Watch out!

From "Teach Paperless" a little while back...


I do think that teachers and schools in general would be wise to learn something from the example of what has happened over the past ten years in the music industry. Or face a similar irrelevance.


Ouch.

The significance of furniture

I'm beginning to think that furniture is key, especially in a 1:1 classroom. The layout of my classroom is beginning to irritate me.

So, recently, I've moved from this:

To this:

This is perhaps the biggest eureka-moment of my teaching career (or is that "halleluya-moment"?).

First off, just look at how crowded the first classroom looks, and how much space there is in the second one. I get thirty desks in the classroom with enough space to dance in the middle. Most important is how easy it is to get to the pupils. Look at the first picture and imagine helping a pupil with her work. How do you get to the one in the middle? Or the ones sitting by the window? In the second classroom, the teacher can easily get to every pupil, stand beside them, see their work and help. The second classroom also makes a clear division between activities. When the pupils are working alone, they face away from each other. When the teacher wants their attention, they must turn away from their work. In the first classroom, a teacher standing at the front of the classroom has to compete with what the students have in front of them for attention. This typically requires closing computers every time the teacher wants to say something. In a class discussion, the pupils cannot see each other well, while in the second classroom, the pupils can easily see each other when they turn to the center of the room.

There are other advantages, as well. In the first classroom, the pupils at the back of the room often end up staring at 30 computer screens, and get frequently distracted. The second classroom makes it easy to arrange spontaneous group work by getting the outer circle to swivel. And so on. I'm just starting this, but it seems to work.

A couple of points.

1. You need to have swivel chairs.

Swivel chairs are probably a necessity in a 1:1 classroom, anyway, and a great thing in any classroom.

2. The pupils find this weird. They are used to a passive role, and this classroom expects them to be doing something school-related during all class time. Many of them have become comfortable

with their computers as an alternative to school and this set-up makes this more difficult. In one class this week when I did not have time to remodel the classroom, a pupil asked why, saying she liked my new lay-out. Variations are probably due to differences in motivation and to level of distraction, since the new lay-out provides for fewer distractions.

3. This is not a good lay-out for long talks from the teacher, particularly if they have to take notes from the board. On second thought, I'm not sure if this is a weakness, or a strength...

Technology, anyone?

Sociology class. 12th years. Each pupil gets one of the key terms we have been working on and is to explain it on a short Mp3. The Mp3s go into a bank that pupils can download for help and repetition. I also want to get everyone familiar with Audacity and exporting to Mp3 so that I can get up to speed with a class podcast and other projects. As well as fun and variation, the effect that different media have on social interaction will be a topic for a later unit - so I want to use varied media in class before that.







One pupil complains:" Why all the technology? Why can't we just talk? Why do things always have to be so complicated? I'm not a technical person and I don't like to use technical methods to communicate. I'd prefer to talk face-to-face, in front of people."


I notice that she has two (2!) different chat pages up on her computer while she is saying this. She has also downloaded Skype (among other things) to her laptop.


Not quite sure what's going on here. Does technology become invisible when you are using it for a meaningful goal, and take all your attention when the goals are external or meaningless? (the claims of this pupil to not be a 'technical person' are particularly weird - in her daily life she does more complicated things than what I was asking her to do) Has technology become an easy place to hang one's general dissatisfaction with school? Do teenagers feel invaded when we use 'their' stuff in school? Or has school suddenly become an irritating 'geeks-only' zone?





Humn.



Photo credit: eBuddy CC

Glogster, anyone?

Monday morning. Posters. Every pupil has a city and is to make a quick poster. No paper, but, hey, it's 2009. "Log onto Glogster, everyone and you can all make a Glog on your topic."

One pupil looks at me disdainfully. "I don't glog."

How I do it now.

Onward!





School year has begun, enough existential angst. Now it's time for some practical, pedagogical thinking. For a while, the goal is to give this blog a practical slant by blogging about what I do and what I'm trying.





