bodmas blog

He said a program would be created to enable those in the developed world to underwrite a laptop for a child in a designated country and to correspond with the recipient by e-mail as a sort of “glorified pen-pal program.” But however attractive the idea of a $100 or $150 laptop, he said there were no plans to make it generally available to consumers. – NY Times

I have my $150 waiting. I could buy two of these for the price of a single AlphaSmart Neo. Negropnte may be doing something really useful here. As a colleague (and registered OFSTED inspector) once put it, “just how much computer do you need to run a noddy spreadsheet?”

• Earlier post on $100 laptop
• Original post on $100 laptop
• Badly designed web site of project
• An alternative approach

Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as “fair use”, for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). The photo was taken by Jodi Hilton and commissioned by the NY Times.

Note added 8th Dec: Alan Staley’s PowerPoint is now available online, along with the other presentations from an interesting day

Alan Staley presented a slide with the Venn diagram above to explain his way of classifying Moodle courses. The slide had many examples, notes, categories on it – I have pulled out the central image.

The Automation of status quo circle represents using Moodle as a ‘filing cabinet’ to make handouts, schemes of work and PowerPoints (and screencasts as I am using more) available to students. It is a useful support function but the actual learning bit may not be happening within Moodle. In Moodle this corresponds to courses that make exclusive use of the ‘resources’ features.

The Tutor Control circle represents the use of some Moodle ‘activities’ such as quizzes, forum discussions with tutor question and student response format, Assignment functions and some use of tracking and the grade book. The tutor is laying out the path and the students can work through the activities and receive feedback and reassurance that they are learning.

The Student Autonomy circle represents Moodle courses in which there are case studies, peer activities, collaborative work, perhaps using forums with student initiated topics, perhaps a wiki where students can store and refine ideas and post information for modification by other students. One of Alan’s colleagues is using the Workshop module – students are assessing other students’ work by means of the criteria. In this way, each student will come to understand the assessment critieria through negotiating the grades with other students – this ties in with the idea of ‘assessment cues’ that Phil Race mentions in a recent book (I’ll find the reference tomorrow).

Alan went on to outline a simple (again, when you have seen it explained by someone else) scoring sheet for tutors: each circle is a target with a high score of 6 on the outer rim and a low score of 1 or 0 in the centre. Colleagues are asked to put a point in each circle scoring their course on the 0 to 6 scale for the attribute. The points are joined to give a ‘pedagogic triangle’ describing the course implementation.

I can use the intersecting circles to present the range of facilities in Moodle without suggesting a ‘progression’ starting with Moodle as filing cabinet and moving through developmental stages. A tutor could set up a Moodle course with one or two forums, no content, and use these to support a dialogue driven series of activities and a peer discussion space – and in so doing jump directly to the Student Autonomy circle. UCE policy is that certain course documents should be in every course, and I think most FE Colleges will follow suit – but I suspect that is the same as the printed course handbook most students receive at the start of their course, it will be kept in the folder until the tutor refers to it or the student needs it to complain or access a College service!

We have to be honest about the extent to which ‘social constructivism’ can actually work for a given group of students in a given context of study (e.g. Accounting Technicians on an accelerated AAT Level 3 course). It can in many, probably more than we use this approach for now, but some course designs and ‘communities of practice’ (e.g. engineering apprentices) may need a different approach.

Some links that spring to mind

• A challenge to constructivism from Clive Sheppard on his Clive on Learning blog
• Can you teach yourself with Google?

We like the Gulf News layout. Below is a grab of the whole front page on 27th Nov made using the neat little Mac OS X application called Paparazzi. No scooters and long lenses here, just a nice solution to a problem I often have – how to capture the whole of a Web page that is much larger than my iBook screen.

The photo above shows an edition of the Press Gazette on a Mac monitor, with a colour print. Martin Stabe’s photo from his Flickr album. The photograph was taken in August 06 at the Old Bailey offices.

