The Open Source School

Open source surgery

2012-01-23T13:51:00.000-08:00

Not quite do-it-yourself surgery, but an open source surgical robot nonetheless. Ensuring that corporations don't own, limit and control the technologies used to save lives is extremely important. I'd love to see more of these open, transparent and shareable approaches to medicine:

"A multidisciplinary team of engineers from the University of Washington and the University of California, Santa Cruz, have developed a surgical robot, called Raven 2, for use as an open-source surgical robotics research platform. Seven units of the Raven 2 will be made available to researchers at Harvard; Johns Hopkins; University of Nebraska-Lincoln; University of California, Berkeley; and the University of California, Los Angeles, while the remaining two systems will remain at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the University of Washington.

Seriously solar-powered OLPCs in Haiti

2012-01-22T13:48:00.000-08:00

Great video on a large solar installation that charges 500 XO laptops at a time. The installation was completed by a team from Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago, Green WiFi, and Haiti's National OLPC Coordinator and took place at EFACAP school in Lascahobas, Haiti.

"With the system having been designed and built to power 500 XO laptops it was - and very likely still is - the world's largest single-school solar laptop charging deployment."

Ali Carr-Chellman - A Closer Look at Cyber Charter Schools

2012-01-19T14:40:00.000-08:00

A different angle on the charter schools coming to New Zealand. Ali Carr-Chellman looks at cyber charter schools in the US. 4 million students took part in cyber charter schools in the US in 2010, 250,000 of whom were full-time. She links cyber charter schools to the wild west and the goldrush, saying that, like in goldrushes in the past, people are making a lot of money out of cyber charter schools at the moment. Huge amounts of money are being diverted from public schools: US$1 billion in 2010. That includes paying private company CEOs annual salaries of up to US$2.6 million.

That's public money, remember.

Classroom-less schools in Sweden

2012-01-19T13:38:00.000-08:00

I came across this from Stephen Downes. WARNING: images may make educators extremely envious:

The principles of the Vittra School revolve around the breakdown of physical and metaphorical class divisions as a fundamental step to promoting intellectual curiosity, self-confidence, and communally responsible behavior. Therefore, in Vittra’s custom-built Stockholm location, spaces are only loosely defined by permeable borders and large, abstract landmarks. As the architects explained, “instead of classical divisions with chairs and tables, a giant iceberg for example serves as cinema, platform, and room for relaxation, and sets the frame for many different types of learning,” while “flexible laboratories make it possible to work hands-on with themes and projects.”

EDvent Calendar: Day 24 (Leadership)

2011-12-23T12:00:00.000-08:00

I've saved the best gift until last. Here's a chance to change someone's life. In April 16-17 2012, we're holding the second annual NZ Emerging Leaders' Unconference. It's a chance to get together everyone who wants to make a difference in education.

What is an unconference?
It's a participant-driven event. Rather than inviting people to attend a conference where everything has been decided by others in advance (the speakers, the content, the timetable, the spaces etc.) an unconference emerges out of the strengths and interests of the people who attend. If you want to lead a session, you write it up and people attend. It sounds a bit chaotic, but works brilliantly.

We recognise that letting the Principals do all the talking is only one approach to leadership. Another approach is to harness the wisdom of everyone, build on their ideas and collectively take them to the world.

Leading, not following.

EDvent Calendar: Day 23 (Game Design Goodies)

2011-12-22T10:00:00.000-08:00

Unleash the entrepreneur in your students. If you've ever played Angry Birds, or even heard how much money the developers make each month, you can see that game design is an incredible rewarding career (in every sense). For students who show promise in programming, here are three good open source engines to get them building games relatively easily.

1. Spring RTS "Spring is a project to create the best RTS engine ever (no joke). There are three principle goals which we hope to achieve:

Build a flexible and powerful 3D RTS engine that can handle large numbers of units and state-of-the-art special effects and animation.
Support new games and maps with powerful built-in Lua language support that allows game designers to realize their goals and develop better and better games.
Support end-users, fix bugs and provide the best support we can."

Stencyl

2. "StencylWorks isn't your average game creation software; it's a gorgeous, intuitive toolset that accelerates your workflow and then gets out of the way. We take care of the essentials like physics and native APIs so you can focus on what's important—making your game yours."

3. http://unity3d.com/ is an editor and engine that lets you author for desktop, web or mobile and has nice features such as an asset gallery/store built in.

Unity 3D

EDvent Calendar: Day 22 (Visualisations)

2011-12-21T10:00:00.000-08:00

Three of my favourite 'sights':

1. Incidental comics is a cartoon blog that has really clever, heart-warming comics like this one:

2. http://visual.ly/ is a very good infographics site, helping to communicate easily a lot of information about topics:

3. Information is beautiful. The designers work very hard to make easily accessible very complex topics and huge amounts of data. Take a look at this one to see just how screwed the U.S. (and global) economy is.

EDvent Calendar: Day 21 (The final frontier)

2011-12-20T11:06:00.000-08:00

If your students like exploring the infinity of space, introduce them to these three programmes. All open source and free for everyone to install.

Stellarium

1. Stellarium... "is a free open source planetarium for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope.It is being used in planetarium projectors. Just set your coordinates and go." Available for Windows/Mac/Linux.

Celestia

2. Celestia. The free space simulation that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions. Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn't confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy. Available for Windows/Mac/Linux.

3. Virtual Moon Atlas. "Software for Moon observation and survey. Let you visualize the real Moon aspect at every time. Also help to study any lunar formations using feature database and pictures library" Available for Windows/Mac/Linux.

To infinity and beyond.

EDvent Calendar: Day 20 (Unconference)

2011-12-20T10:00:00.000-08:00

Try an unconference in your school. Here's a good example of the way they create new things: we ran an unconference/barcamp with our staff to share knowledge and expertise. I spoke about it at the Emerging Leaders' Edu Ignite Evening, emphasising the way it shifted teacher professional development from a passive to an active process:

Ignite Talk | Mark Osborne from Emerging Leaders on Vimeo.

Tara T-J was in the audience (and speaking as well) and decided she should run one for her students. Great idea. She and Tim Kong bounced a few ideas around on Twitter and set up two similar experiences for their classes at opposite ends of the island; both being great successes.

In Tara's class, students were teaching each other how to sketch, change a bicycle tyre, play guitar, dance and do BMX jumps, but what they were really teaching each other is that everyone is a teacher and everyone is a learner.

So what did the students think?

It was really fun and you feel really proud of your self for teaching people something that they didn't know.
I found it hand when people started to do their own thing sometimes and go off task.
Next time I would probably ask for less amount of people so its easier.
I learnt that teaching is harder than you would think.

in Tim's class, a similarly wide range of topics were taught. Here's some more student reflection from Seatoun School's barcamp, but you get a better sense of what's happening by watching this student-led dance class:

Barclass: Hiphop warmups from Seatoun School on Vimeo.

EDvent Calendar: Day 19 (Safe social)

2011-12-18T10:00:00.000-08:00

If Twitter gives you the Facebooks, here are a few safe ways to use Social Networks.
1. Edmodo is a Facebook-style site that is secure and operates a lot like a closed class space. My friend Tara T-J uses it with her classes but I don't have a lot of experience with it. "Edmodo provides a safe and easy way for your class to connect and collaborate, share content, and access homework, grades and school notices. Our goal is to help educators harness the power of social media to customize the classroom for each and every learner."

2. Status.net allows anyone to set up their own micro-blogging site. It's a really safe, secure way to allow organisations to tap into the power of micro-blogging for internal communication, micro-reflection, questions and answers, out of hours discussions etc. It's great and we use it at our school.

Face book

3. Diaspora is not the new Facebook. It's not even the old Facebook, but it is a project that has the potential to become very useful to schools as sites like Facebook create impenetrable walled gardens within the web. Tim Berners-Lee says

"Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster and others typically provide value by capturing information as you enter it: your birthday, your e-mail address, your likes, and links indicating who is friends with whom and who is in which photograph...[but] once you enter your data into one of these services, you cannot easily use them on another site."

But Diaspora is different. It's completely free software, which means you can install the code wherever you want and retain ownership of your data. Right from the very start of the project, users have had the ability to remove their data and permanently delete it, unlike Facebook which makes it difficult to do this. Many schools and universities are wary of using Facebook to create communities around courses because all of the content they upload to Facebook can be used, modified or even sublicensed by Facebook in every possible way – even if they quit the service. It goes without saying that setting up your own internal Diaspora* server ensures you retain ownership of content long term. You can even link your account to Facebook if you really want to, which means you're posting into both environments at once.

