Gravity’s Grace

Wolfram|Alpha 2

Mon, 18 May 2009 09:56:01 -0400

Well, Wolfram|Alpha is live, and mathematics instruction is going to have to change. Like, now. At the next school year, at the latest.

The attached screen shot is a real Wolfram|Alpha solution to a random equation that I typed into the website. Already some schools are talking about blocking it... BLOCKING IT?? Good grief, people, are you daft?

Blocking content on the Internet is tantamount to admitting that your school can’t do better than what your students find there on the ‘Net. It’s proof that your institution can’t deal with change. It’s a demonstration that your teachers and administrators are unable to cope with new knowledge or new means of accessing knowledge.

Guess what? I think our job descriptions just changed. I just wish I could figure out what the new description is.

Sunday: Sources on the Web: Galileo

Sun, 17 May 2009 16:24:34 -0400

Last week, we looked at Canossa and the conflict between Pope Gregory VII and Emperor Henry IV. This week, let’s look at another struggle between Church and rival, namely science. Here, we’re going to examine the events of Galileo’s showdown with the Church.

The thing that’s hardest for students to understand is the (1) Geocentric or Ptolemaian model, against the (2) Copernican model. So my links-list this week concentrated on visuals that would help students understand how this belief worked, and why it persisted. Retrograde motion is hard enough, that they might want a (3) print source as well as video. And this might help explain (4) why Ptolemy’s view persisted so long. Seeing the (5) printed map of the cosmos is useful; remind them how hard it is to question the textbook’s accuracy, just because it’s a printed document

Some students might want to quote from Nicolas Copernicus’s book. It’s difficult to get to, but they could try (6) his books, published for the first time in English in 1939.
Maybe their parents remember (7) Carl Sagan’s explanation from Cosmos, now available on YouTube. And (8) this comparison, 47 seconds long, is a great way to see the differences between universal models. Someone has even done (9) a brief animated interview with Galileo. And Bard College has published (10) the complete text of Siderius Nuncius in English — a book that should be required reading before eighth grade.

There’s more which I present below as a bullet list, because there is so much available. You don’t have to take my top ten links, because there’s at least another twenty or more I couldn’t include here:

• Sidereus Nuncius - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• Galileo Portraits
• A lecture on the Pre-Copernican worldview.
• Why finding Jupiter’s Moons, and the phases of Venus, was such a ground-breaking discovery.
• A slideshow from an astronomy class, showing Galileo’s moons.
• Galileo’s telescope
• The Indigo Girls’ song, Galileo, and the video for it.

Perhaps most importantly, a place where you can buy... not replicas, exactly... but telescopes that do what Galileo’s instrument could do.

All in all, it’s a pretty powerful list this week, and I’m happy to be able to assemble it for everyone. Go stargazing, everyone, and learn about Galileo! We owe him a lot.

Switching to WordPress?

Sat, 16 May 2009 22:40:11 -0400

So... I started this weblog using iWeb, the program that comes with your new Mac... but I’ve been learning today about WordPress. Does anyone have strong feelings about me using iWeb vs. my WordPress blog, or is it just one against another, both about the same? Do you use WordPress, or something else?

In my time as a blogger, I’ve used Diaryland.com, and Livejournal.com... I’ve resisted going to blogger and blogspot, and the rest. But now my school is thinking about installing WordPress, and I’d like to be involved in administering that program. I think it could really get kids writing.

Wolfram|Alpha

Sat, 16 May 2009 12:24:36 -0400

Uh-oh. One of the things that we as teachers do is set ourselves up as keepers of content. But that’s starting to change. It used to be that thanks to Google, we could establish ourselves as interpreters of what websites were good, and which ones were bad. Google would throw up thousands of places to find the information, but its search system wouldn’t find the answers and hand them to you on a platter.

That is beginning to change with Wolfram|Alpha. I just typed in Charlemage, and got his birth and death dates. Now, the bugs aren’t all worked out of the system, so I can’t show you a screenshot of what I saw. but I saw a timeline, a chart showing Charlemagne’s official name, and another chart with his birth and death dates. It’s not going to be super-useful, yet. But it will be, and our students will be using it before the end of the week to answer math problems, because it’s BUILT to handle mathematics equations specifically.

This video explains more about just what your students will be able to do with Wolfram|Alpha.

Schooling just hit another major hurdle, and it’s like the limbo bar in Caribbean dancing — the bar keeps getting higher for us, and lower for everyone else.

