Over the past few months I have been working to create a new open source project: Gibbon. At the risk of neglecting this blog and other projects, I have been putting in many, many hours to create a system which allows schools to better manage their data. Whilst there are plenty of commercial systems that do this, I wanted to create something that I could alter, and that other people might help me build. The aim of the system is to bring students, staff and parents together in understanding through the use of shared data. This takes the form of student demographic data, attendance, marks, units of work and lesson plans, which is mostly complete for students and staff. In the coming weeks I hope to add in more functionality, such as timetabling and the parent interface.
Tag Archives: development
Thoughts on Technology
As I develop as a teacher, I am constantly wrestling with ideas relating of technology, such as “what is technology?”, “is technology doing us any good?” and “how should we teach with and about technology?”. Here are some of my recent thoughts.
In 1980 Alan Kay (of Xerox PARC fame) said “Technology is anything that wasn’t around when you were born”, which neatly sums up one of our interesting, common traits as human beings: we are so good at adapting to change, that we don’t realise things have not always been as they are now. We take the level of technology at our birth as a baseline, a given, and only really consider new developments as anything special. As an ICT teacher I am particularly prone to doing this: I assume that technology=computer, when in fact almost everything we engage with every day represents technology (think clothes, paper, pencils, tarmac, cement, wheels). I am sure almost all school children do exactly the same thing.
Yesterday my wife showed me the following statement on the Candlebark School technology page:
It is important for us to remain in control of our own lives. But at the same time it’s good to look forwards, to investigate new technologies, to evaluate whether they will enhance our society. Teaching technology is not just about teaching the use of computers. It is also about microwaves, vacuum cleaners, bicycles, gameboys, chainsaws, telephones and cars.
But it is also about values.
We want students who leave here at the end of their secondary education to be able to ride bicycles and motorbikes, maintain and service bicycles and cars, use a vacuum cleaner effectively, shop for, prepare, cook, serve, and clear up after quite sophisticated meals, use a computer to do research on the internet or word processing or play games, maintain and operate chainsaws and lawnmowers, burn a DVD or download music from the net, use a sewing machine and a washing machine, use pumps and whipper snippers…
Students should be comfortable and confident with technology, but able to tell the difference, in terms of values and moral worth, between an automatic climate-control device for propagating seedlings, and a battery powered tooth flosser.
To me, this sums up an elegant, sensible and complete approach to technology in education, and it has given me much food for thought. As we move more and more to knowledge-based work, it is vital that we do not forget the many layers of technology that allow us to engage in worldwide, lightening-quick electronic communication and information manipulation. I think it is vital for students to be hands on, in terms of making, taking apart and tinkering with all sorts of technological hardware. As noted by Gever Tulley and his Tinkering School this kind of activity (and especially the “dangerous” stuff) has many educational benefits, such as improved confidence, common sense and risk assessment.
Next I need to start thinking how I can can turn my evolving vision into classroom practice.
Scrolllooper
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/162030/
Scrolllooper is a Firefox Addon that I created to allow automatic page scrolling in an infinite loop. This addon was designed to allow a web page to be displayed in public on a large screen. The aim of the addon is simply to automatically scroll to the bottom of the page, and then jump back to the top. The scrolling speed is variable and can be defined in the Preference pane.
The motivation for creating this addon was two-fold: firstly, someone needed this exact functionality, and it did not seem to be available elsewhere; secondly, I was curious as to how exactly addons were put together. In total, it took about 12 hours of work from start (no idea) to finish (addon available on Mozilla addon website), and of course this included many wrong turns and dead ends. Oddly, this was the only case I can ever recall where Google failed to help me find any really useful information on how to proceed. Initially I tried to follow a number of different guides, but they all seemed to be out of date, incomplete or incomprehensible (especially those relating to JavaScript). In the end, I proceeded by using an online generator, some disparate documentation, preexisting addons (open source is handy) and plenty of trial and error. Right when I got to the final stages, I discovered two rich sources of information, which I would recommend as great starting points:
- Addon Builder at the Firefox Addon Developer Hub – this page provides a customised starter-kit for addon developers, which acts as a springboard, taking a lot of fiddling out of the early stages of development. The site also contains plenty of documentation. I wish I had had this at the outset.
- XUL Documentation at the Mozilla Developer Center – XUL is Mozilla’s XML based language for defining application interfaces: this is useful when tailoring the Firefox interface to meet your needs. The API provided here seems very thorough and well organised.
Having been through the process of creating an addon, I think there is plenty of educational potential in this process. With proper guidance, there is no reason why senior students should not be able to create and distribute their own Firefox Addons. This would provide a fantastic and realistic introduction to the wide world of open source software, with combination of integrated technologies (XML, JavaScript, CSS) providing a reasonable challenge.
Gever Tulley on 5 dangerous things for kids
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/gever_tulley_on…
As a parent and a teacher, I am keenly aware of the need to provide children with a safe environment in which to grow up and learn. However, at a certain point, too much safety begins to deny children the opportunities to assess and take risks, to push themselves, and to learn what is and is not safe and acceptable. Children need these experiences to develop confidence, self esteem and common sense. Personally, I feel that by denying children the opportunity to take suitable risks (owning pen knives, hiking, making bike ramps, etc.), we are pushing children to take unacceptable risks (taking drugs, driving under the influence, unprotected sex, etc). In this video, Gever Tulley gives examples of dangerous things we should encourage children to do, for these very reasons. With proper guidance, these activities can really help children to develop a better understand of themselves and the world around them.
