Within ten minutes my son, who attends the same college came into the kitchen to ask if I remembered a student that I taught a couple of years earlier who has chosen to shave her heair off to raise money for cancer.

I spent the day surveying teachers about Inquiry and Problem Based Learning. It’s easy to think that what is taught in the classroom stays there. I would like to think that the today’s lesson of the day is that we have a far greater impact than we realise. I hope that we, as teachers develop learning experiences that allow kids to think about how what they have learned can make a difference to other people.

Related posts:

1. World Clock
2. If the World Were a Village of 100 People

On the other hand the same teacher instinct was apalled by how little progress we have made teaching people how to search in a way that will return the information they are seeking. Particularly using appropriate key words to refine our searches.

I have been constructing a similar post in my head. Beware the river of consciousness that follows.

Recent work that I have done with teachers has lead me to wonder about how we seem to have hit skills in a roundabout sort of way. I’m often asked to work to help teachers get skills in using ICTs to present kid’s work or to show off the finished product – PowerPoint, Photo Story, iMovie or Movie Maker. Or teachers want a bunch of websites to use in their classroom programme.

If I suggest spending time looking at search techniques or alternatives to Google, they say that they know how to use Google. And then, I watch as they type a web address into the Google’s search bar.

Just over a year ago I wrote a post about the core things that computer users of any age need to know. Turning the beast on, where and how to use right click context menus and saving and retreiving files. I also said that we need to have some internet skills. And one of the most important of those skills is to understand the difference between an address bar and the search box.

As I see it we’ve taken a whole language approach to the concept of information and knowledge literacy and while we bemoan the fact that many kids can’t sort out the fact from fiction we can’t see that at the moment many adults don’t know how to tell either.

A few weeks ago my son’s science teacher was horrified that one of her students might use the Wikipedia for information. “Don’t let him use the Wikipedia,” she told me, “It can be changed!” We were in the middle of the mid-year interviews and I was asking why she was accepting material from him that contained unreferenced facts and information.

I am regularly informed that the Wikipedia is an unsafe place to look for information. Often times the person who kindly tells me this has just discovered this at a professional development course. My response depends on the environment but I have been known to tell people that, “Yes, I know, they have even let me edit Wikipedia articles.”

The Wikipedia is no better or no worse than any other website – if you understand its purpose and its place in the ecology of the internet and information. It’s a great place to start your research but a bad place to end.

In her post Dorothy talks about the way that Google has gently removed us from the reality that poor spelling and loose thinking won’t get us what we want.

I guess what I was seeing at the Googleplex was a testimony to the failure of this approach. When Google came along with their user-friendly search engine they not only made it simple to do an advanced search (just click the Advanced Search button!) but they seem to make intuitive sense of our paltry efforts. Whether it is poor spelling and grammar or people who simply type in a question, Google seems to be able to to supply a list of intelligent results.

I think we have to go one step further back – yet again – and look at search engine design and search engine purpose. It’s not always about helping you find the information that you want, but about directing you to what it wants you to see. We need to step away from the Google (and Google Advanced) is good / Wikipedia is bad mode and take a look at the myriads of other options that are out there.

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1. Google Maps Mashup – NZ!
2. Searching
3. Linkeracy

RMS argued that “a change in technology cannot change basic moral principles” and used historical facts to show how large and corrupt business organisations have used governments in order to retain complete contol over software, works of art, music and literature. He discussed DRM (Digital Restriction Management as the Free Software Foundation prefer to call it) increasing threats to our freedoms in the “pay-per-view universe”. I could go on and on but others have already done it for me – with a photo as well (complete notes here from someone who attended a similar event last month).

What really interested me was that RMS proposes that we stop looking at copyright based on the medium of of a work. His idea is, instead, to look at the purpose or the social use of a piece of work …

• works that serve a practical purpose – software, recipes
• works of testimony or expression
• works of entertainment

RMS argues that all are of equal value but that their different nature means they should be treated differently.

The first category – the practical works – must be free. Free to publish, free to share and free to modify. His argement is that unless you are free to change it, you don’t own it. My roast beef recipe, your code or an interesting mashup of the two.

