As easy as 1-2-3

Monday, 19 January, 2015

My PhD student James O’Connor (and by the way, check out his cool 3D model generated from video) reminded me of my (unknown until this point!) mantra/advice for a PhD:

1. Complete ONE PhD thesis
2. Write TWO publishable papers
3. Any talk/presentation will (nearly) always have THREE main points

Can’t go wrong!

A-Level Students Forget Knowledge

Wednesday, 25 June, 2014

New students have forgotten bulk of A-level knowledge” reports The Times Higher Ed… well no real surprise there given what we already know about the forgetting curve. In fact its a bland study that has been repeated over and over - Eric Mazur’s work has shown that memorisation of facts is dangerous when you need to understand concepts

How to present your data

Saturday, 7 June, 2014

Two brilliantly simple animated slide decks at Dark Horse Analytics - the first on presenting tabular data and the second on presenting graphical data.

I regularly simplify my graphics and tables - many templates overstyle their design so simplifying is good. It also makes your design stand out from the rest because its different. These are REALLY well worth a look.

HEPI Student Academic Experience Survey

Wednesday, 21 May, 2014

HEPI published their 2014 Student Academic Experience Survey today with a brief summary over at the THES. Some interesting pull out facts in terms of value for money and cost of the degree - students still smarting from the increase in cost - and also the range of contact hours between courses and universities (although note that contact hours is recorded as the number of staff hours, not the number of attendance hours!). I love this part at the end of the THES article:

“The survey also found that the scheduled contact time for undergraduates across all years (13.1 hours per week on average) was greater than the contact actually experienced (11.9 hours per week).

When asked for reasons why they attended fewer hours than timetabled, the most common reason cited by students was “I didn’t find these lectures very useful” (cited by 50 per cent), followed by “I didn’t feel that I needed to go because I could get the notes online” (40 per cent), “I was ill” (31 per cent) and “I couldn’t be bothered to attend” (31 per cent).”

Besides the obvious problem that 150% of people responded (copy editing THES!!), it does show a lack of independence and responsibility on the part of the student, particularly for something they are so conscious they are paying for. The sickness rate amongst students also seems particularly high - clearly health is a serious issue in universities!!

Nick Hillman, the director of HEPI notes: “Higher education is a partnership between institutions and students. There is an onus on both parties to ensure the experience is as rewarding as possible but only sometimes is that happening.” I would also add that students should be experiencing university in the same way they might experience a gym - there is someone there to facilitate progress, but unless you take responsibility and put in the sweat, you won’t get much out of it. And this is the big rub - students are coming out of a school system where the responsibility for progress and achievement is placed firmly on the shoulders of the schools - its a culture shock to come to university and take over that responsibility. Universities DO need to change and for many that will mean becoming more “school-like” but there is also a communication issue in getting students to engage in determining their own futures.

In lectures… *write* notes

Thursday, 15 May, 2014

Came across this nice piece over at The Atlantic on taking lecture notes…. the short takeaway is that writing lecture notes helps you remember them more easily. However lets dig in to the report a little further….

They conducted a trial: (1) Watch lecture and take notes, (2) Complete irrelevant mental tasks for 30 minutes and (3) Take a quiz on the material. Step (2) is important to allow the “forgetting curve” to kick in (see here). The key finding, as reported, is this:

“In this group, longhand-notetakers outperformed laptop-notetakers on the quiz. Analysis of student notes showed that laptop-notetakers tended to transcribe a lot of the speaker’s words verbatim. Mueller and Oppenheimer suspected that this was because those who typed notes were inclined to transcribe lectures, rather than process them. This makes sense: If you can type quickly enough, word-for-word transcription is possible, whereas writing by hand usually rules out capturing every word.”

Being able to type quickly means that you become mentally lazy - the key point which was NOT drawn out is this…. deep learning takes place when you assimilate new ideas, classify them, interpret them, interject them with your own thoughts, rework them in to your mindset and then see where you started. Surficial learning occurs when you simply try to “record” what is being said - this could be by recording the audio and then just listening, or it could be writing it all down, verbatim, word-for-word. This is knowledge, not learning. If all you want to do is this, buy a book, read it. Don’t waste your time going to a lecture!! If however you really do want to learn, treat the lecture as an interactive medium - the lecturer shouldn’t be there to simply read out a set of notes to you, but rather introduce you to new ideas, concepts or techniques, get you to practice them, think about them, assimilate them…. reframe what you hear within your own understanding or context, ask questions in order for it to make sense, be classified, within your mindset. In the genuine sense of the word, your are turning your ignorance in to learning, but it is only with that active participation that this can happen.

