Oct

26

The Science of Teaching

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After exploring the artistic side of teaching, I suppose it’s only fair to redress the balance and look at teaching from a scientific perspective. A post form ‘the frustrated teacher’ a few months back explored this distinction and came down strongly in favour of seeing teaching as an art: I love the idea of ‘Double the pay, and see who shows up!’
Coming at teaching from the other perspective does make some sense though, and I think that the move to evidence based practice in medicine and social policy might yet be followed by a greater respect for research evidence in teaching too. There was a wonderful CalTech commencement talk by the great Richard Feynman on cargo cult science, a term he coined to refer to research which looks like science but lacks the scrupulous integrity essential to the scientific method – he cites educational research as an example here. Well, I don’t know that this is necessarily the case, but just because it’s difficult to conduct educational research scientifically doesn’t mean that regard for scientific method and basing practice on evidence isn’t of value.
It’s perhaps worth teasing out a few aspects of the scientific method and exploring how they relate to educational research and teaching.

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Oct

21

OpenSourceSchools – the inaugural meeting

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A good meeting today up in London as part of the advisory group for the opensourceschools project that alphaplus consultancy are running for Becta. Given we had people with us from a couple of the teams that had failed to win the contract for this project, I was not alone in wondering whether it was any accident that the Institute of Arbitrators were hosting the event (Is this the right room for an argument?…), but in fact the gathering was a very amicable one, as most such occasions are: open source folk are a friendly bunch.

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Oct

20

AS ICT – Some thoughts

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Just back from a lovely long weekend in Wales, including a day’s training on the WJEC GCE ICT Specification that I’m teaching to a few of the Senior School’s Lower Sixth this year. It’s not a bad specification – the theory side is actually quite meaty, and gives a decent enough overview of information systems. There’s a nice mix of things to the practical coursework too – DTP, mailmerge, websites or presentations, a spreadsheet, and even a little programming (if you include VB macros), even if these do have to be in the context of a business or organization rather than something of more immediate or academic relevance, which actually would be far more useful for most of my students.

I have a few minor niggles, around the particular hoops we’re expected to jump through; for example:

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Oct

15

Cloud Classification

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Interesting post from Luis Villa over on the rather wonderful Freedom to Tinker concerning cloud computing, and how it may not be all that the forecasts predict. Luis helpfully distinguishes at least four different sorts of cloud here – hosted applications, big data sets (a nice library analogy here), collaborative creation and hosted computing power or storage.

Luis starts though with a link to Richard Stallman’s interview with the Guardian (that I missed entirely), and some of the comment it generated. One of Stallman’s concerns is the lock-in that outsourcing technology provision will produce, potentially worse than the lock-in associated with proprietary code.

With his commitment to free computing, RMS’s concern is a predictable one, but the warning is worth hearing, with not only students making increasing use of web 2 applications, but schools outsourcing much of their information infrastructure, either as managed services as per BSF or to google via google apps for education, which now, significantly, can provide security and ‘compliance’ tools at a generous discount.

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Oct

13

VLE vs Informal Learning

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An interesting conversation on Ferl’s splendid VLE discussion list over the last couple of days sparked off by Leon Cych’s observation that institutions generally exhibit a lack of awarenes of the ad hoc and informal networked learning that’s taking place.

Leon certainly has a point. His blog post earlier today about the way mobile technology and ubiquitous networking is making it possible for individual’s to connect, create and collaborate in ways previously impossible, when applied to schools, suggests that things are indeed different now – yes, we’ve always had informal learning alongside the formal, with informal learning not always encouraged institutionally in the secondary phase, but the range of resources and the extent of the network available to the former are now orders of magnitude greater than ever before. As he says:

It’s all personalised, they have complete ownership of their devices and connectivity and they sure know how to use it!

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Oct

11

Open Source Schools

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It’s nice to see opensourceschools.org.uk up and running. This is an information portal for schools, developed by alphaplus consultancy “on behalf of Becta” – some readers may remember the mild furor that surrounded a firm with relatively little open source experience, coming from outside the open source community, winning the contract to promote open source software in schools. It could be argued that alphaplus’s lack of significant prior involvement in open source gives them a degree of objectivity which may well count in their favour. It’s interesting comparing Becta’s commercial approach here with the more community based approach favoured by JISC, which happily sponsors open source development and funds the excellent OSS-Watch, but this is a start, and it’s great to see Becta doing more, at last, to promote open source as a viable alternative to commercial software, after quite a period when there’s been a perception of bias against open source, perhaps particularly in regard to the learning platform rollout.

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Oct

10

Personal productivity tools for teachers

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I have a piece in today’s TES Magazine exploring the use that teachers and school leaders could make of personal information management tools like calendars, contacts and to-do lists:

Apart from your markbook, what other tools do you use daily or weekly to stay organised and on top of things? I bet many of the things we need as teachers are pretty much the same as those for people working with clients and projects outside of education. The computerised Personal Information Management (PIM) tools they use as a matter of routine can make our lives easier too.

[See TES site for more...]

Oct

8

The Paperless School?

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Interesting item on the World Service news this morning about the Don Milani di Rivoli elementary school in Turin that’s just started experimenting with a paperless curriculum for third and fifth grade pupils, with all their textbook contents delivered online, and I believe their work completed that way too. The site describes this as ‘a unique experiment’, and my hazy recollection of the 5 am news had this as a ‘world’s first’. I’d be very interested to know of any previous examples of such a radical adoption of e-learning, especially with primary aged children.

This is a brave, and potentially important, experiment and it will be interesting to see how things work our for them.

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Oct

6

Flickr and InDesign

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I find myself teaching AS ICT to a few of the senior school’s pupils this year. Quite a difference from the running the prep school stuff that makes up the majority of my day, but none the worse for that. We’re following the new WJEC specification, although we’ve held off switching to Welsh as the medium of instruction for the time being. The coursework side includes quite an emphasis on ‘presenting information’, which, given my students are also studying art or photography, is allowing them to produce some impressive work.

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Oct

5

Twitter

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Well, I know I’m really late coming to this particular party, but for the last week I’ve been spending time with Twitter, a micro-blogging, social networking tool. There’s a really vibrant ed-tech community there, which it’s pretty easy to link up with by just following the people followed by others (if you see what I mean), with a wonderfully rapid exchange of ideas: there’s been much over the last week that I wouldn’t have noticed or thought of without this twittering. It’s also a great way of staying in touch with friends that I’ve been far too out of touch with of late. It’s still early days for me at this, but it’s been interesting exploring a few of the interfaces: I like twitterific, both on the desktop and the iphone, although the web interface isn’t bad either. Also on the iphone, I have locly – which, as well as finding nearby flickr images, wikipedia articles, restaurants and the like, also displays geo-tagged tweets.

I’d love to try twitter at a conference. It would be really interesting to see this working in class or out on a school trip too; although I suspect a walled garden version would be a good idea for this.

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