The second category – memoirs, essays of opinion, scientific papers (which he says are the witness of specific scientists)- should not be able to be modified because in doing so the original author could easily be misrepresented. These works should be able to be freely (although non-commercially) shared. “Sharing is the basis of society,” he said.

And the third category – works of art and entertainment – should have some copyright attached but for a much shorter period of time. Stallman argues that an creator should get royalties for ten years before a work enters the public domain (and can be modified). However, during that time he says that unmodified versions of the work should be freely shared. Modification and attribution is the key idea here. He spoke in detail about music sharing and cited the examples of Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails who have released their work to be downloaded and freely shared. He had a couple of suggestions about how musicians, for example, could be recompensed by those of us who could afford a dollar or two.

While I believe that copyright law needs a total overhaul, Stallman’s talk threw up more questions than answers. The audience had opportunity to ask some of those questions and I noticed that he avoided answering those that he didn’t like by telling the questioner that there was a better question (that he did answer).

A couple of further ideas to think about:

• avoid YouTube because the software required to view the videos is proprietry (an interesting discussion about that here).
• Stallman demands that recordings of him are shared only in Open Source formats – RadionNZ respected that viewpoint and made all of yesterday’s recordingings available in Ogg Vorbis format – not just the Stallman interview – although there is still a Windows Media Stream available here.

Richard Stallman is an interesting man with a passion for something that is really important. The trouble that I have is the totality of his belief. His “all record companies are evil and are ripping off all musicians” mantra is too much of a generalisation. What about the artists that have their own record companies – are they involved in their own rip off ? And should we teach that all laws that we believe are evil should be totally disregarded?

Yesterday, on Radio New Zealand’s Saturday Morning Show Kim Hill asked a listener’s question about travelling in a modern car running on all manner of non-free software. Stallman said it was permissible, just as he allowed himself to use Windows computers if that was what was available at places that he was staying. Isn’t that a contradiction of his own terms? From the man who gave back a copy-protected CD because he had a point to make?

I often wish that I totally believed in a cause – a religion, a political ideal or a social cause. I used to have a cause, a total belief system but one day I woke up and realised that I was living in an echo chamber, that I had no peripheral vision or depth perception.  When I heard RMS on Friday, and again on the radio yesterday morning, I was reminded of that time in my own life and while I espouse many of his views and ideas I think it’s all just a bit too black and white.

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You play a secret agent infiltrating a top-secret neuroscience research facility. Your mission: to track down and root out the Nanobots that have invaded the brains of the scientists there. If you fail, the Nanobots and the secret entity that spawned them will take over the Earth, reprogramming the human brain into docile submission.

Neuromatrix is a game that is designed to teach kids about the workings of the human brain. The game is being released on August 24th and is designed for 11-15 year olds.

There is video preview on the site (no demo ) and brain information and teachers notes are available. I’ve emailed the site about getting a copy to have a close look. I’m quite keen to have a closer look and I have an experienced 13 year old game tester who will happily put it through its paces.

Site | Video | Morphonix Blog

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There is a bit of a story to this website. The project started when some kids were introduced to Pivot Stickfigure Animator by their teacher. They were so excited by the software that they decided to start an animation club. They met in their own time and started out working as individuals. Over the course of a few weeks they started to collaborate with each other and to share ideas and resources. Their teacher noticed that the students were uploading all of their figures and backgrounds to shared folders on the school server so that they could springboard off each other’s efforts.

The project is growing with the orginal students working with kids from different schools and showing them how to use this clever piece of free software.

http://theanimator.celebrates.co.nz – if you like what you see, leave the animators a message (comments are moderated)

Find Pivot here.

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My final comment on all of this is that almost any technology can be a learning technology. It’s how it’s used, not what is used. What’s the difference between a conference room and a classroom? What is the difference between a CMS and an LCMS? Mostly branding, I would say. This is one reason that I’m keen on non-educational tools (SNS, wikis, blogs, social bookmarks) in that they are not constrained by some pre-conceived notions about learning. I can use these tools for instruction or for guided study or for discovery learning, just as the same physical classroom can be alternately an exciting learning environment or a prison cell.

I rather like these comments because they cut through some of the hyperactivity often seen in the interweb about the the 2.0-world. It’s not about the tools but about the thinking behind them.

