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November 30, 2007

Kids and Computers

Good to see Charles resuming writing on the blog after some quiet. I've read remarks from Flotoonie and other contributors as well and coincidentally just spent the day - 3 sessions - face to face with Year 8s in a school, showing them certain aspects of MS Word - they had just received their notebooks. Also, looking at my own Year 6 boy, I see heaps of lateral issues in getting achieving a good balance - issues other than sheer hardware and infrastructure ability. Here's an off-the-cuff list.

• Examinations and tests are still hand written. I have had recent feedback from a Uni Law lecturer and a Year 12 teacher - both of them are currently marking papers and they really grimace at a poorly scrawled paper - they are both conscientious teachers and both want their students to do well but a poorly scrawled paper is simply difficult to read - taking twice the time at least to decipher - adding to their rush workload to finish marking by datelines. And more and more students are suffering from poor handwriting because they type rather than write nowadays on their weekly projects. So computer literacy - will that erode their ability to write with their hand or should examinations ultimately be electronically based.
• Kids are not difficult to teach ICT - however, they are very different from adults. Their attention span is very different, their resistance to flipping the screen and playing runescape or reading their email / instant messenger is a lot weaker than adults, during class ICT training. They can smell the end of a weekday, and they also play roles at showing off smartness, affecting dumbness or acting wooden faced. I find procedures that are more 6 steps separate the interested adult from the disinterested one. From my very brief encounter with these kids, I find 3 steps to separate the interested kid from the disinterested kid.
• Kids pick up ideas very quickly but don't mistake that for the mythical super-hero ability to work the computer. After teaching some classes of mixed ages as well as pure adult classes and now, pure kid classes, kids still make the same mistakes as adults. If they haven't been told what Alt+F11 is, they will press the Alt key, the F key and search for the 11 key (there isn't one).
• Holding the attention of an adult isn't the same as for a kid. An obvious example is, that an adult wants to know how to auto-calculate GST in Excel. My Year 6 boy? Showing him how to code an IF...THEN statement in the Sheet_Change Event Procedure in Excel so that when he types 2 and Excel wipes that and replaces that with TWO as the word equivalent - he thinks that's really cool and his mates will do a one up as soon as they figure out how. And no one has taught them how to program VBA.
• Newbie Kids and Adults will trash their machines when they connect to the Web, because they WANT, WANT, WANT for free and they're not likely to sit in boring sessions where they're told in droning voices NOT, NOT, NOT. Now, if you're a retiree and you mess up your PC, you will sooner or later get it fixed. In a school or public use environment, academics and kids use publicly provided equipment from school - they wreck it, some poor IT chappie gets it fixed or Helpdesk gets an earful. "And oh, can you fix it like Yesterday, I mean, I've got a paper due, like in 5 mins". If you leave their OS untampered, they wreck it and you have endless sessions restoring or wiping their OS. If you employ draconian software lockdowns, you eliminate some genuinely useful software and stop them from learning, creating their stuff - you inhibit them. Linux vs Windows is not the issue - I am quite able to wreck Linux as well as I can wreck Windows if I go to town with Linux and operate it as I would Windows. Linux is a fortress because you do lock it down.
• Learning by osmosis complements but does not replace formal training of principles and approaches. One obviously vocal young chappie told me that they had been using Microsoft Word since primary school. Yes, this generation of kids have. But they had been learning by osmosis, they didn't know the difference between Tabs and Spaces, between pressing the Enter key lots of times to make an automatic page break and pressing Ctrl+Enter to force a manual page break and the significance of the two. They don't need, yet, to be taught how to make a Table of Contents or a Concordance Index (after all, they're only Year 8) but they do need to be taught the aspects of Word Outlining, how Outlining improves their approach to Structured Documents and their thinking.  In fact, they should have been taught Outlining in Year 5 along with the de rigeur de Bono's Thinking Hats.
• They don't need really, to be formally walked through the Drawing Toolbar but they should be shown that it's there (many of them had discovered that already and it's soooo yesterday. But who makes up the syllabus? Well one of us boring adults.

"All Ahead, Mr. Sulu, Warp 6, Engage!"