Right, I am off to play with fire…it is, after all, educational.
Food For Thought
This is a great poem that sums up the important relationships that exist between parent and teacher, home and school. I saw it on a classroom wall in Sydney today, and it really made me stop and think about the way I teach and how I might be able to involve parents in their children’s education. At current, as a casual teacher, there is not much I can do in this regard, however once I start permanent teaching it will be at the top of my agenda. The thumbnail image chosen for this piece (Piles of Salt by Luca Galuzzi) ties nicely into a theme I keep coming back to: that we are all seperate but neither isolated nor independent (both from our environment and in relation to each other).
I dreamed I stood in a studio
And watched two sculptors there,
The clay they used was a young child’s mind
And they fashioned it with care.One was a teacher; the tools being used
Were books and music and art,
One a parent with a guiding hand
And a gentle, loving heart.
Day after day the teacher toiled
With touch that was deft and sure,
While the parent laboured just as hard
And polished and smoothed it o’er.
When at last their task was done
They were proud of what they had wrought,
For the things they had moulded into the child
Could neither be sold nor bought.
And both agreed they would have failed
If they had worked alone;
For behind the parent stood the school
And behind the teacher, the home.
David Bowen
Thoughts on Being Human
When I was younger I operated to what I held as a strict, innate moral code. I believed I was, by my very nature, a good person. As time has passed I have behaved in different ways, learned new things and been exposed to many more people. This has caused me to realise the fallacy of my earlier beliefs. It seems to me now, that humans are, without passing judgement on any individual, simply base animals. What appears to set us aside from other animals is our development of complex culture, language and society. Obviously this is due to biological differences, but as DNA has shown this represents a relatively small difference. The way I see it now is that our biological differences have, over time, tiny step by tiny step, allowed us to build up a facade of non-animal behaviour. This behaviour is passed from generation to generation, and as such allows us to maintain a continuous history of relatively steady behaviour. Over time we have come to see this behaviour as being innate: something that makes us different (superior) to other species. Cases of humans “raised by animals” show us clearly that a single generation, removed from our societal constructs, reverts with alarming speed to “primitive” state.
If this belief is accurate, then, the most important question we can ask is what are the mechanisms through which society is reproduced from one generation to the next? I would propose that the traditional answers of family and school are at the centre of this issue. Over the last 100 years I would also imagine, certainly in Western Europe and North America, that mass media has largely displaced the Church as a means for social reproduction.
As both a parent and a teacher-to-be, this line of reasoning has really made me pull up and think for a minute. How can I play my part in this continuum of human behaviour? Which aspects do I wish to propagate and which do I wish to subdue? The answers to these questions might have to wait for another time…
Drupal IPT Project
Having completed my first practicum I thought it would be useful to post the major artifact that came out of it: the unit of work plan for the project I ran with my two HSC classes. This complete document details a proejct whereby students in the HSC IPT Preliminary course work in teams to redevelop their school website using the Drupal Content Management System (CMS).
The unit can be downloaded from our here.
The main aims behind this project, derived from and taught through the syllabus outcomes outlined in the unit of work, were are to challenge students with the following aims ideas:
- undertake work that poses a significant challenge;
- work in a situation that is more like industry than school, including;
- engage in independent problem solving;
- work towards developing a functioning system;
- engage in effective time management;
- interact professionally with a “client” (played by the teacher);
- produce effective written communication
- consider their new system from the perspective of its users.
- meet specified syllabus outcomes
Whilst the document plans for 4 weeks of work, it eventually took 6 weeks to deliver the unit, so some modification will most likely be required. Do keep in mind that this was designed to really challenge students at an academically selective school, and so may require customisation for use with other student groups.
The final presentation of student-developed websites showed that students had met many of the expected outcomes, and were, in many cases, capable of producing functioning websites suitable for use by a school. Students provided feedback suggesting that they valued the learning involved in the unit.
Remember, this work is published under a Creative Commons BY-SA license and I encourage anyone interested in it to take it and use it (provided you meet the simple license requirements to attribute the work back to me and to share your resulting work in the same way I have shared mine). Have fun!
Mastery
Having talked about this very same thing (in a more general context) in our psychology tutorial only 2 weeks ago, I thought it was serendipitous that I encounter this article discussing 4 stages in mastery:
- Unconscious incompetence
- Concious incompetence
- Concious competence
- Unconscious competence
Having experienced this progression myself a number of times, I find this concept to be extremely useful in setting expectations when first approaching a new domain.
Wappalyzer
http://wappalyzer.com/
Wappalyzer is a Firefox addon that tells you what, if any, content management system has been used to create the website you are currently viewing. This saves hunting through source code looking for keywords when you find a site you like and wish to learn more about how it was built.
Useful AJAX Auto-Suggest Scripts
http://woork.blogspot.com/2009/02/useful-ajax-auto-suggest-scripts.html
When building a website there is no need to produce each component by hand, from scratch. A far more efficient work is to bring together components developed and made available by others. This site offers scripts for Auto-Suggestion, which can help make the process of completing online forms easier and more consistent.