A Presenter’s Tale

It was my pleasure to present at the recent Reform Symposium. This was my first presentation at a virtual conference: all my previous offerings were at physical conferences, standing at a podium in a room with a seated audience.

I like to have my presentations properly prepared well in advance of the event. With all the physical conferences, that preparation was done in isolation from other presenters. Despite trying out the presentations on anybody that would listen, it was in some sense a lonely effort.

With the Reform Symposium, I became aware of the efforts of other presenters through the #rscon10 hashtag on Twitter, and the sorts of pressure they were feeling. It was a great relief to find that I was not alone in facing those sorts of pressures. The very technology which we were using to make our presentations was also allowing us to share our thoughts and feelings in advance of the event. I happen to be married to one of the other presenters, which also helped.

At the time, I did not realise how much nervous energy I was using. My presentation was in evening local time, and it was not until the following day I realised just how tired I was. Would I do it again? Yes!

I like to think that my efforts might be of some use to other people. Well, in this case, the answer seems to be yes. It was something that came to me after listening to another presenter the day before my own presentation; he spoke of digital natives and digital immigrants. In my presentation, I offered an alternative view, that of “digital junkies, digital competents, and the digitally challenged”. This seems to have resonated with many of those present, as well as others who have watched the recording and read the accompanying document.

For anybody who wants to see the recording, it is at http://bit.ly/938hmW. The accompanying document comes as part of that recording.

The next time I present at a virtual conference, I intend to get in contact with as many of my fellow presenters as possible – I think a feeling of community will help.

My Thanks To …

My thanks go to Marie Noske (twitter: @MarieTN) for prompting this post.

It all started with her response to my tweet “Sorry (well, I’m not sorry at all, just plain *peeved*), but I block lurkers!”, to which she responded “@philhart good on you. I’m curious to know how you can tell if someone is lurking on your twitter page.”. This prodded my grey cell into activity.

Dangerous Assumptions

As an educator, and as I guess most people do, we tend to assume that those with whom we interact are basically well-intentioned. As a life strategy, this seems to work fairly well for most people. But therein lies the danger: there are malevolent individuals who seek to abuse this presumption of honesty and trust to their own ends. Examples of identity theft and of gold-diggers abound, so I propose not to repeat them here.

How I Assess Others

I am perhaps fortunate in that I have numerous tweeples who I trust. The basis of that trust is reciprocation. They gave me at least as much as, and usually more than, I give them.

And of the Silent Tweeple?

So what are we to make of the tweeples who follows hundreds of people but post no tweets? I suggest to you that they are watching you entirely for their own ends. When are you away from your house? What are your daily habits? This sort of information is very valuable to people of mal-intent.

In Conclusion

If I see somebody following me who makes no tweets or only nonsensical tweets, it screams to me “lurker of mal-intent”. I need to protect my family and myself: I do not fancy being a victim of burglary, arson, rape or murder. My opinion of such tweeples is not fit for publication: my only recourse is to block them and advise others to do the same.

Introduction

I did some work recently which needed the creation of a font, and it made me realise just how much work was involved in that seemingly easy task. Then it occurred to me that my experience might be useful to people who were on their first steps in graphic design.

The Brief

The brief was for a font using a matrix of light-emitting diodes to display price of fuel at petrol stations.

The Planning

High-level Factors

There were some high-level factors to be considered when designing the font:

• The capabilities of the technology
• The importance of readability
• It forms part of the organisation’s public image

The Technology

Each price is displayed on a single sign, with 32 pixels vertically and 80 pixels horizontally. Each pixel is either completely black or is fully on. This meant that anti-aliasing techniques were no available.

Readability And Public Image

Reading printed material is usually done under lighting conditions that are at least good. One thinks of magazines in things like waiting rooms. However, lighting conditions on the public roads can be far from ideal. At the very least, we have:

• fog, rain, hail and smoke
• the sun directly behind the sign
• the sun reflecting off the front of the sign
• dirty windscreens
• vehicle speed, at or above the open road speed limit of 110 kph
• driver or passenger eyesight

Each glyph needs to be instantly recognisable. This meant that it needed to be plain and simple, something along the lines of Arial. Anything along the lines of a comic font would not be acceptable.