First, what is it that I already do? Who am I as a teacher? I started with the thing I have probably taught the most, the figure-8 tie-in knot for rock-climbing. I tried to video myself and learned the following things:

• Video is difficult (hence the lack of video here - maybe one day)


• I rely greatly on feedback from students - modifying as I go along.
• I rarely talk for more than a few seconds before getting the students to do something. That surprised me, actually. I thought I talked for minutes at a time. I do when I teach something I don't know so well, but in the things I really can do - I get the students going quickly.
• I don't move on until each pupil has mastered each step. The quick automatically become helpers for the slow.
• I start with the known and work to the unknown - demonstrating to the students that they already know the basics here, even if they think they don't.
• My approach takes about twice as long as the simple 'follow-me' instruction that most people seem to use to teach this knot. I do it my way because I feel I get better retention. On day 2, most people remember.

Now - how can I use this approach in, say, Sociology class?

The gatekeepers of knowledge

Howard Rheingold recently blogged on evaluating the quality of information. A good post - he says about the same as in thousands of similar texts, but does such a good job that I'll probably use this as a standard text in class for a while. This is quality because he both includes the latest cool tools, but makes his discussion fundamentally about attitude, not gizmos.



The basics here are of course critical thinking and source evaluation - good 19th century skills, it's just that kids have to start learning this stuff earlier nowadays and we have new tools to help us. It would be possible to lament the emergence of a world that requires these changes - wasn't it better when our main access to information was books, with their more rigourous editing process? Andrew Keen has built a whole career lamenting the disappearance of the 'gatekeeper'. He is mostly focused on news and culture, but the idea is valid everywhere: "Before", most of our media exposure was vetted by experts, so what you read in books, for example, you could mostly count on. "Now", any idiot with a modem can publish, so we all have to be our own gatekeepers about thousands of topics we are not experts on. (The Telegraph's technology blogs are a hotspot for the debate around 'gatekeepers'.)


What really got me thinking was a comment on Rheingold's post by someone called dogu4: "Questioning one's sources is useless, unless one is questioning oneself as well. Consider many of the supposedly irrefutable facts regarding human health just in the last decade or so". A seed in the back of my head suddenlty became a full-grown douglas fir. I must admit I think about Warren and Marshall a good deal. They are the two Australian scientists who in 1982 found good evidence to link stomach ulcers and h. pylori bacteria. Despite this connection first having been noticed in the 1890s, this finding went against several received truths of medicine and Warren and Marshall had trouble getting their findings accepted. It took well over a decade for the connection between bacteria and stomach ulers to be fully accepted.

Some of the other commenters clearly didn't understand what all the fuss was, but in my worldview, Warren and Marshall are key figures in the history of ideas. Both as a symbol of how knowledge progresses and practically, as a watershed in thinking about infectious diseases. Try a quick thought experiment. Imagine that the Web existed in 1983. Ulcer sufferers searching for information about their condition come across information about h. pylori. The chances are that neither their primary care giver nor their treating gastroentorologist would have heard of the study and that they would have refused to prescribe antibiotics. Within a year or so, so many people would have stumbled across Warren and Marshall's work that the medical establishment would have been prompted to respond more actively to their ideas - mostly likely producing a wave of anti-antibiotic statements from the medical establishment. (In real life, in those pre-Web days, Warren and Marshall were dealt with mostly by ignoring them.)

The point is, it is easy to find examples of how the old 'gatekeeper' model didn't always work. It was just harder to see its weaknesses and harder to get a debate going. The Andrew Keens of the world can lament all they want - the old model has not fallen apart merely because of new technology, but because it didn't always work so well. Now we are groping towards something new. Rheingold's post is a good example of the kinds of ways that are emerging to deal with this new, gatekeeper-less world.

(An example - this spring I did a whirl around American health web sites, checking for their view on feeding raisins to children. I limited my search to 'serious', mainstream sites, mostly those vetted by medical doctors. I did not find a single site that mentioned mycotoxins - they all limited their discussions to considerations for the teeth. It's odd - mycotoxins aren't some kind of secret (just Google the word and see what happens) - do these people know how to publish to the internet, but not how to do basic research? So in this case, I'm left without a 'gatekeeper' to help me sort the data here - I just have to bring all my research skills and critical thinking to bear to make my own decisions.

