mikes web log

Had a great brainstorming(thought showering) session with Jay and Deborah at the Botanical Gardens. How can podcasting augment the work of the gardens?

How about

- Podcasts of visitors talking about the gardens

- Podcasts for pupils coming into the gardens -sub-themed for different age groups.

- Vid casts of special plants and habitats which they can access before they arrive.

- Themed podcasts – the medicinal podcasts – conservation podcasts.

- Podcasts of trail around the gardens

- The gardeners talking about their areas of the gardens.

 -The Green Man podcasts

These could all be different subscription items made up of small manageable chunks podcasts will. There is a botanical garden in Melbourne that has one substantial podcast that takes you on a tour of the gardens. A bit big (30 minutes) for my liking. The Birmingham Botanical Gardens podcasts will be short and sweet and make the listener WANT to visit the gardens.

A great opportunity has arisen linked to two of my present focii. We are at the present time beginning to expand the ‘Computers in Homes’ project into Year 4 at two of the project primary schools. A total of 150 families.

Year 4 in Prince Albert primary are visiting Birmingham Botanical Gardens on 7th/8th November to look at different habitats. This gives me a great opportunity of a podcast with PICTURES. We will get the children to take photographs of the plants and then record them talking about them. What a wonderful resource to share with their parents.

Podcasting photographs can use the facilities of Windows Movie Maker. Create the audio file using Audacity and then drop it into Movie Maker. The still images can then be dropped into the video section. The whole thing can then be published as a file that can be succesfully podcasted. Look out for the instructions …..and problems and evaluation.

The Green Man has been part of our heritage. The evidence points to this mythological figure being linked to the fertility of the ground. In many respects the Green man is Natures representative. The Green Man is linked to death and revival and regeneration.  
 

The Green Man is enjoying modern day resurgence as we become progressively alarmed by what we are doing with the environment. The Green Man is now associated with environmental awareness.
One of the problems we are going to have is that the images of the Green Man are usually of an angry foliated face. They are dotted all over the 14 Century churches joining the other grotesque gargoyles that adorn them. Were they a medieval environmental warning of environmental change?

 
Quite a lot of the users of the Green Man are going to be young users. How will they cope with a grotesque foliated image? The image has got to persuade these young users to communicate and through this discover the mysteries of the gardens.

To help the young visitors we will have to find or devise a story that will introduce them to this controversial figure. A story which is going to support its mythological origins and also make him a ‘real’ figure that children will want to communicate with.

The Green Man is a brilliant choice to lead visitors to discover the gardens. It is planned that the Green Man will give the gardens users ‘Quests’ which will lead them to question what they see and help them find answers to there questions. They will discover for themselves the magic of plants and the environment in which they exist.

I can remember a book by Clive Sutton “Words Science and Learning” where he emphasised that, in science, word are the ‘reflection of ideas’. And they are. I read this almost 14 years ago just after the book was published and here I am again tackling these statements. 

I refer back to my thoughts on ’subtractive bilingualism’. I am now beginning the process of experimenting on it, and of course started with a science example (You silly bugger). I constructed a one minute sequence on materials which described their properties. Simple things, I thought. Who would quibble about words like ‘material’,’ hard’, ‘concrete’, ‘metal’ and ‘transparent’? 

I asked a Bengali speaker to translate my 60 second speech on materials. She tried and then very soon gave up. This was done in the most polite of ways. The problem was the meanings associated with the words. You can say ‘material’ in Bengali but what does it mean? In reality it’s a bit like English. ‘Material’ in English would normally mean a fabric of some kind, in science it’s meaning is a lot broader.  How do you describe transparency when, in Bengali, there is no word for through?. You suddenly realise the power of language in science. 

I am now going to tackle the same text in Urdu. The translator in this subject has a lot more skill and I suspect I will learn a lot in the process. There is always this temptation to suggest certain courses of action which might seem easy, however in reality the solution can be immensely complex. Great. It is the recognition that is important. 

The Grandma of my children sent me a book recently. I am now reading in it. It’s by Oliver Sacks and his immersion in chemistry. What I cannot understand is how he lived to write it. There cannot be many chemistry teachers who do not bemoan the health and safety regulations that now control what happens in the classroom. I can still remember my chemistry teacher dropping a great chunk of sodium into a trough of water and shouting ‘duck’ and thenwatching in amazement as the small fiery pellets dropped around me and the other pupils. 

As a teacher myself I can recall the delighted screams as the chlorine + hydrogen = hydrogen chloride plastic bottle propelled itself across the classroom after glimpsing some burning magnesium. How bland the subject is now. 

