“... why am I completely incapable of putting non-verbal marks on a page so they do the same? What neural channels are so blocked that my ducks don’t just look wonky, they look like scribbles? Why does eye-mind-hand work about as well in me as I contemplate a teacup or imagine a tree, as it does in my two-year-old nephew?”

and

“This must be what a lot of real beginner-writers feel. There’s stuff in their head or before their eyes which they yearn/burn to get down on paper. And when they try? It reads like scribbling. Awkward, ugly, incompetent, even incomprehensible. The one writerly skill I’ve always had is the capacity to bend words to my purpose (I just had to learn everything else about writing fiction). So I’ve never really had the feeling that the words in my hands won’t do what my mind wants them to. Now by analogy I know how it feels, and as a teacher that’s a lesson worth its weight in red biros.”.Emma Darwin, It doesn’t matter

All teachers should have something they do that ‘doesn’t matter’ and that they have to learn from scratch. That’s me and my piano, Darwin and her drawing. Then we can understand students better. What’s your thing that does not matter?

• Is Google Making Us Stupid by Nicholas Carr
• Get Smarter by Jamais Cascio

Both reference Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf.

The crux of the problem. Active learning is known to be more effective than receiving information, but we don’t use the active tools in Moodle. Geoff Petty gives out a large number of handouts on the downloads page of his Web site. The pyramid above was found in the Word file called Active Learning Works, which is the first download on the page.

This Red Herring post is about the images used in the Stance section of the presentation. I have strong views on PowerPoint, and prefer to use mainly images with a few words and diagrams.

Nietzsche was fond of his schreibkugel. The Friedrich Nietzsche quote is taken from Friedrich Kittler’s book Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Standford University Press, 1999, translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. The book deals with these three technologies that put a mechanical layer between ourselves and the performance or text, and that allowed reproduction of performances. Just one irony: before the gramophone became a mass technology, many households had a piano. Young ladies were encouraged to take lessons and to play light music in the home – and not just in richer families. As Kittler documents, this pool of young women trained to use all their fingers enabled the rapid adoption of writing machines. The gramophone began to replace the piano in the next generation. As Seb Schmoller has pointed out in a nice diagram, we are at the very beginning of another technological change, and similar ironies can be expected.

The last ten years has seen a significant increase in knowledge in how the brain learns to read. These developments are summarised in popular and accessible form in Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, published by Icon Books in the UK. Pages 145 to 154 explain the processes and circuits used when we fixate on a word between saccades (around 250 milliseconds). The small image of a cave painting in the Bhimbetka rock shelters was taken by Sarbanidas Roy. The ‘tag’ image is my own.

Our new writing tools. I rendered the outside of the poster as a greyscale to underline the way some people find the online world more engaging than “R.L.” (‘real life’). As one of Sherry Turkle’s students put it some years ago, “RL is just one more window, and it’s usually not my best one“.

East Side in Digbeth is undergoing significant development at present. These two artist posters appeared on a building fence site. The iBaby image is very simple: it is a scan of an old doll. When you scan a three dimensional image, only the parts of the object in contact with the scanner bed will be in sharp focus, there will be a very fast loss of focus and illumination as you move away from the scanner bed.

Professor Alan Staley is Head of the Learning Technology Development Unit at BCU. He has introduced Moodle as BCU’s VLE and has used the introduction of a VLE to encourage more active styles of teaching and more focus on pedagogy. I attended a JISC West Midlands Regional Support Centre user group meeting some years ago at which Professor Staley suggested using a simple visual scoring system for teachers to assess the style and degree of interactivity of their Moodle courses. I have cheerfully stolen and adapted this idea for staff development next year.

• Video of Alan Staley talking about Moore’s Chasm as it relates to introducing technology to teachers [ 12 minutes, see graphic below as the video is not clear ]
• Download the PPT that Alan Staley used [ Number 2 on the list, 7Mb ]
• An earlier post on this blog

Diana Laurillard is professor of Learning with Digital Technologies at the London Knowledge Lab. Laurillard wrote a very influential book called Rethinking University Teaching, published by Routledge, second edition with updated examples and a few modifications was released in 2001. Roger Rist has provided a brief summary of the conversational model from which I have taken the graphic above. There is a review of the second edition by Stephen Bostock – I’ve linked to the Google cache version as the original is in RTF.

