Desultoration

Learning Styles - Really A Myth?

2011-09-15T08:59:00.001+10:00

Are Learning Styles a Myth?

Do learning styles exist? Some people certainly seem to think so, and the notion of learning styles has been popular in education for many years. But the validity of the theory is now being challenged - read this blog entry to get a contrary view.

The Exploring Education blog links to a video you make have seen before, from Daniel Willingham of the University of Virginia:

Once, I would have wholeheartedly agree with Prof. Willingham. When I first heard the theory of Visual/Auditory/Kinesthetic modes many years ago, I was rather skeptical - it didn't seem to fit my own experience as a learner. But as I considered the plausibility of the theory in relation to my students, I recognised that it explained certain things about the difficulties some of my students seem to have, and could also explain certain aspects of my own learning patterns. One thing that occurred to me in reflecting on all of this, but which I cannot say I have seen mentioned often, is that one's preferred learning mode may also depend on context. I may well favour visual input in one situation but auditory input in others.

Still, does that mean that the theory is correct and Prof. Willingham is wrong? Of course not, but I'm not really convinced by Prof. Willingham's arguments. The experiment he refers to is about memorization, but in the classroom, memorization is not the main focus of what we do (at least, not in my classroom). Learning occurs where new material has meaning and is assimilated into what we already know. And it is on this point that I am inclined to think that students may well have a preferred mode of taking in new information, and their preference is for the way that is easiest for them to make the connections between the new material and what they already understand.

Why do I think this is the case? For a couple of reasons.

First, my own teaching experience - over the years I have worked with many students who have clearly shown a preferred mode for learning new material. I have had students who struggled to understand new material until you drew them a diagram showing how different ideas or components relate to each other. A few years ago I had a student who was very bright but who struggled with written material - unless you talked her through the ideas, she floundered. When I checked with her other teachers, I found they had observed the same pattern.

I've had students who needed things written down - verbal explanations got lost somewhere between ear and brain. I once had a student in Maths who struggled with understanding written material (but not because he had a reading problem) but who thrived on spacial and geometric work. If I could find a way to show him a concept geometrically or diagrammatically, he could cope. In the same class was a girl who struggled with diagrams, and wanted written explanations.

Theories about learning styles have come about precisely because teachers have noted time and time again that different students appear to cope differently with different ways of presenting lesson material. This is not some sort of collective illusion. Every experienced teacher I have ever discussed this with has been able to relate experiences like those I have given above.

My second reason for believing that students may well have a preferred mode of taking in new information is to do with my elder daughter. When she was very young and still learning to talk, we realised there was an issue - she wasn't following the typical pattern for language development. She had a large vocabulary, but wasn't putting words together in the normal way. There were more than a few tears in dealing with a child who clearly trying to tell us something, and who clearly knew the meaning of the words she was using, but who was not communicating effectively.

Fortunately, our family doctor and a very astute speech therapist also noticed that my daughter was highly tuned in to even very subtle visual cues. Eventually the therapist concluded that she was hyperlexic (which I had never heard of before) and through her visual responsiveness was able to work with her to catch up her language development. (Today, none of her peers and few of her teachers have any idea that she once had a difficulty with spoken language.)

Of course, anecdotal evidence proves nothing. But it can inform our ideas about what might or might not be true. Based on my own experience and what other teachers have to say, I am inclined to think that there may well be some validity to the idea of learning styles. And it's not about memory. It's about the assimilation of new concepts.

One of the consequences of the idea of learning styles, regardless of its validity, is that many teachers are now presenting their lessons in richer, more varied ways. It may well be that the true explanation for what teachers have been observing is connected to the format of presentation of new material, where variety and multiple media have a greater impact on understanding. Or maybe it's just less boring.

But until someone offers a better explanation, if subscribing to the idea of learning styles leads to more effective lessons, claiming that learning styles are a myth strikes me as less than helpful.

The Power of Three

2011-09-07T17:31:00.000+10:00

At the recent 5th Leading a Digital School Conference, John Pearce presented a session on Evernote and Diigo called "Never lose a document again".

It's a great summation of the usefulness of both services. I use both with my students, but in conjunction with a third - Moodle.

Now I know that some consider Moodle a little bit 'last year'. And I have read a number of edu-bloggers who have questioned the "walled garden" approach that they feel Moodle embodies. But using Moodle in conjunction with Evernote and Diigo works really well for me.

My students and I both use Evernote for note-taking - I love being able to progressively construct diagrams/mindmaps on the whiteboard as we discuss a topic and then at the end just take a snapshot on my phone and send it straight to Evernote - if I manage to keep my scrawling reasonably legible, Evernote even lets me do a text search on it. I can also share key diagrams and notes with my students.

I have Diigo groups for my students, who can then see the webpages I have flagged for them to read or refer to - so much simpler than copying URLs and pasting them into something else for the students, not to mention being able to highlight the particular sections I want them to pay close attention to and add comments they can read in-place. And they are now finding other related materials and bookmarking them for the class to see.

Where does Moodle fit into this picture? Being a content management system, Moodle allows me to do the following (and more):

create a page where students can upload assignments/projects and I can mark and comment
provide links to materials that are not on the web - python files, screenshots and movies I have created, assessment tasks, course outlines, etc.
provide a place where they can post questions
build quizzes for them to test themselves on

There are other ways to accomplish these tasks, of course, but Moodle provides a convenient way of doing these things and also monitoring what the students have and have not accessed. So I end up with the following:

a way for the students (and I) to take notes from classes (Evernote)
a way to flag items on the Web for students to refer to (Diigo)
a way to provide items not on the Web to students (Moodle)
a way for students to send items to me (Moodle)

Others may be using other services, maybe Ning or Edmodo, to achieve similar ends to what I am doing with Moodle. I may change to something else in the future. But right now, Moodle fits in nicely.

Point of Inaction

2011-09-01T22:30:00.000+10:00

I recently attended a day at UTS for high school science students with my older daughter. Run by scientists from ANSTO, it was a fun morning where segments of various sci-fi films were shown, followed by a series of questions for the audience, then one of the scientists discussing the actual science.

Part of what made this a good experience for the audience was the use of a KeePad system for getting the audience responses to the questions. Response systems, when they work well, are great - everyone can participate, no one has to feel conspicuous, you can put up on screen nice graphics to show response patterns, etc.

But as we all know, things do not always work well.

One of my colleagues earlier this week pulled out the response system (not KeePad) that was bought for the school a couple of years ago, and started asking questions about its use.

I don't use it. I don't use it for a few simple reasons.

It caused me no end of grief trying to get the software installed, mainly because the driver install program simply refused to do what it was supposed to do. Once I had found a way around that problem, I then discovered that the software wanted to work with a version of Keynote that was older than the one installed on my laptop. So I had to save my presentation file in the older format, only to find that it still would not work properly. (My suspicion was that the software had been written for an older version of the OS.) So I didn't use it.

One of my colleagues was a bit more persistent than me, and kept trying to find solutions to these problems, checking the developer's website and forums, downloading the latest version of the software, the latest driver, etc. He brought his PC laptop from home and installed the Windows version, which apparently worked somewhat better, but not long after, he stopped using it. The time and effort involved in getting it to work in the classroom was too much.

So now another colleague wanted to try it, and it occurred to me that some time had passed, and maybe the developers had updated their software and drivers, and these problems had been resolved. Err, no. Apparently not.

It's a shame, because response systems can be excellent. But the experience with the software has to be smooth, easy to work with, and time-efficient. And in this case it's not. It's actually easier to wheel in the laptop banks and get the students to work with an online polling system.

The end result is that bag of remote clickers is just another item on the pile of technological deadwood that accumulates in every school. The sad part is how much of that deadwood needn't be so.

To Word Process Or Not To Word Process?

2011-08-13T23:19:00.003+10:00

I came across the blog of Fraser Speirs ~~the other day~~ some time ago, and in one particular post found this interesting statement:

We are also focusing heavily on presentation skills using Keynote on the iPad. It is my personal belief that Word Processing - setting text on a computer in preparation for printing on paper - is a skill that will wane in value over time. [Emphasis added.] Communicating your ideas to an audience is a skill that is already a clear competitive advantage for those able to do it effectively. Few skills demand the development of confidence like public presenting. [link]

Word processing is one of those areas that has become regarded as a quintessential IT skill in many areas, including education. It has always been the first application covered by the ECDL/ICDL, for example. It is specifically mentioned in the new National Curriculum 18 times. It's part of the Computing Skills test my Year 10 students do as part of their (soon to be defunct) School Certificate exams.

However, Speirs' statement got me thinking – has word processing been over-emphasised? Are presentation skills more important to focus on, as Speirs seems to suggest?

What is the point behind teaching word processing anyway? A search of the new National Curriculum reveals something interesting - while word processing is referred to multiple times, nowhere does a rationale for teaching it appear.

A search of the Web leads to a great many items that discuss how to teach word processing, but very few that discuss why. Those that do address word processing as a means for teaching writing and composition.

But does that require a word processor? Can the same objectives be achieved through blogging and other online activities?

Thinking a bit more about Speirs' statement, it's the bit about printing on paper that I keep coming back to. Do we only do word processing in order to print stuff? In my own work, preparation of documents remains an important skill, but a large proportion of those documents do not get printed - they get turned into PDFs and emailed or put on a server.

On reflection, I think Speirs' definition is the problem - if we think of word processing as only 'setting text on a computer in preparation for printing on paper', he probably has a point, but if word processing is about composition and its visual presentation (and obviously I think it is), word processing will be around for a long time yet.

On the other hand, what should schools be teaching? Writing and composition? Definitely. Presentation? Certainly - but in what format? Does blogging meet our educational requirements? Or does word processing remain part of the picture?

Teachers, students and ICT - the more things change...

2011-03-08T13:13:00.000+11:00

I happened on an interesting juxtaposition of blog posts the other day: What students need from teachers and 10 things all teachers should know how to do.

Putting them together, you get a pretty interesting picture of the 21st century teacher.

Of course, lists like this are always and endlessly debatable, but I liked the following in particular:

My job is to teach thinking.
My job is to help them learn to think critically about the information they are encountering.
My job is to help them articulate ideas fluently so they can be effective participants in this global conversation.
My job is to encourage flexibility, creativity, resourcefulness and self-direction so that can they can continually adapt to a rapidly changing world.
My job is still to call home when the work is not being done, to identify students who are struggling and provide them with support and to collect money for field trips and pizza days.

It seems to me that all the rest flow from these key points. And the interesting part is that I think these points were largely true when I was a student, when my father was a student, when my grandfather was a student. Yes the world has changed greatly, and continues to change rapidly, but some things don't change. Good teachers today are like the good teachers of yesterday - they're the ones who help you to realise your potential, let you find your voice, show you the possibilities, and are there when you need support.

For those suffering app overload...

2010-12-17T10:06:00.002+11:00

(Follow InkPen at GoComics.com)

Getting on Deck

2010-09-20T14:23:00.001+10:00

Tweetdeck.

"What about it?" I hear you ask.

Well, Tweetdeck has changed the way I'm using Twitter. Previously I had either used the web interface or Tweetie or, on my iPhone, Echofon.

At the 4th Leading a Digital School Conference, I noticed a lot of people using Tweetdeck. And I heard an unequivocal statement that the web interface was the worst available interface for Twitter.

Then I sat in John Pearce's session on PLNs as he demostrated Tweetdeck and the lights went on in my head.

As I looked at all those tweets with the #edtech hash-tag and shortened urls leading to a wealth of useful resources, it suddenly made a whole lot of sense why educators should be on Twitter. But you need Tweetdeck (or something like it) - the right tool makes all the difference.

Get on 'Deck!

The Poisoned Carrot

2010-08-10T09:27:00.002+10:00

In the classic fairy tale, the evil queen offered Snow White a poisoned apple. In their battle for chess supremacy in 1972, Boris Spassky offered Bobby Fischer a poisoned pawn. (Fischer took it, and lost the game.)

Now Julia Gillard has offered the Australian public a poisoned carrot.

Yesterday, Gillard announced new education policy as part of her election pitch. The plan is to reward schools where student achievement has improved. Primary schools would be given $75,000 and high schools $100,000 for improvements in student performance in the areas of literacy and numeracy.

This scheme apparently would begin in 2013 and work in conjunction with the MySchool website. (In other words, by comparing NAPLAN results from year to year.)

Another part of this plan is for teachers to earn an extra 10% of their salary (up to $8,000) if they meet new performance benchmarks.

Of course, this is all just recycled ideas from NYC's Joel Klein. Ideas which have been roundly criticised by educators far and wide, and which recently have taken a battering. I can't say that it came as a complete surprise - there's been speculation about this ever since Gillard pulled out the MySchool website and foisted it on schools.

The problem is that while educators can see this "policy" for the dreck it is, many parents/voters may well be swayed by the idea that this is a progressive step that will improve schools, and don't understand that excessive focus on the results of a small set of tests actually hurts schools by leading to a narrowing of the curriculum, teaching to the tests and reduced standards rather than improved ones.

Will the voting public take a bite of this poisoned carrot? I fear the worst.

Online Tools for Online Schools

2010-07-06T11:07:00.004+10:00

I'll be doing some training with my colleagues in about a week's time, and one of the sessions I'll be running will cover a few of my favourite online tools for teachers and students.

So what are they? First cab off the rank is Diigo. Since I found Diigo, I've hardly looked at my delicious account.

Why do I like Diigo? The ability to highlight a section of a web page, add a sticky, bookmark it, send it to a group, all very quickly and easily makes Diigo the stand-out bookmarking service, IMHO.

Interestingly, on the home page of delicious, there's a public Diigo bookmark which has the interesting observation that Diigo is the best way to manage bookmarks, delicious is the best place to find bookmarks. That seems a fair observation, so I'll probably now look to see how I might be able to make Diigo and delicious work together.

Next fave: Evernote. If Evernote was just a note-taking app on my laptop, I probably wouldn't use it that much, to be honest. But I have Evernote as an iPhone app, and my iPhone is always with me. Now I find myself continually taking notes on my iPhone, taking photos and adding tags to them. Evernote synchronises between my laptop, my iPhone and my Evernote web account, so if I have my phone or can get to a computer, I can get to my notes.