So it’s not about laptops or writing, but rather our approaches to learning…unfortunately it appears many students can’t make that distinction, even when they are told about it.

Student debt…. pay more to get….less

Friday, 21 March, 2014

Interesting article at The Guardian and salutary tale on bad government and how this impacts of student careers, lives and the success of HE more widely

Let there be stoning!

Friday, 24 May, 2013

I can’t really add to much more to Garr’s blog entry, other than to point you to the short essay/editorial that appeared in Ground Water back in 1985 (Lehr, J.H. 1985 Let there be stoning! Ground Water 23, 2, 162-165)….. in the first instance it makes you laugh, then you can feel the anger and then the wisdom. In short, whilst nearly 30 years ago, the detail of this paper holds the presentation essentials for any academic - it’s a treasure trove of wisdom. Read it and compare yourself against his yardstick - there is no excuse for boring your audience to death.

Tablets in learning - not fit for purpose?

Wednesday, 27 March, 2013

I’m actively involved in learning technologies both as my role as a lecturer (e.g. Livesribe pen and also as a school governor. One of the things I have been involved in is trialling the use of mobile phones for delivering learning of times tables and number bonds - nothing new in using an app to learn times tables, but when you roll this out to a class of children there are a variety of key considerations. Not least usability, cost and durability of the hardware platform. So you need to take account of the physical size of the child and the equipment and how they are going to use it, as well as the need (or not) for screen real estate - ergonomics are vital as this determines the ease with which people engage, use and learn. After that look at cost and durability.

Our conclusions? Tablets are ideal for consuming media due to the large screen size (both 7” and 10”). They are poor for interaction due to their large size, something that becomes worse the smaller the child gets. So, when you want interaction? A tablet is NOT the form factor to use - a 4” size device (aka smartphone or iPod). These are easy to handle, cheap (e.g. at O2) and (often) durable.

So why all the hubris over tablets? Good question and something Donald Clark covers, particularly on their total unsuitability for active learning, as well as how they can actually inhibit learning. Tablets are madness for serious active and creative learners - I’ll say it again, they are for consumption not creation.

Yet again and again we see the tablet bandwagon being fuelled by nonsense such as Newscorp. What’s more worrying is when so called charities start spouting this nonsense. As one headteacher recently said to me “they are not genuinely interested in school improvement or 1-2-1 pupil learning or they would be more analytical, more diverse and more innovative.” In fact the drive for tablets in to schools seems to be driven by manufacturers hoping for a windfall in the same way the consumer market has moved, what it’s not thinking about is actually what learners need. The scale of cost and replacement for these devices (e.g. Newscorp) is mind-boggling, particularly with the manufacturer tie in.

Manufacturers….please please design for the needs of the market. Look at what your customers need and make the best possible product you can for that.

Teachers….don’t be taken in by the marketing spin (look at the number of defunct whiteboards!), but look at the genuine learning that takes place and credible successes where this has occurred. The image that immediately springs to mind was the BBC reporting on tablets rolled out to an entire school and showing them in a science lesson. Tablets, lab, children, teacher….and nothing else! Where was the science lesson? Was it watching it on the tablet?! This isn’t active learning. BEWARE

What are the “sticky” times tables?

Friday, 25 January, 2013

Really, think what’s your favourite times table? Say it out aloud…. eight times eight equals sixty four. Well that’s mine - the number just feels nice, rounded, well mannered. What don’t I like? Nine times six equals fifty four…. that’s just strange, jaggedy, unpleasant. Definitely a sticky one that I have to work at to remember.

What’s the point of this you may ask? Well numeracy was highlighted in 2012 as a key aspect in making Britain competitive and noting that lack of numeracy is often seen as a badge of honour. Note the relatively high profile Make Britain Count campaign at The Telegraph and National Numeracy charity. And Michael Gove has introduced a new primary curriculum that has (in part) a focus on times tables (and number bonds). And whilst I don’t want to get in to a discussion about pedagogy and the rationale for memorising numbers, there is no doubt that higher maths skills build on number bond and times tables and ability in these makes achievement (and enjoyment) later on easier.

So if children are (indeed have been for quite a while now!) memorising times tables which ones are harder to remember? That’s a good question, and whilst not a maths researcher (a long way from it!), I would imagine there has been something written about the ones that are easy and hard, nice and unpleasant. 5x tables….easy. 10x….easy. 9x…..use the fingers trick. 7x….mmmmmm. 8x….tricky.

