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Twenty years ago, I decided to learn to touch type. Struggling with conventional classes, I looked for an alternative and discovered that the psychologist Robert Dilts had just invented a computer program that could teach me. No Google in those days; it was fortuitous that I already knew Robert, having trained under him. So I bought a copy and became the first person in the UK to learn to type without tears. Such programs are now commonplace (e.g. Mavis Beacon) but Robert was the genius behind them. The relevance of this is that I was trying to find a copy of Robert’s book Strategies of Genius III to give context to the photomontage. Volumes I and II are out of print but available from AA Books. Volume III has, however, disappeared into the Twighlight Zone. I feel really sad that this book is no longer available. It is a valuable contribution to our thinking about Leonardo (also Freud and Tesla) and the beginnings of a discussion, at least, about how we might teach ourselves and our students to think like he did. In a rational society, such books would not be permitted to simply disappear. Which brings me, in a roundabaout way, to Google Print. Google has taken upon itself to digitise some 10 million books, the vast majority of them out of print. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. American libraries alone list 32 million books of which just 4% are in print. Even allowing for duplications, translations and so forth, the total number of books that exist as at least one copy somewhere in the world must be in the range of 100-250 million. Even using these amazing machines, it’s likely to take Google a while to get around to my particular book, or to the one that you feel equally strongly about. After all, to quote the Kirtas promotional video, we have a 500-year backlog. Update: Look what Miranda found! |
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Chalkface Blog
The best teaching materials in the most practical format.
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I’ve found an absolutely wonderful multimedia company in Hubei (where the Three Gorges Dam is) to create avatars for Yacapaca. They are quick, accurate, and very, very technically competent.
Seeking to turn cultural difference to advantage, I asked them to suggest an initial set of characters, and back came the complete cast of The Monkey King. Brilliant. From anecdotal evidence, Pig is the most popular character to date (even in stats-obsessed Chalkface, we don’t actually measure this).
So, full of confidence, I commissioned a couple of sporting avatars intended particularly to appeal to boys. The footballer was fine. Football is global, pretty much, and well understood in China.
And then we came to Cricket. I hear you starting to chuckle already; you know what’s coming. Even with some fabulous action shots from Flickr and a simply sublime video of Imran Khan bowling out the opposition from Channel Dosti it has still taken them six attempts to get our hero plausibly bowled out in response to a wrong answer. The attached sketch is my latest and hopefully last attempt to explain the Noble Game to a still-mystified Chinese illustrator.
But I am not the first to struggle with this. Ben reminded me of a famous attempt to explain Cricket to Americans:
You have two sides, one out in the field and one in.
Each player in the side that’s in goes out and when he’s out he goes in and the next player goes in until he’s out.
When all the players are out then the side that’s out goes in and the side that’s in goes out and tries to get those coming in out.
Sometimes you get players still in and not out.
When both sides have been in and out, including the not outs, that’s the end of the game.
Update 24/11/05: it took three more goes, with both sides getting increasingly frustrated. It turned out that “bails” is particularly difficult to translate into Chinese. Ho hum, they should be uploaded and available by Monday.
Update 2 25/11/05: I nicknamed the footballer avatar George, in memory of George Best who died today. Not sure the kids will get it; I was in Yr 10 myself when Best was at his peak.
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It was Ted who named our company, when he coined the term ‘Chalkface’ in his TES column in 1989. We felt that our values as publishers were closely aligned to his as an educator, and wanted to make that link visible. It stood us in good stead over the years. Thanks Ted, you will be sorely missed.
Source: BBC
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Alastair Wells is one of those guys you should stay away from if you want an easy life, but unfortunately he teaches just up the road from me at The Netherhall School which makes him pretty hard to avoid. He has this bad habit, you see, of telling you how wonderful [insert elearning product here] is, and then demanding a terribly hard-to-implement new feature. And somehow you always wind up saying ‘yes’. Well, I do.
So it came about that earlier this year, Alastair declared Yacapaca perfect in all respects but one. He wanted the students’ logins to be the same as they are for the school intranet. Alastair tells me that his students can typically remember three online IDs, but may be registered to a couple of dozen online services. You see the problem.
We’ve been here before. Paperless School was designed as a school-wide system, so we worked with SIMS to create a sophisticated tool to import student data (including all class memberships, and class and form teachers, and login details) from SIMS direct into Paperless School. Technically, it worked a dream. The problem was that it took three meetings of the SMT to decide whether or not Chalkface should be trusted with that data. The subject teacher who needed it could not afford to wait that long, so new IDs got typed in anyway.
As usual, Alastair is asking for the moon.
Happily, though, a solution is on the way, and it goes by the name of Shibboleth. Shibbloeth is an open-source solution to shared logins that is now endorsed by Becta. It is currrently being piloted by LGfL, Worcestershire LEA, and others. The promise is that each student logs into the school network as now, and after that access to authorised services is transparent. Never mind how, It Just Works.
But…
We do have to look into the technicalities just a little bit. Shibboleth requires each “institution” to hold student data centrally on a suitably-configured server. What do we mean by “institution” in this context? Shibboleth is another hand-me-down from HE, where it is taken to mean a university, acting autonomously. But look at who is piloting Shibboleth in schools – GfLs and LEAs. So now, schools are being asked to surrender their SIMS data to the LEA or grid. Back to Square One.
In fairness, LEAs have more clout with the schools than Chalkface does, and they may get faster results. After all, what’s wrong with providing such data to a centralised authority? It probably is OK, and they probably have it anyway, but I shall leave you with one thought for your next school debate on Civil Liberties.
The word Shibboleth comes to us from the Bible; specifically Judges 12: 5-6
And the Gileadites seized the passages of the Jordan before the Ephraimites; and it was so, that when those Ephraimites who had escaped said, “Let me go over,” that the men of Gilead said unto him, “Art thou an Ephraimite?” If he said, “Nay,” then said they unto him, “Say now ‘Shibboleth.’” And he said “Sibboleth,” for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him and slew him at the passages of the Jordan; and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.
It’s named after an ethnic cleansing tool.
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- 37,000 students
- 100,000 assessments taken, marked, analysed, returned to their teacher.
This really crept up on us – those numbers are not reported in our admin pages so I only found out because Sergej thought on to tell me. I’m gobsmacked, frankly. I hadn’t realised how fast it is growing.
(Sorry for the bad quality of the photo btw, it was taken with my phone, on an escalator in the Kiev metro. How’s that for pose value?)
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