EDvent Calendar: Day 18 (Fun theory)

2011-12-17T12:00:00.000-08:00

How do you foster creativity in your school? Do you think schools collectively do a good job of teaching creative problem-solving? I'm interested to see what would happen if schools ran more of these kinds of creativity competitions. I'll let Kevin tell you more about his fun theory:

How would your students come up with solutions for traditionally difficult problems in school like litter, doing homework, encouraging teamwork or stamping out bullying? Let's ask them.

EDvent Calendar: Day 17 (Cyber safety)

2011-12-16T13:54:00.000-08:00

One of the best internet safety organisations in the world is New Zealand's Netsafe.org.nz. Here's a quick run-down of some of the best tools they offer:

In festive spirit, they've released their own Advent Calendar with 24 great tips on staying safe online: http://xmas.netsafe.org.nz/
Hector's world: http://www.hectorsworld.com/island/index.html "Hector’s World® is a unique cybersafety initiative for teachers and parents to help young people learn about safe online practices and digital citizenship. The core content of Hector’s World® is the 7 animated episodes featuring Hector the dolphin and his friends. Each episode has support material for teachers and parents."
Scam Machine: http://www.scammachine.org.nz/#/intro "[The Scam Machine] lets you build a news story based around someone you know, putting them at the centre of a online scam story. Once you have made your selections, added some information, you can watch the story unfold on video, with your friend right in the thick of it. Share the video news story to educate friends and family about how easy it is to fall for requests to send money offshore by wire transfer."

...and a couple of videos that can be used with older students to help educate them on the dangers of posting online.
Think before you post:

Out of your hands:

EDvent Calendar: Day 16 (QR codes)

2011-12-15T12:00:00.000-08:00

Some fun things to do with QR Codes:
1. Help students find software:

2. Have a treasure hunt:

3. Learn about the periodic table:

That is all.

EDvent Calendar: Day 15 (I've got the power)

2011-12-14T12:00:00.000-08:00

My gift to you today is the gift of inspiration. Two amazing stories centred on generating eectricity: first William Kamkwamba talks about building for his village in Africa a water pump and a wind-powered electric generator:

"I found a tractor fan, shock absorber, PVC pipes. Using a bicycle frame and an old bicycle dynamo, I built my machine. It was one light at first. And then four lights, with switches, and even a circuit breaker, modeled after an electric bell. Another machine pumps water for irrigation."

Watch and be inspired:

Second, Justin Hall-Tipping demonstrates a material that allows us to generate electricity using our windows. Truly remarkable.

EDvent Calendar: Day 14 (Augmented reality)

2011-12-13T13:52:00.000-08:00

For those who don't know about it, augmented reality is the name given to any technology that can overlay the real world with information or data. There is huge potential for learning in Augmented Reality; if you've got a smartphone, download one of these apps and have a play. If you'd like to learn more about how students can use AR as a publication tool, go here. At the frivolous end, we can turn roadsigns into monsters:

...while at the more serious end, AR can be used to see what the world used to be like...

...before the Christchurch earthquake (CityViewAR by Hitlab):

...to bring textbooks to life (Aurasma):

...or make meaning out of the world around you (Wikitude):

EDvent Calendar: Day 13 (Homework is broken)

2011-12-12T14:24:00.000-08:00

Three interesting articles to get you thinking about how we use homework. Aside from the fact that anything related to learning that is called 'work' turns students off, there is a mounting body of evidence to show that most homework does more harm than good.

1. Here's a really interesting interview with Richard Walker (associate professor at the University of Sydney) who has summarised the issues surrounding homework in his book 'Reforming Homework'.

2. "Armed with neuroscience, self-analysis and common sense, some of New York City’s most competitive high schools, famed for their Marine-like mentality when it comes to homework, have begun to lighten the load for fear of crushing their teenage charges."

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/24/education/24homework.html?_r=3

3. From the Best Evidence Synthesis:

"Cooper reported cases where homework generated negative effects for students when their parents brought conflicting instructional techniques to bear on students’ homework activities." Make sure homework is designed and delivered in a way that works to align and promote links between home and school contexts.
"In the light of much research showing that homework can be potentially negative unless carefully structured and managed by teachers, Epstein reported on the research-based development of the TIPS (Teachers Involve Parents in Schoolwork) process of interactive homework (Epstein, 2001)." Make homework as interactive and engaging as possible.
"Alton-Lee and Nuthall (1990) found homework opportunity to be more strongly related to the learning of intermediate students than whole-class, small group or individual learning opportunities in class in social studies." Make sure the homework is as differentiated as possible.
"In a later study of intermediate students' learning in an integrated science and social studies unit, Alton-Lee and Nuthall (1998) found curriculum-relevant homework tasks to play a critical role in enabling working memory to consolidate in-class learning before forgetting occurred." Focus on reinforcing learning from the in-class lessons, not homework for the sake of it, or repetitive, boring drills.

EDvent Calendar: Day 12 (Classroom Gardens)

2011-12-11T23:18:00.000-08:00

"Britta Riley wanted to grow her own food (in her tiny apartment). So she and her friends developed a system for growing plants in discarded plastic bottles -- researching, testing and tweaking the system using social media, trying many variations at once and quickly arriving at the optimal system. Call it distributed DIY. And the results? Delicious."

...and if liked that, start building your own farm tools and equipment.

EDvent Calendar: Day 11 (new approaches to school)

2011-12-10T18:22:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I think we do school this way because we've always done school this way. Here are a few alternative approaches that are based in research rather than being based in 'what we've always done':
Tinkering School:

Studio schools:

The Teddy McArdle Free School:

EDvent Calendar: Day 10 (Your kids can code)

2011-12-09T13:53:00.001-08:00

Five awesome tools to teach youngsters the basics of programming:

http://scratch.mit.edu/ Scratch is a programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art -- and share your creations on the web. As young people create and share Scratch projects, they learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also learning to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively.
http://www.appinventorbeta.com/about/ Creating an App Inventor app begins in your browser, where you design how the app will look. Then, like fitting together puzzle pieces, you set your app's behavior. All the while, through a live connection between your computer and your phone, your app appears on your phone.

http://www.alice.org/ Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student's first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games. In Alice, 3-D objects (e.g., people, animals, and vehicles) populate a virtual world and students create a program to animate the objects.

http://www.codecademy.com/#!/exercises/0 "Codecademy was created out of the frustrations Zach and Ryan felt with learning how to program. Tired with less effective text and video resources, Ryan and Zach teamed up to create Codecademy, a better, more interactive way to learn programming by actually coding. This is just the beginning. Join us as we make it easy for everyone to love and learn how to code."

http://hackety-hack.com/ Hackety Hack will teach you the absolute basics of programming from the ground up. No previous programming experience is needed! With Hackety Hack, you'll learn the Ruby programming language. Ruby is used for all kinds of programs, including desktop applications and websites.

(This post's title references one of the best sources around for kid-friendly programming tools. Follow @mykidcancode on Twitter if teaching programming is something that interests you.)

EDvent Calendar: Day 9 (The myth of learning styles)

2011-12-09T13:53:00.000-08:00

One of the best gifts we can give our students is the assurance that our classrooms will be devoid of any kind of quackery. Every 'good idea' or new strategy we come across should be scrutinised according to what we know about what works in teaching. In short, if it hasn't got a peer-reviewed evidence base, it should go into the quackery basket until more research is done. (If you only read one thing on what works in teaching, read this.) One of the things that should be in the quackery basket but is practised in almost every school in the west is learning styles; the notion that particular people learn best in one particular way in all contexts.

"There is no credible evidence that learning styles exist. While we will elaborate on this assertion, it is important to counteract the real harm that may be done by equivocating on the matter. In what follows, we will begin by defining “learning styles”; then we will address the claims made by those who believe that they exist, in the process acknowledging what we consider the valid claims of learning-styles theorists."

http://www.changemag.org/Archives/Back%20Issues/September-October%202010/the-myth-of-learning-full.html

This video also puts the case nicely:

Give your students the gift of being research-based in your practice. It's the best gift you can give.

Edvent Calendar: Day 8 (Contexts for Mastery)

2011-12-07T11:40:00.000-08:00

Watch this video!

