Public Address | Cafe | Hard News: Real Media

merc

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 10:11:56 +1300

Hughes Jean, AWE.

Jean Hughes

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 09:51:56 +1300

Well – I have missed out on most of this as I was away for a lovely weekend – so here is a small account on how the organisation I work for lets teenagers loose on computers and the internet with great results.
I work for Notschool (www.notschool.net)an online learning…

reece palmer

Sat, 27 Oct 2007 21:52:32 +1300

Hey Dorothy, We should get on to Ewan McIntosh and Tony Ryan etc to embed the movie in their sites, I reckon. Helen Baxter would be keen too surely, we need to mobilise.

reece palmer

Sat, 27 Oct 2007 12:59:49 +1300

Hi Public Address,
I haven't posted in ages which some of you may consider a great favour so,
*lodges cotton wool in cheek*
"Now maybe you can do me a favour"
The school I work at has entered and has made the final five of a competition to create and…

Stephen Harlow

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 00:57:15 +1300

If you heard Danah Boyd when she was here then the Bebo-haviour Russell describes won't come as a complete surprise. There is, however, an opportunity to educate (rather than regulate) here and as Don says, we need to give up a bit of control.

Instead of leaving Beebo and Blogger…

Don Christie

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 23:49:46 +1300

Interesting variety of topics, Russell. I am attending and speaking at an education conference (Moodle Moot) at the Open University in the UK. Martin Langhoff has just given a keynote on the One Laptop Per Child project. Whilst that project is worthy the most interesting stuff is some of the…

Don Christie

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 23:39:52 +1300

Why is it that only Nandor and the Greens seem to be able to protect the interests of the vast majority of the digital community?

Not.only.Nandor

BenWilson

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 23:08:31 +1300

Paul, nice honesty. My mum (who is a teacher) told me that it never bothered her when students were streets ahead of her on something. It gave her hope for the future.

But I can well imagine the frustrations involved in teaching such a rapidly changing subject as graphics, from…

BenWilson

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 23:00:46 +1300

Robyn

Oi, the world record for typing is about 170wpm! Did you maybe mean 50wpm or 500 characters per minute?
Speed doesn't mean much without accuracy :)

Read more carefully! It was only apparent speed. I was preloading a little buffer with the entire paragraph, then pushing 'print' and miming…

BenWilson

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 22:44:14 +1300

Dorothy,

I wonder how many of your the commentors who have been disparaging about teacher technical competencies have to be highly skilled in such disparate arenas in their business lives?

I sure don't. I admire teachers greatly for doing an important job that is really hard, and not particularly well…

Dorothy

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 22:07:01 +1300

...Russell, you may want to investigate Pt England Primary School. They have a stunning program there....
Thank you Jackie
..the optimum way of encoding clips to play on YouTube and similar services....
Russell...
I am a middle aged, female teacher and I am sure you will be cheered to know…

Geoff Lealand

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 21:26:35 +1300

kia ora tatou: Russell mentioning my name (but not in vain!) prompted me to join the discussion. I have sent a message to Russell (we bump into each other at events such as the Unitec meeting) just to clarify what I was suggesting when I said that Media Studies has…

Paul Wernham

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 20:41:55 +1300

__Yet none of them were teaching what ought to be a core skill in handling video these days: the optimum way of encoding clips to play on YouTube and similar services. In many cases that's because YouTube is dangerous ground for schools. Some of them just filter it at the…

Deb Thompson

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 20:16:28 +1300

I was at the Media Studies meeting yesterday and, with all due respect Russell, I think you may have misinterpreted what we were saying. It's true we don't have a formal curriculum, but we do have a place in the curriculum and a structure to our courses, based on integral…

Paul Campbell

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 19:44:34 +1300

Yamis: one thing I've done with my kids a bunch of times when I've found something they've written that so obviously wasn't theirs has been to cut out some text and past it into google .... finds it every time ..... next question is always "If I can do it…

Ben Austin

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 19:36:12 +1300

Oh, and I learnt to touchtype by being addicted to IRC when I was 16...

You and me both Joanna, except I think I was 18 and it was initially research for political studies.

Yamis

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 18:50:04 +1300

Not really right on topic but I used my laptop in class last term to bring up the wikipedia page for a topic that we had just done assignments on. I hooked up to the projector and displayed the page on the whiteboard. At the same time I held up…

Neil Graham

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 18:35:16 +1300

oh I forgot..

teach her Visual Basic.

hell no. :-)

If it's Basic, It'll be Blitz. Let's you do pretties quickly, that counts for a lot when you're a kid.

