mikes web log

One more day before Egypt!

I really do not understand new technologies. How do the kids do it? Or do they?

The story begins with the purchase of a new car. Our Nissan Almera was quite OK but we were ready for downsizing and a special offer on a Ford Fiesta sounded good. Part of the deal was the buying of a Nokia account which came with free Tom Tom navigation plus other incentive.

Now I am in some cases a traditional male. I don’t do maps. Males are traditionally not a gender that uses maps. We would prefer to get lost. Then get lost even more. Then maybe more. Maybe at this stage we would stop and ask somebody but in no way will we refer to a map. I know where we are. It is the next on the left. Bugger, it must be next right.

Here I am installing a free direction system into the car. Can I. No chance. There are so many stages to go through which are eventually achieved with very little help from booklets and CDs . You then reach an interesting problem. How do you type in, on a phone, a registration number like CSJCW NZZRZ  MKADJ, even on a supposedly advanced  Nokia N70! You obviously look at the phone instructions. Rubbish the only reference to Text in the index sends you sailing into messaging worlds. You look at the TOM TOM software and things are equally obscure. nice

The frightening thing is that the instructions may not be obscure to your average thirteen year old. They may, for some reason be very clear to them. It is me that is joining the void. I (Me  and the wife) will tackle the problem …. in the end but wouldn’t it be really nice if they could create instructions for the normal nerd.

My daughter pointed me to an interesting article by Dan Gillmor on the BBC site. I particularly like his optimism with respect to the posibility of a ‘more diverse media ecosystem’ as I still enjoy the weekends papers. I still haven’t worked out how to safely operate the laptop in the bath. The real interest is however the comments, hundreds of them. They make brilliant reading. Including ‘The vast majority of blogs are self-indulgent ramblings’. In part I agree but am I bovvered?

I was talking to a group of teachers today about the benefits of podcasting and blogging and decided to show them the Ford blog. It was filtered out by the Birmingham network filtering system for porn……… I really get fed up with this heavy filtering environment. It makes no difference whether the filtering is right or wrong (in this case very obviously wrong) the kids go into the playground get out their mobile phones and access completely unfiltered material. Education has got to be the name of the game we cannot keep building higher and higher fences.

There was a very interesting article in the Observer today from John Naughton, who is apparently an Internet Guru. He was talking about broadcasting and the way in which it is changing.

You have the general picture of a boadcasting medium which might have attracted 20 million ten years ago but will now only attract 5 million because our interests are now more focused and there are more pushing channels available to us.

What I couldn’t understand was the push/pull arguments he developed. i have heard these before. Why is broadcast TV only a push technology. We choose to watch it. We choose to change channels. We choose to switch off. We can choose to pull it.

He says ” The web is opposite to this. It’s a pull medium. Nothing comes to you unless you choose it and click on it to pull it down to your computer. Your in charge” How on earth is this different from the push model?

It was a classic. I was trying to explain it to my youngest daughter and you suddenly realise the stupidity of your statements. Everything is a ‘pull’ technology. Even with a podcast you pull it down even though it is pushed towards you.Is this an emporer’s new clothes scenario? Shouldn’t we abandon this simplistic model and accept the fact that it is even simpler. We are in an era when their are a myriad of pushes that we can choose from. We can also also join the pushers with our web based activities including our blogs. Everybody can become a pusher and likewise all can be pullers.

Naughton was right when he said that “the asymmetry of the old push-media world is being overturned” It has omly because we can all be pushers not just pullers.

The NAACE conference is probably like most conferences. It has good bits and bad bits. One of the best bits for me was the pleasant sunny, frosty two mile walk into Torquay from the hotel on Thursday morning. This was made even more pleasant by the company and the realisation that the first mile had taken so long that there was no chance of getting to the first conference session in time. The walk then deviated around the harbour and along the promenade ending at the superb Torquay railway station. This prompted a discusion on different classes of steam locomotive including the School’s class

 

so I suppose it did have some educational relevance. After a pleasant coffee in the buffet room of this Brunelian station we made our way to the conference and listened to probably the best presentation of the conference.

