UTS Digital Generation – Danny Mavromatis

“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.

Annie posted a youtube video on this amazing new technology being developed by Microsoft and others. I must admit that even I, someone who has seen quite a few IT fads in my time, was impressed! Annie commented:

“Whilst this clip is about commercial applications imagine what you could do in the classroom…How much fun could this be??”

Yes, I agree entirely about how much fun this could be. The thing that concerns me is the educational value that this might bring (and at what cost). We have seen quite a few new technologies in past decades that were going to ‘revolutionise’ the classroom:

1950’s Overhead projectors

1960’s Audio

1970’s Television / video

1980’s Personal computers

1990’s Enabling software (Word, Powerpoint, etc)

2000’s Interactive whiteboards

However, in my last practicum I saw none of these things in my co-operating teachers classroom. We have to be careful not to confuse the medium with the message. The technology can be as ’sexy’ as you like but unless it is properly integrated into the syllabus content, it will end up not being used.

This has been, and continues to be, the challenge with the introduction of new technology into schools. The technology by itself won’t create a better learning experience for students. Educators have to think very carefully about teacher training, provision of content/resources, quality of instruction and alignment with the curriculum. If these things don’t happen then there is a danger that technology will end up not making any real difference.

Basil Capizzi wrote on this subject in his blog and I found it a valuable introduction to reading the article itself. Basil provides some great insights into the differences, or rather, the complementary nature of the two “isms”.

Papert strikes me as a “feely-touchy” kind of person. He was obviously a child who was very tactile and enjoyed making things with his hands. I was reading a prologue to his book in which he describes a fascination he had with gears at the age of two. Yes, at two years of age! He went on to build gear-based models with a kit when he was a little older. He also explains how he related mathematics concepts into differential gears in order to understand them internally.

Yes, somehow it doesn’t surprise me that Papert takes Piaget one step further from cognitive processing to actually physically making things in order to learn.

“Why Do We Teach” by Annie Agnew

The link you provided for “Freedom Fighters” was good and I found the story inspiring. I wish there had been a bit more detail about the actual teaching side of things.

The “Ron Clark Story” link confused me. We had a very famous runner in Australia by that name (it may have been Clarke). Not the same person! And very little detail in the link.

The “Teacher Man” link to an interview that Mr McCourt gave was fascinating. I read it from start to finish and ate up the words. However, at the end of it, I came away feeling that he wasn’t really enthralled by his life as a teacher. He seemed a bit jaded or even cynical about other people’s perceptions on the worthiness of teaching. I felt he had always been a frustrated writer who was now free and in his element. That’s how it came across to me anyway.