The best thing for me is taking photos. For example, say I've been teaching a senior computing class, mapping out things on the whiteboard, jotting down key points, etc. and it's the end of the lesson. I pull out my iPhone and take a photo, add an appropriate tag and upload to Cloud Evernote. It's automatically dated and geo-tagged from my phone! Later, I can search my Evernote account for certain words, and Evernote's text recognition finds those words in the photo. (Well, more often than not - my handwriting on a whiteboard can be rather messy, and any OCR program would struggle to make sense of it - heck, I've walked in the following day and found myself looking at my own writing and struggled to make sense of it!)

#3: Flickr - an idea I got from Alan Levine's blog was to put up images and then use Flickr's notes tool to make 'hotspots' on the image. You can put hyperlinks in the notes and suddenly your picture becomes the central focus for a web-based exploration.

#4: Dabbleboard. An interactive, collaborative online whiteboard. Ridiculously simple to use. I've only recently starting using this, but I can see students loving it!

#5: Stixy. Another collaborative environment, but with a very different emphasis to Dabbleboard. Stixy has no drawing tools as such. Instead, you upload images and documents, and add sticky notes and todo lists. As a tool for allowing a group to manage a project, this seems far more intuitive than list-based approaches to collaboration.

On a side-note: it's disappointing that Ning has decided to do away with their free plan. Apparently someone (with plenty of money) has decided to pay for the new first tier plan for educators in North America, which is good for them, but the rest of us will have to pay to continue using Ning, or migrate to an alternative (Spruz and Zuku appear to be ready to step into the breach).

Addendum: I've just been looking at Zoho Notebook - this is a seriously good tool! As a workspace for students to compile items for a project they're working on, or keep notes, or even create a multimedia presentation, this is well worth considering - and the price is right.

The Funny Pages

2010-04-08T12:10:00.003+10:00

(On Rupert Murdoch, Google and the Apple iPad)

Jonathan Holmes, from the ABC's MediaWatch program, has written a nice little piece for The Drum. He addresses the fact that many in the newpaper industry, including Rupert Murdoch, are busy wetting themselves over the iPad.

Murdoch apparently thinks that the iPad and its competitors will be the saving of the newspaper industry. Why? Because they (the newspapers) will be able to sell apps that deliver the newspaper "experience", providing users with something that is more like the actual paper article than websites currently provide. And they are hoping this will resurrect the industry.

What Murdoch and co. do not seem to get is that there is an enormous contingent of news conusmers who just aren't interested in what they are planning on offering. Young people have become used to news for free. Why would they suddenly want to pay for it? When (and it is 'when', not 'if') the newspapers put their content behind pay-walls, those young people will simply look elsewhere - and there will be an elsewhere to look.

Even my generation, who grew up with newspapers, have become accustomed to using the web and aggregators to find the news. And in that, we have acquired something that the likes of Murdoch don't seem to understand - we decide what news we want.

Holmes correctly pinpoints this in his article: "...this isn't just the difference between paying and not paying. It's the difference between deciding on your own news agenda, or buying someone else's." And I for one, ain't buying. And I don't think I'll be alone.

Murdoch also made the news this week for re-iterating his threat to put a pay-wall around his online newspapers to keep Google and Microsoft out.

My reaction to this bit of non-news: good! With any luck, this bunker mentality will see him off completely.

The newspapers do not seem to understand that their old model ("we'll decide what you want to know about, write it up and bundle it up for you, and you can pay us for it") is no longer really viable, and will disappear at about the same time as my father's generation. So they need to do something different - if they can. It's difficult to say what that should be.

Comic book producers, on the other hand, will probably survive. Why? Tim Bray (now at Google, as it happens) nailed it: "the two things you do with comics are read them and trade them". [Link] And therein lies the difference between a comic book and a newspaper: no one lines the bottom of the budgie cage with a comic book.

Repeating Myself

2010-04-01T09:22:00.002+11:00

[This is a re-post/cross-post from another blog of mine.]

Who in their right mind would be a high school Maths teacher? I must be nuts.

I’m tempted to stop right there – what more needs to be said? But I’ll elaborate a little, just so the screen isn’t so empty (poignant though that might be).

You see, nobody really cares about what it is that I do as a Maths teacher. They think they do, but because they have no real understanding of what Mathematics is or why you would study it, they are quite wrong.

What’s prompted me to say this? Mainly the obscene politicising of education in this country. Education has always been a political football to some extent, but the stupidity has reached new lows under the Rudd government.

You see, what the politicians what, and what they’ve persuaded parent that they should want, and to some extent what school principals want, is not for students to learn about Mathematics. They want them to learn about arithmetic and numeracy.

Now, I’m sure that for most politicians, many parents and quite a few principals, the distinction between Mathematics and numeracy is lost on them. And therein lies the problem - decisions about education are being made by people who do not understand the distinction. I’m sure that much the same issue lies in other subject areas.

How can I state the above so confidently? Simply by considering the obvious: an Education Minister who would implement a website that compares schools based on the results of once-a-year tests, given to four of the thirteen year levels, in the areas of literacy and numeracy and virtually nothing else, and who defends such a move by claiming that parents want transparency, clearly knows nothing about education.

Is this to say that the NAPLAN tests don’t have a purpose? Of course not, but to use such data to encapsulate the “performance” of an entire school in a set of 20 numbers is absurd.

Politicians like to be seen to be doing something, and Education is an arena where it’s easy for them to rearrange the furniture and claim to have made progress. It’s long been so. But the Rudd government has taken matters to another level. They have firmly shifted the emphasis away from the notion of providing a comprehensive education to a scenario where the focus year-by-year will be on the NAPLAN results, particularly once funding becomes closely tied to those results. Principals and education departments will be under pressure to secure funding, which means teachers will be under pressure to secure results that will deliver that funding, which means the focus will be to teach to the test. And because the NAPLAN tests are about literacy and numeracy and little else, the curriculum will narrow over time, as principals and education departments in the main are not going to pour time and money into areas that won’t affect funding.

Now doesn’t that all work in the favour of my particular subject, Mathematics? No, not really. The problem is that the focus is on numeracy, not Mathematics. The pollies want the kiddies to be able to do their sums well – being able to do trigonometry, quadratic equations and matrix operations is irrelevant to them.

And it’s becoming just as irrelevant to the students themselves. More than ever, I am being confronted with students who not only come out with the age-old “when will I ever need this?”, but who are quite sure that if they ever actually do need it, they will be able to get what they need from the Web, whether through tutorials, discussion forums, online courses or some other way.

Add to that parents who struggled with Maths at school and who are subsequently dismissive of it, is it any wonder I feel that my vocation is becoming a bit pointless?

So I repeat: nobody really cares about what it is that I do as a Maths teacher. They care about students having arithmetic skills. They care about the NAPLAN results because they think it means something. They love the government’s “back to basics” mantra, because it means “back to something I think I can understand”.

But don’t ask for more than that.

Thoughts on the Education Revolution - Why We Are Going In Circles

2010-03-14T15:26:00.004+11:00

The Rudd government’s “Education Revolution” has now progressed through a number of phases.

1. The Big Sell

This was the pre-election “look at us, we have the answers” phase, where Rudd waved about a laptop and promised to spend a billion dollars giving every Yr 9 students a similar laptop. This ‘largesse’ certainly pleased a lot of people (particularly journalists) who thought it sounded like a nifty, forward-thinking idea but who couldn’t be bothered to do the sums and work out that one billion dollars was well short of what would really be needed to follow through on the promise. And it seems that few people have stopped to consider how this promise was meant to pan out over the long term, or what sort of money is really needed to provide the maintenance and infrastructure to go with providing students in senior high school years with laptops.

2. The Big Spend in the wake of the Big Crash

Well, not quite that big a crash (if you look behind you, you’ll see Wayne Goose Swan jumping up and down, saying “Thanks to me! I spent lotsa money and made it all better! Me! It was me!” and a little behind him you’ll see Nassim Nicholas Taleb shaking his head and tutting), but it gave Rudd and Co. licence to spend even more money “building the Education Revolution”, which was code for building several thousand Julia Gillard Memorial School Halls and not giving a rat’s rear about whether the money was actually spent effectively (which in many public schools it apparently hasn’t, if the commercial news channels are to be believed).

3. The Big League Table

Julia Gillard declared the MySchool website a huge success, apparently on the basis that a lot of people logged on to see what the fuss was about. The air was heavy with buzzwords like "transparency" and "informed parents", but mention league tables and you could expect Ms Gillard to keep you in at recess for a good haraguing.

But let's be honest - what is the MySchool website but a digitised league table on steroids, reducing schools down to a small set of numbers and then drawing up a set of dodgy comparisons based on badly flawed socio-economic measurements.

4. The Big Curriculum

The government has released the Draft National Curriculum - or, to be precise, about one-third of one. Rudd and Gillard have described it as “back to basics”, which in the English components means more phonics, phonetics and grammar, but less literature; in the Mathematics components, we apparently will now be using calculators from Kindergarten, but not teaching the 7 times tables. (What the...? An oversight, surely. Would you believe...?)

But what has really been achieved?

The laptops have arrived in most schools, which are now dealing with issues of management, networking and maintenance (and the budgetary headaches that come with that), as well as needing to inservice teachers in how to use them in the classroom. The Federal government has 'generously' decided that the States need to deal with these issues (and the money).

There are schools all across the country in various states of chaos as building projects grind slowly on, quite a number of them apparently not what the schools really wanted or needed, and many apparently costing far more than they ought to.

Journalists and politicians have fallen over themselves about the MySchool website, enthralled by having ready access to something they can understand - "this school's better than that school, because the numbers say so". Sadly, some parents appear to be falling for this dreck as well.

The curriculum is set to be introduced in 2011 - whether schools and teachers are ready or not. And the indications are - not. The various teachers’ unions have publicly raised the issue, but the government still hasn’t talked to them. How do you introduce a curriculum and not talk to the people you expect to implement it?

Is it a curriculum for the 21st century? By my reading, not really. It’s still firmly welded to the 20th century, in keeping with a federal government that still clings to the ‘factory’ model of education and regards it as essentially a tool for increasing economic productivity.

(Interestingly, Edward de Bono has commented on the curriculum, criticising it for not including thinking skills. Yes, this has been de Bono’s soapbox for nearly two decades, and thus his criticism is hardly surprising, but in the era of the Internet, could anything be more critical than thinking skills?)

Looking at what has been put in place, and comparing it to what governments have done in the area of education over the last three or four decades, the only significant difference is that in this instance, it’s been a federal government rather than a state one that has delivered an unbalanced set of resources, mismanaged taxpayers’ dollars and implemented curriculum changes that don’t quite hit the mark.

Round and round we go.

On the Threshold

2009-12-31T20:34:00.003+11:00

2009 comes to a close. Many a new year's resolution will be made and subsequently broken or forgotten.

What of my intentions for 2010? Here's a quick list:

Neapolitan ice-cream - just say no!
People who spend January talking about the start of the new decade - resist the urge to slap them silly.
Read more. Write more.
Turn off the telly.
Dissociate lap and laptop.

Enough.

Playing in the Snow

2009-11-07T22:07:00.005+11:00

Recently I upgraded my laptop to Snow Leopard. From Tiger. Bypassed Leopard completely.

Stupid is as stupid does.

My reason for making the jump up was simple - there were apps (or upgrades to apps) that I wanted to use that needed Leopard. But Snow Leopard was out, and the upgrade disk I tried for Leopard had failed, so Snow Leopard was tried and upgraded successfully. And now I'm gradually finding all the things that have broken in the process.

Registrations of various apps have gone AWOL. My Fink set-up is broken - I expected that, but it may be a while before a number of packages I want are ready for SL. FruitMenu doesn't work. Spotlight comments have been wiped. Dashboard seems to be completely borked.

Those last few have been the most painful. I had a number of things in FruitMenu that I used more than I realised. Same with Dashboard. You don't know what you've got till it's gone (as someone once sang).

At least I've found a (partial) alternative to FruitMenu that I can live with: XMenu. It sits in the top right corner, so I'm gradually learning to change sides, but it works well.

The Spotlight comments issue is the biggest pain, in conjunction with the fact that QuickSilver (which I'm now addicted to) has some issues under SL, namely that certain advanced options, like the File Tagging module, cause QS to crash. I had been using QS's tagging options to keep a lot of stuff organised. Now those tags (stored as spotlight comments) are gone - %$#@!

I can work around the lack of the File Tagging module to some extent using Automator to add my common tags. But this is quite limited compared to what could be done with QS's File Tagging module.

Still, overall I'm pretty happy with Snow Leopard. And when I get time, I'll be able to find solutions that suit the way I like to work. When you play in the snow, you have to expect the odd chilblain.

In a League of Their Own

2009-07-03T11:32:00.006+10:00

The last few weeks have seen further wrangling between politicians over the publication of league tables comparing schools. The NSW Opposition combined with the Greens and minor parties to push an amendment blocking newspapers from publishing tables comparing school performance data.

The Federal Education Minister Julia Gillard and her NSW counterpart Verity Firth naturally took a swipe at the New South Wales Opposition Leader Barry O'Farrell, calling him hypocritical and accusing him of "political vandalism" and calling the move "a ploy that did nothing to benefit schools".

While this response was quite predictable, it does rather beg the question. Does the publication of such tables really benefit schools? A scan of some recent letters to the SMH reveals some interesting ideas "out there" such as this offering from one Lydia Sharpin:

This is what the real fear is behind league tables - they will lead to the migration of the brightest talents from schools. The better schools will get the better kids and the worst schools will be forced further down the ranking tables, which could then lead to the closure of schools and loss of teachers' jobs. But are we protecting the teachers and schools at the cost of our students' futures? [Link]

Personally, I find the suggestion that blocking league tables is about protecting teachers' jobs to be rather short-sighted. While there are students, there will be a need for teachers – exactly where those students and teachers end up may well be affected by the publication of league tables, but Ms Sharpin needs to think it through a bit more. If the "better" schools do get the "better" kids, (and I'm assuming that by better, she is referring to academic results), does that necessarily lead to school closures? If it does, where do the students and teachers go? (They have to go somewhere.) If it doesn't result in school closures, what is the impact on students and staff at those schools identified as underperforming?