Neil Graham

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 18:21:26 +1300

Sounds like a job for...Javascript!

Hell no. For starters, see my link above. It's a copmarison between flash and javascript. Canvas is a joke. I found setting cells in a table was faster than plotting pixels.

Then there's Silverlight, the so-called "Flash Killer" by Microsoft.

Also hell no. It's another…

Robyn Gallagher

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 18:10:50 +1300

Despite apparently being able to type at 500 words a minute I actually was a 2 finger typist until I left university

Oi, the world record for typing is about 170wpm! Did you maybe mean 50wpm or 500 characters per minute?

Speed doesn't mean much without accuracy :)

BenWilson

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 17:38:31 +1300

Doh, now I feel stink, I thought Leo was some arcane language! What does he have to say about Flash?

Bart Janssen

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 17:29:07 +1300

because it's not the real world — you can't share the stuff you make.

Heh guess that should have been obvious. When you learn how to do something new you usually want to show what you can do to your friends and get their feedback. After all they are the…

Mikaere Curtis

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 17:23:43 +1300

Then there's Silverlight, the so-called "Flash Killer" by Microsoft. They guarantee it will work on IE, Firefox and Safari which is a sizeable proportion of browsers in use.

And you can program it using any of the .Net family of languages such as VB.Net, which leverages any .Net learning.

Jackie Clark

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 17:20:50 +1300

Russell, you may want to investigate Pt England Primary School. They have a stunning program there. And to go a bit further down the age scale, Roskill South Kindergarten is a Centre of Innovation. Min of Ed website will have details on both, I think.

BenWilson

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 17:18:42 +1300

OTOH, Flash — that's fun, not too hard to learn, and any browser runs it.

Gosh yes, forgot that one, probably because I can't stand what people do with it.

__The idea that you can past some code into a text box and run it on your browser would be…

Mikaere Curtis

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 16:50:47 +1300

At the start of the Digital Review, the entire paradigm shift caused by the digital revolution couldn't be anticipated ( we certainly never thought about bands like Radiohead making a business decision to offer their music on-line for no fixed price...).

Although it had been already done by a headlining…

Neil Graham

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 16:49:16 +1300

I have been keeping half an eye on flash. The flash 9 VM is very nice. I even had a play with converting a 6502 emulator from javascript to flash. ( http://www.screamingduck.com/Lerc/6502asm/ Left side flash, right side javascipt).

One of my many "I'll never get time to do it" project…

rodgerd

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 16:48:13 +1300

The whole point of the digital review was to ensure that the centuries-old 'Copyright' based legislation could apply equally to digital technologies (ie, the words/ideas were technologically neutral). But the very concept of protecting and stimulating the creative process is unlikely to be protected by legislating against 'copying' in the…

Russell Brown

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 16:26:51 +1300

Try Kids Programming Language. I haven't looked at it in any depth myself, but someone i know was saying nice things about it.

Karl from CactusLab has been doing some work with Leo, and we found that specialised kid stuff like Phrogram, for all its merits, falls down because it's…

Rochelle Hume

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 16:24:29 +1300

Touch-typing has served me well, but all the other skills – like counting spaces and tabbing across to lay out a brochure – were virtually obsolete when they were being taught.
LOL tell me about it. The typing teacher at my high school didn't even fully grasp the concept of…

Rochelle Hume

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 16:19:37 +1300

Nandor's speech was awesomely concise. My concern is that the legislative process (this review began in about 2002) is just not quick enough to keep up with the quantum changes digital technology is making to the way we do things.

The whole point of the digital review was to ensure…

BenWilson

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 16:13:52 +1300

Mikaere, nice one. It's a pretty tricky choice now, of course. Back when I was a kid, to even use a high-level language at all was pretty new. Now it's all visual and drag-and-drop if you want.

There's no best advice on what language to teach. Actually, they're all the…

Max Call

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 16:08:26 +1300

also as a parent....

i think it is really important that you instill a love of learning
in your children right from the start.
it will stand them in good stead

Max Call

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 16:05:49 +1300

Just a quick note from a trainee teacher (Secondary)

totally endorse 81st column and Barts posts

I think we as teachers are there to ensure that students can

learn and think

even outside of class!!

Deborah

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 15:59:27 +1300

At uni, however, tutors were very useful cats.

Added bonus is it is semi-acceptable to have one as a love interest.