This is the world we not only have to live in, but prepare our students for. Clinging to the textbook and locking down all computers looks like head-in-the-sand behaviour from here.)

Niels Bohr and the barometer

I was recently reminded of a classic urban legend:

The following concerns a question in a physics degree exam at the
University of Copenhagen:

"Describe how to determine the height of a skyscraper with a barometer."

One student replied:

"You tie a long piece of string to the neck of the barometer, then lower the barometer from the roof of the skyscraper to the ground. The length of the string plus the length of the barometer will equal the height of the building."

This highly original answer so incensed the examiner that the student was failed immediately. The student appealed on the grounds that his answer was indisputably correct, and the university appointed an independent arbiter to decide the case.

The arbiter judged that the answer was indeed correct, but did not display any noticeable knowledge of physics. To resolve the problem it was decided to call the student in and allow him six minutes in which to provide a verbal answer that showed at least a minimal familiarity with the basic principles of physics.

For five minutes the student sat in silence, forehead creased in thought. The arbiter reminded him that time was running out, to which the student replied that he had several extremely relevant answers, but couldn't make up his mind which to use. On being advised to hurry up the student replied as follows:

"Firstly, you could take the barometer up to the roof of the skyscraper, drop it over the edge, and measure the time it takes to reach the ground. The height of the building can then be worked out from the formula H = 0.5g x t squared. But bad luck on the barometer."

"Or if the sun is shining you could measure the height of the barometer, then set it on end and measure the length of its shadow. Then you measure the length of the skyscraper's shadow, and thereafter it is a simple matter of proportional arithmetic to work out the height of the skyscraper."

"But if you wanted to be highly scientific about it, you could tie a short piece of string to the barometer and swing it like a pendulum, first at ground level and then on the roof of the skyscraper. The height is worked
out by the difference in the gravitational restoring force T =2 pi sqr root (l /g)."

"Or if the skyscraper has an outside emergency staircase, it would be easier to walk up it and mark off the height of the skyscraper in barometer lengths, then add them up."

"If you merely wanted to be boring and orthodox about it, of course, you could use the barometer to measure the air pressure on the roof of the skyscraper and on the ground, and convert the difference in millibars into feet to give the height of the building."

"But since we are constantly being exhorted to exercise independence of mind and apply scientific methods, undoubtedly the best way would be to knock on the janitor's door and say to him 'If you would like a nice new barometer, I will give you this one if you tell me the height of this skyscraper'."

The student was Niels Bohr, the only Dane to win the Nobel Prize for physics.

(text collected by snopes.com in '99)

There are lots of 'points' to this story, but what stands out to me is the challenge to educators here. Are our 'open' assessement questions really open, or are they multiple choice without the options being clearly presented to our students? How ready are we to accept pupils thinking way 'outside the box', particularly in formal assessment? How ready are we to accept that some of our pupils may be smarter than we are?

The story is also a good one because of the deliberately provacative attitude of the student. He must have understood from the beginning the answer the examiners wanted, yet some combination of self-importance, humour and lack of respect for formal education makes him risk his exam by giving an alternate answer. Even under the second chance he is given, he is deliberately provocative, clearly making a point of his disdain for the exam. I know many educators who would have trouble standing for this kind of disrespect coupled with 'the wrong answer'. How do we react when the next Niels Bohr appears in our classroom?

The choice of physics for this story is also telling - 'doing physics' requires questioning basic assumptions about the nature of reality, but teaching phyics easily falls into a pattern that unfortunately does not nurture the kind of thinking physicists need.

As an educator hearing this story, I am reminded that humility is one of a teacher's most important qualities.

Oh, and the story? Probably not completely true. May have happened, but no-one can prove it was Bohr. The part about him being the only Dane to win the Nobel prize for physics is also not true, but it was when this story first surfaced in the '50's.