O'Farrell's position doesn't exactly excite me either: "What we support are parents getting information about their child, about their child's school and their child's school's performance against the state average and against like schools." [Link] This really isn't very far from the Commonwealth's plan to publish results about 'similar' schools. Similar in what way? The likely measure here is socio-economic, but the current methods used by the Commonwealth for determining the socio-economic level of schools are badly flawed. And is socio-economic really the most appropriate measure?

However, the biggest problem (in my opinion, at least) lies in how the public understands the situation. Filtered through TV sound bites and jejune summations by newspaper columnists, the public ends up with a caricature instead of a proper understanding of what the issues really are, which in turn leads to these kinds of comments:

"For the record this is absolutely no logical reason why schools - as with any other public service - should not be benchmarked against each other to determine the poor performers. Anyone who argues otherwise has a vested interest." [Link]

Presumably this person would also expect that police, fire and ambulance stations should be benchmarked against each other and the results published so he can work out which suburbs he should avoid living in or visiting.

The politicians who are for league tables keep talking about transparency. But why should transparency necessitate the publishing of league tables? If the Commonwealth required that all schools make their results from various tests publicly available, wouldn't that be transparent enough? Schools would no doubt also put up a lot of other data about their school, filling out the picture of what their school is like, and isn't that a good thing? Won't parents be better informed by this, rather than simply looking at a table of figures comparing results on tests? Verity Firth keeps trotting out the same canard:

"Providing more information about schools' performance is not about naming and shaming schools, it is about helping and supporting schools ... Full transparency will enable us to channel resources to those schools that need them most." [Link]

Except that identifying where the needs are and channelling resources doesn't require publication of anything!

This entire exercise seems to be yet another example of politicians being seen to be doing something, in this case neatly wrapped up as 'giving parents more information'.

Maybe the teachers unions should fight fire with fire and propose the publication of league tables for politicians - number of divisions voted on, attendance rates, number of days actually spent in the electorate, whether or not the member actually lives in the electorate, number of overseas trips, etc. I'm sure we'd all appreciate such full transparency come next election.

Thank You, Dan Mesa

2009-04-01T22:34:00.002+11:00

In response to an article on Net Tuts+, Dan Mesa coined this gem:

"IE doesn’t support the internet."

Best laugh I've had this week!

Puncture-ation

2009-03-26T20:01:00.002+11:00

From the ABC News website:

Prosecutors were criticised by the presiding magistrate, for not formally notifying two of the men, that they were entitled to consular assistance. [Link]

What's with the commas? Surely the ABC can afford to have someone proof-read even a short article like this so that it doesn't appear to have been written by the work-experience kid.

Education in the Land of the Blind

2008-12-19T09:46:00.004+11:00

Thanks to KRudd and Co., education here in Oz is very much in the public eye at the moment. Online news sites have embraced the blogging meme and provide their readers with the opportunity to comment on stories in a way that was never possible with newspaper columns. While in principle I think this a good thing, far too much of commentary on education stories is, sadly, drivel.

This appeared among the comments to a journo-blog entry on the Daily Telegraph website:

In many public HS, we have teachers who don’t know much more than their top students. These students actually learn from books and self research (and some do it with help from private tutors). Those who are not top students move on and cramp [sic] for the HSC. And again, some of these average kids are the most likely to follow education training to become new teachers. By the time they get to University 2nd year, they forgot most of the stuff they bolted down in a short period without true understanding. So we have a vicious circle that need to be broken by offering high pay to teachers to attract top candidates. I could see that Universities are doing the right thing at this moment to offer combined educational degrees to make sure that new teachers will have at least one solid specialisation. But we need the government to get serious and offer high pay for good teachers and encourage the rest to go back to University to learn specialisation to lift their performance and consequently, better pay.

There are a number of fallacies implied in this comment:

that teachers don't really understand what they are teaching;
that those who go into teaching are not the 'top candidates' but only average students;
there is a vicious cycle (!) of poor teachers leading to more poor teachers;
a 'solid specialisation' (whatever 'solid' is supposed to mean) should be part of teacher training (hmm, now what 'solid' specialisation should a K-2 teacher have?);
that 'specialisation' would lift 'performance' (naturally without any explanation of how 'performance is to be measured or how a 'specialisation' would change it).

I keep seeing this dreck again and again in comments on websites to educational stories. The Federal Government has added fuel to the fire by teasing the media with hints about performance pay (though they've carefully dodged using that exact expression) and teacher accreditation and accountability.

Like our politicians, it seems there are many members of the public who believe they are knowledgeable about education, apparently on the basis that they had one.

And it appears to have become fashionable to rubbish our education systems in this country. It's no surprise that the KRudd government is gung-ho about changing education in Oz - fiddling around with education and then claiming to have achieved something is de rigueur for Labor governments (and almost as much so for Coalition ones). But we are now seeing the likes of Rupert Murdoch dumping on Australian education (though why anyone would think that Murdoch would know anything about it eludes me) and no one standing up and saying "hang on a minute, is any of that criticism actually valid? Is it based on anything substantial, or is it just hot air?" The same goes for the media - witness the negative spin put on the TIMSS results reported by ACER a couple of weeks ago. Anyone would think that our Year 8 students couldn't add up, the way it was reported in the media. In reality, the gap between Australia's results, and those of the USA or Britain was very small, and only Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan can claim to be clearly ahead of everyone else.

Is there room for improvement in our education systems? Of course there is. Are we failing our students and delivering them a substandard education? Of course not.

Geek vs. Tool

2008-12-07T14:25:00.010+11:00

I've started playing with GeekTool. I'd seen it some time back, but hadn't bothered with it until I stumbled one of those "Top 10 thingies" lists and saw some nice screenshots of GeekTool in action.

Getting my CPU usage stats up on my desktop was straight-forward enough, so I thought about what else I'd like displayed. Then I saw a forum post where someone was using curl and sed to pull out a list of items from SlashDot.

The script was this:

curl http://slashdot.org/index.rss | grep <title | sed -e ’s/<title>Slashdot</title>//g’ | sed -e ’s/<title>Search Slashdot</title>//g’ | sed -e ’s/<title>//g’ | sed -e ’s/</title>//g’

Now, I wasn't interested in SlashDot, but getting the headlines from the ABC news website appealed, so I started playing with the above script, using the same idea to strip out the parts of the xml feed I didn't want.

At which point I learned something important about sed on Mac OS X - it won't wipe out blank lines. This instruction - sed -e '/^*/d' - should delete all blank lines; at least, that's what every sed tutorial tells me. But it just doesn't work on OS X. I even made sure that I had the GNU version installed rather than the POSIX one, but to no avail. So my output contained multiple blank lines between titles. Blech!

After scouring the web for hours trying to find an answer to this problem, it seemed that GeekTool had left me feeling rather un-geek-like, but certainly a bit of a tool.

I finally found part of the solution, in another forum - use perl instead of sed:

perl -pe 's/\r\n/ /'

This did the job of removing the newlines, but left me with a long chain of sed and perl calls piped together, at which point I began thinking again and asked the obvious question: can I do this more simply with a single call to perl? A little more searching, and...

curl http://www.abc.net.au/news/indexes/justin/rss.xml | perl -nle 'print for m:<title>(.*)</title>:'

Done.

I'm now thinking that it would be nice to be able to put somewhere on my desktop a list showing the subjects and senders of my most recent unread emails. If I can work out where and how Thunderbird keeps this info, it should be easy (note the unwarranted optimism), but it could also mean that I need to learn perl (properly). Now if only some kind person would comment on this post and provide me with a solution. (There's that unwarranted optimism again.¹)

1. With apologies to Dilbert

Drongo #3

2008-10-06T15:37:00.002+11:00

Playing with StumbleUpon, I came upon a list of websites that work only with IE. I still occasionally come across websites that only look good in IE, but I was surprised that there are still websites out there that use javascript to check the user agent and spit back unhelpful messages if you are not using IE.

When I noticed an Australian site, I decided to have a look. Sure enough, this site for an electronics firm in northern Queensland checks your browser and unless you are using IE on a Windows machine, you get "Your are not currently supported" (whatever that's supposed to mean), and the (poorly designed) drop-down menu doesn't appear.

When I looked further at this site (after changing my browser to bypass the javascript), it became apparent that there is absolutely nothing in the site that requires IE as the browser or Windows as the platform. The javascript to block non-Windows non-IE browsers appears to have no rationale except to ensure that people who use other platforms or other browsers cannot navigate through this website, i.e. to turn away potential customers.

Pathetic.

The Purpose of Education?

2008-06-24T21:10:00.003+10:00

I've been catching up on reading the edublogs in my newsreader, which has led to an interesting juxtaposition of articles for me.

The first is Wolin, Democracy and The Math Wars by Michael Paul Goldenberg. I found the following quote Michael gives from Wolin's book resonates very strongly with me:

"The new education is severely functional, proto-professional, and priority-conscious in an economic sense. It is also notable for the conspicuous place given to achieving social discipline through education.
It is as though social planners, both public and private, had suddenly realized that education forms a system in which persons of an impressionable age are “stuff” that can be molded to the desired social form..."

While Wolin is talking about the US in particular, this is consistent with what is also an emerging trend here in Australia, where governments readily tout education as an economic mechanism, but discussion of education as a means for personal discovery and development is thin on the ground.

Craig Emerson, the Federal Minister for Small Business , has made his view very clear:
"Market democrats harness the power of the market for the public good," he said. "They dedicate themselves to remedying social disadvantage out of prosperity by giving every child the opportunity of a quality education through excellence in teaching and high-quality school facilities." [as quoted by Ross Gittins in the Sydney Morning Herald]

I agree with Gittins' response: "the primary cause of inequality of opportunity isn't education, it's inheritance - of brains, social status, social skills and money." [link]

Hard on the heels of reading Goldenberg's article, I came upon this offering from Tom Hoffman.

After reading through William Deresiewicz's article and then visiting the Teach For America website, I found myself wondering if I was missing something, if perhaps I had failed to fully appreciate the full extent of the socio-economic impact of education.

But after re-reading all of the articles again, and taking some time to reflect on them, my response to all of it is as follows:

My own view of education, while it allows for the idea that improved levels of education may lead to opportunities for students to improve their socio-economic status, is grounded in the idea that the student be given the opportunity for self-actualisation. Consequently, I object to views of education that seek to reduce education to little more than a social or economic mechanism. This sort of utilitarianism devalues education as a whole - it dismisses as unimportant subjects like Visual Arts and Music in the first instance, but ultimately devalues all subjects by narrowing the curriculum to fit the desires of business and industry.

William Deresiewicz's "holes" are not in his education - or more specifically, not in his schooling. His attitudes, his self-professed inability to talk to people not like him and false self-worth are the products of the social environment he grew up in, not his education. (What does the fact that he now wants to point the blame at his schooling rather than his social upbringing say?)

Programs like TFA are actually doing good things, but there is a real risk that governments, bent on driving their particular socio-economic (read myopic) views of education, may hijack their agendas.

But that's only my view things, which no doubt someone will regard as the by-product of my 1970s/80s education and Gen-X mindset. Or possibly my working-class upbringing or maybe the fact that I now teach in a non-denominational non-government school.

Whatever. I just wish there was a way to keep politicians at arm's length from education.

The Plausibility Trap

2008-03-24T17:29:00.002+11:00

Words intrigue me. I love learning about language, and it seems I'm not alone - websites and mailing list about words abound.

Unfortunately, so does a lot of rubbish about the origins of certain words and phrases.

An enquiry to the World Wide Words website asked about the word denigrate:

“A recent film, The Great Debaters, suggests that denigrate is an offensive term for African-Americans because it means “to make black”. The Denzel Washington character says that the word has racist undertones because of this. What do you think?”

Thankfully, World Wide Word's Michael Quinion pours cold water on the notion, but the plausibility of the idea worries me. It appears in a highly acclaimed movie - how long before someone claims to be offended by someone else using the term 'denigrate', simply because they've seen the movie and picked up on this faulty idea?

It's not quite up to the level of the feminist who objected to the term "mandate", but it's not that far from it.

Stumbling into Nausea

2008-03-08T17:55:00.003+11:00

One of my favourite things is StumbleUpon. Today it led to me to this site. It'll make you think again about your next visit to a so-called "family restaurant". (At least, it ought to make you rethink what you order.)

And the #1 worst food bothered me for a whole different reason - as an Aussie, I cringe at the thought that Americans might think that here in Oz we would actually eat "cheese fries". We don't even use the word "fries" here. And we certainly don't have "ranch sauce" (or 'ranch' anything else). I don't know where the Outback Steakhouse is, and I don't really care to find out.

Excuse me now, it's almost dinner time and I have to throw a couple of roo steaks on the barbie.

Web + Mathematics -- Take 2

2008-03-04T20:32:00.003+11:00

At the end of 2006, I posted a rant about the sorry state of working with Mathematics in the browser. That post elicited some good feedback, but I was still dissatisfied with the overall situation. I still am, to some extent. Microsoft still couldn't bring themselves to add support for MathML in IE7 (along with a host of other things) - at least MathPlayer is still there to paper over the gaping hole. Apple's Safari browser is into version 3 and still struggling with MathML. It's not encouraging.

But there are good things happening. Peter Jipsen of Chapman University has developed a javascript approach to entering equations in a simple syntax (well, simpler than LaTeX, at least, and nowhere near as verbose as MathML itself) and rendering it on-screen with Presentation MathML. It's called AsciiMath. And it works! Not only that, adding it to Moodle proved to be simplicity itself.

There are a few caveats. (Isn't there always?) Because you are using Presentation MathML, you need the MathML fonts installed on your computer. And if you use IE, you need MathPlayer (or a real browser, but let's not go there.) If you use Safari... sorry, try Camino or Flock.

But it's a big step in the right direction. Especially if you are using a VLE like Moodle, since it means that students can enter their own mathematical equations and expressions without needing to resort to other software for its creation and/or editing.

Being able to type in `x^2 +(3x)/5 =0` and getting a good-looking equation on-screen is exactly the level at which students (and teachers) need this to work - a simple, effective way of entering their equations resulting in immediate and effective presentation.

Peter Jipsen - you're a legend.

Big Brother Down Under?