Projects as step-lists

Sat, 16 May 2009 09:37:47 -0400

I recently started using Jing, an application which takes a video of your computer screen and turns it into a Flash file, or a QuickTime video. You’re limited to five-minute shows, but those can be posted on a website, or added to a blog like this one. And you can explain how to do a multiplicity of things in five minutes; many such lessons can be imagined for school, in particular. Because it’s a video, the lesson is repeatable, and a student in a tutoring situation can review the lesson even when you are not there — as long as they have access to the internet, or have the video on a DVD.
Because you, the teacher, have creative control over these videos, you can teach the same kinds of lessons that are taught at Lynda.com. You can teach your students how to use a computer for common school-related tasks like adding a footnote, or building a bibliography for a research paper.
But this is where my colleague Glenn comes in. He’s a great teacher, and he just got bumped up to administrator grade. It’s a gain for the school, but also a loss. Now we have to teach the same skills he taught, but we don’t have the tools he had. I spoke to him about some of my ideas for shifting my classes toward project-based learning, and he was interested.
Yet he made one clear, specific suggestion. “Remember that when you assign projects, you also have to teach the path to completing that project.” A diorama isn’t just a finished project: it’s about assembling the materials, and finding a shoebox, and planning the position of the horses and Indians and cowboys. Build a rubric that requires kids to submit each step of the diorama — initial concept sketches, a “materials needed list”, proof-of-shopping trip, assembly of materials, and so on.
A poster is the same way. At another school, I observed a group of kids making posters for a health and anatomy class. Their posters were nice, in that they encouraged kids not to smoke, do drugs, abuse alcohol, or bully others. Yet the teacher should have taught methods for laying out guidelines, so that blocks of text can all be the same height. Some teaching of fonts and typography would have been useful, too. And some short drawing instructions, like Dave Gray’s semigram, would have been marvelous as well.
So I think about Glenn’s reminder, and then a set of rubrics for a poster looks more like a to-do list:
• Acquire poster board
• Acquire markers, or choose paper size for digital design
• use t-square, ruler & triangle to lay out border 1/2” wide
• Lay out guidelines to find the center of the board
• Lay out guidelines for poster’s main title
• Lay out guidelines for poster’s sub-title
• Lay out guidelines for poster’s body text
• Write poster body text
• brainstorm main title and sub-titles
• Search Google Images for appropriate images for poster
• Brainstorm poster color scheme
• Choose typography for poster: main head, subheads, and body
• Practice lettering for main poster (if hand-done)
• select pull-quotes for poster
• add copyright block and bibliography or URL list to poster fringe/back.
In this context, making a poster is a lot more complicated. You have to think about issues of design as well as writing, research as well as creative tools. Brainstorming with Glenn yesterday, I came up with eighteen ways a student could show that they understood the material in a history class:
Graphical Formats
1. Graphics
2. Poster
3. Travel brochure
4. Sales catalog of pottery or other artifacts
5. Comic book detailing a historical event
6. Timeline

Written Formats
1. Essay
2. Biography of person
3. Wiki article
4. Blog entry
5. Legal Brief
6. Short story (historical fiction)

Audio/Visual Formats
1. Animated short film
2. Storyboard for live film
3. Podcast
4. Slideshow
5. Diorama with presentation
6. Art history database file

Presentation Format
1. self-written Song
2. in-class presentation
3. Staged debate
4. Poetry recital
5. Staged reading of primary sources
6. Alternate Reality Game (ARG)

So... there’s eighteen different ways to analyze a student’s abilty to answer questions based on a given content-set, and each of those items manifests as a to-do list somehow. I haven’t written these to-do lists, but I may decide that this is what I want to teach and how I want to teach next year.
There will need to be an effort on my part, to generate a few examples of each of the eighteen types. And I think each student will have to generate at least ONE of the eighteen types in the course of their school year. That way, they can point to a set of photographs or a .pdf, or a podcast stream, to show what they’ve done and how well they’ve done it. This becomes, in effect, a digital portfolio for high school and college. But it also means that we’re pushing students into creative public work at a much earlier age. That carries risks, not just for the student, but also for the adult. The kid may fail early on, and attract the derision of admissions officers and potential employers. The adult teachers are taking other broad risks worth considering before implementation, too. But I think the idea of allowing multiple avenues of expression is a great one.