Each glyph needed to be as large as possible. This was to maximise the use of the available “real-estate” on each sign. This mean that some of glyphs look a little narrow, but this was considered acceptable by the client.

All the digits needed to be the same width, otherwise the glyphs on the various fuels would not line up vertically. Anybody who has seen a proportional font used in such a context such as this will know just how awful it looks. There was one exception to this: the decimal point. Having a narrower glyph for this, it allowed the other glyphs to be wider, this slightly reducing the squashed appearance.

A consequence of simplicity is that it ruled out seriphs. There was one exception to this, being the number “1”. By having simple seriphs on 1 it kept the black space between the glyphs as even as possible, an important consideration for readability and attractiveness.

I have seen a seriph font on other matrix displays using the same display. It seemed that the font designer had attempted to implement Times New Roman. Admittedly, the display in question had many more pixels both vertically and horizontally, but the overall result was still rather unpleasant to my eye: it looked very “fussy”.

Some Remarks on Individual Glyphs

Another fuel supplier has glyphs where the “6” and the “9” have tails that come back below well below the top and bottom lines: they both curl back down to the loop in the glyph. Under adverse lighting conditions, they could be mistaken for an “8”. There was also the business requirement to assist in differentiating the client from its competitors. Couple this with the impossibility of using anti-aliasing techniques, and this means that the tails of the “6” and “9” are straighter rather than curved. While they may look slightly unusual, they are nevertheless instantly recognisable. The same two glyphs have their loops offset from the midline: the loops are one pixel width short of the midline. Again, this reduces the potential for visual confusion with the “8”.

Similar comments apply to the glyphs “5” and “6”. By minimising the rise at the bottom-left of the “5” it helps to provide visual distinction between these two glyphs. The fact that the loop of the “6” is smaller than the “5” also helps.

The glyph “3” also needed to be made very distinct from “8”. As with the “5”, minimising the tails at the top and bottom of the glyph helped here.

My first thought with the “1” was to place the riser at the midpoint of the bottom serif. The result looked as is if it was going to fall over to the left. To restore the centre of gravity, I moved the riser one pixel to the right.

The Final Result

This is what is looks like “out in the field”:

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to the following organisations for their support in this work:

• DMI Signs
• Gull Petroleum
• Screentech (Aust) Pty Ltd

My Thanks To …

My thanks goes to RSColley (twitter: @burntsugar, http://twitter.com/burntsugar) for prompting this post.

Background

RSColley mentioned that she does not find designing courses as easy as I do, which prompted me wonder how I designed courses. I then realised that I was an unconscious-competent, and I was unhappy about the unconscious bit. RSColley then replied with this delightful tweet: “@philhart do u think you could unpack that knowledge for others without losing *it*?”. Well, yes I could, hence this post. It is my unpacking of what goes on in my grey cell.

Roadmap

Designing a course is in many ways identical to designing information systems, and probably designing a lot of other things as well. It is all about “going from where we are now to where we want to be”. It is form of project management. While the tools of education may differ from the tools of information systems (e.g. curriculum documents are not the same as relational databases), the principles of construction are identical.

Top Down, or Bottom Up?

There was for years a heated debate about whether design should be top-down (start from the overall design first, and then work your way down towards the details) or bottom-up (start with all the details, and then finally assemble them all). Of course, both positions are flawed (as numerous extremely expensive failed projects can attest), and what is needed is a more sophisticated approach. My own approach is more top-down, with continual revisions up-and-down the levels of detail until I have something that I can at least trial and test.

Construction

My approach to constructing something is “you cannot get a higher level thing working until all its foundations are in place”. By way of example, you cannot create a word-processed document until you already some keyboarding skills and an understanding of the language in which you are writing.

Educators are already familiar with the concept of course pre-requisites: these are identical in concept.

The structure of components within a course mirrors the structure between courses: “What do [I] need to know before [I] can go on to the next piece of learning?”. My task then is to fully understand the curriculum document, pull out my own relevant experiences, and remember what I need to know before I could do the more sophisticated work. For example, if I am going to dismantle an engine, I need to know how to use a screw driver and a spanner.