Do you offer students the ability to choose their own contexts when demonstrating mastery of a skill or concept? In the New Zealand Curriculum, the key competencies of thinking, participating and contributing, relating to others, using language, symbols and texts and managing self are very context specific, but we don't always do a good job of offering students the ability to choose the context. I have no idea how Danny Macaskill would go with a pen and pencil or a calculator, but the video below tells me quite a bit about his ability to learn and be creative:

EDvent Calendar: Day 7 (Games for change)

2011-12-06T23:57:00.000-08:00

"Founded in 2004, Games for Change facilitates the creation and distribution of social impact games that serve as critical tools in humanitarian and educational efforts.
Unlike the commercial gaming industry, we aim to leverage entertainment and engagement for social good. To further grow the field, Games for Change convenes multiple stakeholders, highlights best practices, incubates games, and helps create and direct investment into new projects"

http://www.gamesforchange.org/

EDvent Calendar: Day 6 (Open street map)

2011-12-06T12:00:00.000-08:00

If you're slightly concerned about how nicely Google has woven itself into anything on the web that requires a map, there is hope. Open Street Map is a wiki-based mapping site that allows people to participate in crowd-sourcing the creation of maps. Have a look at OSM. Is your street there? If it's not, log in and add it. Add points of interest like schools, hospitals and parks.

This video shows a time-lapse of the creation of the map covering the greater London area. It's a lovely metaphor for a community of people creating knowledge out of darkness.
London OSM Edits 2005-2010 from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

EDvent Calendar: Day 5 (Campfires, watering holes and caves)

2011-12-06T03:00:00.000-08:00

Learning Spaces for the Digital Age
Prakash Nair is one of the great thinkers in the area of innovative learning spaces. One of the great ideas he explores is the notion that in all learning spaces there needs to be:

Campfire spaces
Watering hole space, and
Cave spaces.

Campfires are where stories are shared (presentation spaces), watering hole spaces are where ideas are exchanged and connections are made, and caves are quiret, reflection spaces. Have you got the right mix of these three kinds of spaces in your school?

Nair asks:

"Why do schools look the way they do? Why is there a chasm between widely
acknowledged best practice principles and the actual design of a majority of school
facilities? Why has the disconnect between learning research and learning places been
so difficult to repair?"

If you read nothing else this summer about learning spaces, you should read this:
http://www.designshare.com/images/TheLanguageofSchoolDesigneBooksummaryweb.pdf
(...and if that floats your boat, you'll love Dr Kenn Fisher)

EDvent Calendar: Day 4 (Google Streetview)

2011-12-05T11:00:00.000-08:00

Have some fun courtesy of Google Streetview. Explore the ruins of Pompeii:
View Larger Map
...or take a stroll through the Colosseum:

View Larger Map
...while Google Art Project takes the power of Streetview to the world's best art museums:

Have fun!!

EDvent Calendar: Day 3 (The Barefoot School)

2011-12-05T10:39:00.001-08:00

Barefoot School
Bunker Roy talks about why he turned his back on a potentially prosperous future as a lawyer or a doctor to start a school where you can stay for a day or a lifetime and people with degrees are disqualified from entering:

EDvent Calendar: Day 2 (Single Sex Schools)

2011-12-04T18:52:00.000-08:00

The myth of single-sex education.
An overwhelming body of research shows that coeducation is better for girls and boys.

"decades of research on academic outcomes from around the world has failed to demonstrate an advantage to single-sex schooling, in spite of popular belief to the contrary. Of course, there are some terrific single-sex schools out there. However, research finds that their success is not explained by gender composition, but by the characteristics of the entering students (such as economic background), by selection effects (for example, low performing students are not admitted, or are asked to leave), and by the substantial extra resources and mentoring these programs provide."

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2011/10/the_single_sex_school_myth_an_overwhelming_body_of_research_show.html

EDvent Calendar: Day 1 (Games and Brains)

2011-12-04T15:48:00.001-08:00

Okay, so this is an EDvent Calendar rather than an advent calendar. For each of the 25 days of Christmas, I'll post a link to a great teaching and learning video or article. You can start the countdown with this good TED talk about games, rewards and dopamine:

Streetview or Skiview?

2011-12-03T14:59:00.001-08:00

Like skiing? Are you stuck at your desk but feel a burning desire to sail down the slopes of Breckenridge and Whistler? Streetview may be able to help:

From the streets to the slopes, Street View in Google Maps recently updated its special collections to include a number of new ski resorts, so you can tour some of the world’s most beautiful ski terrain right from your browser. Whether you’re planning your annual trip to your favorite resort or hunting for an exciting new adventure, Street View can transport you to your desired destination. Tour a few of our favorite ski resorts below.

View Larger Map

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/street-view-special-collections-ski-and.html

Google Maps goes indoors

2011-11-29T10:40:00.001-08:00

"Where am I?” and “What’s around me?” are two questions that cartographers, and Google Maps, strive to answer. With Google Maps’ “My Location” feature, which shows your location as a blue dot, you can see where you are on the map to avoid walking the wrong direction on city streets, or to get your bearings if you’re hiking an unfamiliar trail. Google Maps also displays additional details, such as places, landmarks and geographical features, to give you context about what’s nearby. And now, Google Maps for Android enables you to figure out where you are and see where you might want to go when you’re indoors."

From http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2011/11/new-frontier-for-google-maps-mapping.html

Koha does not mean 'to steal'

2011-11-22T10:17:00.001-08:00

This makes me extremely angry. One of our key online tools is our library catalogue Koha. It's patron-centred, allowing students and staff to write review, tag items, create and share reading lists, rate and recommend books- it's a wonderful tool for promoting literacy. It was developed 12 years ago by the Horowhenua Library Trust and open sourced as a gift to the world (koha means gift in Maori). It is inconceivable that a foreign corporation could apply for, and receive, a trademark for the word Koha in New Zealand. It was developed here, it's a common Maori word and it's community owned. Large international firms who can hire better lawyer than a community trust shouldn't be able to bulldoze their way through law. It's just wrong.

Donations are being gathered here for the legal fight.

Unconferences for CPD

2011-11-21T10:33:00.001-08:00

At our school last week, we held our first ever Unconference for staff professional learning. I've been to quite a few unconferences (or barcamps) before but this is the first time I've been part of one where the whole school stops and takes part for two days.

An unconference is a participant-driven event. Rather than inviting people to attend a conference where everything has been decided by others in advance (the speakers, the content, the timetable, the spaces etc.) an unconference emerges out of the strengths and interests of the people who attend.

The 'open grid'

How does it work?
The open grid: if you would like to meet up with others to talk about something that interests you, write the title of the session in one of the timetable slots on the day. Anyone else who wants to take part (or co-convene with you) turns up at the appointed time and contributes what they can. It makes for a very responsive, very engaging event which is grass roots and bottom up. If your session sounds similar to one already being proposed, merge the two and co-convene.

Unconference session in progress

I was lucky enough to attend sessions run by my colleagues on things like:

Role plays and the mantle of the expert in the classroom
Using Facebook to build community with classes
Creative use of teaching space strategies
Strategies to give useful feedback to students
Effective groupwork strategies

But the absolute BEST thing about the unconference was seeing the transformation that takes place when you empower a group of teachers with the belief that they have a powerful contribution to make to the way learning happens inside their school. Outside experts are great, but the first step to transforming any learning organisation should be to tap into the amazing practice that is going on in classrooms every day. And, better than one-off conferences, all of the experts I heard from will be in the staffroom at lunchtime if I want to carry on the conversation.

The two ideas we kept coming back to were 'the answers are in the room' and 'what if your contribution is the key ingredient?' If you've never been part of an unconference before, do it; you won't regret it.

Hackerspaces in schools

2011-11-10T17:42:00.001-08:00

Hacking (in its old sense of pulling old things apart and making new things from the parts) has a wonderful link with learning. When we learn something new, we take our existing schema (or frameworks to assist understanding) and add new information into them. We pull apart, remake, remodel, expand and adjust them to take onboard new concepts and information. So wouldn't it be great to facilitate more hacking in schools? Here one approach to doing just that:

What happens when you turn a middle school library into a hackerspace?

Can homework do more harm than good?

2011-11-10T16:58:00.001-08:00

Yes, is the short answer. Here's an interview from RadioNZ's Nine to Noon show with Richard Walker (associate professor at the University of Sydney) about his new book called 'Reforming Homework'.
In short, there is limited evidence that homework does much more than blunt a student's desire to learn. To be fair, there is some evidence that a small amount of homework / reinforcement at senior levels does improve student achievement. A really thought-provoking interview.