The slide I intend to use on Wednesday is taken from the PowerPoint presentation that Professor Laurillard used for her inaugural lecture at the LKI. The whole presentation is available and worth looking through.

You can also read or listen to Kevin Donovan interviewing Professor Laurillard. I’d be interested to know if you went for the text or the audio. I went straight for the PDF transcript, a colleague instinctively clicked on the audio button.

I’m doing a presentation about Moodle and how we need to broaden use of the communications tools next Wednesday. I’m working to a 20 minute time allowance. I’ll be ‘signposting’ people here at various points as we cross large and complex issues. The Red Herring category will mark those extra bits, cut material, and digressions that could not be pursued. The category will also provide referencing for sources that I use.

The image is actually of the Blueback Herring, and thanks to the authors of the Fishes of New York Web site for providing a high quality image for download. They ask that images be cited as: Kraft D. E., D.M. Carlson, and M. Carlson, Inland Fisheries of New York (Online), Version 4.0, Department of Natural Resources, Cornell University and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. They own the copyright of course.

I’ve used the GIMP ‘colourise’ filter with setting of 0 on hue to make this herring red. Yes, I know, Red Herring is actually a kind of kipper.

The English Summer is upon us and I’ve been caught in thunderstorms twice. All the classes finish soon and I’m ramping up the staff development. I’ve been thinking about how people will interact with the Internet over the next few years.

I hate to admit it, but the future is probably with small portable devices rather than Web Books. I think there may be a ‘student’ use-case (see comments on the article linked in this paragraph) where a decent screen and day long battery life make a Web book attractive, but people who are not in full time education will be sticking to an enhanced phone for mobile Web. We have enabled the mobile theme for the College Moodle, so that smart phone users can use their small screens to see lesson content and use forums.

Another factor: the laptop manufacturers are moving towards larger screens and heavier machines with higher price tags. The 7 inch Asus EeePC has now been discontinued as has the Elonex One £99 laptop. The difference in cost between some of the fancier Web books and ‘proper’ (larger, heavier) laptops is now quite small.

I’m migrating the BODMAS theme over to something that will serve both the mobile needs and look OK on larger devices (this is a work in progress!). I’m also hoping to be able to get a sim card for the tytn phone that I have been lent to use over the summer that allows mobile Internet. The aim is to publish to this Web site, upload photos (the English Summer image at the top of this article was taken on the tytn’s camera), do sound and short video clips from the phone. We’ll see how it goes.

I’ll need to rethink navigation for the site theme, not just use liquid layout and plainer page designs. There is an argument for a very simple landing page for mobile devices that shows the most recent updates, and provides a link to a page with more content and search functions.

Just a way of looking at Moodle courses that Alan Staley described during a Moodle User Group meeting some time ago. I’ll be working this one up for next year’s technology supported learning course.

I’ve used Wolfram Alpha on the projector all this week with various Maths classes, mostly level 2. We are covering topics like ‘trial and improvement’ solution of equations and plotting quadratic graphs. The general response has been positive, and students have been quick to recognise that ‘you still have to understand the steps’, that just getting the answer has limited value in itself.

‘Searching’ on terms like “4.5Kg + 500g” produces answers in terms of both the units used. Terms like “y = 3x + 1” produce graphs, but you can’t alter the x or y range, and Alpha picks intervals that contains important features like zero crossings.

One group of three mature students who have GCSE and want to study AS Maths next year used Wolfram Alpha for half an hour in an IT session (it was my differentiation activity as most of the class were looking at BBC Bitesize pages or on s-cool for interactive equation solving activities). They solved an equation, admired the exact solution, and this lead onto research for the cubic formula. The statistics search lead to speculation about the impact of systems like Wolfram Alpha that can cross reference large quantities of information from a variety of sources. I’ll be revising my Mathematica commands to work out how to take the mean temperature figures for a number of UK cities over a period of time (smoothed means?) and to plot them geographically to show the gradient from North to South. A graphing task lead to the accidental discovery that Mathematica regards capital Y used in an expression as meaning the Bessel function, and it takes a guess at the order. Graphs need to be specified using lower case y and x variables!

I’ll work out more ways of using this system in the classroom. Searching on “prime factors of 68128” gives a list of the prime factors, so there could be activities early next academic year.