Ahem.... I married mine.

Tom Beard

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 15:52:44 +1300

Try Kids Programming Language.

Or LOLcode

BenWilson

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 15:52:34 +1300

On the same topic, my 19 month old has already learned to eat shit, and why you don't want to. That lesson is a keeper.

Mikaere Curtis

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 15:51:26 +1300

Neil, teach her Visual Basic. Much as I hate to say it, it's a good learning tool for programming.

I'm planning on teaching my 10 year old daughter VB.Net, IIRC the Express version is free from Microsoft, although Linux users can use the Mono version. The amount of blogs /…

BenWilson

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 15:49:34 +1300

In that case Ben, I would of course nominate toilet training.

Yes, it's important to learn when to give a shit! Although learning to get others to clean your shit up works too....double edged sword, that one.

Mark Easterbrook

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 15:42:27 +1300

As for teachers: IMHO, there are two types of teachers you should hope your kids have at some point.

The first are ones like my Mum and older sister – teachers who give every ounce they have to give, and then some, to their students. Who genuinely care about every…

Mark Easterbrook

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 15:35:33 +1300

Just jumping back to Nandor:

Many years ago now, when he first stood for Parliament, I saw Nandor speak in a debate at Auckland Uni. I had a long conversation later that week with my then-girlfriend's Dad.

He was a fairly liberal, Labour stalwart kind of guy, but it was…

Stephen Judd

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 15:34:52 +1300

In that case Ben, I would of course nominate toilet training.

BenWilson

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 15:32:34 +1300

I learned the violin by the Suzuki method.

Heh, I guess it's arbitrary which skills to choose as the most important. In the first few weeks of my life I learned to coordinate my eyeballs, and to smile. These skills have been amongst the most valuable throughout my whole life.…

Jeremy Andrew

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 15:25:26 +1300

Try Kids Programming Language. I haven't looked at it in any depth myself, but someone i know was saying nice things about it.

Stephen Judd

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 15:19:51 +1300

That's very interesting point, Bart.

You know what the very best thing I did as a child was, as far as my future mental development was? I learned the violin by the Suzuki method. That method demands that you learn every new piece by heart, from ear alone. So I…

BenWilson

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 15:17:16 +1300

Neil, teach her Visual Basic. Much as I hate to say it, it's a good learning tool for programming.

Bart, That's what teachers contribute. Much more than general knowledge.

And from what you've said Ben, that's what you learned to do.

Sure is, and I fully acknowledge the role of…

Bart Janssen

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 15:09:44 +1300

Ben wrote

I'm not saying school teachers are useless. I just think that what they have to contribute is some fairly general knowledge,

81st column's response covers some of my feelings buit I'll say it in my words too.

Teachers don't teach general knowledge for the sake of the knowledge…

Neil Graham

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 15:06:42 +1300

I have been wondering when I should teach my daughter to program (4 years old atm). It's a bit tricky because the simplest thing out there is Logo, but Logo is very unsatisfying.

also considering the merits of an OLPC XO. Or If I can't get one, something similar (anyone…

kmont

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 15:06:37 +1300

At uni, however, tutors were very useful cats.

Added bonus is it is semi-acceptable to have one as a love interest.

BenWilson

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 14:57:23 +1300

Sadly for me older kids taught me squat at school

Likewise, except in sport, where they taught me practically everything. At uni, however, tutors were very useful cats.

BenWilson

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 14:50:20 +1300

Stephen, I so agree, I couldn't even imagine what Lotus 1-2-3 was for when I was 16. If I wanted to add up some numbers I'd write a program? Ironically my first programming job was writing Lotus 1-2-3 macros. Funny old world, you never know what's going to be relevant.…

kmont

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 14:50:19 +1300

Kowhai, there's a lot to be said for just being taught by older kids. They're a lot cheaper too, and it's less dodgy when their students fall in love with them.

LOL, some truth in that.
Sadly for me older kids taught me squat at school.

Tom Beard

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 14:48:48 +1300

Re touch typing: I type like I live – fast, with a lot of mistakes.

I did a six-week touch-typing course when I was a teenager, primarily so that I could type in the BASIC and Assembly code that appeared in computer magazines. Every week we learned some more letters,…

Andrew Paul Wood

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 14:47:22 +1300

Frankly, I'd be glad if my tertiary students could manage basic English grammar – and that's just the native speakers. Don't be filling their heads with all that shiney flash gobbledigook.

