bodmas blog

These notes are for a College newsletter – comments and disagreements welcome but I am moderating the comments.

The phrase online learning can cover a huge range of activity – some examples include

• Using the Web for research
• Giving feedback by e-mail
• Class Web log with links to web sites and lesson summaries
• Structured forum discussions
• Online assessment

The simplest activity is using the Web for research (in my case digital sound recording and microphones). Students can be doing this as part of a class exercise in a blended learning room or outside the class. Like any activity there needs to be a clear brief and some scaffolding in the form of keywords or Web sites with ajumping offa points. Depending on the group, some prior work on evaluating Web sites and how to spot Web sites that are mainly about selling might be useful.

A slightly more adventourous activity is using e-mail to receive, and provide feedback on, written assignments to support students you teach each week. The main technical skill here is dealing with attachments and organising some folders on your hard drive.

Setting up a class blog as a repository of useful Web links, exercises and images is a logical next move. The material from last week is at the top of the blog page so students do not have to navigate a complex Web site. Blogs have become associated with scandals and propaganda: the blogging tools do provide us with a wonderful system for managing a simple Web site. Linking the class blog with the Web research activities will give students a sense of contributing to the course, and perhaps may speed up coverage of worthy background material.

Using a Virtual Learning Environment like Moodle as a storage system for course handouts and Web links to useful sites is useful for part time students. As Moodle courses are password protected, students can post questions to a forum without any fear of wide exposure on the Web, and you can answer them and recall your answers quickly. The answers are visible to all the course participants which might save repeating yourself. With a bit of careful prompting, you might find that peer support starts to occur – this is rare and takes time. As all the interactions on a unit or module available within the Moodle course, you can reduce the ‘scattergun’ feeling when receiving e-mail from students on a range of different courses. Logging into the Moodle course on a regular planned basis will also help keep a lid on the time allocations.

Using a forum in Moodle to launch structured discussions in small groups based on a reading or scenario can help develop skills of synthesis and analysis. These activities can be very effective in post-experience work with participants from diverse settings – such students appreciate the social and ‘back-channel’ communications with peers. Participants must login a few times each week or the discussion’ tends to be making a statement and maybe feeding back to someone else. Successful discussion based activities include an exercise that requires the discussion to be summarised or reflected upon in some way. I have plenty of examples.

Using Moodle to provide online assessment using multiple-choice or gapped handout type activities with instant feedback to the student and tracking of scores is very useful for skills based work – maths and numeracy spring to mind for me. It takes a bit of time to set up a set of quizzes, but the payback in marking load reduction and instant tracking may be worth the investment. Knowledge and application outcomes (using Bloom’s taxonomy) lend themselves to this treatment.

None of these ways of supporting students online exclude or entirely replace face to face teaching and probably never will – they can support the face to face process. Rapid feedback and prompt recognition of issues with evening and weekend students can help improve success. Recent moves in the UK to emphasise ‘in company’ delivery of courses means that online delivery may become more important soon.

A good place to start is to identify parts of a programme that could be meaningfully delivered using one of the techniques above. Then locate the teaching resources (handouts, PowerPoints and so on) that already exist. The next step would be to identify relevant Web sites for each week of the course. Finally you might want to review the learning objectives carefully and then devise activities or online learning techniques that fit the objectives – more on that later on!

Technorati Tags: elearning, teaching

They still pinch just the same when new, and they squeak a bit.

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If you have any version of the Flash Player from 5 upwards installed on your browser, then the yellow and blue grid above should show a blue square and a red triangle moving around and changing their opacity.

The animation loops once and then stops, and the frame rate is 15 frames per second. According to the book, animated shapes with changes in the alpha channel (transparency) while moving make a lot of work for the Flash player.

I am working though Mindy McAdams’ book Flash Journalism published by the Focal Press. Lesson 1 was mainly getting used to the drawing tools within Flash; and I found the way that overlapping objects cut at instersection points quite different to most vector drawing software. The answer is to put things on layers – and you have to do that anyway to animate them.

Having worked step by step through Lesson 2 in the book, I have produced this very simple non-interactive animation. The instructions flow quite well, and I had no problems following the Flash MX instructions with the Flash MX 2004 boxes in Flash 8. The only very minor change is that the Actions panel is back under the Window menu item in Flash 8, apparently the panel was moved a level down in the earlier version.

A major part of this lesson was converting a shape into a symbol and then making instances of the symbol. I found that the ‘order’ of the symbol on the stage in a given frame depended on the order in which you dragged the instances onto the stage – as you can see below, the semi-transparent rectangle is ‘above’ the red triangle to the left but ‘below’ the red triangle to the right. In vector drawing software (where the coordinates used to construct the shape are stored rather than the colour of the pixels making the shape) shapes can overlap and most software has tools for changing which shape is ‘above’ another – the drawing tools in MS Word and PowerPoint are a good example. I can’t find how to do that in Flash – perhaps you just drag the symbols onto the stage in the right order!

Having followed the instructions with my own ad-libs, I ended up with four layers and a functioning animation with four key frames on the timeline for each layer. I can see that a sophisticated animation with masked areas and a lot of shapes moving is going to need plenty of layers.

I have also covered the material in the short but vital Lesson 3; exporting the Flash movie. I have left the .SWF file above ‘unprotected’ if you wish to load it back into Flash to see my errors.

I did find drawing the background grid to be hard work – I drew it as separate blue lines each 25 pixels and then I selected and grouped these. Finally, I converted the grid to a symbol so I can have it in the library. I’m sure there is a more efficient way of creating a grid – bear in mind that I drew the verticals first, so of course, when drawing the horizontals, those lines were chopped into small sections as a result of the instersection logic.