All I want for Christmas is an Android tablet

2011-11-10T10:24:00.001-08:00

Here's a 'ruggedised' Android tablet designed especially for younger students. The design might be more Fisher-Price than MOMA, but the fact that it's being sold by Toys-R-Us is an indication of how far touchscreen tablets have come in the last two years. Do you think I could buy one and pretend it's for the kids? US$199

http://www.theverge.com/2011/11/10/2551758/toys-r-us-nabi-tablet-kids-199-99-price-availability

Infographic: mobile phones and teenagers

2011-11-09T13:54:00.000-08:00

This is a pretty comprehensive run-down of mobile phone use by teenagers. Some points to note:

40% use phones to do last-minute study before exams
88% text during class time (despite this being 'banned'- are you winning the war on this?)
Scary: 25% have been at one end of 'sexting' or the other. Woah!

Created by: HackCollege

Innovation: Lamborghini or Lemon?

2011-11-09T11:02:00.000-08:00

Graeme Aitken's keynote from ULearn 11 is available. The TLDR version is:

Educators are obliged to cause:

Successful learning (achievement)
Greater interest and
Greater confidence

It's not enough to simply cause one of these to happen, we must maximise the intersection of all three. BUT, educators can waste students' time in three key ways:

Misalignment (not doing the core business of the task)
Disengagement
Lack of success

Evaluate your innovations again these criteria to ensure they are not 'mirage' innovations:

Free online music tools

2011-11-09T10:59:00.000-08:00

A great list of useful music tools. As the article says: 'who needs Garageband'?

Here are nine free tools that students can use to create their own music online."

Nuf said.

OLPC goes Minimally Invasive

2011-11-08T13:21:00.000-08:00

I don't think it's bizarre, I think it's genius. Sugata Mitra would probably like it too:

"The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project has devised a bizarre plan for deploying its new XO-3 tablet. The organization plans to drop the touchscreen computers from helicopters near remote villages in developing countries. The devices will then be abandoned and left for the villagers to find, distribute, support, and use on their own."

From Arstechnica

Moodle Admin Map

2011-11-08T11:14:00.000-08:00

Here's a great 'underground-style' map to the location of all the Moodle 2.1 Admin tools:

"Moodle 2.1 is here and now… so is the Moodle 2.1 Administration Map! Such was the success of the original version we couldn’t go without updating the map to include the new features of 2.1, most notably the addition of Mobile devices.."

Flipping the flipped school?

2011-11-07T10:54:00.000-08:00

There has been quite a bit of talk about 'flipped school' over the last few months, mostly centred around Sal Khan's video lectures. The concept of the flipped school is that students should watch video lectures at home and come to school for one-on-one tutoring from their teachers. It's worth noting that i) Sandi Mann's research shows that 60% of students find lectures boring and ii) watching videos about even extremely complex problems only light up the brain a fraction of how much working with a group of people does. If you want to give your brain a work out, question a friend about something you're both learning.

Does this picture look like good learning to you? Don't get me wrong: eLearning is at the heart of what I do every day, but apart from the fact that these students don't need to be at a school to stare at a screen, what you're seeing here doesn't align with what we know about good learning. Links between physical activity and brain function, the importance of social interaction, experiential learning, multi-literacies and differing perspectives are all missing from what these students are experiencing.
Recording videos for 'pure' concepts like calculus and physics might work well for some learners, but once you start presenting things like the French Revolution in the same manner, I get a little bit worried. The beauty of studying history is hearing different voices, and differing interpretations, and the thought that you can 'get' an event from a video lecture is a bit unsettling. I also think the Khan videos have gained such popularity because there is an inherent lack of trust in most teachers' ability to explain difficult concepts.
Personally I think we need to flip the flipped school.

Being part of something important

2011-11-03T13:23:00.000-07:00

[Cue Aretha Franklin singing R.E.S.P.E.C.T.]

From: Bersin & Associates

A new book "RESPECT: Delivering Results by Giving Employees What They Really Want", which Brenda Kowske co-authored with Jack Wiley outlines the following as motivators for employees.
"[Respect] stands for:
Recognition
Excitement
Security
Pay (only 25% of answers were in this category!)
Education
Conditions at work - social and physical
Truth
Makes sense, right? But here’s the kicker: companies that executed on the principals of RESPECT had higher customer satisfaction ratings, higher financial metrics, and tracked a percentage point above the S&P 500. Simply put, and the third reason I’m proud of this book, it’s the ultimate win-win at work."

So let's translate that to education: happy teachers result in happier students (customers). It links pretty closely to what Dan Pink outlines in his TED talk on the surprising science of motivation:

"It's an approach built much more around intrinsic motivation. Around the desire to do things because they matter, because we like it, because they're interesting, because they are part of something important."

A great question to ask is 'does what I am teaching help students to feel like they are part of something important?'

Making ideas real

2011-11-02T11:20:00.000-07:00

From The Official Google Blog:

"For the past decade, legions of Google SketchUp users have been quietly shaping the world around us. Two million professionals and hobbyists use this 3D modeling tool every week to design everything under the sun, including houses, room layouts, movie sets, aquariums, bridges, robots and furniture. They even rebuild cities. Chances are, even if you haven’t tried SketchUp yourself, you’ve witnessed, touched or walked inside something created by a SketchUp user. "

World of Warcraft in school

2011-11-01T12:48:00.000-07:00

This presentation asks a question I find irresistable: 'What Happens to "School" When Learners Become Heroes?

Classroom Cataclysm: Or What Happens to "School" When Learners Become Heroes

View more presentations from Lucas Gillispie

The pseudoscience of single-sex education

2011-11-01T12:46:00.000-07:00

This research is a challenge to popular belief:

"No, the studies don’t show that girls’ schools are better for girls. But they’re sure great at perpetuating sexist attitudes. ... Together with six co-authors, we recently published a peer-reviewed article in the journal Science, “The Pseudoscience of Single-Sex Education,”... It’s a provocative title, but our paper supported it with three lines of evidence."

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2011/10/the_single_sex_school_myth_an_overwhelming_body_of_research_show.html

Schools that astonish.

2011-10-31T17:43:00.000-07:00

Derek Wenmoth has a thought-provoking blog post over here with a great video of Stephen Heppell talking about how students should find schools, "the physical spaces, “astonishing”, and be “wow-ed” by them as places that stimulate, engage and excite them to learn."

A second thing that has me thinking about innovation is John Key's announcement that the partial sale of our energy assets is going to fund more innovative schools in New Zealand. I thought it appropriate to showcase a few of the stunning schools being built at the moment, within the existing Ministry of Education building programme. These are schools that astonish.

Amesbury School in Churton Park, Wellington, NZ
"Amesbury School is a new decile 10, year 1-6 school in Churton Park, Wellington. The school will open on February 1st 2012."

Hingaia School, Auckland, NZ
"We are a state Y0-8 school opening in February 2012 for all year levels."

Stonefields School, Auckland, NZ
"Stonefields School is a learning organisation that designs learning to cause learning for each learner. It is a place that is committed to building the necessary knowledge and competencies for students to thrive and succeed in learning and life. The School, opened on 3rd February 2011, and is located at the centre of the Stonefields development. The School has a supportive and encouraging community."

Albany Senior High School, Auckland, NZ
This is our school. While this video focuses on the school in general, there is quite a bit of time dedicated to the learning spaces:

Ormiston Senior College
"Ormiston Senior College is one of New Zealand's newest and most forward-thinking senior high schools. We cater for Year 11-13 students (generally aged 15-18 years old). The students are firmly at the heart of our school. We are focused on preparing and inspiring them to achieve their very best in a global society. Although academic excellence is our key focus, we are also striving to develop and hone their skills socially, culturally (through sports, art, culture) and globally so that they are able to reach their full potential across a wide range of subjects and interests."

The fallacy of the digital native

2011-10-27T13:17:00.000-07:00

Dan Pontefract has a nice rebuttal of one of the most persistent myths in e-learning: that of the binary digital native/immigrant split. This construct is almost as persistent as that other great baseless invention, learning styles. As Dan says:

"Through the first half of the article, Prensky paints the picture of Millennials (Digital Natives) being hard-wired differently from birth automatically leading to a digitally enhanced learning style. The non-Millennials, (Digital Immigrants) are therefore luddites incapable of learning and/or teaching and/or living like said Digital Native.

Hogwash."