Posted by Anandasim at 10:13 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 29, 2007

Brendan Nelson: Liberal self-loathing?

Correct us if we're misreading this, but the only way to understand the decision of our erstwhile leaders, the Liberal Party, to appoint Brendan Nelson as its leader, surely is as some manifestation of the Freudian death wish.

Even watching our former Minister for Buying Stuff, and let's see now, Education, Science and Self-Promotion on TV, we feel an unaccountable urge to get up and check the silverware. Which could of course be one possible explanation: what we view as Nelson's baggage, his recent performance on education - as Sydney University's vice-chancellor, Professor Gavin Brown, put it, "an example of ambition overriding principle" - the Liberals view as an essential qualification for the job.

Or do they feel Australians will quickly find themselves yearning for another Lying Rodent?

Posted by cw at 12:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Kids need computers ... but ... is $1 billion enough?

We're getting the impression that while we're still in Heaven with Kevin in 07, and believe that his plan to provide access to a computer at school for every student in Years 9-12 is a jolly good idea, we're wondering if $1 billion is going to be enough.

The comments on Anandasim's post suggest the key word is "access". If they're going to be much use to the kids, those computers will have to have fast, reliable access to the Internet, which Labor does seem to have anticipated. What seems less clear is whether Rudd has paid due attention to the capacity of the current system to cope with what will be an abrupt release of the tectonic forces built up by the previous Government's neglect, to say nothing of the enormity of the task of maintaining and policing those new computers. (And will they run Windows we wonder, or Linux, or possibly even Macs?)

Julie Bishop's comment during the campaign - "I visit schools all across Australia and I'm yet to see a school that is not well served with computers" - makes us shake our head with wonderment that she is being seriously considered as the Libs' deputy leader. There's something about her expression that suggests to us that a critical part of her intelligence frequently slips away for a quick fag and a cup of tea. It seems to us that in the past, computers have been deployed in schools in roughly the same way and with the same intent as Potemkin built villages.

The task the Rudd Government faces seems to be well illustrated by the comment from "Flotoonie", which we'll quote at length here, because it might otherwise be overlooked:

"My school (1500) currently has a series (three) of computer classrooms with approximately 28 computers in each. Also around the school in particular buildings are pods of computers with 8-15 computers in each pod. It is impossible to book the computer rooms because subjects reliant on computers - like business, acounting, CADD, etc - have first preference. Booking a pod is a frustrating exercise and only for the quick at the start of each term.

"So any influx of computers to be housed by the school is going to be very welcome but will also need some serious infrastructure support such as networking, cabling, maintenance, repairs from vandalism and general use, professional development, a major increase in bandwidth etc. The internet at my school moves at a crawl at the best of times. In one 70 minute lesson I was only able to open 8 webpages in total.

"Then the nature of teenagers is going to be an issue. I have to prowl the computer room to keep students on task. Given any opportunity students will install dodgy programs, viruses, watch videos, play music, try to locate porn, and indulge in the main offender - games. Let me just say that Flash games are a teacher'ś worst enemy in the computer rooms. It is all well and good for someone to say computers are necessary for a valuable education but most teenagers don´t care or realise the importance of their education. At least two computers are vandalised or have parts stolen from them every week.

"It is not a minority of students either that don´t value their education or access to computers. If I put kids in a pod I have to move from the classroom to the pod and back again endlessly. Every trip to the pod I catch or suspect a student has been playing a game. So many students know the keyboard commands to not only minimise the application but to exit completely. We teachers have come to know the vacant stare of a gamer well.

"This leads me to my next point. It is hard to keep up with these kids and their knowledge of technology. Many of the teachers in my school use their notebooks to send and receive email and little more. Most don´t know how to do anything else, other than rudimentary word processing or spreadsheeting. What professional development is offered to advance ICT skills is provided by a few knowledgeable teachers on the fly. As a result teachers (other than those using specific software) use computer rooms for word processing and Internet research and little else. Teachers would know little of ´search strings´, the pros and cons of Wikipedia or how to download relevent UTube videos. While many teachers are behind in the tech race against the kids, some of us are ahead.