Even at this early stage, I can now produce much slicker versions of the Areas and Pythagoras’ flash animations that I made by exporting from Open Office.

Onwards to Lesson 4 and buttons!

Technorati Tags: elearning, maths teaching, teaching

Note added Wednesday : Theme does not work so well on MS Internet Explorer 6 as installed on Windows 2000. While I fix the CSS, I’m using an even simpler theme based on the fixed one column layout from CSS Tinderbox.

You can Download the ABC WordPress theme as a 28Kb Zip file. The theme can be unpacked and uploaded to the themes folder in WordPress 1.5 or 2.0 installations. It seems to work; but don’t sue me if it melts your Web server.

I visited Open Source Web Design and picked a simple CSS based template called All Business by Aybabtu. I hacked up a single file index.php to match the style classes and selectors and I modified the list layout within the .right class. Then I borrowed the comments.php template from the default Kubrick theme and customised the layout. A single if(is_single()) statement in the index.php calls the comments.php if comments are open, and adds the ‘trackbacks/comments’ status footer to the post page. The result is the theme illustrated above, which I am currently using on Bodmas.

I have re-designed the whole bodmas (400 posts/pages) blog by changing three files – this is the advantage of dynamic Web sites.

I think that Open Source Web Design could become a useful teaching resource as we checklist designs against questions like “what happens if I increase the text size to twice default?”.

Note to self: In an article on A List Apart called How to Plan Manpower on a Web Team, Shane Diffily defines three classes of (large) Web site:

• Basic: brochureware – pages with pictures, possibly even the one page Web site. Tools might include Dreamweaver, Photoshop.
• Dynamic: Content stored in a database and pages built on the fly when readers visit. No ‘log-in’ or purchase or membership. Tools might include text editor to code the templates and the Web application (blog system, content management system)
• Transactional: Log-in for purchase or to interact with a Web application that is part of the business model of the organisation (e.g. mark an online register or use a VLE course specific to your class). Tools might include the business process model and databases, and ‘rules engine’ or application development system.

This forms part of a discussion about calculating the staffing needed to develop and maintain a Web site or Intranet in a large organisation. The whole page will be useful for the Web Design module on next year’s Foundation Degree course, but this three-fold classification is especially appealing as a way of explaining which tools to use for which job.

The other dimension will be John December’s audience analysis checklists and tables, and perhaps I can get the students to think about the goals of a Web site project in relation to the threefold analysis above.

“Even on the small scale, when you look at any programming organization, the programmers with the most power and influence are the ones who can write and speak in English clearly, convincingly, and comfortably. Also it helps to be tall, but you can’t do anything about that.”

I’d say: replace word ‘programming’ with a word describing any occupation short of leading edge algebraic topology.

From Advice for Computer Science College Students by Joel Spolsky, found on the interesting reddit.com. I think I’ll be using the new feeds.reddit.com service – very minimal and it works fast. In fact, I might steal the templates for use on this blog for the Summer Redesign, all very Web 2.0. By the way, being tall does help, I’m 183 cm and I have noticed this over the years. You get noticed, but then you also get picked on.

There will be some Maths posts here soon. And I’m teaching a study skills unit next year (Thanks to Rob for the idea for the course title, NTK or Need To Know) so there will be a new category.

Technorati Tags: teaching

I’m working through Mindy McAdams’ book Flash Journalism published by the Focal Press. This book has 10 ‘lessons’ or activities in Flash, and the book leads to flash animations timed to a sound track. Much journalistic use of Flash is around sequences of still images or video clips synchronised to a sound track – just what I need for basic Maths animations.

Flash Journalism is based on Flash MX with comments on the new features and changes to the menus in Flash MX 2004. I have Flash 8 as part of Studio 8 Student and Teacher edition, about £100 in the UK, and part of this sequence of posts will be to comment on the differences in the new version. The Web site for the book has details about Flash 8 as well as sample files to download.

When I am more confident with the Flash interface and metaphor, I will be looking at interactive animations – so students can drag things around the animation to trigger actions.

In this first lesson, McAdams suggests you spend time with the drawing tools and get familiar with the interface.

In Maths, we need to be able to draw polygons, ovals and other shapes and to arrange lines and points easily. The polystar tool in Flash produces a pentagon by default: you click on the polystar tool and then look at the Properties Inspector for the tool settings – click Options in the Properties panel and set the number of sides to 3 in the pop up window. To make an equilateral triangle that is horizontally aligned, hold shift down while dragging with the mouse.

One of the unusual things about the drawing tools in Flash is that when shapes overlap, they cut the shapes at intersection points into new shapes. Drawing a line through the triangle cuts the triangle into two different shapes. The operation also cuts the line into 3 separate segments – you can select each length separately. Shift-selecting allows you to select the three parts of the line. Dragging this selection clear of the triangle makes the line one object again. This behaviour is very different to the default drawing arrangements most vector drawing packages! This feature makes it easy to use intersecting ovals to make lenticular shapes handy for faces, fruit and so forth. Things get interesting when you try to align overlapping shapes.

As you can see the triangle is now cut into 4 shapes; two filled triangles and two poly lines that outline angles. On page 55 of Flash Journalism there is a paragraph about the align tools (Modify | Align from the Modify menu item). Align to middle and top works as advertised for shapes that do not overlap. When applied to overlapping shapes, things get interesting. As I want to animate lines and shapes, objects will end up on different layers anyway, and this may alter the cutting behaviour… on to lesson 2

Technorati Tags: maths teaching