Nicely said. (HT @jedd)

http://www.danpontefract.com/?p=1300

Google+ comes to Google Apps

2011-10-27T13:01:00.000-07:00

I don't think Google+ is a Facebook killer just yet, but if it can crack social networking for organisations, it'll take a big step in that direction. Facebook's strength lies in it's ability to connect individuals, but it doesn't do a good job of coping with our complex, context-based social interactions. Depending on whether I'm in a work or family context, or talking geek or sport stuff, I'm a slightly different version of myself. It makes sense that whatever social networking tool I use reflects this kind of nuanced approach to my personality and I think Google+ has the making of this with it's circles. That's why I think it's a better fit for business and organisations than Facebook. Being able to share a link with my organisation and my geek friend but not my family, or family and organisation but not geek friends has the potential to be a very powerful way to connect with others.

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/10/google-for-google-apps.html

Edit: I note in the admin information that Google+ is only available for higher education if you want to use it with Apps for Edu. It would be nice is expands to include high schools at some stage in the future.

Google Street Viewer comes to Pompeii

2011-10-26T19:35:00.000-07:00

This is stunning. Whether you've visited the ruins at Pompeii or not, spend a few minutes wandering around them using Google Streetview. It's one of many historic and cultural sites that have been opened up recently by Google's clever map people.

Open source collaborative video editing

2011-10-26T12:42:00.000-07:00

As December gets closer, I'm getting excited about this beauty landing in my stocking. For a long time, video editing has been less than spectacular on Linux, but with the release of Lightworks in December, that's about to change. A previously proprietary application, on which The King's Speech, Martin Scorsese's The Departed, Mission Impossible, Pulp Fiction, Braveheart and Batman were edited, Lightworks is a stunning product that is being open sourced. It's not for beginners, but if you know what you're doing this will have you nominated for the best picture category in no time.

As well as offering all of the features one would expect from a non-linear video editor, "Multiple users can work on the same Lightworks Project at the same time, collaborating on edits with fast, intuitive user permission controls." This is the real potential of video editing and something that is long overdue. Linux release 19th December 2011

http://www.lightworksbeta.com/

Three cool features of the latest Android phone

2011-10-26T11:40:00.000-07:00

Here's a nice video about NFC (near field communication). The latest Android phones, equipped with NFC, allow people to pay for purchases using credit card details loaded onto their phone. As the video shows, you can tap the point of sale terminal with your phone and have small purchases deducted from your account. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/10/more-google-wallet-merchants-are-live.html

The second cool thing about NFC is its ability to share content using 'Android Beam'. It works a bit like bluetooth, and allows users near each other to share just about anything: videos, website links, contact details, images etc. Just tap and go.

The other cool thing about the latest Google phone? You can unlock it by smiling at it. :-)

Blackboard embraces creative commons

2011-10-25T16:43:00.000-07:00

What a difference a few years makes. This is a powerful acknowledgement of the importance of creative commons, collaboration and open access:

"Critics called for a boycott of Blackboard in 2006 after it used a flimsy software patent to sue a rival, and raised fears that it would sue universities that were using their own teaching software tools rather than Blackboard’s products... last week, it announced it would help instructors tag their material with Creative Commons marks, a system of licensing that allows others to use a work without fear of being sued for copyright infringement."

http://paidcontent.org/article/419-why-patent-bully-blackboard.com-became-a-creative-commons-advocate/

Advice from The Steve

2011-10-25T16:33:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I'll be the first to say that I'm not Steve Job's biggest fan. He's been spectacularly successful at developing a closed computing ecosystem and determining what users have access to and what they don't. It's quite different from my view of the way digital tools should work: seamless interoperability, regardless of hardware or software choices, with the user (and not the corporation) at the centre of everything. However, The Steve's advice to Larry Page of Google on how to be a good CEO is exceptional:

"We talked a lot about focus. And choosing people. How to know who to trust, and how to build a team of lieutenants he can count on. I described the blocking and tackling he would have to do to keep the company from getting flabby and being larded with B players. The main thing I stressed was focus. Figure out what Google wants to be when it grows up. It's now all over the map. What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they're dragging you down. They're turning you into Microsoft. They're causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great."

If you want to take over the world, this would be a pretty good starting point.

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/10/how-steve-jobs-influenced-googles.html

Linux Desktop Faceoff

2011-10-25T11:47:00.000-07:00

To be honest, I'm still not 100% convinced by the new Unity interface for Ubuntu, so I was particularly interested to see this article: 'Linux Desktop Faceoff: GNOME 3 vs Ubuntu Unity'
http://lifehacker.com/5853099/linux-desktop-faceoff-gnome-3-vs-ubuntu-unity
Whatever your view, it's clear that operating systems are thundering headlong towards the tablet as the key device in coming years. Big buttons, apps and gestures, all coming your way.

Revisiting the digital divide

2011-10-25T11:42:00.000-07:00

Steve Wheeler has a nice post over here about the persistence of the digital divide. Raises some interesting issues around access and participation in the digital society if people can't (or choose not to) be present in the digital world.

Moodle: export to portfolio

2011-09-16T13:49:00.000-07:00

As online learning platforms mature and develop, interoperability and mash-ups become increasingly important. As LMSs (learning management systems) develop areas of strength, no one single system will be able to do everything an organisation wants it to. A good example is Moodle: excellent as a teacher-directed, assessment for learning tool that allows students to collaborate on a task and demonstrate to their teacher what they do and don't know about a topic. But the e-portfolio features of Moodle are not as well-developed as something like Mahara, so when a student finishes a piece of work inside Moodle, they should be able to easily and quickly push that evidence of learning through to an e-portfolio (which, of course, they can).

Moodle 2.0 offers site admins the ability to connect portfolios to their Moodle site so that users can push content through. We've got our one set up for Mahara (http://myportfolio.school.nz) and this video shows you how easy it is for students to push content through.

Moodle and the pedagogical progression

2011-09-12T18:26:00.000-07:00

At the NZ Moodlemoot recently, Martin Dougiamas used a slide in his presentation that was entitled 'Pedagogical Progression' It's a list of online/blended learning activities in the form of a progression or taxonomy, but it's also a really good checklist for the way we use online learning environments. How much time do you spend on the first three activities? Martin estimates about 90%.

Publish content (pages, SCORM, video, audio)
Assess via quizzes and assignments
Provide a passive forum
Wikis, glossaries, databases (collaboration/media)
Facilitate discussions in the forum. Questions!
Combine activities into sequences
Introduce external sites, activities, games, networks.
Use survey tools and log to study/reflect
Give students more power (structure/grades)
Research, custom code, communities of practice.

Freemoodle:
Also at the Moodlemoot, Stuart Mealor announced the launch of http://www.freemoodle.org/ , a site that hosts (free of charge) teachers and learners using Moodle courses. The one catch is that the course must be free for anyone to enrol in and use. Sound like a good deal to me, and I'm going to be uploading some of my courses over the coming weeks.

SlowMo Video

2011-09-08T12:38:00.000-07:00

Saw this over at OMG! Ubuntu:

SlowMoVideo might just be my favourite video-manipulation tool available for Linux: the effects it can create from even the simplest of footage is amazing.

Hyperbole over, on to the facts.

SlowMoVideo is a Qt4 application designed for intelligently slowing down video clips.

Rather than achieve this by ’time stretching’ your footage, as most video editors do, SlowMoVideo allows you to “smoothly slow down and speed up your footage” with the option to apply motion blur for an added fluidity of image.

Layar AR gets a re-vamp

2011-09-06T02:00:00.000-07:00

Layar has provided users with a very usable augmented reality platform, but its recent re-vamp offers some really nice new features. One of the most interesting is the ability to use AR to share real-world content like magazine articles with Twitter or Facebook followers. Another (less earnest but still just as much fun) application is to interact with things like cafe menus and wine lists. The only difficult part of using it seems to be choosing between the strawberry and lemon margarita during happy hour.

Zappar: augmented reality app

2011-09-04T14:29:00.000-07:00

Here are two examples of the augmented reality app 'Zappar': one where a 2D poster for a film turns into a 3D animated advertisement for a film:

...and another one that could get a bit out of control (if you're prone to hearing voices)...

Zappar Sign Monsters from Fraser Davidson on Vimeo.

Virtual Moon Atlas

2011-09-02T18:21:00.000-07:00

Google Moon is a great tool for exploring our closest celestial neighbour but there are a few shortcomings with it. Like anything to do with Google, it will only exist as long as Google has the energy and inclination to continue with it. One of the reasons I like to use free software is that under the GPL all the code is released to the world and can never be rescinded. Even if a project is abandoned, it won't ever disappear because hundreds, thousands or millions of people will have the source code. So I'm always looking to alternatives to products like Google Earth (Worldwind for instance) and Google Moon, which is where Virtual Moon Atlas comes in. It's available for Windows, Mac and Linux and is open source. You can use it to explore and discover, but also to say 'take me to the Sea of Tranquility." The other great thing about free software is that anyone (particularly students) can screen capture the software without breaching copyright. Wouldn't it be great for students to use something like RecordMyDesktop to film a virtual tour of the Apollo missions using software like this.

