Global Edmonton | Student gets a zero: Teacher gets suspended

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via Global Edmonton | Student gets a zero: Teacher gets suspended.

Formal education takes another giant leap towards irrelevancy:

EDMONTON – A teacher with more than three decades of experience is speaking out after he says he was suspended for giving a student a zero.

Lynden Dorval has been a physics teacher at Ross Sheppard High School for 15 years and a teacher in the Edmonton Public School system for 35 years. Last week, he was suspended indefinitely for what he says was insubordination for disobeying an order not to give zeros to students.

“My prinicipal has been giving me directive for almost a year-and-a-half to not give students zeros if they don’t hand in work or show up to write an exam,” Dorval tells Global News. “Instead we have a comment policy where we’re supposed to put in comments indicating what they haven’t done. The problem with that is the marks program doesn’t count that for anything, so if a student had only done half the work then their average mark would be based only on that half the work. The average is calculated by whatever marks are in there.”

This sounds suspiciously like the work of a bully.

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What do non-programming designers have to know? | Janet H. Murray’s Blog on Inventing the Medium

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via What do non-programming designers have to know? | Janet H. Murray’s Blog on Inventing the Medium.

Exactly!!!

What should she know instead? Key concepts of computational architecture like these:

Information abstraction: Is data separate from proprietary code and stored in a standardized format i.e. in an XML file or a SQL data base rather than in Flash? It is semantically segmented so it can be accessed at multiple granularities?

Modularity: Is the display of the program separate from the data and from any other complex calculations? Will the owners be able to display it on multiple platforms or move it when the current platform becomes obsolete?

Encapsulation: Are the computational structures embedded within one another like Russian dolls, so that you don’t have to recode every layer when you make a change to one of them? Can you reuse the same routines, and especially can you reuse routines for common functions e.g. draw a tree diagram by drawing on other people’s functions like a Java library?Understanding these concepts are much more important for designers than learning the syntax of any particular programming environment.

 

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Visual ability predicts a computer science career: Why? And can we use that to improve learning? « Computing Education Blog

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This is interesting, and may explain why teachers have trouble with science and math (and why kids who are inclined towards science and math have trouble with teachers).

This is from a longitudinal study, testing students’ visual ability, then tracking what fields they go into later. Having significant visual ability most strongly predicts an Engineering career, but in second place (and really close) is “Mathematics and Computer Science.” That score at the bottom is worth noting: Having significant visual ability is negatively correlated with going into Education. Nora points out that this is a significant problem. Visual skills are not fixed. Training in visual skills improves those skills, and the effect is durable and transferable. But, the researchers at SILC found that teachers with low visual skills had more anxiety about teaching visual skills, and those teachers depressed the impact on their students. A key part of Nora’s talk was showing how the gender gap in visual skills can be easily reduced with training (relating to the earlier discussion about intelligence), such that women perform just as well as men.

via Visual ability predicts a computer science career: Why? And can we use that to improve learning? « Computing Education Blog.

Here’s a list of characteristics for someone who is spatially gifted. I’m not sure how accurate it is, but it describes everyone in my house, that’s for sure.

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Where I’ve Been (weekly: May 20-26)

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~ A record of places on the web I want to remember ~

 

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Computational Literacy and Literacy vs. Competency

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The comment about competency vs literacy is a really good one.

So I’ll end with a caution about relying on the word literacy. It’s a word I’m deeply troubled by, loaded with historical and social baggage and it’s often misused as a gatekeeping concept, an either/or state; one is either literate or illiterate.

In my own teaching and research I’ve replaced my use of literacy with the idea of competency. I’m influenced here by the way teachers of a foreign language want their students to use language when they study abroad. They don’t use terms like literacy or fluency, they talk about competency. Because the thing with competency is, it’s highly contextualized, situated, and fluid. Competency means knowing the things that are required in order to do the other things you need to do. It’s not the same for everyone, and it varies by place, time, and circumstance.

via » 5 BASIC STATEMENTS ON COMPUTATIONAL LITERACY SAMPLE REALITY.

Here’s a summary of the 5, along with the take-aways:

  1. 10 PRINT 2+3

    1. Code CAN be obvious – assuming, of course, you understand the fundamentals of computer languages. If you don’t, you will be routinely mistaken. It’s those fundamentals people need to learn when they learn programming, not the picayune details of the specific language they are using this minute.

  2. 10 PRINT “HELLO WORLD”

    1. Communicating with the “outside world” is an important thing to understand.

  3. 10 PRINT “GO TO STATEMENT CONSIDERED HARMFUL”: GOTO 10

    1. “Programming is a set of practices, with its own history and tensions. ” Discipline is important.

  4. 10 REM PRINT “GOODBYE CRUEL WORLD”

    1. “Yes, code does what it says. But it also says things it does not do. ” Also, annotation is important.

  5. 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1));:GOTO 10

    1. “There’s a limit to the usefulness of the concept of literacy when talking about code.”
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Decorative Media Trap Example: The Elements: A Visual Exploration

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The Elements: A Visual Exploration

The Elements: A Visual Exploration.

