Edtechcc Assignment 1: Signs & Symbols January 22, 2012
Posted by ianinsheffield in edtechcc, Musings.Tags: #edtechcc, assignment, edtechcca1, signs, symbols
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Our first assignment has been released:
Make two signs or symbols using a graphics tool of your choice. The first sign should be for your own department or course, the second sign should be for another educational department or course.
cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo by E-nat: http://flickr.com/photos/einat/27945283/
Well OK it was four days ago now, but that delaying my start has helped I think. I wanted to get started straight away and had some initial ideas – I tend to think things through in my head, do some mental processing, decide on a starting point, then begin. So it was interesting and informative to see how others, especially those for whom design is a more integral part of their lives, set about a task like this. The ‘head work’ I do seems to be done on paper, perhaps preceded by research, in order to scope possible routes forward, whilst taking into account the different demands of the brief. So I thought I’d give it a shot.
The first thing I found is that some people distinguish between signs and symbols. Signs tend to be literal representations for which there is a commonly accepted interpretation. Although symbols may do this too, they invariably contain deeper, more complex meanings open to personal interpretation. With that in mind, I started mooching through the Google Image search results for signs & symbols, and blow me, if I didn’t start looking at the images with a far more critical eye. What exactly were these images trying to represent and how much was open to different interpretations … and what influences would these findings have on my design? I started wondering whether what we see when approaching the gents is a sign (yes probably) and about the history of the circle with vertical dash that now represents on/off … and is that a sign or symbol?
Time to get started then. My own ‘department’ isn’t actually an educational subject or faculty; we’re on the non-teaching side. Whether that will affect people’s interpretation of my sign, I’m not sure. I elected to use Aviary Raven. I’ve been aware of Aviary for quite some time, but have only really made use of Talon (screen capture) and Falcon (image markup), so this assignment provided the ideal impetus to get me started. The interface proved simple and crisp, and there were enough features to get the job done to an acceptable standard, but as someone who has used vector-based applications in the past, I felt there were one or two significant omissions. No grid, so no snap to grid (the guidelines didn’t quite make up for that), no capability to ‘group’ objects (that’s pretty much a fundamental!) and you could only delete by right-clickingan object and choosing Remove (the delete keyboard key has no effect). So whilst Raven got the job done, I didn’t find it particularly productive … balanced against that are it’s online and therefore accessible (in theory) from any PC and of course, it’s free!
So here’s my efforts (I suspect you may find the second easier than the first!):
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- Edtechcca1 – my department
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- Edtechcca1 – another department
What have I learned?
- There is a distinction between signs and symbols and that this is a far more complex and interesting area than I first imagined.
- To look at signs and symbols and what they represent with a far more analytical eye.
- That there is much more to the design process than I could ever have imagined.
- A little more facility in the use of Aviary Raven and an awareness of some of its limitations as a vector editor.
- My analytical muscles are definitely more ‘ripped’ than my creative ones, so edtecchcc will be providing my creative workout sessions.
Educational Technology Creative Collective – Preliminary Task January 8, 2012
Posted by ianinsheffield in edtechcc, Musings.Tags: #edtechcc, #edtechccp1
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This then is the first post in a series of contributions as participation in the Educational Technology Creative Collective. Initiated by Colin Maxwell, this project
is a collaboration of educators investigating and experimenting with digital technologies to enhance education.
cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo by v i p e z: http://flickr.com/photos/vipez/4179099662/
It’s about exploring creativity and sharing those experiences within a community of like-minded educators. That appeals to me in a number of ways. Despite advancing years, I seem to be gaining an increasing thirst for learning and I believe that’s best undertaken socially, within a supportive environment, yet at times and in places to suit the learner. That might be in the evening on the sofa with a glass of light refreshment, in the morning on the bus on the way to work or sitting around a table (in a cafe/pub?) at or after a conference/meeting. Or indeed whilst out cycling! It’s only in recent years that all those opportunities have become fulfilled through the new technologies which have become available.
I’m always scanning for interesting applications which offer new potential as learning tools; a part of my job which I thoroughly enjoy. I guess it’s the seeking and finding, exploring and testing, communicating and sharing. Hopefully Edtechcc will offer the chance to do that with others and therefore enjoy a richer and deeper learning experience as a consequence.