Draftsight: free CAD software

2011-08-30T18:42:00.000-07:00

Good quality ~~open source~~ free CAD software has been difficult to find in the past, but earlier this year 3DS released Draftsight, a product that comes close to industry heavyweight AutoCAD.

"DraftSight is a professional-grade, open 2D CAD product for users who want a better way to create, edit and view DWG files. DraftSight is easy to use and is available for professional CAD users, students and educators to download and activate for free."

It supports DWG files so even if you just want to open AutoCAD files to view, Draftsight can do it.

Maharadroid

2011-08-26T19:11:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Alan McNatty and the great people of Catalyst IT, Myportfolio.school.nz and Mahara users worldwide have the ability to upload images directly to their e-portfolio. Imagine the scenario of a student out in the world seeing and recognising an example of right angle geometry. They whip out their phone, take a photo of it, then upload it to their e-portfolio directly from the phone gallery. It's a great step forward in capturing evidence of learning out in the landscape rather than just in the classroom. Here it is in action:

Sharing is caring

2011-08-22T01:23:00.000-07:00

One of the best things about using open source software at our school is how much it allows us to include students in development. Students built our digital signage system, our video server, our computer power saver system and our social bookmarking site.

When Yahoo said it was going to close Delicious.com I thought two things: i) I could almost hear the howls of outrage across the web, and ii) thankfully my own bookmarks are stored on a system not controlled by a corporation.

We use an open source social bookmarking platform called Pligg that was put together for us by, you guessed it, three of our students. It's hooked into our SAML single sign-on server and provisions new user automatically so there's no on-going maintenance. It supports tagging (as you would imagine), friends, groups, RSS feeds and loads other other features one would expect from social bookmarking. Here's a link to a collection of sites related to one of the topics I teach: The Merchant of Venice.

QR Code Craziness

2011-08-17T19:27:00.000-07:00

After a few exchanges on the MLE discussion group, I kicked myself into action to explore something I've been meaning to play with for a while: QR codes. I've been aware of them for a while, but a few exciting things have crossed my radar recently that have opened my eyes some of the possibilities they hold for learning. The first was this video about Tesco's homestore set up in a Korean subway. Commuters, too busy to visit the supermarket, can scan the QR code of a product on a billboard and have that product delivered to their home.

Cool stuff eh? So I got to thinking, why don't we do the same thing for our school? Instead of QR codes for food and household items, why don't we link the code to apps related to learning in the Android Market? Y'know, nourish the brain rather than our desires to eat processed food? I threw a few screenshots and QR codes into Gimp and knocked up this poster which is now on noticeboards around the school:

Students can scan the code of an app they like (algebra quiz, Spanish vocab, periodic table, e-portfolio uploader etc.) and be taken directly to the market so they can download it. It's difficult to make out, but down at the bottom of the page is a QR code to connect to the school wireless. Scanning the code connects a user to the wireless network (including a password if necessary) and opens a browser and prompts them to enter their username and password before heading out to the internet. QR code craziness!

More useful resources:

Edit:

For the people who have been asking for it, here's the youtube video of the poster in action:

Six steps to rock and roll greatness*

2011-08-16T19:09:00.000-07:00

Find a phone, and piece of paper and a marker pen.
Take the marker pen and draw a keyboard on the piece of paper.
Position the phone so the camera can see your keyboard.
Turn on the Piano Reality AR app
Bang out a melody on your portable, paper piano.
Practice dodging the paparazzi.

*May require some talent.

Video conversion tools

2011-08-12T17:41:00.000-07:00

My knowledge of video types and codecs has been hard-fought. I'm certainly no expert but I do know my containers from my bitrates and my framerates. Sadly it's not always easy for people to quickly resize a video or convert from one form to another without knowing more than you need to about variable bitrates or HD. To the rescue come a range of different open source video conversion tools:

Avidemux: gives you the best of both worlds with the ability to control bitrates, codecs, filters and so on, but also has a handy 'Auto > ' feature that automates the creation of video for things like Youtube, iPod, DVD etc.

Arista Transcoder:

PiTiVi: this is a video editor that also supports exporting to a range of different file formats. Easy to use trim feature, transitions and effects and pretty simple export at the end of the process too.

While we're at it, can I also say how impressed I am with Google's open source video codec called webm? Try it for yourself with Arista: convert a large DVD quality file to webm and see what a difference it makes. I've had file size savings of up to 90%.

Open Source Physics: Tracker

2011-08-06T17:08:00.000-07:00

I discovered this neat tool when learning about the physics of Angry Birds. Not only does Tracker identify and track objects frame-by-frame through a video, it also records and graphs this data for you. It comes with quite a few experiments installed and, in the hands of a good Physics teacher, would form the centre of a very interactive unit on motion and movement. I can imagine students the world around grabbing their cellphones to record video of all manner of objects 'bouncing'. Hmmm. Does my glass of chocolate milk fall at the same rate as a bowl of noodles?
It's an easy-to-use tool that allows students to become better askers of questions and designers of experiments instead of becoming better memorisers of someone else's data.

World Wind: Open Source Google Earth?

2011-07-30T15:26:00.000-07:00

World Wind is by no means as full-featured as Google Earth, but if you just want to play Atlas and spin the world around, it's a good option. To install under Linux, look for worldwind in the software channels, but the java version of the software runs on any platform. Best thing about it is that the software is open source and the imagery is not owned and copyrighted by [insert giant corporation here]. There are some nice Java webstart demos here too: http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/java/demos/ showing things like loading .kml files, mapping elevations, annotations, geo-mapped photos, earthquake information etc.

Hold the world in the palm of your hand

2011-07-24T19:58:00.000-07:00

One of the winners at last year's New Zealand Open Source Awards was Ghosts in the Form of Gifts by Bronwyn Holloway-Smith.

This project used Open Source machines - the RepRap - to recreate physical artefacts from Te Papa that had been lost or destroyed over the years. The finished files for the artefacts were released under a Creative Commons licence so that anyone who wished to could create their own exhibits. Most of these represented items of significance to Pacific cultures.

Wouldn't it be great to be able to use public domain 3D models like these with students wherever and whenever we liked? Of course. Enter AndAR, which stands for Android Augmented Reality. This app allows anyone with an Android phone to download 3D model files and, using a black and white printed marker, use Augmented Reality to view and interact with those models. It's hard to explain just how it works, so here's a video, using one of the stock 3D models that come with the app:

See what I mean?
And as Bronwyn has very thoughtfully made her models available under a CC-BY-SA licence, anyone can download a copy of a file and use it within AndAR. So if you need to play around with an adze, a sperm whale tooth or even a giant land snail shell, now you can.

Four cool tools for studying astronomy

2011-06-20T19:12:00.000-07:00

Two of my favourite applications when it comes to studying the stars are Celestia and Stellarium. The former allows one to fly through the solar system following planets, asteroids or satellites, while the latter allows one to place oneself anywhere in the world to watch the constellations travel across the sky above. Stellarium also allows one to pause, fast-forward or rewind time to see what the starts do. There are some very cool videos on youtube that showcase what these two programmes can do:

There is also an increasing number of applications for Android that help people learn more about the night sky while standing in their front yard as well. Google Sky Map is great. If you want to find where Mars is, type in Mars and it will point an arrow in the right direction until you find it (video). Satellite AR is something I've only just discovered but it is no less impressive. It uses augmented reality to overlay the night sky with images and trajectories of satellites passing overhead. Here's a demo of it in action:

Wikitude AR

2011-06-13T19:07:00.000-07:00

Okay, so here's something I've been playing with for a while: Wikitude AR. I first discovered it 18 months ago and have been working on integrating it with what we do at Albany Senior High School. It's augmented reality, which revolves around placing information into the landscape. The content is accessible with the use of a smartphone and mashes up GPS, 3G or wifi and a phone's compass. My history class had some fun placing information about the 1951 Waterfront Strike around the waterfront in Auckland. If you're interested in learning more, you can go there, and with the help of Wikitude AR learn as much as you like. Because the content is wiki-based and placed into the landscape, the only limit is a teacher's (or a class's) imagination. Here's a video of Wikitude AR being used around the Waitemata Harbour:
P.S. the bird you can hear calling in the video is the pukeko; a tenacious Aotearoa wading bird.