From that point, it becomes almost tedious: arranging all the little bits of knowledge in such a way that each bit has all the necessary preceeding bits in place in my course structure. Then I prepare the delivery and assessment materials around all the bits of knowledge, and check that I have got all the precedents in place while I am doing it. This sometimes results in minor alterations to what is presented when in the course: “Woops, I forgot that they needed to already know about <this> before they could go on to learn about <that>”.

Trialling

Once the magic moment of the first delivery arrives, then is the time that I see how well my course is constructed. There is the inevitable minor mismatch between my expectation of the learners’ responses and their actual responses; in the second run of the course, I have already elliminated 90% of those mismatches, most of the remainder being down to every class being different.

From then on, it is a case of continuous improvement!

My Thanks To …

My thanks go to Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach (twitter: @snbeach, web site http://www.21stcenturycollaborative.com/) and Lynne Oakvik (twitter: @LRIM_loakvik, web site http://www.broward.k12.fl.us/learnresource/) without whom this post would not have been written.

What Started It All

Sheryl tweeted “Teaching & learning by nature are social activities Classrooms, by design, were meant to be social learning spaces. How did we mess that up?”, and I thought, “Wait a minute, that does not reflect how I operate in the classroom.”, hence this post.

My Own Experience

Student Contexts

In the classroom context, I have delivered learning from every level from complete beginner up to diploma level. The students ranged from barely educable to extremely bright, with ages ranging from nine to retirees. The subjects include English, maths and information technology.

Student Motivation

It will perhaps come as no suprise to you that students working at the diploma level were well motivated, some extremely so. At the barely educable end, student motivations were mixed.

My Practice

It was the combination of Sheryl’s tweet and Lynne’s wonderful Elluminate presentation that set me thinking “How do I connect socially with my students, and does this go any way towards explaining why I have had no success with some students?”. The answer suprised me.

The Bright Students

With the bright students, the courses went something like this: “Okay, Ladies and Gentlemen, here are some learning resources you might like to use, there is the mountain you are running towards” and I would fire the starting pistol. Being all self-motivated, they worked because they already wanted to.

The social side of the classroom was in some sense incidental to the delivery of learning, and we all enjoyed that social side for its own sake.

Youth At Risk

Youth-at-risk presents a completely different challenge to me. The initial assumption that “we are all here to learn” does not exist. In this context, the social element becomes crucial in helping the student to succeed. And given that such students usually have had bad experiences of adults in general and school in particular, establishing the social relationship can take a bit of doing.

Using the Social Element

Unlike with diploma level students, I need to customise the learning to each student’s interests. But before I can do that, I need to win their trust. This means just sitting around, and socialising, talking, asking questions, listening to answers, and generally showing an interest in their lives. While I always have at the back of my mind the course content, I don’t talk about it initially unless asked.

Once I know their interests, I tailor the learning to those. Somebody is into cars? Easy! The language of cars, the mathematics of cars, the physics of cars, the social aspects of cars, etc, etc. Somebody is outraged at the environmental behaviour of the local abbatoir? Easy again! Letters to the editor and the local Member of Parliament, complete with statistics to demonstrate her point. I could go on, but this paragraph would degenerate into being just a list if I did so.

Da Capo

To answer my original question, it is as a result of writing this post that I now better understand the reasons for my successes and failures with youth-at-risk.

Let me introduce Charles (not his real name), aged about 17. At a social level, he got on very well with everybody, including me. He was an extremely good talker, and would have been a great asset in a debating society or as a member of a quiz team. But he showed no inclination to read, write or use arithmetic. After a few weeks of his excuses, I challenged him as to what he was doing in the classroom. He was quite explicit in that he was “playing the system”: he had no intention of learning anything whatsoever, he did not perceive any need to learn, as he was not going to work at any time in the future. In the face of such an adamant refusal, I no longer devoted any educational time to him, instead devoting my efforts to those who would benefit.

Related Articles

“Failing” Schools – a Teacher’s Perspective and
You Can Take a Child to School, Mr President, But You Cannot Make Him Learn

I wandered into the State Library of Western Australia a few days ago, and it set my grey cell into thinking about how libraries and librarians function in today’s world.