"My current thinking is that the use of technology or ICTs (Information Communication Technology) in school needs to be for more than basic skilling in wordprocessing, spreadsheeting etc. Those skills are important but the use of ICTs in classrooms need to be used to further learning rather than be the subject of learning. In other words the key is to integrate technology so that it aids learning rather than being the focus of learning. An example would be to use a digital camera to take photos of a seedling to document the stages of growth and blog the results, or define key terms on a wiki, or discuss the progress in a forum, on a school website.

"Giving every kid access to a PC isn´t necessary for them to do the above activities. In fact, the way schools operate now, giving every kid áccess´ to a PC in school won´t help them at all."

We're not quite as despairing as Flotoonie. It's amazing how well those kids adjust to computers without the teachers' help - perhaps those Flash games are particularly instructive - and we detect a stroke of genius in Rudd's demand that MPs check things out for themselves. But there's room here, we suggest, for more debate. And thanks, Flotoonie, for a valuable contribution.

Posted by cw at 07:11 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

November 27, 2007

Computers for the Kids

There's been plans to put more computers in front of Aussie students. Now that the Government has been elected and coming on-line so to speak, the implementation details are being thought and worked out. Will this initiative give the community and the IT industry some real, long lasting benefits or will it be another case of money thrown along the wayside.
Will select IT companies (a.k.a. the winning tenderers) benefit from the spending (with trickle down to sub contractors) or will the whole IT industry benefit (not just the hardware suppliers but the people behind technology - the trainers, people support staff, hardware and systems support staff)? How will the school system human resource the provision of IT? Do they need enhanced skills for the teachers?
Will there be a desperate rush to spend the money on current hardware and impress the electorate or will there be more considered phasing of spending in the face of constantly depreciating technology equipment?
How will this spending affect the success or failure of various IT systems and products - will the winning products be given a boost, will the losing products be buried, relatively?
Where will open source systems appear? Or will the commercial companies like Microsoft, IBM, Sun take precedence because they have their supply chains in place? Do the hardware companies like HP, Acer, Dell really care?
And one relevant point, close to home,  mentioned by Jon FaIne's discussion on 774 ABC today - how will the education system grade students who have poor handwriting given that they can use computers for most assignments but the real, final exams in Uni and VCE are hand written?
Once you have the hardware and client browsing in place, where do they go? Will there be any fuel to provision of local online teaching, learning systems?
Finally, why is the general public calling them laptops? They've been notebooks to the IT crowd for a long, long time.
Articles in online news:
Australian IT: Tax breaks promise PC sale bonanza
News.com: Post-election sharemarket rise tipped

Posted by Anandasim at 08:36 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

November 08, 2007

And the Big Spend Starts

Well, it's early November and I see the retailers have started putting up Christmas shopping banners. And catalogues are piling up in the mailboxes. In the spirit of things, Bazcaz has mentioned a gadgets website in his post on the forum. What have you got in your eye for IT and Tech this season? A new DSLR? A 1-Terabyte Hard Drive? Something mundane like a new notebook packed with Windows Vista and/or Office 2007? A Spotted Cat? Hmmm....

Blogged with Flock

Tags: Shopping, Gadgets, Christmas

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November 03, 2007

Blogging with Flock

Over at the forum, mibi has been keeping up a continuing stream of freeware spotting. Flock, the social browser has been in development forever - now it's matured to 1.0 status. I've put it in an Altiris SVS layer for the evaluation for the time being and am typing this blog on it. (Can't get it to work with Microsoft Live Spaces but the Bleeding Edge is working fine so far). Flock has some landmark features - I am a Flickr user and there are two enriching features. I can see all my Flickr contacts on the sidebar (hmmm, what about Microsoft Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger contact?) and when I click on one, the content pane fills with their Flickr details. Then a Media Stream Toolbar self discovers their gallery of photos and I get a sideways scrollable thumbnail strip on the top of Flock. This gallery - Media Stream works with YouTube and other social sites as well. Problem though. I'm running out of screen space.... To think we ever survived on 800x600 pixels. Oops, as I publish, the Categories feature of the Blogging does not display the existing categories

Blogged with Flock

Tags: flock, browser, socialnetworking, blogging, flickr, mediastream

Posted by Anandasim at 11:22 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack