Just Suppose Teaching and Learning Became the First Priority. Frank Coffield has provided some summer reading for all of us in FE. Just suppose…

I learned from my father, as he learned from his, to hear the music, the excitement and the hope in the word ‘education’. I also learned that it is the job of teachers to help other people’s children to hear and respond to that music. We do it because teaching is a noble profession, which dedicates itself to the lot of those who have not had our advantages.

As I find myself using OpenOffice more on the Asus EeePC, I decided to put OpenOffice back on my iBook laptop. OpenOffice itself needs the X11 desktop manager and runs slowly on a 512Mb G4 based laptop. NeoOffice is a version of OpenOffice that integrates better with Mac OS X - there is the familiar menu bar at the top of the screen and the Save and Open dialogue boxes are generated from the Finder.

NeoOffice takes a bit of time to load, but once running, it seems more responsive than OpenOffice. Some earlier issues with the compatibility of the fonts and sizes used in the Formula editor between the various flavours of OpenOffice seem to have been sorted out in version 2.

The NeoOffice project is run by a few people in Germany and so I am considering a donation once I sort my PayPal account out. $5 does not seem excessive for a full Office suite.

PS: Yes I know that σ should really be used for the standard deviation of the distribution and that the formula is the population standard deviation! I just needed a sample to test compatibility across OpenOffice on Windows, Debian and Mac OS X.

Delphinium flower mimics a bee – the local Biologists think it is a ploy to ensure pollination. Rough macro photo taken with Nikon D40.

Geoff Petty writes a well known textbook about teaching and learning. Geoff provides a large number of Word files on the downloads page of his Web site. I especially like the ‘25 ways to teach without teaching’ handout, the main message being “What the learner does is more important than what the teacher does”.

I could not resist feeding the plain text from 25 ways to teach without teaching into Wordle. The word cloud above is the result… I think these word clouds make for interesting PowerPoint slides? I’m trying to work out why ‘students’ appears twice.

At http://bodmas.org/neison I’m putting low resolution scans of Edmund Neison’s 22 section Moon map as published in his 1876 book The Moon and the condition and configuration of its surface.

The maps use a ‘hatchure’ technique and have survived photocopying well. The usual South Up convention is used on the maps because of the Newtonian reflector used often in Victorian observatories. The Wikipedia entry for Neison (AKA Neville Nevill) has been edited well from my original draft, itself based on the Royal Astronomical Society obituary. I heard from a grandson of Neison’s on the day of the Venus transit!

Wordle draws a word cloud from text you copy and paste into a window. The cloud above was generated from the BTEC Applied Science assessment criteria for all the units. I can imagine using a word cloud like this to pull out the key words used in many of the criteria. These words are similar to the ‘cue words’ in Blooms taxonomy of cognitive learning objectives, and perhaps I can enable students to take on board the ‘assessment cues’ using this visual presentation. Via Seb Schmoller.

I tracked Jim Roberts down, then in his 80s, to his home on the edge of the New Forrest where he lived with his snow white husky. After three generous gin and tonics and hearing Jim’s epic life story, I summoned [the] courage to suggest the radical changes to Jim’s most famous building. At the, Jim disappeared into his bedroom to return with his original sketches from 1961, the year I was born, of the Rotunda as we now proposed with spandrel panels separating the full height glazing, however he explained that this had not been possible in the 1960s due to technical and economic limits. Glenn Howells, architect of the refurbished Rotunda in Birmingham.

Nic Gaunt’s exhibition about the Rotunda is called Rotunda – 21 Stories. Excellent photography and the book comes with a DVD of interviews. I especially like the looping back and ‘passing on’ shown in the quote above. Howells encountered some resistance to his plan for renovating the Rotunda from the Twentieth Century Society and others who are concerned to preserve the landmark. We sometimes forget that what gets built is a compromise…

Exploring Mathematics with Spreadsheets by Healy and Sutherland was published in 1991. It contains ideas for pair and group work in Maths using basic spreadsheet functions. There are photocopyable masters to give to students and some teaching notes. The two pupils on the front cover are using an early version of MS Excel on what looks like a Mac Classic. The logic was to use pair work as a way of encouraging talking about their thinking as they investigate the problem or situation that they have been allocated. A nostalgic feature of the book is the comparison of spreadsheet software in the teachers notes, does anyone else remember Grasshopper, Viewsheet and Multiplan?

An early activity is ‘find the formula’ where one student puts a simple formula like =B3+2 into a cell when the other student isn’t looking. Then the other student can change the number in B3 and try to work out the formula. More advanced activities include finding the dimensions of a rectangle that maximise the area for a given perimeter (including graphing the way the area depends on the length of a side) and explorations of sequences (arithmetic, geometric and Fibonacci style).

The punchline is that all the activities start with a blank spreadsheet. The students have to decide on the formulas, the layout and have to interpret the tables of numbers and to decide when a graph might be useful! It is this constructive use of the spreadsheet that keeps me using a few of these worksheets once or twice a year for half an hour or so. These activities work fine on OpenOffice Calc and on the Gnumeric spreadsheet, so you can use them on the Asus EeePC as well as the cheaper Elonex One. The Elonex looks as if it has AbiWord and Gnumeric as the ‘office’ components.

As you might have guessed, I’m having a bit of a clear out, and I came across an article from the June 1999 issue of Computer Shopper about using spreadsheets for technical applications. Again, the spreadsheets build up from basic formulas – in this case using the trig functions to simulate amplitude modulation and using a simple Euler method to solve a famous set of three coupled non-linear differential equations.

I built the Lorenz attractor spreadsheet in OpenOffice (using the 17 inch monitor) and reproduced the graphs shown in the article (having noticed the typo in the Lorenz equations). You can download my OpenOffice spreadsheet that integrates the Lorenz equations [500Kb, ODS format].

Moral: anything you develop for the humble spreadsheet program that uses basic functions and graphing is future proof, and students might find building the models informative.

My basic pay as you go mobile phone can take pictures (of dubious quality through its plastic lens and slightly off axis optics), and it can make sound recordings at low bit rates. If pushed, I can view this Web site and read and reply to e-mail – that requires a lot of navigating through menus. I can play mp3 tracks and I can download and view stacks of images in folders on the storage card. A colleague is experimenting with wrapping stacks of images in a Web page and copying that to the ‘web pages’ folder on the storage card.

Yesterday it was the moon. Today is cloudy, so can you guess what these two objects might be?

Object No 1

Maths students need one of these, preferably sharp and with a ruler…

Object No 2

I take this object on the daily bus ride and, sometimes, on trains.

Coming next: a podcast from the mobile phone to compare with the Asus EeePC sound recorder quality. Of course, the Asus is a proper computer that can plot graphs and send e-mails (without RSI of the thumb).

Mobile phone camera through the lens of a 60mm telescope. Loads of flare, huge contrast, remarkably hard to hold the camera steady, but interesting…