Category Archives: Uncategorized

Scratching Away

community, programming, Uncategorized

After a very full June with lots of events and a trip to the ISTE conference in Denver, I am basically home for the rest of the summer with just one vacation week planned. There is plenty to do: gardening, bike riding, pool floating top the list of R&R activities.

But, I also want to be able to spend time on my own areas of interest and that includes coding. I’ve been dabbling in Python on the Pi and for the last two days, getting into Scratch using a couple books I found on Amazon, both from DK publishers. The Coding With Scratch Workbook is short and features four games that use what I would consider advanced features. I made them and in several cases did some remixing of the code provided. I’m now working through Coding Games in Scratch. It takes a similar visual approach and includes a “hacks and tweaks” section in each chapter with ideas for going further. I’m also thinking that I might try to write the code from the description of the game and then dive into the chapter when I get stuck.

There is also a whole community of Scratch educators out there at the ScratchED site from Harvard. Twitter led me to the Creative Computing Guide that Dylan Ryder has remixed. I’m looking forward to spending some time with the old and new guide.

If you’re looking for inspiration, here’s my Scratch studio.

Am I Justifying a Colossal Waste of Time Or….Am I Learning?

gaming, learning, Uncategorized

I had a long, busy week away from home last week. Lots of terrific meetings, both formal and informal, as part of the CoSN Conference and then a chance to play with robots and makey makeys with a bunch of K-12 educators on Friday.

I needed some down time this weekend. I gardened a bit, read a Steve Perry mystery, and played Zoombinis. I’m not a big gamer, but I have always loved solving logic problems and that’s the focus of Zoombinis. I fell in love with the first version of the game when it was first introduced in 1996. A new version was introduced in August 2015, and I signed right on.

I’ve been playing and reflecting on my progress through the game. I think the biggest lesson I’m learning is creating and implementing problem solving strategies.

Testing Variables: In the pizza trolls puzzle, you make a pizza based on the responses of the troll to various toppings. The first level is fairly straight forward but helps set the strategy: isolate and test each variable until you get the correct combination. Subsequent levels add more toppings AND trolls so keeping track of preferences requires a chart.

Enlisting Experts: I just couldn’t figure out how to succeed at the subsequent levels of  the Hotel Dimensia puzzle. Multiple variables have to be applied across a grid, and the rules around that deployment just escaped me. The grid itself is really a chart, but the puzzle comes with a time challenge so you need to establish the important variables very quickly in order to get all the Zoombinis through. No leisurely musing on this level. I struggled and knew I need more help so I headed to the web. The Hotel Dimensia page at Wikia was very helpful.

Purposeful Practicing: Zoombinis includes a practice mode that includes all puzzles and all levels. I worked through several Hotel Dimensia practice sessions, developing a strategy that I could apply in the real game. I really wanted to get better at this puzzle because it is on the path to the Mudball Wall, my favorite puzzle. Somehow, the pattern in that puzzle is easy for me to discern. I think it may be because I used to play it as a stand alone game on the web so I got lots of practice and have internalized the various patterns that can be made.

Embracing Failure: With Captain Cajun, you have to arrange the Zoombinis on a boat and you may or may not have the right combination. The game warns you that you may have to leave some of your Zoombinis behind. You will fail despite enlisting help or practicing.

Overcoming Failure: But, I have discovered a strategy to solve the Captain Cajun puzzles. Stack the deck. Literally. Once you are into the game, you often have your choice of Zoombinis to take with you through the next leg of the journey. So, you can arrange the Zoombinis ahead of time to make sure you have a combination that will fill the boat.

So, I am learning how to play the game using a variety of strategies. Some, like testing variables, are strategies I’ve applied outside the game while others, such as stacking the deck of Captain Cajun’s boat, are game specific. My biggest question is how much transfer takes place from the game into the world. In other words, if kids figure out the “testing variable” strategy for the pizzas, will they internalize that particular strategy and use it to solve problems outside of the game? Does the game foster a general understanding of formulating strategies for problem solving?

 

Best Practices for Professional Development

online learning, professional development, Uncategorized

Thanks to David Croteau, a sociology professor and member of the ALT Lab at Virginia Commonwealth University for annotating and sharing this article from Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, Volume XIX, Number 1, Spring 2016 about effective professional development for teaching online. It is really a blueprint for making ALL professional development more effective with recommendations for smaller, more personalized and customized work that focuses on curriculum and teaching rather than just tools.

Articles like this are why I always check the Diigo updates from ALT Lab when browsing morning email.

