Students on science degrees usually learn how to present findings in the form of a ‘poster’. A science poster is a special kind of wall display invented so everyone who attends a conference can present their results even though there is not enough time for them all to speak. MS PowerPoint (and OpenOffice Impress) can be used to make posters easily – just use a single slide resized to A1 or A0 depending on the size of your poster. Then set up columns using text boxes and import (or draw) some images.
Must
Below are some links to places where you can find out more about scientific posters.
The handout I used in the session today – (Leinonen, 2007)
A Swarthmore College page on scientific poster design, with a downloadable PPT Column based template already set up, and an alternative template based on a central graphic with boxes.
North Carolina State University provides a very full web site on the principles of scientific poster design. Excellent material but will take you a bit of time to read through. If you want to use poster design with your students, it would be good to read this material first – you will get plenty of ideas for activities out of it.
Should
morguefile.com is a Web site where you can obtain free large resolution images. The strange name comes from newspaper practice. The ‘morgue file’ was a filing cabinet where journalists kept photos and pieces of writing that were not actually used in the newspaper.
A periodic table of visualisation. This is an unusual site that shows examples of lots of different visual metaphors. You could make use of a visual metaphor to help you structure the information on your poster.
Could
You don’t have to use PowerPoint if you know another package well and prefer to use that. To ensure that the result can be printed on a College printer, export your completed product as a PDF file. Use ‘embedded fonts’ if you are using more than Arial/Times New Roman/Courier or the Web safe fonts, at least I think that will work!
General PowerPoint tips: One Hour PowerPoint looks like quite a nice page.
Something completely different: This has nothing to do with scientific posters, but is another different way of using PowerPoint. Pecha-Kucha is the Japanese word for ‘chit-chat’. A Pecha-Kucha presentation has 20 slides and each slide is shown for 20 seconds. The slides are usually purely visual, just photos with a bit of text on top. The presenter has to talk over the slides in a structured way. People organise Pecha-Kucha nights, and the phenomenon has taken off among designers and other Web types. Planning a Pecha-Kucha presentation would help a student focus on the essentials of a topic and cut away the extraneous material. I’ll screen cast a Pecha-Kucha presentation about e-learning and you can see what you think…
Published on 5/11/2009 5/11/09.
Filed under: ILT, a red herring
Two articles from The Atlantic
- Is Google Making Us Stupid by Nicholas Carr
- Get Smarter by Jamais Cascio
Both reference Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf.
Published on 11/7/2009 11/07/09.
Filed under: Learning, a red herring Tags: brain science, Learning
Virtual learning environments: an evaluation of their development in a sample of educational settings is a report from OFSTED that looked at 18 college VLEs, with ‘reviews’ of 5 more.
“We found that the exploitation of VLEs at curriculum level resembled more of a cottage industry than a national technological revolution.”
Of course, if you want a ‘national technological revolution’ then you need to provide some resources… The authors have made some important points about the quality of materials found on VLEs, and the lack of interactive use of VLEs in the sample of Colleges (and other institutions) surveyed.
“The best VLEs reviewed allowed learners to reinforce their routine work, or catch up on missed lessons. In those best cases the material offered was fun and helpful and was being used well by learners. In the least effective examples, documents had been dumped on the system and forgotten.”
and I found the following paragraph especially revealing
“It was assumed that [ forums ] might be a popular aspect of a VLE given the prolific use of such sites, including social networking sites, among young people. The survey identified one forum in a high-achieving senior school, and three very specific projects with other providers which, in two instances, were aimed at older learners on level 3 and 4 courses.†-para 33
That assumption is commonly made, but effective educational use of forums is harder than might be imagined to develop with any group of students of any age. “Build it and they will come” is a slogan that might work in the development of open source software, but not in teaching and learning. As Diana Laurillard put it in the interview cited in another red herring.
“I mean, we had ubiquitous technology and all the communication technologies decades ago and it hasn’t really transformed higher education. So I think that shows you that the access issue, that we will just make the technology available and everything else follows, is false, that’s a fallacy. It’s got to be a different way of thinking about what teaching and learning means and how technology can support that” -Laurillard / Donovan interview, 2006
The OFSTED report is important, and needs to be widely read. I think we are well on the way from ‘cottage industry’ to ‘universal service’ in my College, but we do need to do more work on effective educational use of forums. The report raises (among many other managerial aspects) the issue of quality standards for VLE materials, and the (anonymous) authors report that:
“No provider in the survey had a formal quality assurance system that ensured material on their VLE was routinely reviewed to ensure it was up to date, relevant, accurate or appropriate. Three providers had numerical targets for populating their VLE with course material which were then reviewed, but they did not have qualitative reviews. The lack of a quality assurance system was not seen as a significant concern by the providers. The reasons for not having a formal quality assurance system included the belief that the VLE was effectively an extension of a lesson, and as such it was the responsibility of the relevant tutor to maintain standards as they would with lesson material, with appropriate oversight from heads of department. There was also a concern, as with imposing a common structure, that at this early stage of development of the VLEs, too many restrictions would dampen the enthusiasm of those who were taking a lead. A formal system might also discourage others whose material was, as yet, not reviewed frequently in the classroom.” -paragraph 51
My question now is: can we scaffold the development of courses in Moodle without using a blunt instrument like a quality standard?