BenWilson

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 14:37:23 +1300

Kowhai, there's a lot to be said for just being taught by older kids. They're a lot cheaper too, and it's less dodgy when their students fall in love with them.

Touch typing: Despite apparently being able to type at 500 words a minute I actually was a 2 finger…

81stcolumn

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 14:33:50 +1300

Hmmmm…..

Punched cards ? Been there done that in 1980.......someone donated a second hand Honeywell mainframe to the school. We had to send the command sheets to the local poly to get the cards done though….at the time VT120 was just a winkle in the eye…

__It's much easier to…

Stephen Judd

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 14:31:32 +1300

When I was at primary school in the late 70s microcomputers were pretty much unheard-of in NZ. If anyone had got us access to computers, the only things that are still present and useful today are a) high-level programming languages b) keyboards for input and c) the Unix operating system.…

BenWilson

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 14:29:21 +1300

Your 'backwardness' and 'uncoolness' as a teacher are the least of your worries.

Sure, which is exactly why they seem backward and uncool. Even teachers without such privation as you speak of have other priorities, like maintaining order and a professional level of contact with their students. Over familiarity can…

Joanna

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 14:27:26 +1300

Oh, and I learnt to touchtype by being addicted to IRC when I was 16...

Joanna

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 14:26:54 +1300

At my American school in Japan, I played Carmen San Diego, Hotdog Stand and The Oregon Trail an awful lot, and then experienced sexual harrassment over the internet before the internet really was a thing on a 9.6kp modem BBS, when my friend and I were the only girls who…

Kyle Matthews

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 14:24:44 +1300

Touch-typing has served me well, but all the other skills – like counting spaces and tabbing across to lay out a brochure – were virtually obsolete when they were being taught.

Touch typing, I remain convinced, is the second most useful thing I learnt at high school. It made university,…

kmont

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 14:05:33 +1300

and played Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego.

Yeah what was with that? I didn't learn much of anything useful about computers at school, except touch-typing.

An inspirational teacher for me who did guess what? Left teaching to work in computing. Funny that.

I don't know how practical this…

Danielle

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 13:59:20 +1300

More likely they would just embarrass themselves with how uncool and backward they are

Some of them probably have other priorities. My husband, for example, teaches media studies at a decile one school with hardly any computers, about four video cameras (one of which was stolen and had to be…

Rob Stowell

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 13:58:55 +1300

What is the optimum way to encode clips for youtube? I've tried quite a few, including several recommended by others, and some recommended by youtube themselves. None have worked particularly well.
(youtube say

We've found that files converted from .wmv to one of the other formats our webpage accepts generally…

BenWilson

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 13:54:34 +1300

Touch-typing has served me well, but all the other skills – like counting spaces and tabbing across to lay out a brochure – were virtually obsolete when they were being taught.

LOL tell me about it. The typing teacher at my high school didn't even fully grasp the concept of…

BenWilson

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 13:50:39 +1300

there's very little chance I'd be able to walk off the street and get a job as a GIS specialist, Photoshop monkey or web guy without formal qualifications.

Oops missed that. I don't agree. You just won't start at the top. What 17 year old could rightfully expect to anyway?…

Robyn Gallagher

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 13:49:04 +1300

I was thinking back to the computer education I had at school. At intermediate school ('86/'87) there was a lab of Commodore 64s, where we learned the Logo programming language (boring!), used Bank Street Writer and played Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego.

But by the time I got…

BenWilson

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 13:45:28 +1300

Tom, I learned a lot of BASIC at intermediate from a guy who was doing a course at University in the early 80s. An inspirational teacher for me who did guess what? Left teaching to work in computing. Funny that.

But really he just helped me down a path. I…

Tom Beard

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 13:29:15 +1300

Where did you learn to do your tech stuff? Be honest now, was it at school or even on a course?

Well, I did take a course in BASIC at polytech when I was about 12 (there wasn't much tech education at schools back in the early eighties), but apart…

nzMM

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 13:26:58 +1300

Perhaps in the spirit of the internet a howto (howto: optimum encoding for youtube...) wiki could be put together for both teachers and students alike. Refer those in education to it. Make a point of including a discussion about the pros and cons of open formats as well.

BenWilson

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 13:23:00 +1300

I remember the first computer training we had at school. It involved punched cards.

Doesn't it make you marvel at the 2GB SD stick? Think of it as the same thing, just with really small holes :-)

BenWilson

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 13:15:20 +1300

But they're teaching kids to shoot and edit digital video using modern computer-based tools — just not an important distribution (and-self-marketing) skill that would make the editing skills more relevant.

