Computer pre-history

The Romans came late to seafaring.  Having vanquished all of the land mass of Italy with ease, the Romans happened upon  a stricken Carthagian quinquireme near Sicily.  This provided a template for Roman vessels to create a huge naval force, and after winning an epic sea battle against the Carthaginians tin 260BC, the Roman dominance of the Mediterranean Sea eventually led to it being referred to as a Roman lake. 

One such vessel was skirting the treacherous waters south of the Peloponnese in 70BC.  Its hold was swollen with antiquities, curios and innumerable treasures of golden artifacts - all condemned to centuries beneath the waves as the ship dashed against the rocks of Antikythera.

Yet this ship, and this priceless treasure, hid a secret that lay hidden for thousands of years after the wreckage.  The secret was a device of stunning complexity, of beautiful intricacy, and of such astonishing design techniques that it took the civilized English world a full 1,400 years to approach the same level of craftsmanship.

The device now bears the monicker of where it lay, undiscovered, for all of those centuries.  It is the Antikythera Mechanism.  The computer of the ancients. 

Universal Design for Learning

I have now received some more information that relates to my forthcoming ADE orientation session in March - released via iTunes U from the ADE Institute.  The nice thing about iTunes U is that it connects pretty seamlessly to iBooks and of course to standard websites.  So a couple of interesting looking iBooks have come my way, and also a website which I had never heard of, for the National Center (sic) on Universal Design for Learning.
The purpose of UDL is to design learner-centred materials that encompass Recognition Networks (the 'what' of learning), Strategic Networks (the 'how' of learning) and Affective Networks (the 'why' of learning).  Coupled with this are multiple means of representation (aligned to Recognition Networks), Action and Expression (Strategic Networks) and Engagement (Affective Networks).  This does sound like yet more edu-speak at first glance, but what I like is that the website links to a variety of research papers that explore the reasoning behind this methodology. Apple's take on this is to produce a variety of learner-centred materials that align with these three principles, and of course you can imagine how iBooks, iTunes U and a host of creative apps could plug into this.  So interesting times lay ahead for me in terms of materials that I will be producing.

Inquiry-based learning

I followed a link via twitter the other day about enquiry-based learning. It got me thinking about how I approach this with my own classes.  The link quotes Chris Lehmann as he reflects on the successes of challenges with this approach in his Science Leadership Academy.  Lehman identifies 3 key steps to success:

(1) Defining the meaning of enquiry-basd learning
(2) The changes that signal a shift towards that approach
(3) Potential drawbacks
(1) Lehmann takes an interesting look at the notion of personalized of project based or even collaborative learning sessions - and asks whether they actually lead the students into a truly inquiry-based state of learning?  He talks about adaptive software that might lead students through topics at the own pace set by their own abilities - but that this software fails to ask students real-world questions about that material, or to contextualise is, or to communicate these concepts with others.  Similarly he criticises collaborative projects that are bound by strict guidelines, in which the end-products are more or less the same across different student groups.  Lehman is at pains to note that an inquiry-based approach pays little heed to HOW the learning happens, and is more concerned with encouraging students to learn even more - even if they and the teacher themselves don't know the answer.

This is the key - that often there is a blank page in which the teacher and the students do not know what will happen next.   There also should be some sort of ability to publish content, through e-portfolios, blogs, twitter, good old-fashioned printed or handwritten reports, video - anything that suits the content.
Potential obstacles to an enquiry-based learning approach are that lesson are necessarily a lot harder to plan, that covering key content is sometimes harder to plot, and that assessing student progress is not a simple case of ticking boxes or marking homework.  The very essence of assessment is called into question here - what is it that we are looking for when we assess students?  What should we be looking for?

Culture of learning

I read a nice post here which neatly summarises the current thinking of many educationalists about learning.  The interesting thing is that it is written by a Grade A student who is himself questioning the meaning and purpose behind his own education - an education which netted him outstanding grades and led to a whole host of scholarships and awards, but which felt to him as if he had lost his inner voice and his creativity.   I have written about such ideas before but as the article states, this approach to schooling teaches the students that schooling is simply a tenure where you sacrifice creative learning for  educational results.  That is on a good day, with good students.  On a bad day it is simply a turn off for students who are labelled incompetent and not up to the job of organizing themselves to revise and regurgitating facts for an exam board.
I have worked in a variety of schools, some outstanding with amazing results and students.  Some courses I have taught achieved 100% A*-C, and many 95% or more.  But I did not enable this to happen simply by spitting facts at the students to swallow.  Six years ago my students were utilizing learning walls, where they come and pick their own challenging sub-task of their choice once they have finished their main lessons task.  The sub-tasks are graded from 1 star (easy) to 3 stars (difficult), and all of the classes were mixed ability. And the incredible thing?  I found that even the weaker students - who might otherwise be switched off in a standard lesson - were desperate to tackle sub-tasks that were harder than 1 star level.  They really wanted to achieve, and with a little guidance many of them did.
Six years ago we were not using wonderfully collaborative technology such as google docs or iPads.  Six years ago my classes were the only ones using challenge walls in the class.  Now I am part of a school where creativity and resilience and independence of enquiry are celebrated and formally recognised, and as a member of SLT we are starting to see the reaping of the benefits.