But do we really know what kids find hard and easy. And if we know that, do we know why? What are the actual cognitive processes taking place (in the brain, in memory) that cause this? Well, we need to know the first part of that before we can answer the second.

Which is something we have done!

I have been working on a project that allows kids to play random times tables in batches of 20 using an Android app. They login first so we can track who plays what and then let them loose (more in a later post on that). So for this experiment we got a total of 19 year 8 (11-12 year old) kids to play constantly for about 40 minutes, answering a total of 7,030 times table questions for all tables up to 10x10 (we’ll extend this further in the future). That’s a heck of a lot of data in a short period of time (and many thanks are due to my local school, their staff and of course the pupils. It’s inspiring to work with them)

We took all the individual results and produced the frequency of right/wrong answers for each question - I’ve graphed the percentage incorrect below (quick and dirty in Excel so the colour ramp is not very good; apologies) which shows the multiplier (first number) on the x-axis and factor (second number) on the y-axis. I’ve also plotted the 45 degree line so you can see where the multiplier and factor flip (and you might expect the error rate to remain the same; it doesn’t and that’s a project in itself).

I hope you’re mesmerised by this - 7000 answers from year 8 children of all abilities. What they get right and wrong. What’s the most incorrectly answered times table question? 4x8 (71%!). Followed by 6x8, 8x6, 8x4, 8x7, 7x8 and 8x8. Quite amazing and a result I wasn’t expecting. Least incorrectly answered? 2x5 (6%). Followed by 3x1, 5x2, 6x1, 2x6, 4x2 and 1x3.

This will vary with ability, year group and gender. We’ll also look to add in up to 12x12. Check back for more because this has profound implications for what we teach children and therefore how we teach it.

Livescribe in action

Saturday, 20 October, 2012

Following on from my last post introducing the LiveScribe pen I wanted to highlight some useful resources and functions, as well as demo my first two “pencasts”. So, without much ado:

Pencasts:
-at it’s simplest this is making your notes/recordings available online either as a Flash animation or interactive PDF
-the PDFs work great and an incredibly effective way to distribute notes
-there is an iPhone app, but no Android app. This is an almighty cock-up because Livescribe have been banking on Flash working on Android - which it doesn’t. So at the moment, Livescribe doesn’t work on Android
-look at other peoples’ training notes to get a feeling for the scope

Pencasting(with some tips culled from the Advanced Pencasting webinar):
-however pencasts are very exciting for the production of training materials. They in essence allow you to produce, with little time or expertise, a live animation. You essential create a “performance” of the learning materials you want to develop. The flexibility in pencasting (albeit with some restrictions) are amazing
-write a script - I’ll say it again, its a performance
-keep it short 1-3 minutes MAXMIMUM, one page only. They are learning “bites”
-write (draw) first, narrate later. You speak faster than you write
-this highlights one of the exciting aspects of pencasting - when replaying the audio your drawings are synced to them. This massively extends the creativity of the pencast
-pre-draw elements in ordinary pencil on the page; you then get it “right” on your first “take”
-think about your presentation page design in terms of (1) layout and (2) navigation points. You want your material to be easy to follow, visually appealing and have visual cues so viewers know where to click to access different parts of the audio
-pre-draw (with the Livescribe pen) “templates”; these remain static and visible from the beginning (in black) meaning you can animate around them with your audio synced
-“pause and pop”: record, pause, draw, re-start (tap pause to continue). This causes the drawing to “pop” within the synced audio. Visually effective
-“Annotations”: draw your marker, record your audio, stop. Then playback and add your drawing. As I noted above, drawings added on playback are synced to the audio!! It’s worth stopping and taking that in - it is an incredibly powerful feature
-“Simuls”: take the annotations idea and continuously replay your audio to allow you to draw and build up your animation
-Marker Page: when using the “Simuls” approach, each time you playback you touch the marker on your dot-paper. Put the audio on a second page and your drawing on the first page. This stops all your dots appearing. When you export the first page as a PDF all the audio will be with it.
-as promised my first two pencasts. They are a long way from perfect but hope you get the idea:
Basic Wave Theory (including the accidental typo!)
Particle Theory



Training:
SmartPen101: online training
Webinar Recordings: recordings of live training the intro and advanced pencasting are worth viewing if a little long winded at times.

