UTS Digital Generation – Danny Mavromatis

I took on writing a Scratch application as my immersion task for Elective ‘E’. To avoid starting from ’scratch’ (is that where the name comes from?) I loaded an existing Maths project (solving quadratic equations) from the collaborative web site and improved it by changing the interface and adding a graph of the parabolic curve.

My fairly modest effort can be found here.

It may be interesting to recount how my efforts went. I am an experienced programmer so it didn’t take long to pick up the basics of how the coding was done and how events were handled in Scratch. The biggest difficulty I had was understanding how the ’sprites’ interacted with the ’stage’. From there things went fairly smoothly. Say about 2 hours all up. Putting in all the changes and additions I wanted took probably about another 8 hours. I would say 90% of that was fiddling with the GUI aspects of the application and the effects I wanted. Only about 10% of the time was actual coding.

Since this was a Maths application, is this something I would give to a Mathematics class? Definitely not, as there is too much superfluous activity and very little in the way of actual learning about mathematics. However, I would certainly consider it (or something similar) for an IST class.

Todd Oppenheimer is the author of a book “The Flickering Mind: The False Promise of Technology in the Classroom and How Learning Can Be Saved“.

He participated in an interview with an on-line education site in which he was asked to put his views on the use of technology within schools. I have to confess that I found myself nodding as I read each of his responses. My favourite quote:

“There is no greater hoax in this story than the rush to put young children on computers in the belief that it will prepare them for tomorrow’s jobs. It won’t — in fact, doing so may well put them at a professional disadvantage.”

He does concede however that technology (computers) has a place as a supplement to the teaching of many subjects, but not as a replacement for traditional studies.

“Some of the best software offers great tools (again with older students) for expanding understanding of sophisticated mathematical procedures such as scientific modeling. And obviously, the Internet offers valuable resources for research projects.”

Hey, someone had to be an antidote to Prensky!

“Why mindmap?” is a very good question raised by Matthew. I’ve seen a few mind-maps now from both teachers and students at UTS and invariably they have been complex, with connections going everywhere, and difficult to read and understand. One part of me thinks, yes that looks pretty and obviously a lot of work has gone into it. However, another little voice in my head is saying “what is the point of this”? Is it just me? Does the emperor have no clothes?

Some of the mind-maps presented must have taken hours to do. I mean, you put one up for a discussion point for a few minutes and then it’s over. Is that a good use of a teacher’s valuable time? If the mind-map is overly busy or crowded, my eyes glaze over anyway and I suspect most students would react in the same way. What learning outcomes are being achieved?

I decided to review the literature to see if it could shed any light on my problem with seeing relevance. There is no shortage of papers that wax lyrical about using graphics organisers such as mind-maps (aka semantic maps). However, there is very little hard evidence of the benefits that they may provide.

Here is a skeptical view from a UK newspaper.

“They are no good as planning tools for those with a linguistic bias, as the process of creating one is too bloody slow and, maybe because of all the left-brain-right-brain-cross-filtration-action, they can give you a headache. But they are a useful piece in any teachers’ repertoire, given the right circumstances.”

What about student use of mind-mapping? A research paper (PDF) compared the effectiveness of using mind-mapping (a graphics organiser) compared to outlining (an advanced organiser) and to a control group when learning Life Science in the seventh grade.

“Important differences did result between groups on the unit test scores. The outlining group significantly performed better than the mind-mapping group and control group. However, there was not a difference between the mind-mapping group and the control group. There was no difference in the one-week delayed comprehensive post-test scores between groups.”

Having said all this, would I use a mind-map in teaching Mathematics? I could see a possible use as an advanced organiser when starting a new unit of work. However, I would keep it very simple and colourful, with large bold text. I would not have more than six or seven boxes up on screen. Any more is too confusing and won’t be absorbed and remembered. (From psychology earlier in the year, we should take note that our short-term memory limit is only about seven items).

This is a reaction to Don Black’s article on “OpenOffice“.

I have been using OpenOffice from OpenOffice.org for more than two years. It is very compatible with MS Office. That includes not just Word (.doc) documents but also Excel (.xls) files. My wife and I exchange documents all the time (she is a die-hard MS Office user).

The only current problem is that OpenOffice doesn’t read documents from MS Office 2008. However, neither do earlier versions of MS Office! The next version of OpenOffice is due for release very soon and will support MS Office 2008. The only other issue with OO is the lack of an Australian dictionary, but I managed to find one eventually.

There is a bigger concern here than just the office suites themselves that you may be missing. The problem is that Microsoft as a private company has control of the dominant document format. It is proprietary and they don’t release the details publicly. If some other company wants to read Word documents, they have to reverse engineer the format. It’s only recently that the European Courts have forced Microsoft to publish some of their formats.

Not everyone is happy that a private company controls the format that billions of documents are stored in around the world. There is a vast legacy of stored information that could be lost forever if Microsoft should ever decide to stop supporting older formats. An international standard named Open Document Format (ODF) has been ratified by the International Standards Organisation (ISO) to overcome this problem. OpenOffice supports ODF. Microsoft with MS Office refuses to (they have a competing ’standard’).

I believe it would be a very good thing if schools switched to OO as their office suite. After all it is free! Support is not really an issue but can be bought from various companies for a price. The company behind OO is Sun Systems.

Here’s a site where you can read more about it.

In regard to who is using OO, it’s a little hard to tell. The US Defense Department is one that I know of. Since the software is not sold but downloaded for free, it is hard to know exactly how many organisations are using it and who they are. This article might shed some light on usage. I suspect the majority of the downloads are for home use at present.