In passing, these were mentioned in the symposium:
I mentioned today that schools are modelled on industrial era and factories. Probably didn’t make a lot of sense. So here’s a simple way to understand this. You’re in Year 7. The Year 7 says the maths curriculum is x, English y, and so on. But most students are variable in their abilities and where they are up to. That 13 year old actually gets on better with 11 year olds. That 13 year old finds English easy (and so is bored), but the maths very hard, and so struggles and feels, well, incompetent. Ideally, this student isn’t a ‘Year 7’ student. They should be doing an english student with people at level whatever (higher than Year 7) and maths with people at level x, which is probably lower than the Year 7 average. But school’s can’t do this. At the end of they year you will find yourself in Year 8, with a new English and maths curriculum. You might still find English unchallenging, and end up even further behind in maths. The structure of the system just can’t accommodate how we actually learn, it’s designed around 4 classes of Year 7, 8, 9, etc, most progressing through, with no ability to let those doing really well in Maths do more, or even teach those struggling, and same for English and other subjects. It is, basically, a single speed system. Yet we all know that we learn different things at different speeds. Some schools can do this, they’re quite radical in their educational approach, but it is perfectly doable.
From The Guardian a little riposte on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) which got mentioned last week. It is a tad bitter, but in general it is a good article in that it shows how the Web (remember Nelson’s enthusiasm) gets made odd by efforts to commercially exploit it. In this case the only thing being exploited is trying to make Google treat your stuff as more important than it is…
From an email I have just read based on a recent The Chronicle of Higher Education comes:
Steve Kolowich, in “Confuse Students to Help Them Learn”, uses the example of a physics teacher who by trying out clear versus ambiguous presentations discovered that “if you just present the correct information, five things happen…. One, students think they know it. Two, they don’t pay their utmost attention. Three, they don’t recognize that what was presented differs from what they were already thinking. Four, they don’t learn a thing. And five, perhaps most troublingly, they get more confident in the ideas they were thinking before.”
A very good place to start if you want to know more about writing HTML. Dave Raggett’s “Getting Started with HTML“. And in case you’re wondering, code and its basics is going to be much more valuable and useful to you than launching DreamWeaver and not ever having to see code.
We rarely say what we mean (it’s a condition of language). So a quick riff post symposium.
Print and network and digital literacy, not rivals, not anything. It is not this literacy or that one but and, and, and, and. They are not rivals in themselves but they are if we make them. So English teachers might struggle with networks replacing books, or grammarians might struggle with LOL, and people in science, who publish a lot of research, will never (ever) write a book, and don’t care if what they do write is on paper or not. Start thinking not in terms of this or that but and this, and this, and this, and this. Not because of the network, but this is probably more like the way you are in the world (I’m a husband and a brother and a son and a father and a student and a teacher and an employee and an employer and a cyclist and a person interested in birds and a blogger and…)
Interesting service. Use your phone to photograph book cover, then write your name on copyright page, photograph that. If they have book in their library then you either get ebook free or cheap since you’ve proved you have the paper edition….
And here’s the US advocacy site… http://www.unhappybirthday.com/ (in relation to copyright and Happy Birthday).
You can listen to this (use the audio links in the right menu), it is exactly about what the symposium was about. Discusses fair use, copyright, permissions, and so on. The context is news sites using professional photographer’s work on their sites without permission. Particularly note the comment where one response is to simply send them an invoice.
Another afterthought of the legal minefield, come playground. It is international. So while what I write might not defame someone in Australian law it could in Singapore. And if I turned up in Singapore, and the person I defamed was so inclined, they could launch a civil case against me. It doesn’t really matter where it was published from, for most of media law it is about where it is published to.