There’s a little more information on the ‘About Me’ and ‘My Digital Tracks’ pages – the LinkedIn account gives a potted history.
Looking forward to enjoying our connections 
It’s at a Premium January 4, 2012
Posted by ianinsheffield in Management, research.Tags: attainment, learning, pupil premium, research, sutton trust, toolkit
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The Pupil Premium is one way in which the Government is attempting to address educational inequality.
We know a good education is the key to improving young people’s life chances, to enable them to progress into adulthood with the skills and confidence for success. The Pupil Premium will provide schools with the resources with which to address inequalities in the system and raise the attainment of those pupils from low income families.
I was having a look through the Pupil Premium Toolkit, commissioned by the Sutton Trust, which seeks to guide “teachers and schools on how best to use the Pupil Premium to improve the attainment of disadvantaged pupils.” By reviewing educational research, the toolkit compares different strategies used to improve pupil attainment (Assessment for Learning, One-to-one tutoring etc); exploring impact, cost and the strength of the evidence. You’ll see from either the online version or the downloadable PDF, that the information on each intervention is presented first in a summary, then subsequently in more detailed form.
I got to wondering which approaches might be most cost-effective in terms of greatest gain per £ – not a difficult calculation to do and mere moments of effort to produce a spreadsheet. But then I thought how we might also factor in the strength of the evidence; after all would it be wise to spend money on an approach producing a high attainment gain per £ if the evidence which suggested that approach isn’t quite so robust?
Which all led me to this bubble chart:
cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo by ianguest: http://flickr.com/photos/ianinsheffield/6636953349/
Gain in attainment on the horizontal axis, cost on the vertical and width of bubble indicating the strength of the research which produced the findings. So the sweet spot is the bottom right-hand quadrant where we get high gains for low (moderate?) cost. And what do we see? Providing effective feedback, meta-cognitive strategies, peer tutoring and homework (?!) all figure prominently. Sadly, ICT only produces moderate gains and at a high cost … but there’s a whole other post could come from that!
Does that reflect your day-to-day experience though?
No, I’ve not had a good Xmas … and it’s John McLear’s fault! December 29, 2011
Posted by ianinsheffield in Musings, Reading, research.Tags: alfie kohn, book, ict quests, Punished by rewards, rewards
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It’s John McLear’s fault for unsettling me over the Christmas break. It was he who suggested I ought to read Alfie Kohn’s book “Punished by Rewards” as he felt it might inform the work I was doing towards ICT Quests. The subtitle gives you a clue as to the basic premise of Kohn’s thesis – “The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes.” In essence that much of what we do to reward, incentivise, celebrate and acknowledge the achievements of our students, actually has a detrimental effect in terms of student learning and their commitment to good values. A rewards-based system promotes extrinsic motivation or ‘Do this and you’ll get that’, the result being that much of what students do is geared towards and directed by those rewards. The question then arises’ what happens when those rewards are no longer available for whatever reason? Maybe they move into a higher year group where gold stickers are no longer appropriate, maybe they have a new teacher from whom praise is less forthcoming or they leave formal education and no longer have grade’s to strive for. Furthermore, that providing rewards has been shown to stifle creativity and problem solving capacity and discourage risk-taking.
The key is doing all we can to nurture intrinsic motivation where students have a genuine interest in their endeavours, relish challenges and display greater innovativeness. We want students to want to learn, rather than wanting to be rewarded for their learning. A student choosing to produce a piece of artwork and work at it out of class of his own volition or solving a maths problem she read in a newspaper because it’s challenged her thinking, is far more important than a student aiming to get an ‘A’ for a piece of coursework … or avoid getting an ‘F.’ When the grade becomes the significant element, then shortcuts are taken to achieve that grade, paths of least resistance (and lower challenge) become preferable and interesting diversions will be ignored – “Will this be on the test miss?” To get students engrossed in their learning, it is far more effective to encourage them to think about what they are doing, rather than how wellthey are doing compared with everyone else.
cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo by DavidDMuir: http://flickr.com/photos/daviddmuir/583377693/
Oh dear! Not only have several of the behaviours I exhibited as a teacher been shown to be rather less than beneficial, but the ICT Quests model I’m working on might be fatally flawed, linked as it is to a badge-based ‘rewards’ system (Thanks for pointing that out John!). So have I dropped a clanger by devising a system in which completing each step in a sequence of tasks results in the ‘reward’ of a badge. Well, maybe; I’d certainly be interested to hear what Alfie thinks! But I’m going to say no for four reasons:
- Students will be undertaking the ICT Quests as a result of their own interest or desire, not through any element of compulsion. They will be in control; they will make the choice to opt in.
