The more things change, the more it stays the same.
I recently saw this video from the 1940's on progressive education, and it seems very much that 60 years later we're still fighting the same battles. As David Warlick points out, Michael Wesch has another amazing video out about how the students in his first year Ethnography class.
More evidence that students have changed dramatically, but schooling has yet to keep up.
Monday, November 5, 2007
Sunday, June 10, 2007
Tropical Cyclone Gonu
Wednesday Tropical Cyclone Gonu hit here. Not so much as hit here as gave the country a long sideways pummel. The rains started at around 4am and continued until about midnight. The weather probably was at its most extreme from noon to 4pm.
Like Katrina, the hurricane was about category 5, however by the time it here it had dissipated down to a category 1 or 2. Like Katrina, the devastation was not caused so much by the storm itself, but by the flooding that accompanied it. With Katrina it was the failures of levees. With Gonu it was the overflowing of the wadis (normally dried up riverbeds with their sources in the mountains). Some friends of ours reported that they saw a dump truck being swept away by the force of the water and it was just being rolled like a Tonka truck. . In other parts of the city whole sections of the expressway were washed out.
At school, the on campus housing got about an inch of mud when the wadi their housing backs on overflowed. Fortunately there was a solid retaining wall in place, and all the teachers and their families were in the school at the time so no one was hurt. The church across the street from the school was buried in mud. It came within 2 feet of the top of the door. The Toyota workshop next to the church was basically swept downstream. Cars and trucks are strewn all over for about a kilometer. Some buried up to their roofs in sand and muck
We thought we were weathering the storm very well. Until about 6pm, everything was working very well. We had power, electricity, water, telephone and an ADSL connection. The worst of the storm seemed to be over. Then the power went out. It seems that the generator that powers this area used natural gas which was piped in through a pipeline that ran through a wadi. When the wadi flooded, the pipeline broke, and cut off the supply of fuel for the power station. That took 48 hours to repair. We had just checked into a hotel when we came back to get clothes, and saw that the power was back on. A couple of nights make you appreciate air conditioning all the more.
More serious than the electrical outage is the water outage. Water has still not yet been restored. Fortunately we have a stockpile in that we have a water tank on our roof. As soon as we learned that the tank was not being refilled, we took water conservation measures, and still have about 2/3 of a tank. There are rumours that trucks belonging to have been mobbed and others are receiving police escorts. Since initially writing tis, the water has come on for a while and then been turned off so another district can get water.
The infrastructure of the city on all levels took a massive hit. This included the communications infrastructure. In the aftermath of the storm, the phone network went down. At our house it was out for two days. The GSM (cell phone) network was iffy at best. This meant that the school had a hard job communicating with the staff. Not to mention the problem with cell phone batteries dying. With electricity still out at school, and our mail server on campus, communications between the school and wider community are not where need to be. One of my jobs over the next few days is to start looking at some ways to address this issue.
Lessons learned: Two post hurricane stressors were lack of cash as phones and therefore ATM’s were down. Next hurricane, I’m going to make sure I stock up on some cash before hand. Also the half tank of gas in the car was a stressor. I’ll make sure it is full. We had only one cell phone as my Treo suffered an unfortunate accident the week before, and we were constantly switching SIM cards. It might be good to have at least the same number of cell phones as the number of SIM cards in the future. Also good to have is a car charger for the cell phone. Other than that the stocking up with water and flashlights worked out well. Once power is back on at school, I’ll need to start unpacking the lessons learned on the school side. One thing I need to learn about is the difference between a hurricane, cyclone and typhoon. My current theory is that it has to do with which ocean spans them; hurricanes in the Atlantic, typhoons in the Pacific and Cyclones in the Indian. That is just a working theory for now.
Like Katrina, the hurricane was about category 5, however by the time it here it had dissipated down to a category 1 or 2. Like Katrina, the devastation was not caused so much by the storm itself, but by the flooding that accompanied it. With Katrina it was the failures of levees. With Gonu it was the overflowing of the wadis (normally dried up riverbeds with their sources in the mountains). Some friends of ours reported that they saw a dump truck being swept away by the force of the water and it was just being rolled like a Tonka truck. . In other parts of the city whole sections of the expressway were washed out.