2008-01-18T13:26:00.000+11:00

A couple of edubloggers in my aggregator have commented on the recent announcement by the new Rudd government about its intentions to require all ISPs in Oz to filter the Internet for homes and schools, blocking pornography and "inappropriate" material. The announcement clearly states that the scheme is "opt-out" rather than "opt-in", as it was promoted in the recent election campaign. The reaction in various quarters has predictably been "censorship". I think censorship is a secondary issue here.

The Telecommunications Minister Stephen Conroy says he makes no apology for making the scheme mandatory. (Having heard Conroy speak on previous occasions, this is hardly surprising - I wonder if he actually knows how to apologise.)

My feelings about this announcement have shifted as I've thought through the likely scenarios. My initial reaction was that it's a positive move that will protect young children - as a father, things that will help to protect my kids tend to get a thumbs up.

As an educator, my initial thoughts were much the same. Then I started thinking about the implementation and implications.

What sort of filtering will be used? As a teacher at a school with filtering systems in place, I know full well that even the most recent versions of filtering are far from perfect. Word filters catch words, but not pictures on webpages that don't have those words. Black-lists will always be playing catch-up to the websites that you want blocked. White-lists? They also are always in catch-up mode, and in the meanwhile stifle legitimate exploration of the web. It seems a reasonable assumption that while the ISPs may do their best to conform with the government's policy, they won't catch everything.

So what happens when something gets through all this filtering, and little Johnny goes home and says, "Guess what Billy saw on the computer today at school?"

Right now, if that happened, the parents would take it up with the school; the school would check that its filtering was working, and point to the line in their policy that says that they make every effort to block inappropriate material but due to the nature of the Internet cannot guarantee..., etc., and that's probably where it would end in most cases.

But once the new policy starts being enforced, schools have a new defence: the ISP should have blocked it before it got to us; if it got past their filters... .

When the ISP takes the line "we make every effort to block inappropriate material but due to the nature of the Internet cannot guarantee..., etc.", will that be accepted? Will the ISP be fined under the new legislation? Will the parents and/or the school be able to seek damages in court?

If ISPs will be required only to do "their best" to provide clean feed (i.e. demonstrate that they have filters in place which are regularly updated), the end result is no different from what schools and parents are getting from their own filtering software now - except for one important detail - the consumers (schools and parents) will be paying for this filtering on an ongoing basis.

On the other hand, if ISPs must provide clean feed, they will be vulnerable to prosecution, which will leave the smaller ISPs more exposed than the industry big guns, in the long run resulting in the smaller ISPs bowing out or being subsumed by their larger competition. And consumers will still end up paying for filtering.

The other thing that concerns me is that some parents who have been uncertain or lax about buying filtering software will now think "okay, it's taken care of for me, so I don't need to worry about what my kid is doing on the Internet." No filtering is perfect, and there is no substitute for parental supervision. But this policy may delude some parents into thinking that the Internet just got safer.

Australians already pay too much for mediocre web access - now they will pay even more, and for filtering that in all likelihood will be no improvement over what they can buy (for less). This policy stinks of one-upmanship on the Coalition's offer of giving family free Internet filters for their home computers.

Big Brother? More like Fagin, if you ask me.

Janus

2008-01-07T16:43:00.000+11:00

It seems that the New Year had beguiled a few blogger of renown to make some predictions for 2008.
Tim Bray, in his ongoing blog, actually has 4 predictions for 2008. The one that caught my eye (mainly because of the comments) was 2008 Prediction 2: Windows Looks Bad. Tim provides his own summary:

The strain due to the fact that most business desktops are locked into the Microsoft platform, at a time when both the Apple and GNU/Linux alternatives are qualitatively safer, better, and cheaper to operate, will start to become impossible to ignore.

The comments that followed were quite revealing. While many agreed with Tim's sentiments about how Windows compares to Mac OS X or Linux, a couple of comments stood out:

"wrong, wrong, wrong. Why is it that so many IT guys act as if migrating to Linux is such a simple experience that every novice user should/could do it? The average non-IT Windows user runs it because (a) it comes pre-installed (b) their favorite (pronounced "the one their friends or the sales guy recommended") app "x" was readily available, and (c) it closely matches that computer at work so that the daily mind shift is minimal.
Until inroads are made in all 3 of these areas, the market penetration for home users will continue to be minimal." [link]

and:

"... the people I meet in my part of the world are in quite different position. Architects, designers, photographers, sound engineers, movie makers, ... (Btw., what is the term which describes all the above professions? Are those "content creators"?) simply don't have the tools to run under any free OS. There is no Autocad, nor AllPlan. No Rhinoceros, no AliasStudio. No Indesign, Photoshop (no, GIMP, doesn't count), Freehand (no, Inkscape doesn't count), Quark, Flash, Acrobat (not Reader). FontLab. Avid. Combustion. ProTools. Vegas. Capture One. And Lightroom... To sum it up, Windows may look bad but its applications look superb." [link]

though that last comment contrasts interestingly with an earlier one:

"...everything else you mentioned had to do with brain-dead applications from some of the worst companies: Adobe, Sun, and Symantec.
And I guarantee you that if we all start moving to Linux or OSX, these companies will start souring those OS's with their shoddy, annoying, anti-user software just as bad and people will keep buying it.
I'll give you that the OSX user experience, over all, is much better than XP, but without all the extraneous apps from Adobe, et al, XP isn't quite so bad. The real problem is app and driver vendors." [link]

Personally, I doubt that there will be much of a shift in 2008, but I don't think that's exactly what Tim was getting at. The point is that business, becoming dissatisfied with Windows (epecially Vista), will be looking even more closely at the viability of alternatives. The issue of lock-in is very real, especially as one commentator noted,

"...doesn't Office 2007 on Mac not support VBA? ... That is an instant dealbreaker for editors who use Word and heavy Excel users. AFAIK, investment/finance people live by their macros." [link]

Following some of the links from the comments led to interesting reading. Mark Pilgrim, in an entry titled 2008 is the year of Linux on the desktop, had this to say:

"So yeah, my parents switched to Linux because — among other reasons — it was easier to use with their iPod. That’s how badly Apple has lost the plot."

Far be it from me that I should criticise someone of Mark Pilgrim's stature, but I'm not sure who's really lost the plot here.

Stephen Downes took an entirely different tack, looking back at the predictions made a year ago for 2007. [link] It's a timely reminder of the perils of playing Nostradamus. Those who did best, for the most part, made broad predictions rather than specifics (though there was one notable exception).

My prediction for 2009 - we will look back at the prediction made for 2008 and wonder what we were thinking.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly – A GTD episode

2007-12-29T20:59:00.000+11:00

About eighteen months ago, I came across a website called 43 Folders, which in turn introduced me to Getting Things Done, which is the title of a book by David Allen, but more importantly it's a work management system, and eighteen months ago, GTD could not have come at a better time – I was up to my ears in work, and struggling to cope.

One thing that I changed was how I was using my PDA (a Palm Tungsten T5). But here I ran into a problem – the T5 works nicely with Palm Desktop, but not much else. My personal choices re software didn't really help – while I like the Mac platform, I don't really care that much for Apple's applications, so I use Thunderbird rather than Mail, and Firefox instead of Safari. As for iCal, I find its tendency to overlap translucent panels a visual eyesore, so I left it well alone.

Of course, this meant that I could not take advantage of the integration that Apple had built between iCal and Mail.

Fast forward six months, and now my Mac-centric workplace has a centralised calendar solution that most of my colleagues subscribe to through iCal. (I'm still resisting iCal, of course, and using Sunbird.)

It comes as a rude shock a little later on to find that iCal can't handle the volume of data being delivered from the calendar. The solution - scale back the data being delivered from the calendar. (Those of you who are shaking your heads at this – yeah, I know, but it wasn't my decision.)

Meanwhile, I'm still trying to improve my work practices, and I've started using Quicksilver instead of the dock and tags rather than nested folders. I've also found GTDTiddlyWiki (by Jeremy Ruston), and using it to manage my projects. Small tasks, however, still live on
my T5. The separation is a bit clunky, but I'm living with it.

But I'm now noticing more GTD-related software appearing. "Kinkless GTD", a set of applescripts for OmniOutliner Pro, iGTD. Time to look into this more closely.

iGTD at first glance doesn't seem to be offering much more than GTDTiddlyWiki. But the devil is in the details, as they say, and there are a couple of key details here - iGTD interacts with two other apps that completely change the ballgame.

The first app in question is Apple's iSync. Naturally, iSync doesn't want to know about Sunbird, but it is tight with iCal, so items in iGTD get synced with iCal. Nice.

The second app is QuickSilver - I can hotkey into QS, switch to text mode, then drop my text into iGTD's inbox, and I'm done and back onto whatever I was working on. Apart from the actual text for the entry, only 7 keystrokes are required.

As nice as this is, the real key to making this work (for me, at least) is getting iSync to talk to my T5. This particular step proved to be the most annoying - what looked like it should work quite easily just wouldn't. I had to dive into Apple's online support forums to find the answer to a very unhelpful message, to wit, that either I had not properly installed Palm's HotSync Manager or I had never run it - wrong on both counts. (It was in fact a permissions problem, but nothing in iSync or its Help files pointed in this direction.)

Having gotten iSync and the T5 to finally talk to each other, I now have a single system (at least in terms of the digital stuff - the paper war on my desk is another matter) that works well.

And yet I'm now looking at an early version of Things, and I like what I see. If Cultured Code add support for QuickSilver and synchronisation that I can make work with my PDA, I may well switch.

So, to sum up: iGTD + iSync + Quicksilver is good; iSync's flightiness with Palm devices and the effort required to find the solution is bad; iCal remains ugly.

Cyberbullies... and their Mums

2007-11-21T16:32:00.000+11:00

On Monday I attended a seminar led by adolescent psychologist Michael Carr-Gregg on cyberbullying. The one thing that really stuck with me from the day was the problem of boundaries.

Once, the distinction between "school issues" and "home issues" was reasonably clear-cut. If it happened in the school (or on the way to or from school), e.g. a fist-fight, it was a "school issue". Otherwise it was a "home issue". (Yes, I realise that it was never that clear-cut, and there were grey areas, but for most students most of the time, the distinction was a fairly clear and obvious one.)

Enter the Internet, email, instant messaging, mobile phones, SMS. Suddenly the distinction between school matters and home matters is lost in a techological miasma.

Little Miss X and her friends are cold shouldering Student Y at school, but also sending spiteful text messages late at night - is the text messaging a school issue, even though it happens outside the school grounds outside of school hours? The answer would seem to be "Yes" - the actions outside the school are intimately connected to the actions and relationships inside the school, and schools that decide not to deal with these things run the risk of being sued for neglecting their duty of care. BUT (and it's no small 'but') we are then confronted with students and parents who want to argue that the school should not be involved (these are of course the same parents who wouldn't hesitate to pursue legal action if if were their child on the receiving end and the school decided not to act).

So the boundaries have been blurred and we now have students and their parents who want to draw the boundaries where it suits them.

An example of this is the case of Anna Drakers, an Assistant Principal of a school in the US who appeared on the Dr. Phil show after two 15 year old boys created a false MySpace account in her name, and then loaded it with defamatory information. Ms Drakers is now pursuing a civil action against the families of the two boys.

The question that was put to us in Michael Carr-Gregg's seminar was whether or not Ms Drakers was right in her pursuit of legal action. Recent neurological research informs us that the brains of 15 year old boys are not sufficiently developed to fully anticipate and evaluate the consequences of their actions. Anyone who's taught 15 year old boys for more than 5 minutes will agree that 15 year olds and stupid decisions go hand in hand.

It's no simple matter to determine whether or not Ms Drakers' action are reasonable or simply motivated by revenge. The action taken by the school was very limited, but the authority the school was allowed to exercise was limited to begin with.

We heard parts of letters from the families. One sounded generally remorseful. Another included this: "He is a good boy and has been a good boy, and the price he is paying is not equal to his actions. There is no possible way I, or any other parent, can monitor every action."

What caught my attention here was that there is an implicit acknowledgment that the actions of the boy are the responsibility of the parents. If the responsibility DOES lie with the parents, is civil legal action then unreasonable? Could Anna's decision to pursue this action constitute a "shot across the bows" of other parents, a wakeup call to them that they need to be looking carefully at what their kids are doing online (not to mention reinforcing their understanding of what is and is not acceptable conduct).

What about a reverse scenario: if the boys had done the same thing, but about someone outside the school (someone's mother, perhaps) and they had done it on the school's computers during school hours, would anyone blink if the defamed person sued the school for being negligent? Would they accept from the school the defence that teenage brains are not fully developed, teenagers make dumb decisions and the school cannot be expected to monitor every single action? I rather doubt it, but if the argument is good enough for these parents to make, why would it not be good enough for a school to make?

Drakers maintained that the issue was not about money but about accountability. The unanswered question in the whole thing was exactly who's accountability is being discussed. Can these boys be held to be completely accountable for their actions, or does the incomplete development of their teenage brains preclude this, in which case, to what extent can and should the parents be held responsible?

Pesonally, I think that the parents should bear a fair amount of the responsibility for the boys' actions - the question is how this should happen. Unfortunately, in Western society, it usually does end up taking the form of legal action.

All of this points to a need to educate parents as much as we educate the students - maybe even more so.

Learning, Conversation and the Web

2007-06-28T22:52:00.000+10:00

I found this via Stephen Downes' website: Learning is Conversation - Revisited.

There's a lot to like about this blog post - I've been working on some materials for a workshop I'll be doing with colleagues, and in thinking about how the Read/Write Web impinges on learning in the 21st century, the significance of dialogue as a fundamental component of education has been very much in my mind. That post, and the original its drawn from, nicely capture the essence of such conversation in a wired school setting.

Of course, not all learning is conversation - some learning is definitely experiential. But the lion's share of learning that happens in schools is through discussion among teachers and students. Recognising how the Read/Write Web fits into this picture is something that schools simply must do.

The last line from John Pederson is spot on:

We are waking up and linking to each other. We are watching. But we are not waiting.

Programming and idle thoughts

2007-02-17T23:11:00.000+11:00

One of the things that makes me sad about Mac OS X (not that there's many) is the demise of certain tools that were available to me under OS 9 for teaching students about programming.

I used to teach students in Years 9 and 10 about HyperCard and HyperTalk - the lack of proper colour tools was a pain, but HyperCard was nevertheless a joy to work with and a fantastic programming environment for students.