This is against the backdrop being told “Hush!” in a loud whisper in libraries as a child, and even today the Reading Room at the British Library may still be a “silent zone”.

Libraries in the Information Age

Libraries have always been about information, be it fact or fiction. The Dewey Decimal Classification is a wonderful way of organising the books containing that information. Today we have search engines, and we can access information in less than one second, which is less time than it takes to pull down a book from a shelf and open it. From that, we might conclude that libraries and librarians have no further place in today’s world. However, I would argue the opposite.

An Historical Perspective

Changes in technology lead to changes in the way that society operates. Examples of the stage coach and 35mm film come to mind: the stage coach companies fought for their lives when the railways arrived, and 35mm film has given way to digital cameras. Yes there are still stage coaches and 35mm film, but these are now specialised markets. But not all changes in technology necessary lead to the abandonment of an earlier technology. Those of us with memories long enough will remember the days when cinemas were all complaining about the arrival of television being their death knell.

For a more balanced view, I would argue when a new technology comes along, society takes advantage of the best of both technologies, and that the older technology can also adapt. The old “flea pit” has evolved into today’s IMAX cinema while we also have video-on-demand via the Internet.

The Library of Today

Libraries have evolved. Even my local library, serving a population of only a few thousand, has computers that visitors can use to access the Internet. I also make book requests via e-mail; this a norm with my local library, even though my child within finds this rather peculiar.

Librarians, as a breed, are still concerned about locating resources for people – it is part of their vocation. I see this every time I walk into a library. They know all the ins and outs of things like inter-library loan – my local library is now used to me asking for titles that are not available even at the State Library.

There is also the questions of the quality of the information that is available. The Internet is a wonderful resource for finding information, but it is not always accurate. Until very recently, it could be difficult to track down peer-reviewed academic papers. While misinformation on the Internet can be merely annoying, it has the potential to be dangerous or even life-threatening if you are looking for answers to medical questions, for example.

In cases like that, ask your librarian for sources of background information, and then use that information to better understand what your doctor tells you.

In Conclusion

Are librarians a thing of the past? No. Society still needs them, and we should value them more.

My Thanks To …

My thanks go to Tom Whitby (web site: http://tomwhitby.wordpress.com/) for his initial tweet, and to Cathy Brophy (twitter: http://twitter.com/brophycat and Dawnelai (web site: http://dawnelai.wordpress.com/) for their contributions to the ensuing discussion.

Tom’s Tweet

Tom’s original tweet was “Lightbulb Moment: If every tchr saw the exact test their kids will get at the end of the year and spent that year teaching to that test-Win”, and it made me wonder: “Win? Who’s winning?”. The answer of course is “nobody”.

This set me off on my high horse.

Of Tests

I believe that every serious educator would accept that tests are essential. In its most simple form, it is the moment-by-moment assessment that every teacher does (or at least should do) on their learners so as to guide his/her next step in the teaching/learning process. In a more formal context, tests (or examinations) allow prospective employers to choose people that are appropriate for their workplaces. And therein lies the issue. It appears from my little rabbit hole that there is a conspiracy of assumption, that assumption being that tests are (a) a good measure of the assessees capabilities, and (b) what the tests measure are well matched to employers’ needs. If you listen to the “music behind the words” of a lot of educational discussion (or “edubabble” if you prefer) this message comes across loud and clear to me at least. But tests can be worse than useless.

By way of providing an example, the Australian Qualification and Training Framework attempts to match assessments against employers’ needs. Then why, in 2008, was there a specific requirement to teach an outdated version of a word processing package, and even more disastrously the requirement that students be able to format a floppy disc? When was the last time you even saw a floppy disc? We are wasting everybody’s time by teaching these things.

The Pace of Change

Some subjects change slowly. The English grammar that I see being taught in schools today closely matches what I remember from over four decades ago. While new words have appeared, and spellings have changed (no, a “gaol” is not something you find in a game of football), such things as sentence construction and single/plural word forms have stayed the same.

The same cannot be said of information and communications technology (ICT). 40 years ago the phrase “blu-ray disc” did not exist. Some technologies can come from nowhere to mainstream in a matter of months: twitter is a case in point. As educators, we need to empower learners to work with these new technologies in the most effective way that we can.

