Daylight savings, the brain and learning

I have a bit of a thing about brains and I have posted before (on my other blog) about young brains, sleep and learning.
Some schools start later in the day specifically to address the issue that the majority of children seem to become “night owls” during adolescence. A recent report presented at the 2008 Australasian Sleep Association Conference suggests that parents need more guidance in setting bedtime rules to assist teens with the morning wakeup. There are simple (but tough to implement!) strategies, the most important of which concerns light. Reduce light exposure in preparation for sleep and increase light for waking.
So where does daylight savings fit in? Effectively having the sun rise and set an hour later each day seems to be counter-intuitive to what we know about young people and their brains. Am I the only one that thinks daylight savings disadvantages adolescents?

Online Inspiration

There are a number of concept mapping tools some free, some not so free. Inspiration is not super expensive for what you get (IMHO) but it’s not free. What it does do super well that makes it my application of choice is switch seamlessly between what they call “diagram” and “outline” views. So it goes from the concept map bubbles to bulleted list format and makes sense most of the time. What was holding Inspiration back over the last 12 months or so has been the explosion of collaborative tools such as Bubbl.us CMaps and others. Well no more. Webspiration is the Web2.0 successor of Inspiration (and Kidspiration). It’s in beta at the moment so there is bound to be a few bugs (for instance I have had difficulty uploading files) but the upside is you can try it for free. It has all the major features of the desktop version and adds the ability to track changes and collaborate with other Webspiration users. I don’t know what the business model is going to be around this product (I imagine it will be a subscriber account type thing?) but it would be great if non members could at least view the document even if they can’t collaborate. Ability to embed maps into a blog, wiki etc would also be super hot. You can be I’m putting in that suggestion.
Sign up for an account and start planning/creating/mapping/visualising. Then share it with me. I don’t have any friends you see…

New version of Picasa is official

The new Picasa looks hot and is technically out of beta. If you want to check out the new features have a look at the video below. Windows and Linux only. If you’re on OSX stop whinging, you’ve got iPhoto.

RSS The trailer

I espouse the virtues of RSS constantly and I have alluded to how useful I think it can be for students and educators. Sue Waters then put the pressure on so I felt compelled to deliver. I see it as a trilogy, “RSS in three parts” (Quick! Reserve the movie rights!). Basic, intermediate and advanced. In each of the sections I will endeavour to include strategies, experiences or ideas as it applies to teaching and learning. Like backing up your data, therre is truckloads of stuff about RSS and it’s derivative services written by far brighter people than I but my hope is to tailor it somewhat to suit the audience and to save you some legwork. Here’s an outline of what to expect;

Ep1 A quick intro (Basic)

Quick introduction, reading your feeds and bookmarking your feeds

Ep2 Share the feed-love! (Intermediate)

Sharing your feeds – Friend feed, Google Reader
Embed in your site

Ep3 Work that feed baby! (Advanced)

Combine, filter, syndicate and other things you can do to “work your feeds”

That will do for a start anyways. Ep1 coming soon…

Truth about girls

The Truth About Teen Girls – TIME

Some experts recommend media-literacy classes–as early as kindergarten. “Children need to learn how to dissect and understand this pervasive aspect of their environment,” says Gigi Durham, author of The Lolita Effect, “just as they learn to understand the seasons or Newton’s laws of motion.”

and further to that

Durham also suggests, counterintuitively, that kids should have access to more media. But the venues she recommends are those–like girlsinc.org–that are not in a symbiotic relationship with people who want to sell things. And she believes that girls should be encouraged to create their own media, not just to talk back but also to understand how they work.

We are trying to do this with some of the programs we run. I feel quite passionately about the importance of young people’s understanding of electronic media. Creating your own products is great way to deepen that understanding and make informed decisions. I have been doing a lot of thinking about text and where reading fits into a modern education and will complete a post soon. That should go down well…

And we’re back

The ups and downs of the Edublogs servers, a conference in Perth and life in general have stalled things somewhat. It is my intention to resume full service forthwith! There are a couple of posts in the making and I’m hoping at least one of them takes your fancy. Don’t cancel that subscription just yet. Stay tuned.

What, who ar why?

Why do you teach? Is it the subject or the students?