While the original article is a worthwhile read but the title shows the real issue. There is never going to be an “all you need to know” because there can never be a static learning environment. The best we can hope for is for the odd pointer to help us along the way.

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2. Joining the Discussion
3. Checklist

This question is regularly thrown at me by schools that are doing their planning and want to know what skills they should be teaching at year zero, year one, … so that they can produce competent users of ICTs at whatever age their students leave. I’m really wary of skills checklists. I believe that everyone needs the same core skills – at any age. If a child starts as a new entrant, they have the same requirements as a child who enters the school at year five. Or for that matter a teacher who moves to the school after many years of working on an alternative platform. While I’m focussing on Macs and PCs here, the same core skills could apply to moving to a Linux platform or using a tablet PC. Or using a PDA or a phone.

• How to turn it on and off. Don’t laugh – if you come from a PC and want to turn on some Macs it can be a bit tricky, unless you know where the button lives.
• How to login to a computer and something about what this means. For example if you have logged in as a student (or other restricted user) then you can’t do the same kinds of things as a teacher (in most cases). And that logging in at home might not give you seemless access to some resources. Getting onto the internet might be a bit different at home, for example.
• Mouse skills are next. And, if the user is on a laptop, touchpad skills. I believe that both Apple Mac and PC users need to understand the power of the right click. Yes, there is a right click on an Apple computer. Just have a fiddle with clicking the right mouse button on a regular USB mouse, or hitting the CTRL key as the same time as a mouse click. There is a huge range of options just waiting to be found.
• How to start and finish using a programme. Again, don’t laugh because many people – on Macs and PCs – close their window and leave the programme running.
• How to save and retrieve a file. This includes saving a file in the right place. Many people use MS Word or Excel as a file manager, thinking that you move, delete or copy files from inside the “Save As” dialogue. This is dangerous behaviour!
• Next, I think people need some keyboard skills. Not typing skills although I do think that some keyboarding skills are useful at some point in a learner’s career. Users need to understand how to make a capital letter (and the difference between the Caps Lock and the Shift key), how to make a space and common punctuation marks. They need to understand common conventions like one space between the words in a sentence and one after the full stop (period). They also need to understand that the programme will be able to sort out the line breaks and that the Enter (Return) key should not be hit when they think that the line is long enough. This works in Word Processors, blog clients, IM software, cellphones …
• I think that we need to keep using the language of computing. That means that if I am talking about getting my language onto the screen (typing) I use words like Font, Format, Insert and Bullet Point. I talk about Tables when I’m in a word processor and I understand that in a spreadsheeting programme I don’t do a graph but I Chart my results. In all of the programmes that I use I know that Toolbars will help me to complete my tasks and that if I get stuck I am a competant user of the Help files because I can speak the same language as my computer.
• And, we need a few ‘physical’ internet skills. I understand how to use the address bar and that Google’s search box is not the same as an address bar. I need to learn that it can take a few moments for a page to load and that mad clicking on the same link will actually slow loading pages down.

These are the core skills that I believe are the absolute basics that any competent computer user needs to have. I think they should be taught to all children as they start school and that if someone (student or teacher) moves to a new school, this is where to start.

Of course there are myriads of other things that the comepetant user needs to know. Many of these things fall naturally into curriculum areas. For example, information skills are critical and they need to be explicitly taught. However they can’t be explicitly taught if a person doesn’t know the difference between the address bar or a search box. So this is my basic checklist that allows all of the other learning to take place. Just don’t put it into a checklist please!

Comments?

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We did our original work inside Blogger and then copied it all to a static webpage on a piece of web real estate that the company claims will be free for ever. Seven years down the track I’m not entirely certain that I want that work up on the web for all to see. Not that it’s easy to find. I was unable to track it down using any of the keywords or phrases inside it. So am I going to take it down? I probably won’t because however naive it reads, it does represent a piece of thinking at a certain point in time. Unless I get too paranoid about the stalkers.

I guess that’s one of the reasons why I am slightly cynical when I hear about these new tools called blogs. Or wikis. The tools have been around for a few years now. Blogs started when people decided they wanted to be able to diary on the web or keep collections of essays and ideas together and they wanted an easy way to do it. Blogs allow people to keep adding to their space and most readers rarely go beyond the front page so all of the older and possibly embarrassing writing is mostly hidden.

