Last week I absolutely needed a way to import a lot of records into a database. My database skills are legendary – because I have none. I created the tables in Excel and did what I should and tried to import it all into the database. It didn’t work. I tried again. I tried several different ways. Then I decided that I needed some extra help. I emailed the database programme author and over the course of a few emails and a couple of hours he updated the programme so that the data would import properly. Job done.

I was talking to a sounding board about this experience and she said to me that she would have given up at the point where the data didn’t import. I couldn’t afford to give up because I needed to import the data and I needed to get it done efficiently. Time is money and all that.

So what was the difference (tipping point?) – I needed to get the job done.

When I work with teachers and they say … I want to make a movie … I want to make a PowerPoint … I want to do Keynote … I want to learn to make a webpage … sometimes I get just a teensy bit difficult. Because if they want to learn to make a webpage, a movie, a presentation on the off chance that they might use it next term it’s not going to work. They won’t remember how to do it. Framing it inside an existing piece of work or a absolutely have to may just work but that’s not always guarranteed. To learn how to do something – to actually be able to engage with the process and really want to be able to do? it – requires a need. Is this where authenticity steps in?

People often say to me that they envy the ease with which I get around my computer. They should see me with a guitar.

About 35 years ago I asked begged my parents for my first guitar. They got me one of those plywood half size jobs that you give to kids. I think we left it behind when we moved to New Zealand. Shift forward about six or seven years and I remember buying an ancient nylon stringed guitar through an advert in the Hawkes bay Herald Tribune. I read every book in the Hastings Library and attempted to teach myself to play the thing. I got to a D and and A7 but I could change between the two. Not with any degree of accuracy or speed anyway.

Move forward another few years and I had another el cheapo second hand guitar. I took some lessons and actually mastered a 12 bar blues progression. I could even do a B7. But those damned barre chords threw me.

I managed to get a beautiful steel stringed guitar and some of the elusive barre chords fell into place. My guitar teacher gave me quite a bit of help to get my head and fingers around some other guitar sounds and I could throw out some passable renditions of some of my favourite music.
After that beautiful guitar disappeared from my life a few years ago (left in a classroom, lifted by a stranger – I will probably never know ) I occasionaly stummed an old cheapie that floated around the house.

I bought a new acoustic electric last year and took some more lessons but I’ve never really got back to being able to play like I used to. Now I stumble my way through a set playlist, occasionally scouring the interweb for the chords for the latest radio tune. I can play just enough to amuse my self but not enough to satisfy myself.

Half baked post about Just in Time? I don’t even think this one made any where near the oven!

Related posts:

1. Doing It
2. Tablet Apostasy
3. Shopping Lists

And so here lies the problem. I handwrote the first part of this post into OneNote (because that’s where I now keep a lot of the “stuff” I collect and because I can theoretically covert that text into typed text. (You can see a snip of what my handwriting looks like here. ) One of the huge advantages for me of using a computer (of most descriptions) is the ability to save information and ideas and be able to sift and sort through them later (like – I took notes at that meeting and …. this is exactly what she said and I wrote down at that time). Will I be able to sift and sort through the above stuff? I possibly have the only cove Duo tablet in town that I paid for in Yen?

So where am I going with this and what is my conscience telling me? That many of the benefits attributed to putting tablet technologies into the hands of teachers and kids are imagined or overblown. Apostasy? Probably.

The ether is full of educators who are promoting tablet PCs as the next big thing for students (well after Web 2.0 that is). Even here in Godzone we have a Digi-Ops project based on a partnership between HP and a school in Wellington who are using tablets with year five and six kids. They are all very keen to show enhanced learning outcomes! Paperless classrooms!

And so they should be! But there needs to be more work. As I hope I have proven with the first part of this post, using a pen to get writing down is cumbersome and slow (I have a whole lot of Ulearn notes to prove this further). The time spent correcting from pen before proof-reading and editting is wasted time. And yet, in review after review I see all of this waffle about speed and accuracy with the pen. Not true. I simply don’t believe it. Typing is still quicker and more accurate for anything more than a simple jotted down note. I know that Vista is promising to be light years ahead in handwriting technology, but these schools are claiming speed and accuracy now. With today’s technology.

So where does the pen become useful? As I stated before, if you can translate, Artrage is a wonderful example of a programme that is only enhanced by a pen. I have also found that I find the pen is an amazing tool in KidPix, MSPaint and in PaintShop Pro. I find the pen is useful when I annotate or edit Word documents – in Excel it is clumsy and frustrating. I enjoy using the pen to edit PowerPoint slides on screen. I can make a presentation more interactive by putting comments or ideas straight up there.

But wait, there is more to a tablet than just a pen enabled device. I like to lie around and surf the web or to take my tablet to bed and cruise through my RSS reader. The form factor makes it a great device for doing just that. The buttons and pen mean that navigating through web-pages is easy. Do kids in classrooms lie around and surf mindlessly through blog feeds. I hope not, but maybe I missed that particular Web 2.0 goodie.

During meetings, (if I’m in slate mode) the tablet sits on my knee meaning that I don’t look over my screen to the other people. This is good. However, the innacuracy of my handwriting means that I spend far more time looking down correcting my errors so I still don’t look at the people I am with. However I’ve seen lots of photos of kids clustered around tablets on the floor. Now that does look like a good thing – kids all with their own pen anle to add to a mind map … maybe that’s more like it? Next cluster meeting on the floor around my 12 inch tablet guys?

Here endeth the crisis? No, probably not. I wanna be a Tablet PC Evangelist. I really do! I have downloaded the Becta research papers to read later and I hope that I can find some more solid data (???) to support spending money on something that in my opinion has limited usage the way that it’s being presented today.

Related posts:

1. Tablet @ Work – Day 1
2. Taking My Tablet
3. Vista on the Tablet

Did they see him as a potential entreprenuer? Or did they view him as a pain the backside?

And do they have rosey coloured glasses on now?

EDIT: There is a link to an 8:11 Close-Up piece about the sale that includes an interview with Gareth Morgan, father of Sam Morgan (and economist). I think there are a few clues in the interview.

No related posts.

Every week I bought so many toilet rolls, so much washing powder, a bar of soap and all of the stuff necessary to maintain a young couple in a small flat. After a few weeks I realised that I had a lot of toilet rolls in the cupboard. I had several extra boxes of washing powder and enough soap to start a bathhouse (if we had a bath – it was a small flat so we only had a shower).

I realised that the list had a two way purpose. It served for a reminder for me to check what I was running low on and needed to replace as well as a reminder when I got to the supermarket.

This week in New Zealand, teachers will be having Teacher Only Days. They will get cautiously opening the doors of classrooms to see if the cleaner has done the carpets. Some people will be hauling out the curriculum documents and the school’s schemes and doing their planning – because their senior teacher needs it next week, or ERO are coming this term, this year or because that’s what they do at their place.

That’s why the Artichoke‘s latest post The Edublogger and Matthew Arnold is so important for teachers who are returning to work this week. The curriculum, the scheme, the planning is only as important as it is made to be. What is important is the teaching and learning, the thinking and doing.

Back to my shopping list. If you get stuck on the relevant documents you’re in danger of having too much soap and too many toilet rolls. Of kids ‘doing’ space every second year of their primary school lives. Of Auckland kids learning about volcanoes without ever setting foot on Mount Eden or picking up a lump of pumice at Takapuna with Rangitoto in the background.

Artichoke says,

“I think it means that what is authentic in you is the desire to learn.”

She talks about teachers being keen to think and learn in the own time – to even (shock horror) talk about it in their own time. Imagine that. Imagine if it caught on and the kids did it too?

No related posts.