• Press Gazette Web site
• Martin Stabe’s blog
• Roy Greenslade’s article

Journalists in the UK will now be depending on a blog for coverage and the Media Guardian for jobs. We teachers have the TES which appears to go on forever, funded by the huge jobs section (and it isn’t cheap to advertise a teaching job in the TES). As Richard Burton, former Telegraph editor puts it, “I just find it odd that, if there’s a magazine for the serious goat breeder and one for miners specifically interested in tunnelling and trenchless construction, how on earth can the very people who are the media be denied one of their own?”. Perhaps the Journalists are not that big a slice of the media pie these days?

Above is the Tree Diagram screencast as converted and hosted on YouTube. I departed from the script slightly when I was reading over the slides.

I took two complete takes and a couple of false starts to get this 9 minute video done, so, including the script and hacking up the slides, you are looking for an hour to an hour and a half of work. I wish I had added graphics to show the multiplying along the path (see 2:45 minutes into the video), and I originally had a section scripted about why we can treat the probabilities along a path as independent in a non-replacement question – that last point I can add to the worksheet.

Now, as a complete contrast to my screencasting technique, here is an animated video with sing-along about the Mean Median and Mode from LearningUpgrade.com

That must have taken hours to produce.

Download a ZIP file that contains replacement kubrickbg.jpg and a sample kubrickheader.jpg file.

The Kubrick theme that comes with WordPress 2.x as the default uses a background image to provide a white background for the post area and a blue-grey background for the sidebar.

When setting up a project blog on bodmas for supporting workshops with various students, I wanted a very clean bright layout with plenty of white space. I modified the kubrickheader.jpg file so that instead of a blue gradient fill, it has a plain flat white area. I then added a picture on the right – itself with a white background. I’m including a .PSD file from Photoshop Elements with the modified header. The project blog is called Marfona after the potatoes, so I used an image scavenged from a UK site about potato varieties.

The main modification is to the kubrickbg.jpg file – the blue-grey area has been made flat white so that the sidebar now appears against a white background.

To use these files, just replace the old kubrickheader.jpg and kubrickbg.jpg files in the images folder inside the ‘default’ theme folder in your WordPress installation.

Dear Roger Godsiff,

I am writing to you about a rather arcane issue to do with the elearning software that the British Education Technology Agency is recommending to schools and other publicly funded bodies.

I work as a maths lecturer and Information Learning Technology Development Coordinator in a large FE college based in the north of Birmingham, but I am writing here in a personal capacity. 34 FE Colleges in the West Midlands are making good use of an open source (i.e. free, but no commercial support) e-learning platform called Moodle (see http://moodle.org/). It transpires that BECTa is advising against the use of open source and free software in schools. A number of small regionally based businesses now offer support with Moodle and other open source software. Commercial learning platforms tend to be ‘regionalised’ versions of US products with, in my opinion, a poor match to UK needs. Moodle is an Australian development and much of the development activity is being driven from Europe and the Open University in particular.

Moodle is widely supported in the UK, by the Open University, many other Universities including UCE, and by many FE Colleges. Apparently, John Pugh MP has tabled an ‘early day motion’ (software in education, number 179) to the following effect…

“That this House congratulates the Open University and other schools, colleges and universities for utilising free and open source software to deliver cost-effective educational benefit not just for their own institutions but also the wider community; and expresses concern that Becta and the Department for Education and Skills, through the use of outdated purchasing frameworks, are effectively denying schools the option of benefiting from both free and open source and the value and experience small and medium ICT companies could bring to the schools market.”

I would like to express my support for this motion, and I would like to add that the enthusiasm generated by Moodle far outweighs commercial products – it is the feeling that individual teachers can join the Moodle community and have a voice in the development of new features – and this leads to wider and more rapid acceptance. I have, in my ILT Development Coordinator role, seen much more interest since my college adopted Moodle in preference to a commercial VLE product that had (in my opinion) deep flaws.

Some links that may aid your researcher

http://fm.schmoller.net/2006/11/moodlebased_pro.html

http://fm.schmoller.net/2006/10/tetra_collabora.html

http://fm.schmoller.net/2006/10/moodle_and_othe.html

http://moodlemoot.org/

Yours sincerely,

Keith Burnett