Livescribe Echo Pen

Saturday, 13 October, 2012

Over the summer I bought a Livescribe Echo Smartpen to try out some digital note taking (a review and on Amazon). Believe it or not, I like writing and smartphones don’t cut the mustard here, whilst tablets still have a way to go to beat the convenience of paper. The Echo particularly caught my eye as it integrates audio recording in to the digital note taking which in my mind makes it a killer combination. Sit in a lecture and take notes whilst recording the audio. Want to hear what the lecturer was saying when you were writing a particular note? Simply tap the paper at the point and it starts playing it. Audio ceases to be purely linear with a content timeline mapped out in your notes making it very easy to access. You can also upload your digital notes (and audio) to the desktop application and, wonderfully, you can search for words in your text (clearly it does some handwriting recognition behind the scenes) and also convert the writing to text (but using the extra “paid-for” app).

How does it work? Well digital note taking on paper falls in to two categories - a clip on IR sensor that works on any sheet of paper or special dedicated paper that allows the pen to know which page you are on and where. Livescribe use the latter approach with a small camera in the tip of the pen that records the ink trace and compiles the 2D coordinates in to your handwriting. This means you have to buy Livescribe notebooks - I find this fine and think the product is very reliable as a result. Combined with the audio (and you can get a directional mic to plugin!) it is a killer product in the note taking market. In a business meeting a need a formal written/audio record? Use Livescribe? Clerking a meeting? Livescribe. Legal ramifications (lawyer, education etc) - Livescribe.

The basic pen comes with 2Gb of memory - not much if you want keep all your recordings with you but more than enough if you record, upload and store. And its cheap at ~£70 in the UK (recent price drop), although Livescribe themselves have gone very quiet which suggests a product range revamp.

I use it for
-use it for recording a lecture and making notes
-use it for taking notes from books
-convert writing to text (MyScribe plugin)
-user it to create multi-media animations

More in a follow-on blog entry.

BBC In Our Time

Monday, 8 October, 2012

OK, think I’m a little slow to the party on this one (and not a great radio listener) but the BBC’s “In Our Time” presented by Melvyn Bragg is a great “ideas” discussion programme (Wikipedia entry). Just look through the archive which features all episodes from the first in 1999 as well as an RSS feed for all episodes since 2011. Donald Clark notes the power radio for dissemination; thiss is ideally suited to learning and, in combination, with internet playback/recording means you can save and review. Perhaps I’m just not particularly a radio fanboy, but I do quite like listening to podcasts so it may be more a case of marketing than anything else. Not easy in a crowded marketplace.

Anyway, well worth a look at the archive and Ill be pointing my students to the broadcast on Radiation.

What’s a large class size?

Thursday, 5 July, 2012

How about 100,000?? A really great TED talk from Peter Norvig on how they turned their on-site classroom in to a 100,000 strong virtual class and flipped many of the ideas about distance learning to motivate and engage students.

Why we lie…..

Sunday, 27 May, 2012

Dan Ariely has a really good Saturday Essay in the Wall Street Journal on Why We lie. This pulls together (in layman’s terms) a lot of his research on the topic (and it’s well worth watching him speak on the topic at TED) and, in summary, most people lie/cheat a little bit. There are very very few of us that are at the extremities (compulsive liers/cheats or those morally at the extreme). Yet that little bit of lying can have profound effects on us all - just think of the 300M people in the US cheating an extra $100 out of the IRS. He suggests some ways that we can manipulate this in the favour of morality that are wonderfully simple - sign a form at the beginning (of a test, tax return, insurance quote) to state that what you say is true or repeat a moral code (frat code, ten commandments etc) before you start an activity. Has big implications for schools amongst others. Essential reading/viewing.

Repeat to remember…..

Thursday, 3 May, 2012

….it’s a well worn mantra. Repeat something over-and-over to remember it (or, shout longer and louder and people will believe you!). In fact its one of of the “Brain Rules” and spaced repetition is a well known phenomena. Donald Clark covered Kandel recently which provides a nice biological context for long-term memorisation (something experimentally shown by Ebbinghaus over a century ago).

Yet as Donald notes, spaced repetition is largely ignored in training and education, although it is more endemic in primary schools where numeracy and literacy are core skills that are practised over and over. I would argue that this draws on historical norms, that repeated practise has always been done. There isn’t really an appreciation of spaced repetition which could be used more powerfully. Anyway, a nice quote from Donald on Kandel:

Learning, for Kandel, is the ability to acquire new ideas from experience and retain them as memories (a simple fact often overlooked).

