December+2011

December 5, 2011
Over the past few days it has been fun following #pencilchat on Twitter. Curious to see how tech-friendly teachers have used this forum as a place to poke some fun at the frustrations we feel over the concerns and criticisms leveled at using more technology in classrooms. Nobody would argue that pencils ought to be kept out of classrooms. #pencilchat produces a fair bit of irony by substituting "computer" for "pencil" in the ed-tech criticisms. A simple, silly, and surprisingly effective critique has evolved over the past few days. There are many insightful edu-humourists out there. Now I'll be curious to watch #pencilchat morph. Already it has given rise to #jedichat, and I expect that other metaphors will crop up as well.

Strangely, I find myself thinking back to a trip and tour I had of Poston Butte High School in Arizona. A new building, a new way of doing school- all 1 to 1, all with district owned machines. The Principal made the simple point that none of the classrooms had pencil sharpeners- they simply were not needed. It makes me wonder about the close connection between technology, pedagogy, and the delivery of education. Hospital rooms look much different than they did in 1911. So do banks. How about classrooms? #pencilchat is clever as it employs the idea of anachronism to make funny points about schools, and about getting with the times. But, there I go again, bringing it back to "time".

Time out, for now.

December 13, 2011
I'm working through a unit with my Grade 11 Transactional English Class called "My Electronic Self", which is a bit about managing one's digital footprint, a bit about digital ethics, and a bit about managing and visualizing data sets. Here is one of the recent assignments:


 * Assignment 5: Visualizing Data to draw new conclusions.**

//Steps:// //1. Navigate to []// //2. Choose a topic of interest to you, select and copy all of the text.// //3. Navigate to [] & select "Create Your Own"// //4. Paste the text in the text box, click on "Go" - A visualization of the text based on word frequency will appear.// //5. Choose the visualization that looks best to you.// //6. Save it to the public gallery as "Anonymous" (the default setting)// //7. Copy the URL for your visualization, and send it to me in an email.// //8. In your email, answer these three questions:// //a) Why did you choose this topic?// //b) How happy are you with the visualization of the data?// //c) How does this way of looking at the data change or confirm your thinking about the topic?//

It was neat to see the students navigate through this after I set the context by having them do the most basic data visualization possible by having them raise their hands to figure out who was born in each month of the year. A "hands-up" poll is data collection and visualization all at once. Unfortunately, it only works with itty bitty data sets. After they worked through this for a while, I also suggested the idea of comparing two wordles on the same topic that come from different sources. For example, the two wordles below come from two data sets about my school, Dakota Collegiate:

media type="custom" key="11811178" width="130" height="130" align="center"

Data from Wikipedia about our school

media type="custom" key="11811418" width="130" height="130" align="center"

Data from our official website about our school The official site emphasizes students, while wikipedia emphasizes the school name. Many other observations could be made about the two data sets that would otherwise be very difficult without using a tool like wordle to visualize the text as data. At the end of the class, I introduced the students to [|Many Eyes], which is a much more complex tool for visualizing data sets. The power of being able to take very large sets of data and look at them in new ways helps my English students to come to new understandings of subjects that they thought they knew. My [|official Manitoba curriculum] requires that I help students to learn to: Identify Personal and Peer Knowledge (3.2.1), Identify Sources (3.2.2), and also Evaluate Sources (3.2.3), Access Information (3.2.4) and Make Sense of Information (3.2.5)//.// This assignment targets this group of outcomes, and certainly engages students as well in a meaningful discussion about bias, and it does so in a way that also promotes visual learning.

Overall, this was an engaging (dare I say, "fun") assignment for all of us. Now I wonder what would happen if the entire works of Shakespeare were visualized in a variety of ways...hmmm...might make for a good coffee table book some time.