Open mobile learning

2011-05-28T18:25:00.001-07:00

I'm totally convinced about a couple of things regarding mobile phones: that I can't be without mine for very long before suffering withdrawal symptoms, and they are going to be the main way we access learning within a few years. As a result I've decided I'm going to be blogging a bit more about mobile devices and their uses within schools as we explore their use more and more. Like most things I prefer free and open (and therefore lean toward Android as an OS) but I can see that the way we use m-learning in future will probably call on the strengths of Android, iOS (and possibly even Windows 7 for Phones). Stay tuned for more info about how ASHS is using mobile phones and tablets.

Digikam: photo management made easy

2011-05-26T19:43:00.000-07:00

I'm a big fan of Picasa. My only quibble with it is that it's not open and is another way for Google to own your ass (or at least all your embarrassing photos). For quite a while I've been looking for a good photo management tool that has powerful batch processing support and I've certainly found one: digikam.

There is quite a list of open source, linux-friendly photo organisers: F-spot, Shotwell etc. but most of them have either no batch processing support or very limited support. Digikam is different and will probably satisfy all of your batch and manage dreams.

It does what it says on the box:

import pictures
organize your collection
view items
edit and enhance
create (slideshows, calendar, print, ...)
share your creations (using social web services, email, your own web gallery, ...)

Software when you need it most

2011-04-10T16:34:00.000-07:00

I spent some time last week with a leader from one of the many schools devastated by the earthquake in Christchurch New Zealand, and he raised a really good point about access to learning tools. He pointed out that not only are many Christchurch (or Japan's) schools' servers, laptops and desktops locked away in buildings that are too dangerous to enter, so too are all their software licences. One of the many tragedies of the earthquake is that if a school has 5 licences for a piece of software, and that software is for lost or permananetly inaccessible to staff and students, the school has very few choices but to pay for more licences or not use the software. I'm sure some insurance companies or software vendors would be able to provide replacement licences in cases of demonstrable hardship, but timeliness is the key. Staff and students have been without digital learning tools since the quake on 22nd February, and can't afford to wait for paperwork to be completed. Using software that is free to install on any computer a student has access to gets around this problem and helps us take one further step towards any-where, any-time, any-device learning. Not only can students use digital tools outside of school hours in places physically distant from the school, they can also continue learning in times of crisis.

Fast contact sheets for photos

2011-04-07T18:30:00.000-07:00

Fast post this one: if you want to print contact sheets of a whole bunch of photos, do it using GQView. You can customise every aspect of the print job, from the labels printed underneath each image to the layout and rotation of thumbnails.

The story of Linux video

2011-04-06T15:14:00.001-07:00

This is a great little 'RSA animates' style video that runs through the history of Linux. A really nice exercise in reducing a complex topic to something easy to digest.
"You use linux literally every time you surf the internet. It's in your phone. It's in your TV. Running 95% of supercomputers." Bless that little penguin.

Use the forks Luke!

2011-04-05T19:58:00.000-07:00

Luke Skywalker: These chopsticks are driving me nuts!
Darth Vader: Use the forks Luke, use the forks.

A few big forks in the open source world: OpenOffice.org has become LibreOffice and Open Solaris has become Open Indiana. I've installed Libreoffice and have been quite impressed with it. For one thing, mail merges work perfectly (something I've always struggled with in Open Office) as well as a few other nice touches.
But perhaps the most interesting thing about these forks is that their presence reminds us that no large company can ever control an open source project. As soon as Oracle began putting noses out of joint over their handling of Sun's open source assets, the community just up and left, taking its goodwill with it. A cautionary tale for quite a few companies I would have thought.

Music composition and notation

2011-03-25T18:14:00.000-07:00

While I'm tone deaf and struggle to hold a note, I do appreciate well-composed, beautiful music. In the past the only high-end music composition package I've been aware of has been Sibelius, but at more than NZ$1000 a seat it's too expensive to have large groups of students discovering if they are the next Douglas Lilburn or Dave Dobbyn or not. Even if the school could afford it, shelling out another NZ$1000 to be able to tinker at home in the basement is just too much of a barrier for most students. Which is why I'm thrilled to have discovered Musescore. It's open source, multi-platform and powerful enough to meet the needs of even the most intricate of compositions. What did we do with the money we saved in software licences? We bought 18 new desktop computers to allow even more students to see if they've got a gift for song-writing.
...and as with most open source projects, free software means a large user base and a large community offering support and producing help documentation. Here's Musescore in 10 easy steps.

NZ Open Source Awards

2010-12-03T10:24:00.000-08:00

We had some great news last month: our school picked up the award for the best open source project in education at the NZ Open Source Awards. It was a real honour to accept the award on behalf of everyone who has been part of the project.

My keynote address from the awards ceremony has been getting a bit of press at the moment so I thought I would link to the video of the speech so others can hear it for themselves:

Google Demo Slam

2010-10-31T00:27:00.001-07:00

Here are a few cool videos. Google has set up the 'Demo Slam' to try to encourage people to share what their technology is capable of. Take something interesting your phone or browser can do, make an interesting video and try to beat others.
Fooling Google Goggles into thinking your head is Mt Rushmore:

..and playing Chubby Bunny with Google Voice search and marshmallows:

Sintel: a tale of dragons and freedom

2010-10-30T16:42:00.001-07:00

I've just downloaded and watched a copy of the animated short film Sintel. It's a cool little story with an even cooler back-story: it was made by the Durian Open Movie Project using open source 3D modelling application Blender 3D. There's a YouTube copy below, but if you can, download an HD version (legally) using BitTorrent; put it through a good stereo (or plug in your headphones) and enjoy. It's 3D animation like you have never seen before. Best of all, it's released under a Creative Commons licence, so feel free to share it with your friends.
BitTorrent downloads here: http://www.sintel.org/wp-content/content/download.html

Sintel - Third Open Movie by Blender Foundation

Great interview with the creator of Moodle

2010-10-29T01:21:00.001-07:00

The original designer of Moodle. He's a genius.

Quoting:
"When designing Moodle, I wanted a set of values that could act as a compass:

everyone should be a teacher as well as a learner
if you understand the context of a person, you are able to teach them better.
a learning environment should be flexible; as you learn more about the people in it, you're able to change it
learn by doing and constructing and learn by engagement"

It's so refreshing to hear such solid learning theory from a software developer.
http://vimeo.com/15933942

Starting over

2010-10-10T19:38:00.000-07:00

I'm in Christchurch for the ULearn10 conference, and if you haven't heard about it, this region of New Zealand suffered a serious earthquake a month ago. The damage was severe, with a large number of buildings being demolished. It was really heartening to hear that one response to this catastrophic event has been the convening of a group of architects getting together to make the most of the new opportunities
It got me thinking about the Global Financial Crisis and what we as educators are doing in response to this catastrophic event. The budget cuts are pretty severe across the board and one thing is clear: we couldn't afford our e-learning spending before the GFC, and we can certainly afford it less now. Here's the problem we have: we want our students to have better, faster, more powerful software and systems, and there's less and less money to buy them. So what will we do about it? We either give up on the dream or we do things differently. What are you doing differently?

ULearn 2010 kicks off

2010-10-05T19:33:00.000-07:00

I'm in Christchurch for Ulearn10, catching up with a lot of people and having my brain stretched in new and interesting ways. Here's a pic from the opening keynote showing how wonderfully diverse the audience is. Can you see the three screens in this shot? There's Ubuntu Linux, Windows XP and iOS on an iPad. (Size is relative to level of coolness ;-)

Another open source school

2010-09-08T01:13:00.000-07:00

Here's a great story: The Open High School of Utah. Not only do they using open source software, they also use open courseware. All of their courses are released as Moodle packages under a creative commons licence at the end of each year, covering both sides of the free tools and free content equation. One of the drivers behind this project is David Wiley whose TEDx talk is inspirational. One of the teachers at this school says "I can't imagine going back to copyrighted material after using open source". I know what she means.

Free software for kids

2010-09-02T14:39:00.001-07:00

I've just been talking to an educator in the United States about free software for younger primary/elementary aged students. I fired off this list of projects that others might find useful:

http://edu.kde.org/ A project to develop free software for younger children. Office suite, paint programme, learning the alphabet, quizzes and games, story writing and animations etc.
http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/ Sugar is the operating system that has emerged out of Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child program. It's free software and runs really well on old/low spec computers. Two notable things about it: i) a graphical operating system designed around the needs of young learners and learners with low levels of literacy (you can learn the fundamentals of computer programming without being able to read for instance), and ii) the applications are called 'activities' and are designed for students to play with. There is a huge range of software available.
http://edubuntu.org/about A version of Ubuntu aimed specifically for schools.
http://wiki.ooo4kids.org/index.php/Main_Page Open Office for kids.