Back to Sacks. Here he is at the age of 13 investigating the thermite reaction in his own home laboratory. His parents insisted that he use a downstairs room adjacent to the garden  so that any harmful experiments could easily be ejected. He can wander along to a local supplier who will sell him hydrofluoric acid and any other wonderful substance. How on earth did he survive? 

He relates his visits to his uncle who made tungsten lamps.  He played with heavy metals. They both experimented with the thermite reaction on a grand scale. This is the very reaction that helped me burn a laboratory. Wow. It’s a great read – for somebody who loves chemistry. I look forward to relating to you a little bit more about it. 

This is a revised link to meet the needs of those who need to click on the rocks first. Perfectly admirable …I’m learning. http://www.btir.bham.org.uk/rocks/main.htm

The wife is report writing. Always a whitsun chore so we never plan to go away at this time. Maybe just visit a few garden centres. So how shall I spend my time on this cold whitsun week? I’ve just discovered this software called Mediator so that has been my plaything. It has reminded me of a past plaything called Toolbook.

One of my objectives last year (when undergoing chemo) was to master Flash. No chance, your brain is so muddled by the chemicals it is difficult enough to operate a CD Player. So I tried later (after op) and still found in mind boggling. Couldn’t cope with the timeline tool and lots of the other logic involved. I suppose I am not a logical thinker, I’m a trial and error thinker. Are they different? Need to think about that.

Anyway in the past I discovered Toolbook which allowed me to think I am a logical thinker and now i have discovered Mediator which seems to induce the same type of thinking. So see my effort at a little bit of rocks education at http://www.btir.bham.org.uk/rocks/main.htm When you realise the effort that went into it you begin to believe why you pay software companies £200 per hour.

For all this focus on ICT, blogging, podcasting, computers in the home etc etc I am really a scientist through and through. 

I can still remember my first science investigation when at the tender age of about 9 I did a couple of weeks survey of the seagulls that were settling on the playing fields outside of my parents semi council house in the London suburb of Eltham. I noticed that there was always more of them on bad weather days and I wrote to the ‘Old Codgers’ about them. For the uninitiated the ‘Old Codgers’ were a correspondence team working for the Daily Mirror (probably a set of young idealistic journalists). I’m not sure that the letter was published but I did receive a reply which was proudly passed around school. 

Later I can remember vividly the moment when, two weeks before the Chemistry GCE examination I realised that a chemical equation could be treated like a mathematical equation . That one side of a chemical equation would equal the other side. This was quite a revelation because it mean’t that you didnt have to memorise hundreds of chemical equations and held me in good stead when it came to the chemistry degree five years later. 

Then came the PhD ..what was it ….’The ortho-para hyrogen conversion over first row transition metal salts AND Molecular Complexes’. All good fun but what did it really mean. I wasn’t really sure so I decided that a life of research which was 15% being on a high and 85% boredom was not for me so I went into teaching. 

It was only when I started teaching that I began to realise what science was really about. On my PGCE I can remember being inspired by reading for the first time about the history of science. Was this what I had been involved in for the last eight years of my life? However the pressures of teaching soon moved this to the back of my agenda and it didn’t re-emerge for the next ten years when I found myself in teacher training and particularly involved in primary science. I then found myself back with the seagulls and discovered what I had been involved in for all those years. 

Why this little résumé? In 1990, there was a book published (just before the National Curriculum in the UK) It was part of a series called Assessing Science in the Primary Curriculum – Written Tasks by among others Mike Schilling, Linda Hargreaves, Wynne Harlen and Terry Russell. It is about an attempt to assess science process skills through written tasks. An impossible task but a brilliant attempt. Called the ‘Walled Garden Project’ it attempted to present pupils with tasks which upon completion could indicate observation, hypothesising, interpreting, measuring etc skills. When I read it in 1990 I thought it was the answer to all sorts of prayers (the SAT’s testers probably thought so as well). There was also another publication at that time called Match and Mismatch from Wynne Harlen (primary science guru). None of it really made a proper impact on the classroom which was unfortunate because they were looking at real science rather than the accepted traditional fact based subject. 

I have this idea now that ICT can deliver what they wanted to deliver. In the real science world there is the all important idea which with preliminary observations becomes the hypothesis which then with the appropriate experimentation can become a proven hypothesis which is then tested again. This is almost impossible in the normal school environment but with the ICT communication and collaboration potential it could be possible.

My definition of science is that it is ‘Applied Curiosity’. Watch this space. 

PS
I tried to induct my children into science as I walked them in the park and took them here and there. “Look there is a worm. Has it got any legs? Whats thats sticky stuff on its back? What does it eat? Where does it live?” One did an English degree, the other a Fine Art degree and the youngest a Sociology and Physcology degree. Maybe when they are a little older…………………..