At school, the on campus housing got about an inch of mud when the wadi their housing backs on overflowed. Fortunately there was a solid retaining wall in place, and all the teachers and their families were in the school at the time so no one was hurt. The church across the street from the school was buried in mud. It came within 2 feet of the top of the door. The Toyota workshop next to the church was basically swept downstream. Cars and trucks are strewn all over for about a kilometer. Some buried up to their roofs in sand and muck
We thought we were weathering the storm very well. Until about 6pm, everything was working very well. We had power, electricity, water, telephone and an ADSL connection. The worst of the storm seemed to be over. Then the power went out. It seems that the generator that powers this area used natural gas which was piped in through a pipeline that ran through a wadi. When the wadi flooded, the pipeline broke, and cut off the supply of fuel for the power station. That took 48 hours to repair. We had just checked into a hotel when we came back to get clothes, and saw that the power was back on. A couple of nights make you appreciate air conditioning all the more.
More serious than the electrical outage is the water outage. Water has still not yet been restored. Fortunately we have a stockpile in that we have a water tank on our roof. As soon as we learned that the tank was not being refilled, we took water conservation measures, and still have about 2/3 of a tank. There are rumours that trucks belonging to have been mobbed and others are receiving police escorts. Since initially writing tis, the water has come on for a while and then been turned off so another district can get water.
The infrastructure of the city on all levels took a massive hit. This included the communications infrastructure. In the aftermath of the storm, the phone network went down. At our house it was out for two days. The GSM (cell phone) network was iffy at best. This meant that the school had a hard job communicating with the staff. Not to mention the problem with cell phone batteries dying. With electricity still out at school, and our mail server on campus, communications between the school and wider community are not where need to be. One of my jobs over the next few days is to start looking at some ways to address this issue.
Lessons learned: Two post hurricane stressors were lack of cash as phones and therefore ATM’s were down. Next hurricane, I’m going to make sure I stock up on some cash before hand. Also the half tank of gas in the car was a stressor. I’ll make sure it is full. We had only one cell phone as my Treo suffered an unfortunate accident the week before, and we were constantly switching SIM cards. It might be good to have at least the same number of cell phones as the number of SIM cards in the future. Also good to have is a car charger for the cell phone. Other than that the stocking up with water and flashlights worked out well. Once power is back on at school, I’ll need to start unpacking the lessons learned on the school side. One thing I need to learn about is the difference between a hurricane, cyclone and typhoon. My current theory is that it has to do with which ocean spans them; hurricanes in the Atlantic, typhoons in the Pacific and Cyclones in the Indian. That is just a working theory for now.
Sunday, June 3, 2007
Wikis
Lee LeFever of Common Craft has come up with another great video, explaining wikis.
Planning continues on the technology strand at the NESA Leadership Conference in Bangkok using a TikiWiki. Others have started to use the edit button and move away from the comments. The other tech coordinators and directors are starting to create what will be a really good strand.
I also realized today that blogs were he answer to a problem that were plaguing us in Blackboard. The problem was that teachers wanted to use the results of a discussion board from one year to the next. In Blackboard, once users are deleted, their postings disappear. This was a problem in that the course where the students were posting was a Grade 12 course, and the student accounts (and therefore the student postings) were deleted at the end of the year. Moving that knowledge to a wiki will result an ability for students to stand on the shoulders of their predecessors.
Planning continues on the technology strand at the NESA Leadership Conference in Bangkok using a TikiWiki. Others have started to use the edit button and move away from the comments. The other tech coordinators and directors are starting to create what will be a really good strand.
I also realized today that blogs were he answer to a problem that were plaguing us in Blackboard. The problem was that teachers wanted to use the results of a discussion board from one year to the next. In Blackboard, once users are deleted, their postings disappear. This was a problem in that the course where the students were posting was a Grade 12 course, and the student accounts (and therefore the student postings) were deleted at the end of the year. Moving that knowledge to a wiki will result an ability for students to stand on the shoulders of their predecessors.
Taxonomy of Knowledge
David Weinberger's video (based on his new book Everything is Miscellaneous) represents a whole series of new powerful ideas. Equaly interesting are his series of interviews with physicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Markos Moulitsas Zúniga(founder of he Daily Kos), Arriana Huffington (founder of the Huffington Post), Jimmy Wales (co-founder of Wikipedia).
The main threads running through all of these is how everything has changed. "Web 2.0 changes everything" is a common rallying cry among Educational bloggers, but the how is often missing. I believe that David Weinberger is starting to put his finger on it. According to him, there are three orders of data. There is the data itself, say the pictures in an archive. There is metadata, the card catalogue. But when data and metadata are digital, they become interchangeable. For example, if you know that Charles Dickens wrote a Tale of Two Cities, you can Google and the four or fifth hit gives you the text of the A Tale of Two Cities. Conversely if you knew the line, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times", but were unsure of its source, you can Google the phrase and see that it was written by Charles Dickens. Weinberger's important observation is that metadata is what you know. Data is what you don't.
