I before E except after C?

A friend recently posted on his Facebook page the comment, "I before E except after C? Weird!" Another person, perhaps not realising that the comment was ironic, added the next bit, "unless it sounds A as in neighbour or weigh".

This got me wondering about the validity of this 'rule', so I did a little checking. Some time ago I had downloaded the SOWPODS word list and created a database from it, so time to do a few searches.

The results were illuminating:

• 475 words containing 'ei'.
• Only 49 of those words contained 'cei'.
• Of the remaining 376 words, 109 have the long 'a' sound.

This leaves 267 words that contain 'ei' but where it does not follow a 'c' or sound like a long 'a'. We could rule out another 57 words that contain 'ei' because they begin with the prefix 're-' or 'de-', e.g. 'reinforce', and another 32 words that end with 'ing' or '-ism' or '-ist' or '-ise/ize', e.g. 'theism'. This still leaves 180 words that definitely do not follow the rule, compared to only 158 that do.

Esperanto, anyone?

Friday Tab Sweep

So, I'm borrowing an idea from Tim Bray and posting up what's on my browser tabs. The aim is to do this regularly, so that I'm posting something each week.

First up, Ongoing - I've been following Tim's blog for years now, and there's always something good in there.

Next, web2py - I've been looking at this python web framework as a more accessible option for my Software Design students - so far, I like it a lot more than Django, but it's early days.

IronEdge - my brother-in-law Andrew directed me to this - he can't say enough good things about their products. (I'm not into the fitness thing like he is, but I think it may be time for me to start getting back into some sort of shape.)

A post in the Atlantic by Vicki Davis (@coolcatteacher) about independent student projects.

A prezi about Evernote for teachers.

Steve Hargadon's Teacher 2.0 experience on MightyBell and the associated Classroom 2.0 site.

A series of programming challenges on Cprogramming.com which I'm looking at creating solutions for in multiple programming languages.

Tutorials on papier mache at www.papiermache.co.uk - daughter #1 is making a medieval Plague Doctor's mask for a History project.

And finally, something that appeals to my love of absurdity - a news item about how the town of Athens, Alabama is going to hold its first Athens Grease Festival - a "celebration of all things fried"!

On that last note, I fear an outbreak of similar town-name-as-theme inspired festivals across the USA - it could be very entertaining in places like Coffeeville MS, Parachute CA, or Elephant Butte NM, but maybe not so nice in Burnt Corn AL, Deadhorse AK, Mud Lick KY, or Roachdale IN.

And imagine the festival in Tuba City, Arizona!

Learning Styles - Really A Myth?

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

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

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?

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...

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:

1. My job is to teach thinking.
2. My job is to help them learn to think critically about the information they are encountering.
3. My job is to help them articulate ideas fluently so they can be effective participants in this global conversation.
4. My job is to encourage flexibility, creativity, resourcefulness and self-direction so that can they can continually adapt to a rapidly changing world.
5. 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...

(Follow InkPen at GoComics.com)

Getting on Deck

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

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

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

(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

[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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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.