I also used Think Pascal with Year 11/12 students. I learnt Pascal at Uni (after suffering a bad case of FORTRAN) and it gave me a great appreciation for clarity and readability of code.

But as they say, that was then, this is now. The world now hums to itself through the Internet, and HyperCard and Think Pascal are relics from a previous life, no longer relevant to computing in the 21st century.

And that is sad, because under OS X, there's no obvious replacement for HyperCard, and no Pascal IDE I would use with students. You can still do Pascal programming on a Mac (using Xcode and FPC or GPC), but it's not something for beginners to tackle. If someone develops a nice IDE suitable to use with high school students (and I'm hoping that LWP by Ingemar Ragnemalm will eventually fill the bill), then Pascal is back on the table, but not before then.

Which leaves me in a quandary about what to do with my senior classes.

Here in New South Wales, senior computing courses have always mandated particular programming languages for students to learn. Once, the choices were BASIC, Pascal or Logo. Now, the Software Design & Development course specifications say:

"The syllabus does not prescribe a single coding language for implementation of programs but advocates a range of high level languages."

Sure, except that further into the document we see some pretty interesting specifics. Under "General Language Requirements" we find:

Appropriate Languages:
• Pascal, a structured version of BASIC.

Hmm, Logo's vanished, but I'm not surprised - it was too widely regarded as a child's programming environment (even though it wasn't). But why not C? Or Python?

And under "Event Driven Languages" we have:

Appropriate Languages:
• Visual Basic, Hypercard, Delphi (limited functions only), REALBasic.

Hypercard? Someone needs to check their calendar. And where's Javascript? Surely it would have to be the most obvious choice for an event driven language. And all you need is a recent browser and a text editor.

Finally, the pièce de resistance, under "Prototyping and Rapid Applications Development":

Appropriate languages:
• Visual Basic, Hypercard, Delphi (limited functions only), Access, Filemaker-Pro, REALBasic.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

The Simple Wrong Answer

2007-01-25T11:58:00.000+11:00

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING IS A RANT AND IT CONCERNS POLITICS. IF YOU THINK YOU MAY NOT LIKE WHAT I HAVE TO SAY, CLICK HERE.

Disclaimer: I am not aligned with any political party, nor do I advocate for a particular political position. The views expressed here are specifically my own. They are not endorsed by my employer or reflect any position on their part.

Reading through the transcript of Kevin Rudd's interview on the 7:30 Report, I got angry. Yet another politician who wants to fiddle with education in this country for political reasons that have nothing to do with improving education per se. We've already been lumbered with Brendan Nelson's ill-conceived notions of how student reports should look and the absolutely reprehensible tying of Federal funds to its implementation. Now Kevin Rudd's making noises that show he's cut from the same cloth.

Rudd's promising a "revolution". When Kerry O'Brien pressed him for details, Rudd threw out the following guff:

"This whole proposal I put out there today is about how we deal with this gaping hole in Australia's economic performance, and it's the decline in productivity growth ... the most effective way of building productivity growth is to invest in human capital, and that's where the data for Australia has been going backwards."

Gaping hole? Well, I'll let the economists chew over that one. But as for the going backwards part, that I'll buy into.

What does Rudd offer as evidence for this assertion?

"...let's look at what's happening in early childhood education. There are 30 countries or so assessed recently by the OECD - this is how we get in at the ground level for educating our young Australians. What we do with four year olds, for example. Guess where we come out of the list of 31 countries which have been assessed and measured by the OECD? Stone bottom last. That is a rolled gold failed performance. We have to lift the game there."

No mention of exactly what was being assessed and measured - a little searching on the web brought forth some interesting data about the OECD/PISA study Rudd is referring to. The study assesses and measures a wide variety of things, per capita expenditure, expenditure as a proportion of GDP, class sizes, literact levels in Reading, Mathematics and the Sciences, public versus private funding levels, and lots more. So what was being measured in the example that Rudd gave? From what I could find on the web, Australia ranked last out of 20 countries (not 31) in spending on early childhood services.

But I also found a few other things from the same study. Australia's results in overall Reading Literacy - 4th. In Mathematics - 5th. In Scientific Literacy - 7th. Not too shabby for a county that is apparently going backwards. And the really interesting part is the three countries that spent the most on early childhood services (Denmark, Sweden and Norway)^[1] fall well down the list. ^[2] Denmark, spending 2% of GDP on early childhood, education and care, more than any other country, ranked no higher than 12th in the above categories. This in itself raises some interesting questions, but somehow I doubt Kevin Rudd is going to bring them up himself. Rudd's game here is only to highlight results that 'support', however tenuously, his assertion that the Howard government is doing a bad job. Naturally the positive results will get a guernsey somewhere along the line to make the argument about what a great job the government is doing. No wonder Mark Twain quipped "there are lies, damn lies, and statistics".

Rudd went on:

"...we have, against all the measures from early childhood through to universities, a problem in terms of the quantum, of the investment in these areas..."

So this revolution will be about spending more on education? Yes and no.

"...I'm not proposing a blank cheque to the sector, I'm proposing conditions be attached because the parallel part of the education revolution I'm talking about is lifting the standards, lifting the actual quality of the outcomes, the outputs of our education system. More money, but in exchange a better performance, and that's the way we intend to go."

Here we have it - another Brendan Nelson moment. Notice the weasel-words - we've gone from our rolled gold failed performance in an unstated category to an investment problem to lifting the quality of the outputs of the education system. With performance levels attached to the money.

And what's driving this?

"My job, as the alternative Prime Minister of the country, is to put forward a practical program for schools, for vocational education, for TAFEs and for universities which achieves the nation's objectives, which is about raising productivity and underpinning our long term prosperity."

O'Brien actually asked a good question in response to this:

"Labor's Achilles heel at this election will again be its credibility as an economic manager. On the other hand, the polls always tell us that Labor rates well on education. Is that why you've identified education so strongly as an economic issue, to bolster a perceived weakness with a perceived strength?"

Exactly! Rudd's reply was quite revealing:

"No, not at all..."

but 10 seconds later in the same answer,

"...What I'm talking about is this on micro policy, most particularly, how do we boost productivity, how do we do it through human capital investment, how do we raise the quality and skills of our work force for the future economy, that is the core of the productivity debate..."

"No, not at all" ended up sounding to me very much like a "yes, but I don't want to put it that way".

There's no denying that the reason we have an education sector is in part to prepare people for the workplace. But the raison d'être of education is not to drive economic prosperity. And Rudd is implying that there is a strong correlation between productivity and educational outcomes - which is, in the words of Edmund Blackadder, bollocks. I don't pretend to be an economist, but it's no effort to do a bit of reading online to see what real economists have to say about productivity in Australia, and I don't find any of them talking about lifting educational outcomes as the way to lift productivity.

The OECD studies Rudd appears so fond of also contradict his views. Countries like Japan and Canada have consistently appeared at the top of the tables in these and similar studies over the last couple of decades, particularly in those tables concerned with educational measures (as opposed to levels of expenditure, class sizes, etc.), but their productivity has nevertheless fluctuated just like Australia's. Investment in education and outcomes from education have not been significant determinants in a country's productivity. Attempts to narrow the productivity issue to a single focus like educational performance is disingenuous.

Kerry O'Brien hit the nail on the head - Labor intends to bolster a perceived weakness with a perceived strength. Education in this country can do without this nonsense. Let's hope enough economists and educational leaders, regardless of their political leanings, speak up and make it clear to both sides of politics that this sort of drivel is unacceptable.

As my friend Tony Butz once told me, to every complex question there is a simple wrong answer.

</rant>

[1] Based on the table appearing here (Figure 5.3, halfway down the page).
[2] From the tables at the bottom of this article.

Drongo #2

2007-01-21T18:26:00.000+11:00

Below are some words from a panel on one of those animated adverts you see on various websites.

100% Zero-Footprint? Hey guys, 100% of zero is the same as 1% of zero.

Maybe that explains the "business intelligence" part.

Webpages and Warthogs

2007-01-19T23:12:00.000+11:00

I was reading an entry by Josh Porter on his Bokardo blog asking "do MySpace users have bad taste?" and it reminded me of a few things.

The first thing that came to mind was experiences I've had teaching students in IT classes, where we would be looking at building something, multimedia presentations or perhaps databases using Filemaker Pro. And always someone would build something that was flat out ugly. Not just untidy or unbalanced or bland, but downright garish. And I would always ask, "Does that look good to you?" And the reply was invariably, "yeah, what's wrong with it?"

Now, I'm not asserting that my sense of aesthetics is highly refined or some such, I know it's not, but I understand exactly where Josh's question has come from. MySpace is replete with examples of ugly design, but it's not just MySpace where you can find such. The web is full of it. But why?

The comments on Bokardo are well worth reading (read also the comments to a follow-up post "Visual & Social Design") - the discussion of usability vs aesthetics is quite interesting, and poses some good questions about what really constitutes usability in a website. (I can forsee some interesting discussions in my senior classes.) But I don't think the discussion got near the root of why ugly is okay in MySpace (or other websites).

I particularly liked this comment:

I think MySpace inadvertently played in to the kids within us who want to build a rough & ready treehouse. Now, would you be happy enough to put your treehouse together yourself or would you want to get some high end feng shui designer in so you could impresses your teenage friends but lose a lot of the personalization?

This rings true to me, though I don't think it's the entire explanation. Others mentioned the fact that MySpace is predominated by teens, which reminded me of something else.

A few years back, a friend and I looked at the logo of certain organisation and felt it was rather poor. This wasn't just a general feeling on our part - we could clearly pinpoint some significant flaws in the design of the logo.

My friend is a qualified graphic designer, and he approached the organisation's directors and offered to design a new logo for them. They were nonplussed, but agreed to look at what he could come up with. He produced three new logos for them to consider. Several of our friends saw the new logos and were impressed by what they saw. Not so, the directors. They preferred the old logo.

My point? It's not just teenagers who seems to be blind to good design (or bad). So now I'm wondering if having an eye for design is one of those things that for most people requires training or at least significant exposure. Some people can't really tell the difference between a genuine home-cooked Italian meal and what they can buy prepackaged from the supermarket. Some people like instant coffee. And McDonalds. And maybe they always will.

My last point concerns warthogs. Most people will look at a warthog and think "ugly". But ask someone like David Attenborough, you'll get a different answer. (Yes, I have been watching a few documentaries of late - my daughter's becoming quite hooked on DA's stuff.) The thing is, once you've heard Attenborough talk about the warthog and why it appears as it does, you get a new appreciation for its appearance - 'ugly' is no longer the right word.

And of course, to the female warthog, there was never any doubt about the male's attractiveness, but then, she was able to appreciate the merits of his appearance from the start.

The Unguided Missile of Good Intentions

2007-01-03T09:45:00.000+11:00

Browsing through my ever-growing selection of edu-blogs, I found an interesting item in Tom Hoffman's blog, aptly titled "Perhaps Someone Else Could Respond to This…", linking to a blog item at the MacArthur Foundation.

The blurb on the Foundation's homepage:

The MacArthur Foundation launched its five-year, $50 million digital media and learning initiative in 2006 to help determine how digital technologies are changing the way young people learn, play, socialize, and participate in civic life. Answers are critical to developing educational and other social institutions that can meet the needs of this and future generations. The initiative is both marshaling what is already known about the field and seeding innovation for continued growth.

The website links to a blog ("Spotlight") "where visitors can engage with initiative grantees about their work."

The blog entry in question is by one Sandra Weber, a Professor of Education at Concordia University in Montreal. In it she writes:

Young people trust adults to to be smart enough to realize that it is plain rude to go snooping on children’s websites without their permission. As public as their postings may be, it is ‘bad form’ and an invasion of privacy to visit a personal site that you know was not intended for your eyes.

The title of Tom's entry on his own blog makes it clear that he sees a problem with what Weber has written. Those who commented on his blog, as well as on the Spotlight blog, also see the problem. So why can't Weber see it?

She goes on to say:

Just as adults should not read a diary left lying around unlocked or open some one else’s mail or eavsedrop on telephone conversations, they should not snoop uninvited on cyberpostings of children they know.

How will young people learn to be trustworthy if no one will trust them?

As a parent, one thing I will be impressing on my daughters as they do things online is that anything they put online is available to anyone and everyone to see, even me, and they cannot afford to think or act otherwise. And I will be looking at what they put online, so I can be sure that they are not compromising their own safety. What I won't do is be sneaky about it. I'll tell them up front that I will be looking, and I'll tell them why. If they want to keep something private, they'll do that in a way that is private - posting stuff on the web is not and never will be.

When I look back over the MacArthur Foundation's homepage blurb (mission statement?), it's obvious that the intention is good. I'm also fairly confident that Sandra Weber's statements are well intended. But entries like Weber's may lead young people (and perhaps some educators) to wrongly assume that they can publish online materials and expect a certain level of privacy. Such a view is hopelessly naive. More to the point, it's potentially dangerous. Weber would do well to contact organisations like NetAlert (I'm sure Canada would have an equivalent agency) and talk to the experts about what can happen when young people put things online that they shouldn't.

'Public' is not the new 'private', regardless of anyone's intentions.

Web + Mathematics = ???

2006-12-26T14:28:00.000+11:00

Me: Don't mention MathML.

You: What about MathML?

Me: I said, don't mention it! Don't. Just don't!

You: O...kay. Let's talk about what you got for Xmas.

Me: You know what the problem with MathML is?

You: I'm not allowed to mention ... that.

Me: Oh, don't you start! I'm fed up with software that doesn't deliver. MathML is a pain in the $#@! If it was supported properly, Maths and Science teachers everywhere would be putting stuff online faster than a Pommy cricketer can give up his wicket, but support for MathML sucks, plain and simple.

You: Why? (Oops, shouldn't have asked -- too late now.)

Me: Don't get me wrong, the concept is great. Have a markup language that browsers can use to display equations. It's a great idea. And Firefox does a pretty good job of rendering MathML. Obviously, so does Amaya. But for students and teachers to use it effectively, you need more than a couple of browsers that will display MML, you need tools that students can access at home as well as at school which allow you to easily create and edit mathematical expressions.