In terms of Web 2.0, Weinberger mak. es two observations. Firstly that all taxonomies are arbitrary. There is no perfect order, waiting to be revealed. If everyone can organize their own knowledge in any way they see fit, that is incredibly liberating. The Web 2.0 tool that allows users to do this is tagging. As I was writing this I realized that tagging is a constructivist tool. It allows people to attach their own meaning.
Secondly, he notes that traditionally editors have exercised power by controlling what goes on the front page of a newspaper. Thanks to Web 2.0 tools, everyone is their own editor and can use tools like NetVibes to pick what stories they want to see, and in what order. To me that is a revolution on par with Martin Luther's "Every man is his own priest," and sums up very well how Web 2.0 changes everything.
The main threads running through all of these is how everything has changed. "Web 2.0 changes everything" is a common rallying cry among Educational bloggers, but the how is often missing. I believe that David Weinberger is starting to put his finger on it. According to him, there are three orders of data. There is the data itself, say the pictures in an archive. There is metadata, the card catalogue. But when data and metadata are digital, they become interchangeable. For example, if you know that Charles Dickens wrote a Tale of Two Cities, you can Google and the four or fifth hit gives you the text of the A Tale of Two Cities. Conversely if you knew the line, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times", but were unsure of its source, you can Google the phrase and see that it was written by Charles Dickens. Weinberger's important observation is that metadata is what you know. Data is what you don't.
In terms of Web 2.0, Weinberger mak. es two observations. Firstly that all taxonomies are arbitrary. There is no perfect order, waiting to be revealed. If everyone can organize their own knowledge in any way they see fit, that is incredibly liberating. The Web 2.0 tool that allows users to do this is tagging. As I was writing this I realized that tagging is a constructivist tool. It allows people to attach their own meaning.
Secondly, he notes that traditionally editors have exercised power by controlling what goes on the front page of a newspaper. Thanks to Web 2.0 tools, everyone is their own editor and can use tools like NetVibes to pick what stories they want to see, and in what order. To me that is a revolution on par with Martin Luther's "Every man is his own priest," and sums up very well how Web 2.0 changes everything.
Saturday, May 19, 2007
iPods in school debate
We had an interesting discussion in a High School faculty meeting today. The debate was what to about "personal listening devices" at school. Some faculty were in favour of banning them altogether. The reasons being:
On the flip side, certain faculty members were arguing:
Good analogies abounded.
All in all it was a very good discussion. In the end, the decision was to reframe the school rule so that students are allowed to use personal listening devices at school during their free time, and in classes only with permission of the teacher. I can clearly see the arguments on both sides of this debate. The only one that I have trouble with is the cheating argument. Why are we testing students on rote memorization? Why are we not looking at what value the students can add to the content with which they are working? The health argument especially caused me to rethink allowing students to use their iPods in my computer literacy class while they do their typing. I had always thought of it in terms of the music being an incentive for them to engage in what would otherwise be a dull repetitive task. I need to think some more about the effects it has on their hearing, or at the very least monitor more closely decibel levels.
- The historical reasons were:
- There is a very real possibility that students can damage their hearing.
- Teenagers being the creatures they are need to see immediate consequences. Deafness /impaired hearing five ten years down the line is not on teenagers' timescale.
- Volume and length of exposure are the key factors. Should we do what we can to reduce exposure?
- There is a concern that students were not socializing with each other. when they were jacked into their iPods they weren't connecting with each other. Not the environment we want to promote at school.
- There was a concern about the students listening to explicit lyrics that were inappropriate for school, and listening to such lyrics would not be conducive to engaging in constructive dialogue with their peers
- There is a very real possibility that students can damage their hearing.
- Additional concerns
- The need for students to spend sometime unplugged, in that they ar eplugged in so much of the rest of their day. The converse of this argument is that allowing iPods in school helps make school like the rest of their world.
- The possibility of students using iPods to cheat on tests and exams as witnessed by this article
- Some students are not using the personal listening devices responsibly, ie. walking past people without exchanging basic civil greetings like "good morning"
On the flip side, certain faculty members were arguing:
- The current policy of no personal listening devices at school from 8:30 to 3:30 (school hours) except under the direct supervision of a teacher was basically unenforceable.
- There are perfectly valid reasons to listen to an iPod at school, especially when teachers assign podcasts to listen to such as in Easy French
- The students are social about their listening devices socially, often sharing a pair of buds between two people
- If not at school, where else can we teach students to use these devices responsibily
Good analogies abounded.