Staging Stories

Media, Photography, social networking, Uncategorized

I’ll start by saying that I am not generally part of the Facebook police. I figure the medium just lends itself to the spreading of misinformation, and I have a limited amount of time and energy to keep people honest. I rarely pursue all the photos and factoids posted by friends.

But, for some reason, the photo of a little girl curled up asleep in the outline of a female figure with the caption indicating she was an Iraqi orphan longing for her mother seemed too heart wrenching to be true. It didn’t take me long to discover that the photo had, indeed, been staged by a professional photographer. The little girl is Iranian and a relative of the photographer who, on her flickr page, has similar photos.

The question asked by Annie at PhD in Parenting is important for all of us to consider: “Does it matter?” She comes down on the side of yes, and so do I. She writes:

I know that in this day and age of the Internet, and especially since I’ve been on the Internet for 22 years now, I should know not to take things at face value. But it grabbed me and then I felt betrayed that it was staged, but presented as photo journalism.

As Annie points out, there are plenty of sad stories of children in war zones. Why make up a story? Maybe because you can? And perhaps the original poster figured it would highlight a tragedy so its verity was not important. But, a quick look at the poster’s public Facebook profile shows a wide variety of posts from silly cats to find the panda so I’m not sure we can give him the benefit of the doubt. I would like to extend that benefit to my friend who shared it…she is a socially conscious individual who really does care about the world.

But, she is also a well-educated woman who should know better. I suspect if I called her on it, she would be apologetic but might also lean towards the side of bringing attention to children in war and be less concerned about what I see as a major digital citizenship problem. If you aren’t willing to check your sources before you post, what other questionable bits of information might you be passing along? Maybe nobody gets hurt…well, except for the photographer whose photo is under standard copyright and the next person who shares it only to find out it’s fake and, honestly, my friend whose reputation is now suspect at least in my mind. These are certainly minor hurts in a larger world of hurting children but scaled up they lead to the kinds of misinformation that make the web the dangerous echo chamber it has become.

 

Learning, Education and Snow Days

Education, learning, online learning, Uncategorized, work

There has, as you can imagine, been lots of talk about snow days here in the Commonwealth. Jon Becker mused about how odd it seemed to have a university close despite widespread connectivity. He asked a powerful question: “Are we not supposed to work?” The comments provided examples of both K-12 and higher education organizations that managed to continue work and learning despite not being able to physically meet. My own comment was bit tongue in cheek: I teach online for two universities that were both officially closed. Our learning went on as usual. If my students, most of whom were themselves out on snow days, chose not to work on the days the schools were closed, that is up to them.  I suspect, however, most of them used the time to get caught up.

National Public Radio revisited a report from 2015 on students in Delphi, Indiana, who were expected to log in from home on snow days. Teachers had prepared ahead, creating digital versions of lessons and engaging with students. The article described some of the issues around e-learning that will resonate with anyone who has taught online: some content is harder to teach online, not all students have access, and tech support can be difficult. I was most interested in the “diminishing returns” described by the superintendent:

But he admits there is a point of diminishing returns, which he noticed during a recent string of snow days.

“You know, the first day we had about 100 percent of the kids involved in e-learning,” Walker says. “Well, then, after the fourth day, we were down to about 55 percent of the children.”

On the fifth snow day, Walker gave kids and teachers a free pass: No e-learning today.

I wonder why there was a fall off in participation? The novelty wore off? The sense of community was reduced? Or, did students have a sense that the work didn’t count? The edict that there would be “no e-learning today” reminded me of Jon’s tweet: an educator is banning learning? What if they wanted to continue?

K-12 educators  seem torn about snow days and formal learning. In a tweet chat last evening, the topic, not surprisingly, was snow day learning. Some teachers felt like these days should be breaks for the kids: have fun in the snow, hang out with family, and just take a break from the rigors of school. Others indicated they had communicated with their students and parents, sharing ideas for how to keep the learning going despite being out of school, whether it was encouraging elementary kids to read or high school kids to apply their physics learning to snow.

As with the students and teachers in Indiana, there were some constraints. Not all students had Internet access and even for those who did, accessing the school ecosystem could be difficult on a non-school device. Some questioned the use of non-school communication systems like Twitter as being against the AUP.  And, ultimately, making kids and teachers work on a day off still didn’t make the day “count” towards state attendance requirements so there was a sense that it was all just optional.

That last problem underscores the disconnect between bureaucracy and technology as the latter moves much more quickly than the former. Ultimately, if snow day learning is going to catch on in K-12 at least, bureaucracy is going to need to catch up.