Looks great. Basically a picture book. You’d think that for the price ($13.99) it would be more interactive and that it would include everything one would normally need from a table of elements – like the ion charge, for instance. It’s not like they have to invent this information. For this price, I should not have to buy another app (or book) just to look up facts.

This is one of the classic examples of what I see as a disturbing trend – HD. Don’t get me wrong – I love clear, crisp pictures. What I DON’T like is having to run updates as overnight jobs because they are so bloated that they take forever to download.

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A Stellar Example of Ed vs. Fun: Virtual Frog Dissection

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I was looking at a “Top Ten Best of” list today. There are dozens, if not hundreds of these. It’s rarely made clear why or how the people posting these lists are qualified to judge, nor is it usually explained how they came to the conclusions they did, but I’ll leave that for another rant.

Most of the lists I come across are extremely US-centric. Most do not acknowledge the very legitimate concern of many non-American educators about leaving their data in an American cloud, but that’s for another rant too.

Today’s rant is about this:

 This came up as one of the top educational apps on the list I was looking at. I’m quite familiar with this app as I examined it quite carefully when I was doing my dissertation (2003-2008).

To be fair, there are some very good things about it:

  1. It is visually very, very good (but, see my Decorative Media Principle, here, here, and here. I’ve also got a few publications on this notion).
  2. It is accurate. Can’t fault it there. They did their homework.
  3. The software works as designed and is robust. Again – kudos!
  4. They promote humane treatment of animals and this app certainly provides a viable alternative to killing and cutting up real frogs. RL still beats virtual dissection, but I really don’t believe it is necessary for everyone in a class to kill a frog in order for them to get the RL experience.

BUT, and here’s where we part ways…….

IT IS NOT FUN.

When I evaluate educational software and apps, I try and look at it from the kid’s perspective. You know those pins you use to hold your specimen down on the board? First thing I tried was to stab the frog in the chin – I couldn’t. This was not an option. Then I tried pinning it down by the elbows and knees instead of the feet. Again – not allowed. It didn’t even tell me I’d done it wrong – it just didn’t work. Now, I love animals – really I do, but this is a VIRTUAL frog – I CAN’T HURT IT. Why shouldn’t I be able to EXPERIMENT? That’s what scientists do after all, right? You can not tell me that real scientists don’t have some goofy fun with their specimens from time to time?

OK, moving on. I acquiesce, and put the pins exactly where I know they want me to put them (boring…), and move on.

Next: I pick up the scalpel. Guess what? I HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO CUT EXACTLY ALONG THE DOTTED LINES ON THE FROG’S BELLY. This is NOT interactivity – this is me using my mouse (or finger, if you have the mobile app) to advance a linear video. Again, I am given no option but to do it exactly the way they want.

How dare you call yourself “interactive”, when the only thing I get to do is exactly what you tell me to do. How is that better than clicking the button on the slide projector?

Interactivity is about CHOICE. I should get to “be bad” – who am I hurting if I cut off the frog’s leg? Why can’t I play Dr. Frankenstein and switch the heart and brain?

I’ll tell you why: far too many teachers and administrators have bought into the myth that education and fun are at opposite ends of a continuum. Education can’t be fun or it’s not real. Kids having too much fun aren’t learning.

No wonder so many kids STILL hate school.

Virtual Frog Dissection | Educational App – iPad Mac Desktop Whitebroad & Intel AppUp.

 

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Where I’ve Been This Week (weekly)

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~ A record of places on the web I want to remember ~

 

  • Snap! Build Your Own Blocks. Alpha

    programming language

    tags: snap scratch

  • News Details

    Overall, the top five countries, nominally providing the ‘best’ higher education were found to be the United States, Sweden, Canada, Finland and Denmark. However, broken down into the smaller sections, it was interesting to see that the US, traditionally seen as a country with one of the strongest education systems, did not always hit the top spot. Government funding of higher education as a percentage of GDP is highest in Finland, Norway and Denmark. Taking private expenditure into account changed this significantly: on that measure funding is highest in the United States, South Korea, Canada and Chile, unsurprising, given the structure in these counties.

    tags: news details higher-ed rankings

  • Gartner’s top tech 2012 predictions: Impact on learning at 3 levels | Learning Cafe

    The crux of the article is that IT budgets and responsibilities are moving out of the control of IT departments and into the hands of others, thanks to trends such as consumerization and cloud computing which is making centralised controlled of IT difficult. Users are taking more control of the devices they will use, business managers are taking more control of the budgets IT organizations. IT organization will need to co-ordinate those who have the money, those who deliver the services, those who secure the data, and those consumers who demand to set their own pace for use of IT. This decentralisation of control provides the learning function with opportunities to be a bit more responsive to e-learner needs which in the past may have been hampered by the rigid operational frameworks imposed by IT.

    tags: gartner tech predictions impact learning

  • Why TV is Better Than Games | GamesIndustry International

    Gamification is often described as ‘adding game-like elements to things that are not games’. That’s not really what it is at all. Those game-like elements aren’t anything to do with games, they are behavioural economics. Normal economics believes that people are rational and act in their own self interest, and then goes off on one from there. That is, sadly for economics, not true. Behavioural economics makes no such assumptions. It’s the study of what people actually do. The study of the world as it is, not the way we wish it were.

    tags: games international gamification

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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