- When one is reading, one is immersed in a world of one's own
- Students may be reading objectionable material, but we don't censor that
All in all it was a very good discussion. In the end, the decision was to reframe the school rule so that students are allowed to use personal listening devices at school during their free time, and in classes only with permission of the teacher. I can clearly see the arguments on both sides of this debate. The only one that I have trouble with is the cheating argument. Why are we testing students on rote memorization? Why are we not looking at what value the students can add to the content with which they are working? The health argument especially caused me to rethink allowing students to use their iPods in my computer literacy class while they do their typing. I had always thought of it in terms of the music being an incentive for them to engage in what would otherwise be a dull repetitive task. I need to think some more about the effects it has on their hearing, or at the very least monitor more closely decibel levels.
Saturday, May 12, 2007
What I've Been Working On
The last week has been very busy. Bad Internet access at home. We were not able to connect until after 9:30pm, so I got very little web work done at home. The NESA Virtual Science Fair has been running in virtual mode for the past week. Stuart and I developed an on-line judging system where the judges log in, access their teams' Blackboard sites and post their scores on-line. Some minor hiccups. Learned about php and timeouts, but other than that the coding I did worked as it should have, and Stuart has been able to have real-time data on the 47 teams that made it to the final round. This is a significant improvement over managing three judges per team, with three rounds, and one spreadsheet per team per round. (It would have been almost 150 spreadsheets).
Just to keep things interesting I volunteered to move the timeline for the 5th Grade Virtual Science fair up a year, and quickly cludged a simplified version of the NVSF judging software. This goes live May 15th.
The other neat project on the NESA end that is off the ground, is planning for the NESA Fall Leadership Conference. We're working on developing a technology strand for tech directors and coordinators from the region. Lynne Schrum is going to be the facilitator for two 3 hour sessions. One with the admins and one with the tech directors. We're doing the planning for this as a Wiki. The interesting thing for me is how far we are behind as a region on the Web 2.0 front. Most of the tech directors are using the wiki like a threaded discussion board. No one has hit the edit button yet. This has me a little discouraged, but ultimately I know this is the professional development that we need.
I've also been working on reworking our library web page. This is not yet finished. I had a frustrating time last week trying to upload from school different changes. The idea is that the web page is going to be database driven. I've got the drop-down menus working, but not the database query. Instead of seeing error codes that can inform me about what is going wrong, all I am getting is a network error. I suspect that it is the error checking and recursion I was trying to code, but it is not yet ready fro prime time. All in all a very eventful week.
Just to keep things interesting I volunteered to move the timeline for the 5th Grade Virtual Science fair up a year, and quickly cludged a simplified version of the NVSF judging software. This goes live May 15th.
The other neat project on the NESA end that is off the ground, is planning for the NESA Fall Leadership Conference. We're working on developing a technology strand for tech directors and coordinators from the region. Lynne Schrum is going to be the facilitator for two 3 hour sessions. One with the admins and one with the tech directors. We're doing the planning for this as a Wiki. The interesting thing for me is how far we are behind as a region on the Web 2.0 front. Most of the tech directors are using the wiki like a threaded discussion board. No one has hit the edit button yet. This has me a little discouraged, but ultimately I know this is the professional development that we need.
I've also been working on reworking our library web page. This is not yet finished. I had a frustrating time last week trying to upload from school different changes. The idea is that the web page is going to be database driven. I've got the drop-down menus working, but not the database query. Instead of seeing error codes that can inform me about what is going wrong, all I am getting is a network error. I suspect that it is the error checking and recursion I was trying to code, but it is not yet ready fro prime time. All in all a very eventful week.
Wednesday, May 2, 2007
Streaming music
I took a listen today to last.fm. In comparison to pandora, it has some definite strengths. If you create stations on the band "Blue Rodeo" in both of them, the results are very different. Pandora picks up on the country aspect of Blue Rodeo's music and takes you down that path. Last.fm, picked up on who they sound a bit like and I think with whom they've toured, so bands like Great Big Sea, and the Jayhawks were coming up as well as artists like Simon and Garfunkel and Tom Petty. To my ears, this is a better match, so last.fm may have the better algorithm, however they do not have the better library.
My favourite station on pandora is "Theolonius Monk." This consistently delivers excellent jazz that for me is very listenable. Attempting to create this station on last.fm yields a "Not enough content to play this station." I am still torn between these two.
My favourite station on pandora is "Theolonius Monk." This consistently delivers excellent jazz that for me is very listenable. Attempting to create this station on last.fm yields a "Not enough content to play this station." I am still torn between these two.
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