We thought Peter Ford’s session was going to be on Blogs. It wasn’t. It was on the much more important subject of teaching and it was brilliant. Blogs did get a mention now and again but only in the context of how they could contribute to successful teaching. I am looking forward to the podcast of the session. Just before I left for Torquay I at last found out how to add links to the right hand side of blog. It needed a phone call to Australia to discover how. Am I that thick? Probably. So the first thing I did on returning to Birmingham was to find Peter Fords blog and make a link. Wow. Maybe Ill add my sons’s next.

Off to sunny Torquay. Snow showers threatened but an interesting programme (for once).

One of the delights of being married to a teacher is to hear each day the stories of the classroom. There are a myriad of stories as one would expect when 30 young people (Yr 3 in this instance) interact with the dominant adult in an enclosed space for all of 6hrs each day. Over the year each child becomes an individual as the day to day picture paints them into your memory. This is one such short story. This 8yr old had a history within the school of being poor at mathematics. In the previous years she had been marked down as a reluctant and recalcitrant mathematician.

On this Monday morning she had returned after missing the previous weeks teaching due to a holiday commitment. The maths work that Monday morning was challenging and surprisingly the child managed the work very successfully. However on the Tuesday when challenged by the maths she failed to respond. She was behaving in her ‘normal’ mode.

Gina (my wife) decided to challenged her parents about the Monday and Tuesday performance. The outcome was an admission from the parents that two years previously they had been told about their daughters poor attainment in maths. As a result they imposed a regime of half an hours maths every evening before their daughter went to bed. They admitted this was not a very nice time and inevitably ended in arguments. Gina’s advice (in front of the daughter) was basically to say ‘lay off’, she can do it, she is capable, she had proven this in school (on the Monday).

At the end of the week Gina received a letter written and delivered by the daughter. It is copied below.

Dear Miss ………. 

I am writing to tele you that …I likle Mathes Becuase last night I askt my mum if I could do some mathes she said yes So I did. I went thro carfl and I didn’t have eney aregyoumants with my mum ether. So that night When I was In bed I thout to myself Ida can do it Just likle you said. 

Love From 

The keynote speaker had arrived early. he used the extra time to list the first names of all the members of the audience in alphabetical order. At the start of the lecture he displays the names on automatic scroll. He then announces that at some point he will stop the scroll and ask the highlighted name about their ideas on education (not quite that but a really difficult question). The audience shows all the effects of fear. There is however some relief as the automatic scrolling passes the M (M for Michael) …brilliant its not going to be me. He then says that its easy to make it scroll in the other direction. More fear. He slows the scrolling so it becomes even more fearful and he never really asks the question of an individual. Message … no learning can take place under stress.

Brilliant but what a turn around. The school which I am very closely associated with uses a similiar technique. How do you get kids to listen? You get 30 lolly sticks and write in each stick the name of a pupil. The lolly sticks go into a jar so that when you start to question the kids about the learning experience you take a stick from the jar and ask that child the question. Brilliant concept …it really encourages  listening but now what else does it do?

 Maybe I shouldn’t go to these inspiring talks.

This is going to be a busy week. I wish somebody had warned me about using Studio 10 on a PC. I almost lost my work this evening. If I had done the panic bells would have started ringing. In Birmingham we are running some KS3 (11-14) activities and I have some responsibility for the science work. (Visit www.bgfl.org for the others). We are presenting the concept of gravity in five different formats ; Video conference lesson, paper document, home experiment, film and animation and asking the pupils to look at them and then vote on what learning experience they prefered. Its crudely based on the beloved Gardeners learning styles and will be better next time when we try to do the next concept to music. Where does the 42 come from? I’m intrigued by an Australian idea where they link the learning styles to Bloom’s taxonomy of cognitive skills and end up with a matrix of 42 squares with different activities in them. The pupils can then map their preferences. It is also the answer to the really important question!