Da Capo

Back to Teaching to the Test. Cathy tweeted “yep I know I have a teacher who is trying to do just that-he has been given the message it is THAT important-he fears for his job”. Think on that for a moment: any teacher that is REQUIRED to teach to an out-dated test is being put in a truly appalling position, and is a cog a very dysfunctional education system.

Cathy went on “I am struggling w it bcause I feel we (as admin or those who influence admin) need to do a better job bridging that gap”. Exactly.

A Suggestion

As an educator, I raised my concerns about outdated assessment requirements here in Australia. I was informed by the top body for that subject that it takes three years to get such changes through “the system”. In a discipline that changes as fast as ICT, this means that we are teaching today’s children about yesterday’s topics. To put it into a historical perspective, it is like assessing people on how well they hitch up a pony to a trap as part of the driving test.

We have two issues here: (1) How to make the details of the assessment more relevant to “real life”, and (2) How to bring the assessment criteria up to date.

In my own specialist area (ICT) I have seen countless examples of learning requirements that were hopelessly wide of the mark (no pun intended) even when they where first written. Much more care and consideration needs to be given to more closely match the learning outcomes with employers’ needs. While acknowledging that those outcomes can never be perfectly matched (every employer has slightly different needs), and working as I do in both inside education and outside, I know it can be improved a lot.

We also need to shorten the “cycle time” between developments in ICT and changes in the learning outcomes. Basically, if a new technology has become widespread six months prior to the start of an academic year, then it should be being delivered in that academic year. Not to do so is to do a dis-service to our learners, and thereby hamper the country’s economy.

And how might those people who define the learning outcomes (or write the curriculum documents, phrase it however you like) feel about the prospect of all this extra work? Probably with a “Yes, but”, meaning that they lack the resources to do it. Then it is time to work at the political level to argue the case for allocating the necessary resources to those people. Get them to read bad-tempered articles like this.

How might teachers feel? I hear no end of grumbling from fellow lecturers whenever a new curriculum document comes out, typically once every three years in this part of the world, compaining that they are going to have re-write all their delivery and assessment resources. I have very little time for that attitude: if you have prepared your resources at a suitably fundamental level in the first place, then any changes that you need to make should be minor. And if you want to ask me if I am being pie-in-the-sky, I will answer “No, been there, done that”. And if you are delivering learning in the fast-moving world of ICT and you do not expect to produce (or at least somehow obtain) at least one chapter’s worth of new delivery and assessment resources every year, then I have just two words for you: “Get out!”. If you are not fully committed to the process of continuous improvement, then we might as well give up altogether, and go running around in loin cloths and living in caves.

My Thanks To …

My thanks go to Elizabeth Miles (web site: http://www.iken.biz/) for prompting this post.

For Your Bright Maths Students

Elizabeth’s question was about how many people’s birthdays can be found in the first 200 million digits of pi. She also thoughtfully provided a link to where you could see if your birthday was in those first 200 million digits: http://www.angio.net/pi/bigpi.cgi.

I realised that this was a problem that I could give to year 12 maths and statistics classes.

A Note About Date Formats

Elizabeth commented that different parts of the world have different formats for dates: mmddyyyy and ddmmyyyy, which raises the question of does the answer change under these circumstances.

A Worked Solution

To save you time (and by way of getting you to check out my working!), I offer the following answer:

1. Start with the observation that the distribution of digits appears to be uniform for the purposes of this question: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/PiDigits.html
2. There appears to be no correlation between successive digits of pi, nor for any pair of digits at a fixed distance apart.
3. Under these conditions, we can infer that any pair, triplet or n-tuple of numbers also occurs uniformly.
4. A birthdate, in either ddmmyyyy or mmddyyyy form, is a subset of such octuplets.
5. The question then simplifies to identifying how often an arbitrary octuplet occurs, and how many “birthday” octuplets are likely to occur in the first 200 million digits.
6. Given any 8 successive digits of pi, the chances of the first pair of digits matching are exactly 0.1, the first and second pairs matching is exactly 0.01, and for all 8 pairs it is 10^-8.
7. The chances of the octuplet not being in the first 8 digits are 0.99999999
8. The chances of the octuplet not being in the first 200 million digits are 0.99999999^199999993, or about 0.135
9. So about 86% of the population could expect to find their birthdays in the first 200 million digits of pi.