Cool tricks with Openshot video

2010-08-22T19:14:00.000-07:00

I've known about Openshotvideo for a while, but for some reason, I hadn't really put it through its paces. I don't know why, but I didn't think it was very full featured. How wrong I was!!! I spent a couple of hours in the weekend playing with Openshot and found it very intuitive and full-featured: titles, effects, transitions, even chroma keying is easy to use straight out of the box. I've put the video below together from footage of my little son William. Note the 'four square' layout that allows picture in picture. I'd love to say that was really difficult and beginners shouldn't really try it, but actually, all you have to do is right click on a clip and choose 'top left' or 'bottom right'. Easy as pie. Something I didn't put into this video was animations; if you want a clip to slide across the screen and out the other side, there's a preset for that too. Clips zooming in and out? One click. In fact, the only thing lacking from Openshotvideo is support for free video codecs (ogv in particular). It was a bit of a shame that using open software, my own footage and Creative Commons licenced music, I had to export to a proprietary video format. But hey, I'm not complaining: Openshot video is my new best friend.

William aged 1-6 mths from Mark Osborne on Vimeo.

...and sometimes good teaching doesn't need much technology

2010-08-22T12:35:00.000-07:00

A wonderful video about how inspiring teachers can change young lives:

Exciting Mahara news

2010-08-18T11:13:00.001-07:00

Out this week from the Mahara community: two new features that should prove extremely popular with e-portfolio users:

Collections: a handy way of grouping a number of pages together and providing a way of navigating through them. Think of having three separate pages for the different phases of a project: proposal, progress and product. Or of having a different view for each subject you are learning. Collections are also a way to give the same access to a number of views at once.
Plans: "Plans are essentially task lists that allow you to formulate a goal (the plan) and spell out the individual steps (the tasks) you need to take – optionally by a certain date – to reach your goal."

Both of these features our school could start using tomorrow- really exciting news. Well done the Mahara community, and thanks to Birmingham City University for sponsoring the work.

...and now Oracle's doing it.

2010-08-13T01:51:00.000-07:00

News today that Oracle is suing Google over its use of Java in the Android operating system. Possibly something to do with the fact that Google has surpassed Apple in phone os market share. You might have guessed that I'm pretty cynical about this: software patents are simply another revenue stream.
The interweb's running hot with some pretty angry anti-Oracle feeling at the moment...

Apple patents the work of others

2010-08-12T00:00:00.000-07:00

A cautionary tale: Ortwin Gentz is a software developer whose company Futuretap has been extremely successful building apps for iPhone and iPad. Imagine Ortwin's surprise when he discovered that the company that has allowed him to earn a living has actually patented part of his work. A screenshot of Ortwin's 'Whereto' app actually features in Apple's patent claim.

It strikes me that there are two bad things here: i) software patents in themselves, and ii) any one company controlling a lot of the technology we use. If this were ever to happen on the Android platform, consumers would be free to go elsewhere. Not so with Apple.

The Big Blue Button- free webinar platform

2010-07-28T14:31:00.001-07:00

Hat tip to Don Christie for bringing this to my attention: http://bigbluebutton.org/overview
The big blue button is a collection of 14 different open source tools that allow teachers and learners to collaborate in online classes. It features video and audio conferencing, application sharing and chat. From what I've seen, it's absolutely amazing. I'll get some of our students to install it so we can have a play.

The iPad launches today in NZ

2010-07-22T15:55:00.000-07:00

This just in: Apple unveils a new feature in its stores: The Friend Bar.

New Apple Friend Bar Gives Customers Someone To Talk At About Mac Products

While a lot of people are buzzing about this device being the next big thing, I'm a bit more hesitant. As Tim Lee says, moving to more of a closed, locked down operating system, seems to go against the current trends in computing. (RMS calls it the iBad).
I still prefer the Dell Streak for the fact that it runs Android.

Moodle 2.0 - conditional activities

2010-07-10T13:15:00.000-07:00

Moodle 2.0 has been a long time coming: it's been two years in development, 70% of the code has been re-written and some great new features have been added.
One of the most transformational is what they're calling 'conditional activities'. There has been a bit of debate over whether conditional activities should be added to Moodle because some believe that every student should have access to all learning activities at all times (a viewpoint that has considerable merit) but I'm in favour of conditional activities because it gives educators the ability to reconfigure the learning management system depending on the needs of the learner. In short: Moodle becomes a personalised learning environment.
Image a situation whereby a student gets 100% in the diagnostic assessment at the start of a unit of work, while another gets 20%. These two students need dramatically different pathways through the topic ahead, but traditionally they have had the same materials available to them from this point on. Using conditional activities, a teacher could say "If a student receives 80% or higher in this quiz, then reveal to them these further activities, but if a student receives 20% or lower, allow them to see these activities..." Teachers can set any criteria they like around turning these activities on or off, but used well, this has the power to put the right learning activity in front of the right learner at just the right time. I can't wait to start using them with my students...

Stop motion animation with Luciole

2010-07-04T23:35:00.000-07:00

A couple of students came to me recently to explain that they needed help with (what appeared to be) a really complicated process for creating stop-motion animations. They were doing something in Photoshop with some proprietary plugin that could only run on a particular computer, and were unable to bring that computer to school. It got me thinking: the process of creating stop-motion animation is not complicated, so surely there must be some easy-to-use software out there for creating animations. The short answer is: there is.
I installed Luciole from the Ubuntu repository (took me 30 seconds to download and install) and it turned my laptop into Peter Jackson's studio. Thankfully it was wet last weekend, so I turned the kitchen table into a brickfilms stage. My first effort was far from interesting (my wife just frowned and shook her head when she saw it) but now I can't wait until my son is old enough to make films with. I'm sure, however, that in the tradition of train sets and meccano, the grown-up will have more fun than the child.
And if that isn't enough to encourage you to try it out, would break dancing plasticine men convince you?

I chose to be a bit less ambitious with my first attempt:

Software patents coming to NZ

2010-06-27T22:56:00.000-07:00

Further to my post last month, it appears the NZ government has done a u-turn on software patents and has decided, in the face of plenty of evidence to the contrary, we need them after all. What I found most surprising is the relative speed with which MP Simon Power did his flip flop. Going against a long and considered select committee process, Power was swayed by a guy who appears to be happy to admit that he doesn't know much about SW patents, and that, in fact, he is "not well informed on the software patents issue - he had his PA prepare his briefing on it."

Nice Linux ad

2010-06-27T22:52:00.000-07:00

Wow. What a busy term. More posts to come, but in the meantime, here's some nice, open eye-candy:

The Origin... from Agustin Eguia on Vimeo.

(Thanks to cyberkiller.)

Software patents

2010-05-16T20:00:00.000-07:00

One of the biggest threats to free and open source software at the moment is the existence of software patents. News came out recently that not only is Apple suing HTC over its smartphones, but Steve Jobs also has his eyes on the brilliant open source video format Ogg Theora. Essentially what companies like Apple want is for everyone in the computing world to use the product they developed and to pay them a royalty for the privilege of using them. Clearly community-owned assets like open source software gets in the way of this kind of monopoly. Software patents are anti-competitive and unethical for a number of reasons, including:

They are designed to protect an individual's or an individual company's 'intellectual property'. It's not designed to protect public ownership of things.
They are designed to protect incumbents. Companies with good lawyers and deep pockets are collecting patents on just about everything to do with computing at the moment. If young, innovative companies want to make any progress in this kind of market, they have to sell their soul to incumbents before they begin.
They make lawyers wealthy at the expense of entrepreneurs.

...and if a company like Microsoft can patent something like the double click, we might as well all get out of computing before we all get sued.

Jokosher: multi-track music composition

2010-05-12T16:38:00.000-07:00

Now, I don't know the first thing about music composition, but I do know that even I could pull something passable together using software like this. Jokosher is only in 0.11 release, but already it's a very usable, powerful multi-track authoring studio. From http://www.jokosher.org/:

"Jokosher is a simple and powerful multi-track studio. Jokosher provides a complete application for recording, editing, mixing and exporting audio, and has been specifically designed with usability in mind. The developers behind Jokosher have re-thought audio production at every level, and created something devilishly simple to use."

For an overview of what it can do, check out these screenshots.