Teaching, or giving the means to teach themselves? That's really what I'm getting at. Again I ask: Where did you…

Tom Beard

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 13:09:32 +1300

I remember the first computer training we had at school. It involved punched cards.

Jeremy Andrew

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 12:57:04 +1300

One of the main reasons my kids' school uses macs is that the apple folks provide a lot of teacher training, every year several of the teachers get to go off on a few days being taught nifty things to do with the computers.

kmont

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 12:26:55 +1300

And teaching them how to verify whats on wikipedia. I'll try, but it was hard enough getting them into the library to look up some information. Getting them to start cross checking, thinking about where they got the info... I'm tired already. :P

Keep on trucking, we appreciate your hard…

Aaron Dick

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 12:24:51 +1300

I'm training to be a teacher at the moment. I have no idea what to say about teaching kids about social sites or anything. I would like to engage them on it, to get them to think, to realise they are in a public space.

But then that turns around…

Kyle Matthews

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 12:06:36 +1300

Why bother, when I have the wisdom of the crowd to guide me?

Ahem.

Even Hard News seems problematic. It's much easier to declare it unreliable than to impart some basic skills in assessing the merit of an article — as the cornerstone of the vital modern ability to scrutinise…

rodgerd

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 12:04:28 +1300

It is curious that every time I have heard/read Nandor Tanzcos ideas/perspectives he has sounded so reasoned and reasonable. Imagine what the level of debate would be like if the shouters and pointscorers in Parliament had to lift their game to his level!!

Unfortunately that seems unlikely so long as…

Russell Brown

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 11:59:42 +1300

It is curious that every time I have heard/read Nandor Tanzcos ideas/perspectives he has sounded so reasoned and reasonable. Imagine what the level of debate would be like if the shouters and pointscorers in Parliament had to lift their game to his level!!

I've noted before that he's much more…

kmont

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 11:50:20 +1300

And I really strongly believe that it's useful for kids to be encouraged to think and talk about the media they're most likely to be using. And, even more so, to be taught how to assess information, which IMO is a critical task for modern education.

Yes.

Russell Brown

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 11:46:36 +1300

It's pretty tough to expect teachers to be at the bleeding edge of technology. Consider the demographic from which they are mostly taken (old). Then consider the demographic of the people who design the curricula (even older). Also consider how much they could be getting paid doing something else if…

BenWilson

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 11:25:22 +1300

It's pretty tough to expect teachers to be at the bleeding edge of technology. Consider the demographic from which they are mostly taken (old). Then consider the demographic of the people who design the curricula (even older). Also consider how much they could be getting paid doing something else if…

Jeremy Andrew

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 11:24:11 +1300

Yeah, its quite weird, I don't get around many primary schools apart from my kids one, so I tend to assume they're all more-or-less on a par. But last week I visited a local catholic private primary, their IT infrastructure is a whole nother ballgame – some of the classes…

Ian MacKay

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 11:23:45 +1300

It is curious that every time I have heard/read Nandor Tanzcos ideas/perspectives he has sounded so reasoned and reasonable. Imagine what the level of debate would be like if the shouters and pointscorers in Parliament had to lift their game to his level!!

Mark Thomas

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 11:18:10 +1300

wow – hamiltron, truly the city of the future

Jeremy Andrew

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 11:12:09 +1300

Same with blogs. Our kids start making PowerPoint presentations at intermediate level. But no one talks to them about a medium they're much more likely to actually use.

Depends on the school. My 6 year old's class have a wiki, and both he and the 8 year old have been…

Tom Beard

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 11:05:40 +1300

Ah, the open source approach to bug fixes.

Ben Austin

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 11:05:19 +1300

Why is it that only Nandor and the Greens seem to be able to protect the interests of the vast majority of the digital community?

Surely some other MPs use/know people who use the internet

Russell Brown

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 11:02:46 +1300

And perhaps proof-reading HTML would be a good skill to teach, too ;-)

Why bother, when I have the wisdom of the crowd to guide me?

Tom Beard

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 10:42:35 +1300

And, as noted elsewhere, http://nz.youtube.com/" target="_blank">the New Zealand YouTube gateway opened yesterday afternoon.

And perhaps proof-reading HTML would be a good skill to teach, too ;-)

Public Address

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 10:42:35 +1300

Discussion from blog post.