Chalkface Blog

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  • Do VLEs actually de-personalise learning?

    Train crashA well-known consultant* and I have been corresponding about the approaching train-wreck that is English schools’ generally panicked attempts to embrace VLEs ahead of the government deadline. He said:

    It occurred to me that Yacapaca could do a great VLE lookalike if you could upload (as SCORM compliant zips) into a Course structure…

    It is certainly true that we could do that technically, and it’s certainly quite tempting to stick Chalkface’s snout in the VLE trough when there is so much money being misspent. But we won’t do it, primarily because I still think that SCORM is a giant step backwards for school-age education. Here’s why:

    Take a look at a typical SCORM resource being flogged to work in your £10,000/year VLE. Nearly all of them are linear sequences of text to read and pictures to look at, perhaps leavened with a little bit of video. Opportunities to explore and discover are squished by ‘instructional design’.

    As teacher, your VLE will show you that the student has started and finished the ‘learning resource’. It won’t tell you how much, if anything was actually learned. Nor if the student was engaged and enthralled or, more likely, turned even further off formal education by the whole ghastly experience.

    So in what way is this personalised learning? Proponents would argue that if the teacher selected from easy/medium/difficult versions of the resource, that counts as personalisation. Matching the reading level to the student is no bad thing, but personalised learning it ain’t. Any good teacher knows that personalised learning is matched first and foremost to the student’s current enthusiasms.

    Let’s consider an alternative. Web quests have been around for a decade now. Web quests guide the learner but do not over-prescribe. Web quests work beautifully with ePortfolios, and I certainly will be integrating them into Yacapaca this year.

    Postscript: If you are wondering why SCORM is such a gross mismatch for school-age education, just look at its history.

    SCORM is a specification of the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative, which comes out of the Office of the United States Secretary of Defense. Wikipedia

    Yup, it’s a military training system. And soldiers, as we well know, aren’t paid to think. Contrast this with web quests, which are based solidly in student-centred pedagogy.

    A real WebQuest requires higher level thinking, not simply summarizing. This includes synthesis, analysis, problem-solving, creativity and judgment. WebQuest manual.

    From which basis do you want to be teaching your students?

    * I’d better not name him as he has to say nice things about VLEs to some of his clients.

  • The perfect web tool for teachers

    Sketchcast has just launched, and in my view it is the most intuitive web tool for teachers ever created. It works just like a markerboard. You write or draw, and talk. It is all recorded and can be played back at any time. The service is still pretty basic, and I suspect it will take off so fast that their server will get overwhelmed sometime, but I still urge you to give it a go. Here is my first attempt: it’s a bit wobbly, but it does seem to get the point across reasonably well.

  • Big numbers

    It has been quite a chuffing weekend, numbers-wise.

    • On Friday, Yacapaca hit the half-million member milestone. That’s up from 150,000 last September, and 10,000 the September before.
    • Then this morning, a single assessment (the ICT Baselines) passed one million tests served. The actual numbers this evening are 1,016,037 tests completed by 165,559 students – just over six tests per student, which suggests most teachers are following the assessment prescription.
    • And this evening, I see that over 500 different schools  have been logged on today.  That is the first time we have broken the 500 barrier.

    I should give credit where it is due. Yacapaca’s phenomenal growth is largely down to a small group of teachers who saw its potential, and started creating tests, quizzes and other assessments that were good enough that everyone else wanted to use them. If you’re a Yacapaca member, why not feast your eyes on some of the best of this user-created content?

  • We got podcasted!

    I still hate podcasts, but I admit they are far more palatable when they are about my baby.

  • Why Yacapaca?

    I’ve given a talk a few times on the why of Yacapaca, but it seems a bit daft with all this technology at our disposal to go running round the country just to give a didactic presentation. So, today I finally got around to converting the ePortfolio I was using as a slideshow to a multimedia presentation. I used Flektor, a really nice online multimedia composer. Flektor is fairly new and the movie embed is still a little unreliable, but just follow this link and you’ll get to the presentation. About 7 minutes long, and maybe worth using as a starter for an INSET presentation?