Published on 7/7/2009 7/07/09.
Filed under: ILT, a red herring Tags: policy
The crux of the problem. Active learning is known to be more effective than receiving information, but we don’t use the active tools in Moodle. Geoff Petty gives out a large number of handouts on the downloads page of his Web site. The pyramid above was found in the Word file called Active Learning Works, which is the first download on the page.
Published on 5/7/2009 5/07/09.
Filed under: ILT, Learning, a red herring Tags: elearning, Learning, Teaching
This Red Herring post is about the images used in the Stance section of the presentation. I have strong views on PowerPoint, and prefer to use mainly images with a few words and diagrams.
Nietzsche was fond of his schreibkugel. The Friedrich Nietzsche quote is taken from Friedrich Kittler’s book Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Standford University Press, 1999, translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. The book deals with these three technologies that put a mechanical layer between ourselves and the performance or text, and that allowed reproduction of performances. Just one irony: before the gramophone became a mass technology, many households had a piano. Young ladies were encouraged to take lessons and to play light music in the home – and not just in richer families. As Kittler documents, this pool of young women trained to use all their fingers enabled the rapid adoption of writing machines. The gramophone began to replace the piano in the next generation. As Seb Schmoller has pointed out in a nice diagram, we are at the very beginning of another technological change, and similar ironies can be expected.
The last ten years has seen a significant increase in knowledge in how the brain learns to read. These developments are summarised in popular and accessible form in Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, published by Icon Books in the UK. Pages 145 to 154 explain the processes and circuits used when we fixate on a word between saccades (around 250 milliseconds). The small image of a cave painting in the Bhimbetka rock shelters was taken by Sarbanidas Roy. The ‘tag’ image is my own.
Our new writing tools. I rendered the outside of the poster as a greyscale to underline the way some people find the online world more engaging than “R.L.” (‘real life’). As one of Sherry Turkle’s students put it some years ago, “RL is just one more window, and it’s usually not my best one“.
East Side in Digbeth is undergoing significant development at present. These two artist posters appeared on a building fence site. The iBaby image is very simple: it is a scan of an old doll. When you scan a three dimensional image, only the parts of the object in contact with the scanner bed will be in sharp focus, there will be a very fast loss of focus and illumination as you move away from the scanner bed.
Published on 5/7/2009 5/07/09.
Filed under: a red herring Tags: images, Learning
Professor Alan Staley is Head of the Learning Technology Development Unit at BCU. He has introduced Moodle as BCU’s VLE and has used the introduction of a VLE to encourage more active styles of teaching and more focus on pedagogy. I attended a JISC West Midlands Regional Support Centre user group meeting some years ago at which Professor Staley suggested using a simple visual scoring system for teachers to assess the style and degree of interactivity of their Moodle courses. I have cheerfully stolen and adapted this idea for staff development next year.
- Video of Alan Staley talking about Moore’s Chasm as it relates to introducing technology to teachers [ 12 minutes, see graphic below as the video is not clear ]
- Download the PPT that Alan Staley used [ Number 2 on the list, 7Mb ]
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An earlier post on this blog
Published on 5/7/2009 5/07/09.
Filed under: ILT, a red herring Tags: elearning, Learning, moodle, policy
Diana Laurillard is professor of Learning with Digital Technologies at the London Knowledge Lab. Laurillard wrote a very influential book called Rethinking University Teaching, published by Routledge, second edition with updated examples and a few modifications was released in 2001. Roger Rist has provided a brief summary of the conversational model from which I have taken the graphic above. There is a review of the second edition by Stephen Bostock – I’ve linked to the Google cache version as the original is in RTF.
The slide I intend to use on Wednesday is taken from the PowerPoint presentation that Professor Laurillard used for her inaugural lecture at the LKI. The whole presentation is available and worth looking through.
You can also read or listen to Kevin Donovan interviewing Professor Laurillard. I’d be interested to know if you went for the text or the audio. I went straight for the PDF transcript, a colleague instinctively clicked on the audio button.
Published on 5/7/2009 5/07/09.
Filed under: ILT, Learning, a red herring Tags: elearning, Learning, moodle, theory
I’m doing a presentation about Moodle and how we need to broaden use of the communications tools next Wednesday. I’m working to a 20 minute time allowance. I’ll be ‘signposting’ people here at various points as we cross large and complex issues. The Red Herring category will mark those extra bits, cut material, and digressions that could not be pursued. The category will also provide referencing for sources that I use.
The image is actually of the Blueback Herring, and thanks to the authors of the Fishes of New York Web site for providing a high quality image for download. They ask that images be cited as: Kraft D. E., D.M. Carlson, and M. Carlson, Inland Fisheries of New York (Online), Version 4.0, Department of Natural Resources, Cornell University and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. They own the copyright of course.
I’ve used the GIMP ‘colourise’ filter with setting of 0 on hue to make this herring red. Yes, I know, Red Herring is actually a kind of kipper.
Published on 2/7/2009 2/07/09.
Filed under: a red herring Tags: Learning, presentation support