The problem is that those tools, while they exist, are not readily found "out there". Sure, I can say to my students, go home, download Amaya, here's the web address, you'll be able to look at MathML and make you own, but the response will be "Why do I have to work in a different browser, what's wrong with Internet Explorer?", at which point the battle is already lost for the most part. I could probably persuade them to give Firefox a go, many already use it, but for creating their own MathML stuff, what then? The W3C pages have a list of browser plugins and editors, but most of it is either dated or commercial, and students (and their parents) will not want to pay for software just so I can swap equations with them. MathCast is the best editor I've seen so far and it's the right price, but it's Windows only, and I have colleagues (and even some students) working on Macs (and I prefer to work in either Mac OS X or Ubuntu).

It shouldn't be this hard. The World Wide Web Consortium has established a standard, and while it could stand some improvement, it's workable. But most people use IE as their browser, and IE needs a plugin just to show MathML. Yes, the MathPlayer plugin from Design Science is free, but the reason for that is to get people to buy MathType. And creating MathML using MathType is ridiculously complicated, and assumes you are using MS Word. And ideally I want my students to not only be able to see equations in stuff I put online, but also to be able to post stuff up themselves in whatever wiki or blogging system we're using.

I repeat -- it shouldn't be this hard.

What we need is (a) for either Microsoft to make MathML support standard in Internet Explorer or for the rest of the planet to switch to Firefox (and I wouldn't hold my breath for either of these things happening); and (b) someone to develop a MathML editor that is

cross-platform (or has equivalents on each of Windows/Mac/Linux)
simple to use yet capable of handling the most complex equations
free

Or the other possibility is to have an application that uses either MathML or LaTeX markup to create image files of equations (like LaTeXiT does on Mac) but which also includes the markup in the image file (as XMP data?) so that another user, looking at the image in their browser, can open the image in their editor and it reads the markup and recreates the equation.

You: Why don't you build that yourself?

Me: If I knew how, I would!

(stops for breath)

Sorry for the rant.

You: Don't mention it!

Plumbing and Purple Cows

2006-12-14T12:17:00.000+11:00

As I've gotten a little older and a little wiser (I hope), I've learned, as most do over time, not to jump to conclusions too readily. And yet it's something that everyone does at times. I suppose this reflects what Edward de Bono and others have noticed about the human tendency to recognise patterns and trends, even when they're not really there.

So it was with some amusement that I read one blogger's reaction to another person's blog.
Ed Kohler's entry on Technology Evangelist:

I was at Yahoo! HQ earlier this week and noticed that the sprinkler heads are purple.
It turns out that a LOT of stuff is purple at Yahoo, including a cow at the reception desk. While purple is apparently a Yahoo color and a color they take some pride in...

Over at Chuqui 3.0:

It's because purple in plumbing indicates that the water in that system is recycled. They're irrigating their landscape with water recovered from the wrong end (or maybe the right end!) of the sewage treatment plant...

Oh.

Ed was trying to make a valid point about colours and corporate branding, and thought he'd spotted a relevant example, except the pattern he'd recognised wasn't really there. I chuckled over this, right up to the point when I realised that we all make this type of mistake, and more often then we may even realise. The human brain is wired to search out patterns. And sometimes it finds pseudo-patterns. The result is conspiracy theories, most political debate, religion vs. science, Windows vs. Mac, the inability of English cricketers to handle Australian wickets, and so on. It actually requires some effort to not draw conclusions too readily.

Interestingly, I think we most often make this sort of error in evaluating the behaviour of others. We see someone act in a certain way, associate that with someone else we've seen behave the same way, and conclude that the underlying reasons are the same, or that other aspects of that person will be the same. This can lead to some very unhappy outcomes.

Of course, none of this explains why Yahoo have a purple cow at the reception desk.

Small Apps Loosely Joined

2006-11-21T21:04:00.000+11:00

[Over 3 weeks since my last entry - time flies when you're having fun; OTOH, when you're under the pump, it seems to take forever and still not be enough, oy!]
The title is a steal from Alan Levine's CogDogBlog. That article was a nice find, leading to some really useful ideas about Web 2.0 and the myriad of tools that can be put to work in the classroom.
But this article is not about Web 2.0 tools, but about applications.
The other day I found my trusty Victorinox swiss army knife which had been MIA for some time. Once upon a time, I used that knife for all manner of things. It's nowhere near as loaded (overloaded) with tools as the one in the picture, but it was a serious part of my toolkit for several years.
Now, though, my toolkit has expanded considerably, and I have specific tools for specific jobs, so my little swiss knife isn't used, and wasn't missed when it went AWOL.
Similarly, MS Word used to be the application I used more than any other, once upon a time. But these days, MS Word is rarely opened. When I receive Word docs, I usually open them with WriteInOne (or NeoOffice if need be). If I'm creating documents to send to others, I use Lyx, and send the PDFs that it creates.
That's if it really needs that level of formatting. If just text will do (for something that will go by email, or that I'm drafting for this blog, for example), I'll use TextForge.
If I need to do some serious find-and-replace work, in all likelihood the data is raw text to start with, so TextWrangler or SubEthaEdit are my tools of choice. I use OmniOutliner for outlines (who woulda thought?) and OmniGraffle for charts.
The one area where I need Word is documents with equations in them. MathType plays so nicely in Word that it's hard to break away from that; given that I share such documents with my Maths teacher colleagues, for that specific situation, I need Word.
This isn't an anti-Microsoft rant. It's a reflection on how my work practices have changed as I have found better tools for specific situations. Jim Mullaney quipped that Word has more built-in functions than there are words in the English language! But ask the question: why?
Software that takes the swiss army knife approach ends up feeling bloated and clunky. Finding the function you want within the morass of options when you pull down a menu becomes an orienteering exercise.
I find that I'm constantly looking for better ways to do things. And small, polished apps that purport to do only a particular job, but do it really well are getting the thumbs up.
I wasn't enamoured with Preview when I first saw it - I felt it was a poor man's Acrobat Reader. But I've grown to appreciate its simple interface and capacity to handle a variety of file formats. The annotation tools need improvement, but for most of my PDF viewing, it's a good fit. (But I'm keeping my eye on Foxit.)
Lyx is a word processor I'm learning to love. I type. I add things (images, tables, sidenotes, footnotes, comments), and tell Lyx what it is, but never bother with where it will go. Lyx does that part, and I rarely feel the need to go back to adjust the position of anything.
SubEthaEdit is an excellent text editor for working on web stuff, which for me is almost entirely HTML, CSS and PHP. I still like Dreamweaver, but I'm no longer using it nearly as much.
The point is that this overall blend of small apps works better (for me, at least) than the alternative (feature-laden software like Word.) It's like the tools in my toolkit - the tool designed for a particular job is always going to produce a more satifying result. (You can imagine how pleased I was when my wife bought me a router - no, not the computer kind, the wood-working kind.)
Small apps, no specific connection between any of them, except that all put together, they allow me to do everything I want with little fuss and get satisfying results. Swiss army knife software will continue to exist, and no doubt suits some, but my suspicion is that as users gain experience and expertise, they end up drifting away from such bloatware and turn to small apps loosely joined.

Creating a Flickr of Interest

2006-11-02T13:35:00.000+11:00

One of the reasons I like RSS is that it leads me to blogs and sites that I probably wouldn't have otherwise comes across.

Recently I stumbled across CogDogBlog, and a little piece called Small Presentations Loosely Joined. This in turn led me to look more closely at some of the things you can do with Flickr. And I'm excited! The Notes tool in Flickr is simply brilliant - dead easy to use but powerful. (Exactly what software ought to be.) Geotagging's also impressive, though I haven't thought of as many ways I could use it in a classroom as I have for notes on images, but it's early days. Combine this with blogging for a class, or better still, a wiki, and you have the potential to structure images and notes in a non-linear way that could create and sustain student interest.

Why non-linear? Because non-linear arrangements allow students to explore the material in whatever order appeals to them - if a particular item or subheading grabs their attention, they'll go to that first. As they grow their understanding of what they are exploring, the significance of the other sections (and thus the relevance) becomes (hopefully) more apparent. Do I think non-linear presentation is a good thing? You bet I do.

The Web, not surprisingly, is well set up for non-linear stuff, since it's fundamentally non-linear itself.

Collaboration is also essentially non-linear in its nature - how could it be otherwise? So imagine the following: a wiki page about a topic you're teaching that includes images that are links to Flickr images that have notes attached that contain links that in turn lead to other materials, etc. Not only that, but the students can also add to the wiki, add their own images from their own Flickr accounts with their own notes with links to more materials... I suppose you could call this "organic teaching".

(Make sure you click on the image of the breadfruit.)

Drongo #1

2006-10-18T22:39:00.000+10:00

(For non-Australian readers, a 'drongo' is an idiot.)

I admire people who develop good software. The guys at CodingMonkeys who developed SubEthaEdit, take a bow. Likewise the people who made Vienna, in my opinion the #1 RSS app for Mac. The Lilypond developers, the creators of FreeMind, these people deserve standing ovations for what they have contributed to a wired world.

But this post isn't about them. It's about the people who made Powerpoint.

A colleague of mine has lost hours in the following way:

she was building Powerpoint files to give to her students;
these files outlined course material for the students to review;
the files also included hyperlinks to websites to provide additional reading material and resources for the students to investigate;
after she saved a file and quit Powerpoint, when the file was next opened, some of the hyperlinks were missing;
resetting the hyperlinks and re-saving did not change this - the hyperlinks disappeared again once she quit Powerpoint.

I and another colleague, Nayth, spent some time trying to suss this behaviour. Finally, Nayth found the answer. It turns out that...

PowerPoint stores the hyperlink information in the Document Summary storage area of the presentation. This storage area has a limit of 64 KB. The Document Summary storage contains all the document properties, custom properties, references, and other similar data. [source]

64K? Are you kidding me? And this 'storage area' holds not only the hyperlinks, but all the document properties as well?

The worst part is that you get absolutely no indication of when you've exceeded that 64K limit - it just drops the excess data (like my colleague's hyperlinks) and carries on as though nothing's happened. No warning of any kind appears.

Do the developers at Microsoft consider this acceptable? Because I don't! And I can't think of anyone else who would either. The next time someone describes Microsoft's products as the 'industry standard', ask them, "you mean baseline, right?"

So my first Drongo goes to the developers of Powerpoint who not only thought that 64K was an adequate size buffer for storing a document's metadata, but also decided that no one needs to know when they've filled it.

Poll-itics

2006-10-04T17:20:00.000+10:00

The following appeared in the Melbourne newspaper The Age:

THE Australian Democrats are refusing to publish an online survey about God and government after a campaign by Christian groups "skewed" the results.

Democrats leader Lyn Allison said 40 times the usual number responded to the survey, and overwhelmingly took the position advocated by some Christian leaders. Normally the party would be happy with 1000 responses, but the church and state survey got 40,000.

Senator Allison said it was ironic that a survey on the influence of churches should attract such an intense effort by churches to apply influence.

Christian groups have urged the Democrats to release the results, saying it was dishonest that a party that was founded on a claim "to keep the bastards honest" should keep the results secret because they were not what the Democrats wanted.
[The Age - National]

When this appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald's blog column "Stay In Touch", there was vigorous (even rancorous) debate about whether the Democrats should publish the results, and the significance thereof.

But what intrigued me more was the fact that the Democrats typically expect only about 1000 people to respond to their online surveys.

Online polls are actually fairly common, but as a few comments on the SMH blog pointed out, they hardly qualify as good scientific or statistical method, and no one should make too much out of the results. One comment noted that the Democrats website itself states "online surveys are useful because they are fast, easy and inexpensive but they do not typically gather in-depth, rigorous scientifically valid information" [here] and then asked the obvious - "then why do it in the first place"?

This then got me thinking - obviously the Democrats have done these surveys before, and have a fair idea of the typical response pattern. Also fairly obvious is that they have published the results on previous occasions, when the number of responses has been around the 1000 mark. Given that 1000 responses is about one-hundredth of 1% of the voting population of this country, do they believe that the results of such polls are in any way indicative of the overall views of the voting public? (As distinct from "rigorous scientifically valid information", I might add.)

It seems a fairly safe deduction that online polls will usually measure predominantly, perhaps almost exclusively, the opinions of those who frequent your website. Who else is going to go to your website? SBS Sport frequently polls its viewers on the SBS website, but if you don't watch SBS Sport or frequent the SBS website, you won't even know the poll is there, let alone participate in it. Ergo, the results reflect the opinions of the watchers of SBS Sport, not the opinions of sports enthusiasts in general.

In the same way, the Democrats' online surveys, which are not advertised broadly in the media, will usually measure only the opinions of those people who are aware of the poll, i.e. those who frequent the website or who keep track of Democrats-related news and events. In other words, those who are interested in the Democrats and their policies, which will primarily be supporters of the party.

It's therefore quite interesting to see that they will not release the results of the latest online survey because these results have been "skewed" - the results of the Democrats' online surveys are almost certainly skewed in any case, normally in the direction of those who agree with the Democrats.

In a nutshell, online polls measure the responses of interest groups of one kind or another. In the case of this latest poll, the subject of the poll intersected another, larger, interest group - Christians. It's a shame that the Democrats won't release the results.

And now I find myself being a touch cynical. I find it hard to credit that the Democrats would not be aware that the usual results of their surveys are dominated by Democrats supporters, so why publish results which you know do not in all probability reflect the opinions of the wider public? Sadly, there is an obvious answer.

The upshot of the Democrats withholding the survey results is they have made themselves look either incompetent, churlish or duplicitous, depending on who you talk to. If political parties are going to be taken seriously on the web, they need to avoid silly games like this, and think very carefully before conducting online surveys.

