bodmas blog

Just Suppose Teaching and Learning Became the First Priority. Frank Coffield has provided some summer reading for all of us in FE. Just suppose…

I learned from my father, as he learned from his, to hear the music, the excitement and the hope in the word ‘education’. I also learned that it is the job of teachers to help other people’s children to hear and respond to that music. We do it because teaching is a noble profession, which dedicates itself to the lot of those who have not had our advantages.

As I find myself using OpenOffice more on the Asus EeePC, I decided to put OpenOffice back on my iBook laptop. OpenOffice itself needs the X11 desktop manager and runs slowly on a 512Mb G4 based laptop. NeoOffice is a version of OpenOffice that integrates better with Mac OS X - there is the familiar menu bar at the top of the screen and the Save and Open dialogue boxes are generated from the Finder.

NeoOffice takes a bit of time to load, but once running, it seems more responsive than OpenOffice. Some earlier issues with the compatibility of the fonts and sizes used in the Formula editor between the various flavours of OpenOffice seem to have been sorted out in version 2.

The NeoOffice project is run by a few people in Germany and so I am considering a donation once I sort my PayPal account out. $5 does not seem excessive for a full Office suite.

PS: Yes I know that σ should really be used for the standard deviation of the distribution and that the formula is the population standard deviation! I just needed a sample to test compatibility across OpenOffice on Windows, Debian and Mac OS X.

Delphinium flower mimics a bee – the local Biologists think it is a ploy to ensure pollination. Rough macro photo taken with Nikon D40.

Geoff Petty writes a well known textbook about teaching and learning. Geoff provides a large number of Word files on the downloads page of his Web site. I especially like the ‘25 ways to teach without talking’ handout, the main message being “What the learner does is more important than what the teacher does”.

I could not resist feeding the plain text from 25 ways to teach without talking into Wordle. The word cloud above is the result… I think these word clouds make for interesting PowerPoint slides? I’m trying to work out why ‘students’ appears twice.

At http://bodmas.org/neison I’m putting low resolution scans of Edmund Neison’s 22 section Moon map as published in his 1876 book The Moon and the condition and configuration of its surface.

The maps use a ‘hatchure’ technique and have survived photocopying well. The usual South Up convention is used on the maps because of the Newtonian reflector used often in Victorian observatories. The Wikipedia entry for Neison (AKA Neville Nevill) has been edited well from my original draft, itself based on the Royal Astronomical Society obituary. I heard from a grandson of Neison’s on the day of the Venus transit!

Wordle draws a word cloud from text you copy and paste into a window. The cloud above was generated from the BTEC Applied Science assessment criteria for all the units. I can imagine using a word cloud like this to pull out the key words used in many of the criteria. These words are similar to the ‘cue words’ in Blooms taxonomy of cognitive learning objectives, and perhaps I can enable students to take on board the ‘assessment cues’ using this visual presentation. Via Seb Schmoller.