Background

I have delivered learning in a variety of contexts to students aged from 6 up to their 70s in areas as diverse as horse riding (at one extreme) to network design and management at the other extreme.

For the purposes of this post, I would like to focus on two groups of students. The first group were Diploma level students who were all highly intelligent and just as highly motivated: these students routinely had an achievement rate of 95% under my tutelage. The second group was a group of youth-at-risk, where an achievement rate of 20% would be considered exceptional.

“Failing” Schools

There has been a lot of news recently about a Rhode Island high school which has sacked its entire teaching staff: http://wbztv.com/local/central.falls.high.2.1528415.html. This raises the issue of performance-related pay.

The Financial Incentive

At one end of the financial incentive spectrum, there is the “piecework” rate: you don’t produce any “pieces”, you don’t get any money. At the other end of the spectrum, it does not matter how much you produce, you get paid exactly the same amount of money. Readers may have come across advertisements for sales staff who are paid on a “basic plus commission” basis, which lies somewhere between these two extremes.

Imagine then that your pay as a teacher is based on your student outcomes. For the sake of simplicity, let us assume that you get paid a certain amount if none of your students achieve anything, and that you pay is doubled if you have a 100% achievement rate. Enter the teacher who owns his house, has no debts, and has little interest in conveying knowledge. What is he going to do in class all day? You’re right: he will just sit and gossip with his students. This does not benefit the students.

Now imagine the “payment by results” scenario in a school with a mixed range of students. How many teachers would be prepared to lose up to half their pay because they had been allocated a cohort of youth-at-risk students? Even a child of 10 could answer you that question.

Suppose we change the ratio so that you get paid 80% regardless, and the final 20% on a pro-rata achievement basis. Am I going to be bothered putting in that extra effort, both in terms of class time and my own emotional commitment for that extra 20% when the penalty that I will pay (and I speak from personal experience) will be verbal abuse, physical abuse and lies by students about me behaving improperly? Of course not.

It seems to me that the whole basis of using financial incentives to improve student outcomes at the teacher level is fundamentally flawed.

A Different Approach

I start from the premise that schools in different neighbourhoods have students with different social outlooks and different expectations. This may arise from different socio-economic conditions. This is not the same as saying that they have different levels of intelligence or capabilities. What this means is that schools with a high proportion of, or even possibly exclusively, youth-at-risk type students cannot be compared with schools with mostly highly motivated students.

There appears to be very little acknowledgement from the strategic decision-makers that these issues exist. Furthermore, I understand that it is regarded as being politically “inappropriate” to acknowledge and respond accordingly to such issues; this could be seen as a reaction against the social fragmentation arising from legislation such as the Butler Education Act in the UK in 1994 (see my post on a similar issue: https://philhart.edublogs.org/2009/10/29/making-schools-relevant/). From my own experience, there are significant differences between these types of student, and those differences need to be acknowledged. If you are one of these decision makers, and you disagree with what I have written, please use the comment form below to put your side of the story!

In the absence of any information to the contrary, the Rhode Island high school case has the appearance of being a victim of being a school in a disadvantaged area. The statistics and other facts quoted in the link near the top of this post would tend support that appearance. Without doing a lot more delving into the mass firing event, it is impossible to confirm that the appearance also represents “actuality”.

The Next Step

So what would I suggest for a “next step”? If you are in a position where you are working with youth-at-risk, and being expected to have 90% achievement rates, send a link to this page to your decision makers, and get them to disagree with what I have written.

They may argue that it is disaffected teachers that cause disaffected students. I would disagree, saying that in my experience all teachers are motivated when they first enter teaching, and it is the continual emotional and psychological drain on those teachers being over-exposed to such disaffected students that is the cause of the teachers’ disaffection: such teachers need support rather than condemnation.

They may argue that there is no problem, when you can plainly see one. If that happens, then it is time to move to a more enlightened school.

You can only look after your students if you look after yourself first.