On a side note

It’s a little bit scary to look at your work with a critical eye. We did a bit of that scary stuff yesterday when we deconstructed a lesson that one of our cluster teachers had videoed as part on an action research project. Although the intention was to look at question types, there was so much other stuff opened up for all to see.

(Mandlebrot image from CC licensed Flickr image set)

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Today brought back some memories of that first experience. It’s been pretty wild, wet and windy here in Auckland and that weather has brought chaos to the traffic. It also brought a bit of chaos as we looked for the driest route to the conference breakouts today. At least once in the sessions the rooms were warm and dry!

I particularly enjoyed the keynote speaker’s first breakout session today. Miguel Guhlin’s session was about using opensource tools to create a safe, “walled garden” for teachers and students to collaborate and network. I have been playing with Mambo, Moodle and Elgg recently and Miguel’s work has given me some more ideas to play with.

I think the funniest
moment came late in the day. Like the good conference attendees we all are, several of us stayed for the prize draw. I was sitting next to a teacher who appeared to do some sort of worship maneouver at the first draw. He was repeating his “I never win”, mantra so loudly that I don’t actually think he realised that he had won a prize until the rest of us errupted beside him. Go Owairaka District School! Go Nga Taonga Cluster!

The next prize, the ‘man bag’, went to a teacher from Parakai School (Kirikiri Mangu Cluster) so I was pretty happy about that. Then they did the draw for a copy of Kidspiration. Some one else did the”I never win” mantra (see the photo to the left) and the name of another teacher in the cluster was called. The trouble was that she’d gone home. The mantra started again … and it was … another Owairaka teacher! Fabulous!

I wish I’d remembered my camera – the lighting in the conference hall wasn’t great for the camera phone!

In the mean time here’s one last little gem from the trade’s hall!

Don’tcha just love a good ICT conference?

Related posts:

1. Yesterday’s Post …
2. Celebrate!
3. Lead Teacher Programme

This little program saved my wife and I a lot of of grief and emotional trauma while on vacation. Read on.

I am a PopSci reader and linked to DCoT via the mag. My family, which includes two VERY energetic boys, five and three, went to Disneyland for a little get-a-way. Before we went I told my wife about the ‘I’m Lost’ program that one can install on a jump drive.

We decided to buy three 32Mb drives, which are a dime a dozen nowadays, one for each boy and one for us with the same program and ’secret phrase’ on it. We also included our cellphone numbers. Two lanyards with dangling USB drives that had a ‘I’m Lost’ label adhered to them and tucked into their shirts later, we had two boys that if got lost would be found and be reunited with us quickly.

We told the boys to cry for mom or dad if they wander off or got lost and then give the USB drive to the person that found them.

Our three year old did just what we thought he would do – Disappeared. Within 13 minutes of being ‘lost’ though, my cellphone rang. My three year old whom we thought didn’t understand what we told him about the funny thing around his neck actually did what we told him. The account from our boys ‘finder’ was humorous and panned out like this: My little redheaded boy was SCREAMING for his mom. The ‘finder’ came to help him, the boy showed the ‘finder’ the labelled USB drive, the ‘finder’ then brought him to security, security plugged the USB drive in to his computer, saw the message and called me on my cellphone. When we went to retrieve our boy the security guard asked for our USB drive with the secret phrase on it. The USB drives performed just as set up to. It had my cellphone number, my boys’ first name (first name only!) to calm him down and his favorite treat.

To say the least, D-land security was very impressed and the ‘finder’ equally impressed and my redhead boy was wearing M&M’s on his lips and chin.

There it is. Not only can you retrieve lost USB drives with this you can also find lost kids. Thank you!

Daily Cup of Tech
Judging by the excitement around the interweb I might be one of the few people who considers this to be a slightly over the top method of keeping track of the kids.

At the root of this story is the huge excitement about what technology can do. And there is a lot of new technology out there and new ways of doing old things. The problem is that when the new way of doing the old thing turns into an exercise of technology (instead of getting it done) it can become ridiculous.

It’s easy to fall into this trap in the classroom. With the overwhelming number of glossy, shiny new tools on the web it’s easy to get caught up in the cool factor and forget the thinking factor. The challenge is to take a step back and think about the nail.

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