So now we have a differentiation between learning (as in the acquisition of new knowledge/skills) and education (preparation for life). It is perhaps arguable as to whether learning is simply knowledge acquisition…. knowledge is cheap (aka wikipedia), but the skills to use knowledge aren’t and that’s where successful people and business make a mark. However I would strongly argue that a “scaffold” of core/essential knowledge is vital to hang further learning off. A well-worn example is the memorisation of times-tables to make further mathematical understanding easier. So, spaced repetition is a powerful technique in learning that is largely unused and essential to build in to a curriculum.

What is education for?

Tuesday, 24 April, 2012

A seemingly innocuous question that is thornier to answer than you might think….. indeed, what is education for? Thinking historically, there is an element of child protection related to the implementation of mass education for all. Try to reduce child labour. If you take a more behavourist view of history, then it was also a means by which the labour force could be trained for the industrial employment market. However, in a 21st Century education system, what are we actually trying to achieve? Before you can think about school organisational systems and curricula, you need to know what it is you are trying to achieve. And thinking about the massive changes in schools at the moment, Academies, Free Schools etc etc, what are these intended to do (and, in true Ken Robinson style, don’t say “raise standards”. Everyone automatically wants to do that, but what standards?!).

I mentioned this to a group of 21-25 year olds recently and got a sea of blank faces….. to “teach” was the mantra. Donald Clark, in his 50-blog marathon, has written about John White who has spent a considerable amount of his career on (and off) the topic. He uses “autonomy” as the central underpinning reason and, to quote Donald,:

“Autonomy, not reason or any other end, is chosen, as it defines, in terms of the self, what one must learn to be a fully functional adult in a complex world. In this sense it avoids the narrow strictures of an inflexible, over-academic curriculum, but it widens education out to deal with the individual as a rounded functioning being. The learner needs to avoid being the slave to desire but also being a slave to a given authority.

His alternative is an education that promotes rational, freedom of choice. The curriculum therefore needs to foster moral, intellectual, financial and practical autonomy to allow people to lead happy, healthy, lives, form relationships, cook, find jobs and think for themselves. The system is stuck in a mode that allows the people who benefit most, the middle-class, to defend its outmoded values, as it has served them well.”

If you haven’t done so already, take a look at Shift Happens (and the different YouTube versions). This gives a nice media based idea to the challenges facing children as they move to transition to the modern employment market. It’s drastically different from the one I inherited. And in this sense White’s philosophical argument is strong. A pure academic focus (organisation/curricula) is outdated, outmoded and ill-equips children for the future. We need to move to something that really meets the needs of state and child for the future. If you were to simplify this down, you would like to produce economically useful people (to the state), who are happy and can operate successfully in a modern culture. That incorporates all the entities identified above. If we start from this basis, how would we organise our schools?

Pedagogic History

Wednesday, 21 March, 2012

Donald Clark has started a blog marathon looking at a history of pedagogic practise. Its a self-selected list and will inevitably not include those you think it could or should….. but if you want to get a flavour and feel for the scope and extent then it makes fascinating reading. And in good academic style, there are plenty of references to follow up on.

A must read.

Reforming teaching and learning

Monday, 19 March, 2012

Garr Reynolds has combined together a nice selection of contemporary videos on how teaching and learning could happen, the malaise in some areas of education and some of the suggestions for solutions. Ken Robinson’s cartoon talk is perhaps the most academic and well founded, but the others all add very interesting aspects, even if you dont agree with them! Well worth checking out and, it goes without saying, that it is universities that come in for the most severe treatment in terms of large lecture theatres and sterile content. However judge for yourself.

Happiness and Productivity

Monday, 19 March, 2012

A great talk from Shawn Achor on TED.com detailing how happiness leads to productivity, rather than the western view of productivity leading to happiness (aka work hard, earn more, be happy). Its a little bit of a sales pitch but the summary of what this all means appears at 11.25.

There is quite a bit of science that goes behind this work….. interestingly Paul Ekman (Emotions Revealed) notes that you feel an emotion by creating the facial expression for it. So as made as it might seem (in our inhibited western society), Laughter Yoga (enforced laughter!) does have relevance in creating feelings of well being which develops in to a positive feedback mechanism. Thats not to say its the only way of doing this, and Shawn Achor has a list of other suggestions. Also worth noting that its a very funny talk!!

WebDAV for Blackboard

Sunday, 22 January, 2012

Quite a few years back I blogged about using the CMS on Blackboard to store learning materials for students. A much more flexible system that uses WebDAV for drag and drop file management. Well, yes, there are a few Android WebDAV clients around, my favourite of which is WebDAV File Manager. Log in to BlackBoard merrily and modify your files….