Tag: education

OmniGraffle for math & science concept development

Post author By John Koetsier
Post date March 18, 2009

OmniGraffle is a wonderful application that can be used in a lot of ways, but primarily for mind and processing mapping.

In my work as COO of my company, I primarily use OmniGraffle for concept mapping and visualization. It helps me understand how the pieces fit together. But I also play a role as a software architect, and in that role OmniGraffle allows me to play with various user interface elements in a simplistic way … to put them in different places and different relationships … and see how that affects the user experience of our software. All this can happen before a developer ever writes a line of code.

In schools, the situation is different, but the value is similar.

Using OmniGraffle can help students represent knowledge in a visual way … emphasizing relationships among concepts, hierarchy or lack thereof, and connections between ideas that might at first not be obviously connected. Students can also – as I do in my work – build up their knowledge piece by piece as they are learning. Representing it in a mind map can help cement it in their brains

Representing knowledge in a visual way can help simplify complex concepts … and can also help with knowledge diffusion. When a concept can be seen, pulled apart almost physically, re-drawn, and mapped out, it is a great learning resource. It can be shared, changed, updated, and used. As Naykki and Jarvela found, representing knowledge visually engages student in their own ideas – and in others’ as well (How Pictorial Knowledge Representations Mediate Collaborative Knowledge Construction in Groups, 2008). The huge benefit here is that very complex and abstract concepts can be represented visually and thereby made simpler. As Sze argues while developing a method of mapping via origami in Math and Mind Mapping: Origami Construction (2005), schema construction and spatial reasoning can help simplify complex constructs and processes.

One of the best things about OmniGraffle is Graffletopia, a website where people who create “stencils,” or sets of art that can be used as starting points for users of the software, can share them with others. Sets are available for all kinds of different purposes, including a periodic table of the elements.

I can imagine teachers developing stencils over time for a variety of science and math purposes, which can then be shared with others for mutual benefit.

Tags education, math, omnigraffle, science, technology

Uncategorized

WISE – Web-based Inquiry Science Environment

Post author By John Koetsier
Post date March 3, 2009

I am really liking WISE.

A Berkeley project, the Web-based Inquiry Science Environment is a …

… simple yet powerful learning environment where students examine real world evidence and analyze current scientific controversies. Our curriculum projects are designed to meet standards and complement your current science curriculum, and your grade 5-12 students will find them exciting and engaging.

The beauty of WISE is that it is very open … anyone can create or edit a WISE module on an area of their expertise. So teachers can pretty simply use or build modules for their classes. The one proviso is that you better have some familiarity with HTML and the web, or you’ll be in for a bit of a shock.

WISE modules are typically intended to take about a week of class time, and are designed so that two students go through the module together. Students can go through activities and steps, and can take notes throughout the course.

Since they’re run online, WISE modules can handle anything the web can … Flash, Java, Javascript … whatever a teacher might want to add interactivity and media, to the limits of their technical skill and resources.

One thing WISE lacks is a simple portal-style front door or portal which would reveal the wealth of modules available. I’ve heard – but can’t find the reference right now – that there are thousands of WISE modules, but you’d never know if from the spartan WISE home page, and most of them are probably on server installs of WISE in different locations. It’d be nice to see them all listed in a central place

Tags curriculum, education, technology, web, wise

Uncategorized

Jasper learning project

Post author By John Koetsier
Post date February 24, 2009

I’m impressed by the Jasper learning project.

The videos present natural learning opportunities as the characters progress through challenges – for instance … how long will the fuel in your ultralight last, how far can you go, and so on.

In spite of the fact that the videos are clearly very dated, they’re entertaining, topical, rooted in “real” life, and effectively present learning as a natural requirement of everyday realities. This is an answer to the “why will I ever need to know this” attitude that often prevails in middle and high school students.

I can imagine using these with a class and then working through the problems with them. I wonder about interfacing this type of learning with more traditional textbooks and wordbooks, however. Perhaps this would serve best as an introduction to a topic/problem area, and the traditional textbooks would be more suited for practice and follow-up.

Tags education, jasper, pbl, problem-based learning, technology, tele

Uncategorized

Received wisdom, education, & technology

Post author By John Koetsier
Post date February 2, 2009
1 Comment on Received wisdom, education, & technology

For me, a central concern in technology and teaching today should be: what does intelligence mean?

Is someone intelligent if they can locate the right answer?
Is someone smart if they can derive the right answer?
Is someone smart if they can synthesize the right answer?

Is someone smart if they can ask the right questions?

Of course, questions of what intelligence is have been with us for decades if not centuries. And the answer is very likely: there’s different kinds of smart.

But what do school optimize for?

Do they optimize for retention? For synthesis? For investigative skill? Or for sheer intellectual horsepower that powers through tough learning challenges? And, of course, we haven’t even talked about any of Gardner’s physical or musicla intelligences yet, or Goleman’s emotional.

None of this is clear.

What is clear is that teaching someone to be smart in a networked 21st century is a different proposition than teaching someone to be smart in a paper 18th century … just as that was different than teaching someone to be smart in an oral 5th century AD.

But sheer intelligence … has that changed at all?

Going to the oracle of Delphi, as a teacher I interviewed referred to Google, doesn’t make someone smart. And blind reliance on canned answers might be as dangerous and prehistorical obedience to cryptic priestly incantations. But distributed memory and cognition is surely and aide to the wise.

It strikes me that we don’t understand these issues as well as we should.