I have just read a fascinating article from Wired about the new beta release of Facebook search, entitle Graph Search.  Being from Wired, the article goes into a fair bit of depth about how if differs from the likes of google, and at first glance it sounds like it will have google quaking in their boots.  I remember the days of lycos, of alltheweb and altavista.  Altavista in particular used to knock google for six, and was the only search engine I ever used consistently.

Even back then I found yahoo just too...overwhelming, and google eventually started to overtake the likes of altavista in my mind because of the simplicity of its interface, and because of their PageRank algorithms, which marked data according to its visibility and popularity.  Of course now that google have monetised the whole notion of searching - so that prominent listing positions are based upon how much the advertiser wishes to pay for that heady position - you would think that would have put me off.  But no, like most of the planet it is still my trusted search engine.  In a way it has passed from a search tool into a cultural norm, into a verb in a dictionary.  To google.

So the article about Graph Search piques my interest because Facebook itself - 1 billion users and counting - has already hit that saturation point where it has become a cultural norm (if you are in the Westernised, English speaking world that is) To harvest so many users and so much data and to create a search tool with at least the same level of sophistication - and probably more - as google.  And THEN to wrap this all up so that Facebook users themselves are inadvertently providing the data - well what this does is shift the responsibility for a good link from a very clever search algorithm that simply mines passive websites, to an equally clever search algorithm that is showing what other people think and feel about data.  So searching for all the Italian restaurants that my friends in KL like is a realistic thing to do on Facebook.  And so much more powerful than what I can do with google.

Apple of course would like a bite of this, er, apple, and Siri also interests me in the sense that it takes away the pain of typing and makes searching a much more natural experience.  Well it will when it evolves over the next couple of years - and Facebook will at some point integrate voice recognition into Graph Search.  Apple of course have expertise in mobile phones and apps; Facebook have so far proved slow and unusually reticent on smartphones.  Google owns desktop and Android searches.  Three giants of technology all doing the same thing in different ways.  All owning a great chunk of the data market.

Back in the day this is what they used to call competition, and the beauty of competition is that the user ultimately benefits.

Apple Distinguished Educator? Moi?

Yesterday was not a good day for me.  Trying to run Windows 7 through VirtualBox on the newly installed iMacs in our classrooms.  This was for a Year 11 mock exam - in Year 10 the students have been using Windows 7 PCs, so with the influx of the new iMacs into our classroom, I took the decision that I would rather they stay in Windows over the next two terms than have to re-learn everything in a Mac OS environment.  Anyway the printers - which have been extensively tested mind - just decided yesterday to drop the ball and not print the files.  Nothing worked.  In the middle of an exam.  Eventually we figured out that it was something to do with Windows on a Mac PLUS something to do with this:

1. A 500kb image file needed to be inserted into a 24kb rtf text file
2. This text file is then manipulated in various ways
3. Then the students print the file.

Ach no they don't print the file because if they save the document as rtf or just print straight away without saving, it generates files that are 40, 50 or 60MB in size.  HOW on earth can this be the case?  Welcome to file formats.

Now of course we did not figure this out until the students had all panicked, been instructed by me to ignore printing, and copied their work electronically onto their desktops instead.  Still not a good day.

So imagine my delight when I found out in the evening that I had been accepted as an ADE for the class of 2013!  This is almost as if the yan of the iMac/Windows nonsense of earlier was counterbalanced by the ying of receiving such good news.

So there you have it, after much blood, sweat and tears and wiping out the entire month of November, I have been accepted into the global apple community of educators.  

Things that my old brain finds amazing - pt. 1

Internet radio

On the occasions that I venture back mentally to my days of listening to the radio in the 80s, I am struck by something.  I remember very clearly receiving a digital clock radio as a birthday resent in the early 80s, and thinking it was the most amazing invention because at the slightest rotation of an analogue dial I was able to hop to any number of other stations that were broadcasting at the time.  This included mainly Manchester stations, but also the odd foreign language channel, which was tres exotic, and if I was really lucky, a police channel.  Nothing beat the buzz of tuning in to a live police broadcast of a 1985 Ford Cortina being chased down the M62 on a wet February evening.  

I graduated from this to a full on Alba midi system in 1986 - and again the thrill of having a comprehensive sound system - with the girth and the go-faster flashes and the whirring of the cassette heads...well it is something that is difficult to reproduce now that we are all firmly ensconced in the digital world.

However now that I am fully immersed in Apple tech, I downloaded the Tune-In Radio app - and what do you know, I found myself once again experiencing the thrill of having an enormous panoply of radio stations from which to choose. Of course now the choice is global and is digital, but it still raised the hairs on the back of my neck to listen to a Swedish Jazz station playing John Coltrane at 3pm KL time.  Of course digital internet radio stations are not exactly cutting edge - but the point is that this free little app brought me back to a halcyon time in my youth when the world was full of possibilities and all kinds of strange music.  And as a human being in my 40s, it was nice to be transported back to that time.