Conveyal of Content is a Commodity

"Education teaches you to cope with certainty."
"Learning teaches you how to cope with surprise."
"Every day is a surprise. There is no certainty."

Stephen Heppell is well known internationally for his research and practical solutions and suggestions for the future of education. The three quotes above are from him - as part of a video put together about the future of learning.

There are a number of things that resonated with me when I watched this video. I'll mention them here and then put the video in for you to watch.

1. The video brings together the thoughts of a number of people that I have to some degree or other heard of and heard from in the past. Heppell of course has been to NZ a number of times and has somewhat of a legacy here. Seth Godin is another well known IT, marketer and thinker. Don Tapscott - whose quote opens the video - has written extensively about "Growing up Digital" and "Grown up Digital"
2. "The graduates of Education must be uniquely valuable, not identically valuable" - so says David Warlick.
3. More children will leave school over the next 30 years than have ever left school. Period. So, if we can make a small change now we will impact a lot of people.
4. I had only the night before seeing this video signed up to a course at coursera.org. So, I was pleased to see something I had gone past the mere viewing stage to see what the next level was like was featuring here. Labelled as the "world's best courses, on line, for free" I'm looking forward to taking my first course with anything between 10,000 and 100,000 fellow course members come February next year. Yes - you read right - 10,000 or more students. [Of course there are other similar ventures - like Harvards and MIT's edx site.]
5. A big point for me is one that I have made on and off now for several years. And that Daphne Koller says far more eloquently than I ever will... "conveyal of content is a commodity".

Here's the video ...



So - what will make the difference to the student of today ... the leader of tomorrow? Whatever you do, don't get bogged by the content - it will change and there are far better mechanisms than you to deliver it! Do get bothered with sharing the learning journey with those in your care. Foster creativity. Foster mistakes. Embrace that which makes the journey easier. Challenge existing "truths". And if you must assess, then build a meaningful assessment of learning that goes past the narrow confines of the examination paper and the examiners marking scheme. [I mean, so what if the student doesn't use the exact word that the examiner wanted them to use ... or they have just recorded an answer using one less line of working than the examiner was expecting... or they used a diagram to explain a concept that the examiner was expecting words for ... apart from the examiner, who cares? In "real life" you get the opportunity to discuss opinions and ideas ...]

CodeAvengers - awesome training site

If you are looking for a resource to help teach the fundamentals of HTML/CSS or JavaScript - then this is the place for you. I have used this site over recent weeks with a group of Year 9 students to introduce them to some of the basics of HTML - so that I could get them to some simple stuff using Google Earth to embed some images and video into a set of Google Earth place marks. To do this they needed the basics of image tags, anchor tags and text formatting and I was so glad that I found CodeAvengers for them to use.

The site introduces the various aspects of coding in HTML5 in a structured, fun way. You build a website on a phone-style console - the instructions are clear and concise. Help is provided (sometimes costs you points). I found that some of my students enjoyed the site so much that they did far more than I needed them to - some even completed the entire 20 lesson HTML/CSS Level 1 course.

Now - not only does the site have a very good series of lessons teaching all of the basics - but for the teacher it has a running record of how your students are progressing through. This image gives one of the summary progress views.

You can see at a glance student progress, plus the "points" they have received as they progress through the various lessons.

All up, CodeAvengers adds a significant resource to anyone looking to learn HTML/CSS and I will certainly be using this site again next year with students at Years 9, 10 and 11. If you are teaching any of this stuff, or even if you want to learn the language of the web yourself - then this is the best resource I have found to date. 

And if you are in NZ - support these guys - they are graduates from the Uni of Waikato I think. 

Who turned off the light?

NASA has some cool technology tucked away. I love the way that they make a lot of their imagery and other data available via a range of sources. One of my favourites is their Earth Observatory - I subscribe to the Images of the Day.

This week I note that they have a feature on their main website which I think is pretty cool - a view of the earth at night made up from composite images taken in April and October this year. Here's one of the views - and as you can (or can't) see - NZ is quiet at night! And so is most of the planet.

There is a cool video version as well as a wealth of other stuff - well worth the explore and you can easily see how this can link to explorations at all levels of the science and maths curricula, not to mention the spin offs of creative writing about what its like to be out at night in, say, Canada ... or New Zealand ... or India ...