A final observation in light of all this, useful for both online surveys and elections:

Don't vote, it only encourages them. (Author Unknown)

Copywrong

2006-10-01T22:53:00.000+10:00

Miguel Guhlin linked to this on his blog:

There has been a major shift in how (some) Scientific Publishers see the purpose and practice of scholarly communication. Listening to the words used, “database” has replaced “journal” and “users” has replaced “readers”. I suspect the latter word conflates “purchasing officers” with “readers” into an unhappy anonymous entity. Moreover there is a tension between the publisher and the users - significant content is illegally downloaded and an important role of the publisher is acting as “policeman” making sure that content is not stolen. ...[snip]... Now, I have never advocated breaking or abolishing copyright, but it is clear that this is creating a tension in the publisher/reader community. I’ve been involved in setting or being on the board of scientific journals and I see their major purpose as enhancing scholarly communication. I’m worried that we are losing sight of this, where journals in non-profit organisations are seen as a way of subsiding other activities of the society. If the publishers see “users” as a group who have a major motive to steal content, I suspect things will get worse. At some stage we seem to have flipped from a community where publishers interpreted the wishes of the community and served them - for a reasonable fee - to a world where publishers make the rules and police their non-compliance. Did anyone in the reader community:
* actually ask for journals to be transformed to databases?
* actually ask for content to be limited in time to the duration of a subscription (we used to have physical journals we could take home and even hand down to our descendants or give to needy institutions)
It worries me that this has happened almost silently. I remember in ca. 1970 (when I was too inexperienced to notice) that authors were asked to transfer copyright to publishers. These requests came from trusted societies - national societies and international unions (At that stage there were essentially no commercial publishers - Pergamon was a few years later). I didn’t think twice about it - but it was one of the biggest mistakes of my scientific life. Are we sleepwalking into something just as serious? Objectively I have some sympathy with publishers whose content is illegally downloaded - I do believe in copyright. But pragmatically is the way forward to be increasingly draconian with readers (sorry, users)?

Unilever Centre for Molecular Informatics, Cambridge - petermr’s blog » Blog Archive » Do you read journals, or “use a database”?

Reading this reminded me of something else I'd come across recently...

British Academy Says Copyright Hindering Scholarship
A report from the British Academy, to be launched on 18 September, expresses fears that the copyright system may in important respects be impeding, rather than stimulating, the production of new ideas and new scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. ...[snip]... Existing UK law provides exemption from copyright for fair dealing with material for purposes of private study and non-commercial research, and for criticism and review. "There is, however, little clarity about the precise scope of these exemptions, and an absence of case law" said John Kay, who is Chair of the Working Group which oversaw the Review. "Publishers are risk-averse, and themselves defensive of existing copyrights. "The situation is aggravated by the increasingly aggressive defence of copyright by commercial rights holders, and the growing role - most of all in music - of media businesses with no interest in or understanding of the needs of scholarship. It is also aggravated by the unsatisfactory EU Database Directive, which is at once vague and wide-ranging, and by the development of digital rights management systems, which may enable publishers to use technology to circumvent the exceptions to copyright which are contained in current legislation. ...[snip]... This report parallels a report from the Royal Society, 'Keeping science open: the effects of intellectual property on the conduct of science (2003),' which expresses related worries about the ways in which intellectual property, its interpretation and its use, impact on the progress of science.

Managing Information News (found via Stephen Downes' blog)

Together, these blog entries paint a disturbing picture of publishers as an hindrance to research. I'm sure there's plenty more examples out there.

The comment at the end of the Cambridge blog is one I can empathise with. I do believe in copyright, but in proportion -- at what point will it become impossible to even quote a single sentence from a published work without first acquiring the express permission of the publisher (presumably for a fee)?

Stephen Downes has argued that locking down the use of other people's words is in itself a type of theft; his article in the April 2003 edition of the Journal of the United States Distance Learning Association (the link is on Stephen's blog, under the title Copyright, Ethics and Theft) eloquently outlines his thoughts on the subject.

Regardless of whether or not you believe in the concept of copyright, it should be becoming apparent to everyone that the Internet and associated technologies have created a situation that current laws about copyright and ownership do not properly address, and in fact cannot address while they remain tied to ideas about ownership that fail to recognise how the Internet has changed the landscape of expression and distribution of information.

The only people who could possibly be happy about the situation are lawyers.

Gettin' Wikijiggered

2006-09-28T22:00:00.000+10:00

Wikijiggered? Trust me, it's a politer word than what I'm thinking at the moment!

I've been wrestling with DokuWiki, a wiki that the TechGnome (aka Nayth) mentioned to me. It's neat - a wiki that relies only on PHP and the standard HTML/Javascript/CSS blend, no backend database (unless you want one) and no java classes (I'll come back to those in a minute). One upshot of this is that the pages are saved as text files -- yes, I said text files, vanilla flavoured, human readable, completely portable text files.

So why am ready to rip a few limbs off something? ACLs.

Access Control Lists. Or should that be Administrators Cursing Loudly? Without ACL features turned on, DokuWiki performs as expected, all is well. Turn the ACL features on, and register a new user, get a password emailed back, and login... except the username/password combo doesn't work. Aargh! How can be so close and yet so far?!

I want to set up this wiki in a school, but I don't want anyone in the world being able to hack up students' work, I'd like a certain level of security around this - if student X vandalised student Y's work, I'll be able to track X down and ~~kick his sorry ar~~... erm... reprimand him. But I can't do that with someone on the other side of the planet. Hence security. Hence ACLs. And hence "Aargh".

The security issue also came up the other day with blogs. KP wanted a blog that only she and her students would access. I was looking at setting up a blogging system anyway, but had assumed that the TechGnome would know how to lock up subdirectories of our webserver - what do I tell my students until they're tired of hearing it? Never assume.

Nayth, to his credit, had not been simply resting on his laurels - the issue was that Apple had changed things significantly when they introduced OS X, Nayth had simply not had the time to dig through the manuals/forums/online support, and no one had pushed him to find out the answer.

At this point, God said "Come, let us go down and confuse them" (actually, that was the people of the Shinar plain [Genesis 11], but it works here too), and reminded Nayth of something he had seen. Mac OS X Server has a built-in weblog setup.

A quick look at this revealed that it could be locked down to specific users who would be authenticated by LDAP against the users on our file server. Hooray! Problem solved. (Never assume.)

Further inspection of this wondrous blogging system revealed what I should have suspected. It's not something Apple cooked up from scratch - in fact, it's a pruned version of Blojsom, a java-based implementation of Blosxom. Pruned? Yes - Apple have removed several aspects of the standard Blojsom implementation, added their own OS X branded skins, tied it to LDAP, and so on. The point is obviously to make it work neatly with OS X Server, which it does, but at the sacrifice of features and the user interface.

Some of this can be worked around (e.g. themes), but others present a problem. For example, WYSIWYG editing is a standard feature of most blogging systems, but Apple have removed that bit. You can probably install TinyMCE, but if you do, forget about using Safari. There's no easy way to upload images - you can put them into a folder in the web server, but then you have to add the image tags manually. (Unless I can get one of the Blojsom plugins to do this for me. And here I'm starting to get out of my depth - Blojsom is java-based, and its plugins are java classes. If it's just a case of editing some text files to enable the appropriate classes, fine, but if something goes belly-up, well... oh look, a decoy!)

And if that wasn't enough? A user can only have one blog, based on his/her username. Of course, it's possible to create a blog for a 'group', and we could create as many 'groups' as we like, but this means creating 'groups' that aren't actually groups, and cluttering up user lists, and I hate kludges like that at the best of times.

In short, Apple's Mac OS X Server weblog system is ~~wikijiggered~~ blogshlock. (For that matter, so is Safari. Safari could be the best browser on the planet, except that when it comes to some things, like using rich text editors in blogging systems, it's hopeless. Hmm, I can feel another rant coming on.)

Software that takes you nine-tenths of the way, and then leaves you flat on your laurels, just short of your goal - don't you hate being wikijiggered?

Update:
Oh, the shame. The ACLs weren't the problem. The problem? My bad.

It turned out that in adjusting one of the files to set up the 'superuser', Dreamweaver was saving the file with 'Mac-style' CR line endings instead of 'Linux-style' LF line endings, and this was screwing up Dokuwiki's attempts to read the user names and password hashes.

I suppose I could blame the documentation which directed me to make the changes to that file but never mentioned the necessity of ensuring that it is saved with LFs rather than CRs, but then again, that documentation is in a wiki, so I suppose the responsible thing is to go back and add this myself.

So I guess I wikijiggered my own blog post. Ain't irony a beautiful thing?

Onions Make Me Cry

2006-09-26T21:45:00.000+10:00

From Miguel Guhlin's blog for Sep 24:

TorPark, an anonymizing browser (available for Windows) that doesn't have to be installed on your computer, is now out, shares Ben Horst at SolidOffice.org. ...[snip]... As far as I know, while it's possible to block, many school districts don't have a clue. . .the best they can do is block the download site that students might use. Now, all students have to do is load TorPark onto a USB drive (some schools are providing USB Flash drives to students as alternatives to floppies, so all they have to do is load it on there...convenient, huh?). ...[snip]... It's also available in different languages!

Plug it into any internet terminal whether at home, school, work, or in public. Torpark will launch a Tor circuit connection, which creates an encrypted tunnel from your computer indirectly to a Tor exit computer, allowing you to surf the internet anonymously. How much does Torpark cost? IT'S FREE.

What are the implications for something this easy to use? Well, don't worry, info-tech people will be getting all excited about blocking this! Quick, Quick...get started blocking and filtering!! What is fascinating is how K-12 schools can continue to try and block sites like this when there are communities of developers figuring out ways to bypass the blocks and filtering...it's a free speech, protect your privacy kind of use that many Americans see as fundamental.

To achieve strong anonymity, intermediate services may be employed to thwart attempts at identification, even by governments. These attempt to use cryptography, passage through multiple legal jurisdictions, and various methods to thwart traffic analysis to achieve this. A more recent approach in internet anonymity involves the use of an onion router such as Tor. Onion routers send information over encrypted protocols to several intermediate computers around the world in order to make identification more difficult. This has been countered with advances in text analysis, in which the identity of a writer is determined by comparing the writing style of a piece to styles of pieces in which the author is known.
[Source]

This last point--text analysis--almost reminds me of TurnItIn, and the ongoing controversy of using it.

At McLean High School, in Virginia, students collected more than 1,100 signatures on a petition opposing mandatory use of the service, according The Washington Post. The anti-Turnitin faction argues that the database violates students’ intellectual-property rights. And the high school’s use of Turnitin creates the sense that students are guilty until proved innocent, says Ben Donovan, a senior at McLean. "It’s like if you searched every car in the parking lot or drug-tested every student," he says. Source: The Chronicle Campus Blog [Source]

Around the Corner - MGuhlin.net - Courage can't see around corners, but goes around them anyway. - Mignon McLaughlin

I hadn't heard of onion routers until I read this blog entry and then did a little research, starting with the TorPark site itself. It's not hard to see why some school administrators would be getting nervy - this sort of technology can easily make a mockery of a school's filtering efforts.

And the more I think about that, the more convinced I am that trying to use technology to thwart people from using technology is about as sensible as washing grease stains with olive oil. (I was going to say, 'painting over wallpaper', but then I remembered my father... /sigh/.)

That's not to say that we don't use technology at all in managing technology in our school. Obviously Internet content filtering in a K-12 school is good practice, if only to protect little ones from the "nasty stuff". At the same time, relying almost exclusively on technology to handle what students do with technology is just crazy -- if we imagine that filtering systems will stop older/smarter students who are determined to bypass it, we're deluding ourselves.

The TurnItIn issue surrounds the use of software to detect plagiarism -- one gripe with it is that every student is "assumed guilty until proved innocent". As one commenter to the Chronicle Campus Blog pointed out, the software "will only catch the laziest students that simply buy a paper or copy a website off of the Internet, but it does nothing to stop a student from using a thesaurus to change enough words to fool the software" [comment 9 on the aforementioned Blog]. As almost every word processor now comes with a thesaurus, casting through a paper and 'adjusting' enough words to beat the software takes relatively little effort. (How many of these teachers have actually considered changing their assessment methods to address the problem?)

In the same vein, but on a different scale (but not that different), the music publishing companies who are currently pushing legislators in several countries to treat everyone as music pirates (and remember, you're guilty until proven innocent) are following the same flawed logic -- digital rights management is all about using technology to stop you from using technology. But can it really? I read somewhere recently that the new DRM technology in the latest incarnation of iTunes was broken in three days. If you can think of a way to lock it, someone else out there can conceive a way to unlock it.

I honestly think it's naive to believe that you can defeat technology with technology. But there's plenty of people out there who are going to try. And there will be lots of tears before they're through. Mostly their own, I suspect.

Authority? What's That?

2006-09-19T13:03:00.000+10:00

Tim Bray's latest blog entry raises a question I expect as a teacher and IT Coordinator I will hear more and more: how can we be sure that the info on a website is reliable and authoritative?

First, let me quote from Tim's blog:

Let’s ask an interesting real-world question that real-world people might ask: for each of the ten provinces of Canada, what is its population? Let’s suppose you’re not a Canadian insider who knows that the Source Of All Numbers is Statistics Canada. So, you could go to Wikipedia, which would be easy and quick. From East to West you’d look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newfoundland, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Edward_Island, and, well, I’ll stop there, because the pattern is obvious. On each of those pages you’ll find the population, along with a lot of other basic facts, presented crisply and legibly, no further steps required. ¶But you know, that’s just the Wikipedia; some joker might have gone in and changed the number by couple hundred thousand up or down, just for fun. Wouldn’t you be better off going to a source with some real authority?

ongoing · Wikipedia: Resistance is Absent

Tim goes on to explain how he then searched on the government websites of the various provinces, and was confronted by lousy web design, URIs that only a machine or an über-geek could conceive (for example, www.gov.on.ca/ont/portal/!ut/p/.cmd/cs/.ce/7_0_A/.s/7_0_252/_s.7_0_A/7_0_252/_l/en?docid=EC001035 -- wha...?) and he concludes that "Wikipedia is going to win". Given his original premise -- if you want to have authority on the Web, you have to show up on the Web... And those who ought to enjoy more authority than Wikipedia aren’t [emphasis mine] -- it seems safe to conclude that Tim isn't entirely happy with this situation.

So let me make a few observations.

Tim is probably right in thinking that far too many people would read the Wikipedia articles and be satisfied with that, not bothering to check further. Students often tend to do this. Mine would if I let them... but I don't.

I've taken to telling my students that websites are not "nuggets of information" waiting for them to come and pick them up, but signs on a trail leading to the "real answer". The trail metaphor is a handy one, since it suggests that they have to continue on, following the links, occasionally doubling back from dead-ends to re-find the trail, and so on.