- They will also have choice of the level to which they wish to progress and to some degree, choice in what they produce for the output from the tasks.
- The intention is that the badges needn’t be perceived as rewards. They are more correctly seen as markers; indicators to other people of the range of skills possessed by the student displaying those badges – a ‘can-do profile’ if you will.
- Badges won’t be awarded with a ‘well done’ pat on the back. They are merely indicators showing that a set of criteria have been met.
Well they’re the intentions at any rate, though there will clearly need to be some work done as the project is rolled out to achieve a common understanding with participants … given the rewards and achievement based culture within which we come together. (And I’m now going to be looking in far more detail at the positive AND negative effects of leaderboards before I include them)
I think Mark Twain pretty much had it nailed when he had Tom whitewashing the fence.
[If you want a brief overview, here's a PDF of an interview in which Alfie Kohn discusses the underlying themes in 'Punished...']
Looks like I picked the wrong year to … start a 365 project! December 20, 2011
Posted by ianinsheffield in Inspiration, Tools, Web 2.0.Tags: 365, project, SAMR, tools, Web2.0
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cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo by erg0: http://flickr.com/photos/erg0/5378263638/
As the New Year appears on the horizon, I watch people planning their 365 projects with a degree of envy, but a recognition that I’d be unlikely to sustain a photo a day for a whole year. I’d probably run out of steam or inspiration long before even January drew to a close.
And yet I still have a hankering to undertake a serious year-long project. But who says 365 projects have to be about photography? Might it be possible to have a crack at a 365 project with a completely different theme? Well for my 365 project, I make the rules and I decided the answer would be ‘Yes’ … and the theme would be Web 2.0 tools. Given the thousands that are out there, how hard can it possibly be to find just 365? Well OK, it is a leap year, so that’s just made it a little bit harder, but I’ll live with that.
Rather than just picking tools at random, I’ve already done the hard work of searching out the ones I thought might best suit our learning/school-based needs. You might like to speculate which ones made the cut. I first thought I might present them thematically; a week of presentation tools, then a week of something else. But in the end decided to add a little frisson of anticipation by simply launching them alphabetically! I’ll still be tagging them thematically however, so as the year progresses (assuming and hoping I have the stamina!), viewers will be able to filter those of particular interest.
Adding a few lines of descriptive or explanatory text would have been a little too easy, so since I’m less at ease in the oral medium, I’ve opted to push myself a little harder by producing a mini-podcast outlining what each tool offers. With that in mind, I also wanted to add one more layer to each post, in which I would offer a notional idea of the level of demand or learning complexity of each tool. At first I considered trying to assign each tool to a particular level on Bloom’s taxonomy, but that just didn’t seem right; I felt the level on Bloom’s is more related to the task being undertaken than the tool being used. As Silvia Tolisano observed with iPad apps, tools can be used in different ways at different times, so a tool’s position is likely to be somewhat fluid. In the end, having recently begun to read more about Ruben Puentedura’s SAMR model, it seemed to lend itself more closely to how I wanted to classify the different tools.
Moreover, regular inspection and application of a framework is surely more likely to lead to greater understanding?
Assuming that each tool could work at least the ‘Substitution’ level, my task then would be to establish what further affordances might enable it to work at higher levels. So for each tool, I’ll offer a tentative level, but hope that folks might challenge my thinking, suggesting how they think a particular tool works at a different level.
Given that each daily post will mash together different resources, Posterous seemed the easiest tool to facilitate that, so you’ll find it’s all happening at 366 Web 2.0 Tools … well, OK not quite yet, but at least there’s a page of introduction and links to some of the sources I drew on. Roll on January 1st!
