 minutes, and couldn’t expect anything like skills with graphics packages, etc, I decided to do a lesson on finding information on the Internet. I divided the class up into three groups: group A had to use Ask Jeeves, group B had to use Google, and group C had to use Wolfram Alpha. I told them they would have to answer some fact-finding questions as quickly and as accurately as possible. The first correct answer would get two win/draw slips (our school’s reward system), the second would get one, then we’d come back together as a class and discuss the answers they found.

Question one: what is the capital city of Guatemala?

Start off easy. Most kids got it, with the majority of the early hands up coming from team Google. Some members of Team Wolfram who used the keywords “guatemala capital” found not only the information they were looking for, but additional information including location, population, which they started avidly reading in preparation for question two.

Question two: what is the currency used in Guatemala?

Another easy question, but it allowed us to discuss the differences between the three search engines – Ask presents its information in a similar way to Google, with no discernible improvements, yet the chatter from Team Wolfram had the other two thirds of the room craning their necks over to have a look. One student in Team Wolfram who had used the keyword “guatemala” already had the information on his screen (along with a great deal more) so won the prize for first correct answer within seconds.

Question three: what is the population of Guatemala?

With this question, you see the penny begin to drop. I started writing answers on the board:

12,300,000

13,000,000

14,400,000

68,000,000,000 (not entirely sure what happened there)

13,400,000

Wolfram’s population section.

When I got to ten different numbers I called a stop to the search.

“So which one’s right?”

A couple of unsure hands went up. “Mine,” said one of the more confident boys. “Why?” “Because it looked right.” “What do you mean by looked right?” “I’m not sure. It just did.”

There were another couple of similar answers, but then I asked where they got their information from. Because this isn’t immediately obvious on the Wolfram Alpha search page, I pointed out to the class that it was down at the bottom of the page under the link “Source information”:

I wrote this source information down on the board next to the answers. A handful:

Wikipedia

nationsencyclopedia.com

History Central.com

US State Department

CIA World Factbook

“Okay, now we’re talking – Sam, come cross out one you don’t believe.” He goes for Wikipedia. “Why did you choose that one?” “My mum told me anyone can edit it.” Someone else chips in about how that’s true, but that most things that are wrong get fixed quickly. I tell my story about a cherub in a previous school editing Nikita Kruschev’s page to say “mmmmm, burgers are yummy” a couple of years back, and that it got put back as it was in less than a minute.

“Do you want to change your answer, Sam?” “No, I still think some of the others are more reliable.”

This post is turning into storytime with Mr Greenwood, so I’ll leave it there, but suffice it to say from such a simple start these children who had come from different primary schools, with inconsistent (sometimes insufficient) ICT teaching were very quickly discussing how to be critical of sources on the Internet. The US State department is a better source of information than HistoryCentral.com because State is the department responsible for dealing with other countries. You’d expect them to have their facts right.

In the last ten minutes, we discussed how populations are measured, and I ended the lesson with the promise of five of my finest win/draw slips for the first person to explain to me what a census is when they arrive as year 7s in September.

This is a potentially dry subject – hardly the kind of thing you’d expect young children to get excited about, yet it is a vital component of information literacy. I decided early in the year that yr 11 students explaining that they got the information for their essay “from Google” was unacceptable. Hopefully, through integrating lessons like these into the curriculum, it won’t happen quite so much.

The impact of ICT: Facebook hits 200 million users

James — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 20:42:43 +0000

I’m toying with the idea of making a website devoted to resources specifically geared towards developing thinking skills, and awareness of the wider world… I try as far as I can to avoid the “trivial pursuits” Jamie McKenzie argued so eloquently against. Hell, it’s not as if I work hard enough (cough).

Anyhow, thought I’d share my latest effort comparing Facebook users to populations, which I am well aware is like comparing apples with legwarmers, but a fun factlet nonetheless.

Download full-size A3 version here.

The paperless classroom

James — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 17:26:10 +0000

Last week, in all the excitement of being a brand new blog owner, I started having a look through my old waste books; a stunning variety of notebooks, few with anything interesting inside, even fewer anywhere near full… nothing at all like Lichtenberg’s, despite having stolen the name from his wonderful pocket idea machine.

After scouring them for what started life as old journal article ideas, I ended up with an array of posts sitting happily in Wordpress’s admin control panel, including this one.

I started out by saying that thanks to handy tools like Etherpad & Google Docs for brainstorming & collaborating on curriculum developments, Moodle for giving feedback to students, Twitter for talking to other teachers both in and out of my school, as well as more conventional techy applications like email and word processing, I’d almost eliminated paper from my classroom. Back in for the first day of the summer term today, I honestly don’t know what I was smoking. I, like everyone else, had charged out of my classroom on the last Friday of last term at full speed, leaving a stack of papers on my desk – some useful, most decidedly not.

I was in school for three days over Easter for year 11 coursework catchup, of course, but with two of my students bringing in their toddling cousins for the day it just meant the papers ended up covered in chunks of plastecine and felt tip pen marks. I never got the chance to tidy up, so the first free period of my new term was spent cleaning up last term’s crap. During this time, I realised that none of the scraps I was picking up were mine. In my school, we have hugely irritating sheets sent around on an all too regular basis entitled “How’s he/she doing?”, which for me at least is a much easier question to answer via email, rather than having to send a student with it down to the pastoral office. Same for the SEN version.

I’ve never been a technophile, really… I spent longer deciding on a nice fountain pen than I did on my last computer, and as I’ve already mentioned I have a bewildering array of notebooks that I either like the look or feel of. I never thought I’d see the day when I became a digital convert, but it slowly seems to have happened as the technology got to the point where it could replace the more traditional ways of working. Combining Delicious bookmarks or even the newest addition to my “that’s bloody brilliant” list, OneNote, to write down snippets of goodness means I no longer need the notebooks, or the dozen lever arch files of articles I collected together when I found a way around the print monitor at university. I actually felt a pang of guilt about that when I heard that my alma mater was in financial trouble.

I still have my old notes, and I can’t see me ever getting rid of them, but even my trusty yellow legal pads are going unused now. I can’t imagine trading my excessive book collection for a Kindle, no matter how crisp the screen… I’m in love with my iPod Touch, but wouldn’t want to read a book on it. Some things won’t – shouldn’t – change, but in terms of day to day working I’m pretty much paperless – now I just need to spread the word.

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