Some of my students would have certainly found the stats Tim wanted much faster than Tim -- they would have scanned through the Wikipedia article's links and found at the bottom this link: StatCan 2001 Census which is sort of where Tim ended up, but via a longer route.

Then there's the issue of people changing entries in Wikipedia. There's no question, people do weird and stupid things, and changing entries in Wikipedia is one of them. But an even stranger thing also happens -- people fix the mistakes! They get very defensive about it. And it's why Wikipedia works.

But there's one phrase in Tim's blog that really stands out for me: Wouldn’t you be better off going to a source with some real authority? [Emphasis mine]

Define real authority. (Actually, I might pose this as a question to a senior Computing class.) Government websites? (Is that laughter in the background?) Newspaper columns? University sites? Books? (Remember Margaret Mead vs Derek Freeman? I won't even mention Derrida.)

I know that for many, the suggestion that "real authority" is largely ephemeral will ring of heresy. But I'm part of a generation that has grown up realising that the "authorities" all too often spoke (and still speak) a lot of BS.

I would like to think that students who are now growing up with the Web, like my own daughters, will turn out to be fairly savvy when it comes to evaluating info from the Web, from the media, from wherever. They'll know that there's a need to check and cross-check and evaluate and never take any of it for granted. And they may not need to know how to spell authoritative.

Web to point.. oh?

2006-09-18T21:04:00.000+10:00

Last Thursday and Friday, I was at an IT Integrators Conference in North Sydney. I got to see an interesting cross-section of things being done in Australian schools, as well as hearing from some compelling speakers, particularly Jim Mullaney and Stephen Downes. The common theme was "Web 2.0" (though there was some discussion that maybe that term has now been copyrighted? Oh, please - next someone will try to take out a trademark on "ugg boot"... oh... right).
So now the places where IT and education are coming together are blogs and wikis and newsfeeds and learning management systems. That's fine for me, I'm familiar with all these things, but in a short time I will become responsible for staff who are almost totally unfamiliar with these things and who are still trying to get their heads around how to integrate web browsers and email and word processors and Powerpoint into their classroom practice. "Web 2.0? I'm still at Web 0.2, thanks!"
The challenge is how to bring these staff up to speed on what they can do in the classroom with IT, but on the positive side, Web 2.0 presents far more opportunity for students to be involved in the technology. I always worried (still do) about how Powerpoint is used in classrooms - I've seen too many people (from Principals down) using several thousand dollars worth of equipment to do what could be done with an old-fashioned overhead projector. (The term is "powerpointlessness" - thank you, Jamie MacKenzie - check out From Now On.) Web 2.0 tools - blogging, wikis - allow students to put their own thoughts and ideas online and participate in a dialog that can be larger than the classroom and longer than the lesson.
That's not to say that Powerpoint presentations, email and Excel spreadsheets don't have their place - obviously they still do. But Web 2.0 tools have the potential to redefine pedagogy in a way that "office" software and older web-base software didn't.
I think the key idea is dialog, with students being participants in the processes of uncovering and connecting disparate components of knowledge. If that's a little hard to follow, I suppose it's because I'm not exactly a constructionist, nor a connectivist in how I view knowledge.
How well I get this across to my colleagues remains to be seen.

Blogging with Flock

2006-09-18T20:13:00.000+10:00

So I'm using Flock to manage blogs and newsfeeds, but in checking to see how it handled the feed from my own blog, it's not been too happy.

The problem would appear to lie in the way Flock is formatting the HTML it sends to Blogger. Or perhaps in what Blogger is doing with it.

As an experiment, I'm sending this post to Blogger via Flock, but I'm keeping a copy of Flock's html so I can compare it to what ends up in Blogger.

Should be interesting.

Update 1: So far, there's no problem, so I'll try editing in Blogger and see if it takes. (This is where things went awry before.) I'll add styling in this post, maybe that's where the problem lies.
The other issue is that the new post shows up in Vienna, but not in Flock itself. Very strange.
Update 2: adding styling hasn't caused problems.
I'll try blockquotes and links. Here's Ongoing.
What else can I try?
Update 3: the HTML gremlins have gone away, but Desultoration still won't show as a new post in Flock. $#@!
Update 4: it's the next morning, and suddenly the new posts in Desultoration have appeared in Flock. ?!?!? Okay, it's only beta software, and I should know better than to expect it to work perfectly. Still, if it continues to happen, I'll be giving the News part of Flock a wide berth.

Blogged with Flock

2006-08-26T16:23:00.000+10:00

Sorry, Pluto - The Umpire Is Always Right

At first, solar system astronomy and international cricket would appear to have little in common, apart from both being in the news this week. But there is a link between the issues of Pluto's status as a planet and the ball-tampering saga from the England-Pakistan test match. In both cases, there is an umpire in the middle of the situation whose job it is to make decisions about what's acceptable and what's not. And some people are not happy with the umpire.

In the case of Pluto, the umpire is the International Astronomical Union. Faced with various views about what constitutes a planet, the IAU has produced a definition that leaves Pluto out in the cold - a planet is more or less spherical, orbits the sun and clears other objects from its orbit. That last bit was the kicker - Pluto apparently doesn't clear other objects from its orbit; specifically, it's orbit passes inside Neptune's, and therefore it's behaving outside the new "rules".

(Update: it's been pointed out that Neptune obviously doesn't clear its orbit either, so why is it still a planet? Conversely, the two are in a resonance pattern that means they will never come near one another, and their orbits do not actually intersect. So the IAU's rules either don't apply or they should apply to both Neptune and Pluto. It's easy to see why many astronomers are disputing the new definitions.)

Some astronomers have expressed their disappointment with the verdict. They'll made it clear that they will continue to debate it. Others have been philosophical about the matter. NASA's position is nicely diplomatic: "NASA will, of course, use the new guidelines established by the International Astronomical Union," said Dr. Paul Hertz, Chief Scientist for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters. "We will continue pursuing exploration of the most scientifically interesting objects in the solar system, regardless of how they are categorized."

Pluto, at least, has handled the news gracefully and continues to orbit unperturbed.

In the test match, on the other hand, there are two umpires out in the middle, and for over 100 years, those two men out in the middle have been the ones with the final say in regards to anything and everything that happens on the field during the game.

In the England-Pakistan test match, the umpires saw something they thought looked like ball-tampering. They inspected the ball. They spoke to the Pakistan captian Inzamam-ul-Haq, and concluded that the ball HAD been tampered with, and penalised the Pakistani team. Inzamam then refused to lead his team back onto the field after the tea break. After half an hour and two requests by the umpires for the Pakistanis to resume the field, the bails were removed and Pakistan were deemed to have forfeited the game.

Since then, we have heard an extraodinary amount of discussion on the part of several people about whether the umpires acted properly. Australian umpire Darrell Hair has been singled out by several figures in Pakistani cricket, notably PCB chairman Shaharyar Khan, former England captain Mike Atherton, and former Pakistani players Imran Khan, Javed Miandad and Sarfraz Nawaz. There has been a general implication from these figures that Hair has a bias against Asian players. These same people insist that there is no evidence of the ball being tampered with, and that Hair was wrong to end the match. The fact that Hair has in the days after this controversy erupted offered to stand down if the ICC was willing to compensate him for lost earnings has only complicated the picture.

let's consider the possibilities:

1. That Hair is biased against Asian players, and fabricated the accusation of ball-tampering. (But if this is the case, how did he convince fellow umpire Billy Doctrove to agree to it?) His offer to stand down is because he knows he was in the wrong.

2. That Hair is biased against Asian players, and wrongly concluded that Inzamam was tampering with the ball. His offer to stand down is because he knows he was in the wrong.

3. That Hair is not biased, but mistakenly thought that Inzamam was tampering with the ball. His offer to stand down was the result of the stress and pressure brought about by the implications of bias made by various commentators.

4. That Hair is not biased, and Inzamam was tampering with the ball. Hair's offer to stand down was the result of the stress and pressure.

5. That Hair is biased, but Inzamam was tampering with the ball. Hair's offer to stand down - probably still the result of the stress and pressure, but maybe a bit of the other as well.

Regardless of any of this, there's one thing that is (or ought to be) abundantly clear - Inzamam was absolutely wrong to not bring his team back onto the field. The umpires allowed them more time than they needed to get back out and resume play, and in failing to resume the field, the Pakistanis steered the game to only one possible result. In any sport, a refusal to continue play by one side can only be interpreted as a forfeit. Regardless of whether Inzamam and the rest of the Pakistan team thought they were being hard done by, they should have finished the game. Former legendary umpire Dickie Bird summed it up correctly: "Everybody should have used a little bit of common sense, tried to finish the Test match then thrashed it out behind closed doors."

Inzamam now faces a charge of bringing the game into disrepute, but therein lies another testing moment, but in this case for the ICC - Inzamam's decision not to return to the field was clearly wrong, but will the ICC deal with this in a way that does not undermine its own authority? If the ICC fails to discipline Inzamam, its credibility will have dealt a serious blow.

The ICC will also need to address some of the spurious rhetoric coming from the Pakistanis. Pakistan tour manager Zaheer Abbas said the news of Hair's offer was a "huge victory" for his side. A huge victory? Hardly. Zaheer went on to say, "This also proves our protest on the fourth day of the final Test was legitimate..." Does Zaheer really believe that not returning to the field and forfeiting the match is a legitimate way to protest a decision by an umpire? If so, he should get completely out of cricket and all other organised sport today.

Maybe Hair is biased. Maybe the Pakistanis have a problem with non-Asian umpires who don't put up with crap from the players.

The simple fact remains - during play, the umpire is always right. You might not agree with the decisions, you might think the umpire is an idiot, or has it in for you - it doesn't matter. You finish the game, then you can lodge your protest, have the debate, whatever.

During play, the umpire is always right - even on Pluto.

2005-04-07T23:08:00.000+10:00

Unthink

I was reading Tim Bray's blog the other day titled "Unswitch", and the follow-up to that blog, where a number of people responded to Tim's dissatisfaction with Safari. I mentioned the blog to a colleague as we were installing Firefox on his laptop.

His reaction was quite interesting - he told me that he would be quite happy to only use Safari and didn't really want another browser on his laptop. (The reason we were installing Firefox is because one of our online applications, an important one in our organisation, doesn't play nicely with Safari.) Further to this, he is happy to confine himself to using Apple's Addressbook, Mail.app and iCal, and has changed over from MS Word and Powerpoint to iWorks. He likes this arrangement because it's all so seamless.

Now, I can understand that... up to a point. It's nice when applications work well together, and Apple's applications do play very nicely together. But does that mean that Mac users ought to look disdainfully upon software that doesn't play nicely with Apple's own offerings? And why does my colleague want to restrict himself to a single browser? Having another browser doesn't stop him from using Safari for his general surfing. So what's behind his desire for one browser only?

At this point, I must confess that I am the sort of person who has multiple applications for all sorts of things. I like to try new applications, and if I like them, I keep them, and use them. The browser I mainly use is Camino, but I know that there are some things that Camino doesn't work well with, such as those wysiwyg editors you find included in many web applications. So I have Firefox as well, which handles those things that Camino objects to. I also have Opera, which handles certain java applets that even Firefox finds hard to digest (such as the searchable database at ChessLab). I also have other browsers, for other reasons.

Does it matter that I have several browsers? Not as far as I can tell. It's not like email clients, where having more than one client on an email account could be a recipe for disaster. For me, it's like having a set of tools where I can pick the one that best fits my need at the time. The same goes for text editors. For more heavy-duty crunching, I have TextWrangler, and I use jEdit for working with Lilypond files, but I've taken to using TextForge for the simple stuff.

And yet my colleague is clearly not alone in his "one browser to rule them all" way of thinking. It's not just Safari advocates - I'm aware of Firefox supporters who would happily see all other browsers (and certain operating systems) go the way of the dinosaur. What's behind this way of thinking? Honestly, no one browser is that good, and having more than one browser is no real strain. Is it a desire for simplicity? I could understand that. But I don't think that's it.

My suspicion is that, for some people, it's akin to politics and football teams and racing cars, e.g. "I'm a BrandX man." You know, that "draw a line in the sand" thing that leaves some of us walking away shaking our heads.

For others, like my colleague, I think it's something even worse - a desire to not have to think. "I don't want to have to remember which browser to use where, I just want to click on it and go." "I don't want to have to decide." They want the decision already made, no choices, a straight line to follow. So, one browser, one word processor, and so on.

Why is this worse? Because it leads into something else Tim Bray mentioned in his "Unswitch" article - infofascism.

I used to think that it was the Dark Side who were the main perpetrators of this (and I still gnash my teeth whenever I find myself using a certain Word processor that thinks it knows better how to format my document than I do - and yes, I do have the autoformatting turned off, and the preferences set to suit my way of doing things, and the #$%&! thing still finds ways to annoy and frustrate me.) But I've come to realise that others, including Apple, also try to impose their desires on their users.

For example, my colleague, conceding that Safari was not sufficient because of that web app he must be able to use, asked me to transfer his bookmarks from Safari to Firefox. (One browser, remember - if he has to use Firefox, he'll use it for everything.) I asked him why he couldn't do this himself, and he pointed out that Safari didn't have a menu option to export its bookmarks. What the...?

A quick look at Safari and, sure enough, there's an option to import bookmarks, but no export. I tell him (and myself), there must be a way. A quick search on the web shows how to reveal a hidden menu in Safari called "Debug". It includes the option to export bookmarks. Problem solved.

But why is that menu hidden by default? Why does Apple assume that you will not want to export your bookmarks from Safari? Even if Safari was the best browser on the planet, isn't it presumptuous of Apple to conceal options in the software you may want to use, and to make it that little bit harder to switch to something else?

Don't get me wrong - I'd rather have my Mac than a Windows box any day. OS X has opened up a whole new arena to me via X11. I'm now able to work with stuff that previously would have required setting up a separate machine to run Linux. Which gets at the very point I'm trying to make. Computers allow us to expand and explore our thinking. When software starts channelling us into certain ways of working that lead us to not think, that narrow our options, something's gone wrong.

Or maybe I'm overstating the case. Maybe there's plenty of people out there who prefer to have the software developers do a lot of the thinking for them, making their lives a bit simpler. Maybe.