He mentioned that there must be teachers out there who joined the profession because they have a love or admiration of the subject matter and that the students are secondary to that motivating force. That statement intrigued me. Would there be teachers who enjoy the subject, say Science or Mathematics, and have become teachers simply to impart their knowledge and love of the subject? Where does that leave the students?

This post started as a comment on John’s post (which I subscribe to) but I sort of got some steam up and felt it was better to post here with a ping back. So here goes…

I’m not so sure about the primary school teacher hypothesis (you’ll have to go and read the post) but a question I often “go fishing with” is;
“Are you a teacher of *insert subject* or a teacher of young people?”
My hypothesis goes a bit like this.
A teacher who ties their identity to their subject matter is likely to be more threatened by change and blindly resist. A teacher who has the best interests of the young people entrusted to their care at the forefront of their minds is more likely to evaluate things on their merit and act accordingly. Who will be happier in their job?
Another angle (can you tell I have done some pondering?);
Someone asks me, “So what do you do?”
“I teach at a school?”
Now in my experience there are two common follow up questions that stereotype two paradigms.
One says, “So what do you teach?”
The other says, “Do you teach primary or secondary?”
You with me?

Terminology and acronyms

I have decided I don’t like the term LMS (Learning Management System.)
It just implies that its all controlled and stuff.
I feel that online learning spaces as they are currently viewed by most (i.e LMS or CMS system) is fundamentally flawed (for high school students at least.) The names themselves “Learning Management System” implies a level of control that stifles rather than encourages curiosity, exploration and ultimately powerful learning. In my opinion, customisable, personal spaces for participants that can be easily connected with others in the learning community offers more opportunity and the freedom of expression that most young (and old?) people seek. The democratic power of technology is perhaps what ultimately scares traditional educational structures. I think we need to embrace that fear (anyone read Dune by Frank Herbert?)

Backup strategies

Every man and his blog (See what I did? Get it?) has written something about backing up but I have been sparked into action. A colleague related her story to me the other day. She has 3 young children (twins plus one I think.) Anyway, they had been accumulating digital media of the family over the last 5 years or so as only a parent can and (you know where this is going)
next thing the hard drive in their home machine failed.
Insert sick feeling in the stomach here (if you have lost data you know what I’m talking about.) Not good.
They got most of their stuff back but needless to say they spent a bit of time and a lot more money in the process. So I decided that it’s such an important topic I shall add my voice to the crowd more importantly for my audience (who perhaps don’t cast the blog reading net so wide.)
Now I use OSX for all my mission critical stuff (apart from basketball stats) so the software solutions are for that side of the fence. I am twisting a colleagues arm to post some solutions for Windows. The strategies on both platforms are the same.

What I have

1Tb Maxtor One Touch NAS (network address storage)
160Gb HP USB Pocket Drive x2
SuperDuper from Shirt Pocket
Synk Pro from Decimus
Comparison of Synk versions here (includes SuperDuper!)

What I do

I follow a two pronged strategy. It may seem a bit hardcore but trust me, if you’re even come close to losing all your data nothing is too hardcore.
I synchronise my documents folder to the 1Tb NAS (network addressed storage) on my home network. This is done every couple of days or immediately if I have been in the “document creation zone”. I use Synk Pro for it’s powerful archive options. If I delete a file from my documents folder (to save on drive space say) then Synk can be told to move that file to an archive folder on the backup drive. I take a peek at the folder every 6 months or so, burn out to optical media if its worth keeping or delete permenantly. Nice.
I have bootable backups on each 160Gb HP Pocket Drives. (These were dead cheap from MSY. I don’t know how or where they got them from but it was a bargain!) One stays at work and the other at home. I update one of them at least once a week. SuperDuper does a great job creating the bootable backups and can do incremental updates, saving heaps of time. The first backup is always a you-know-what but after the initial pain its pretty good.

Why I do it?

Bootable backup on a portable HD means that I have very little downtime. I don’t have to build a new machine, install applications, type in licence codes, configure preferences etc. I just plug it in, hold down the option key when I start up the new machine and select it as the boot drive. Too easy. Having two gives me two different states that I can roll back to if necessary, offsite security and a little extra redundancy. I usually do these backups overnight.
The documents sync is easy. It can be done whenever I want either wirelessly or with cable (if I’m in a hurry or there are big changes) and usually happens pretty quickly. The inconvenience barrier is very low (vital for backing up) and my documents folder is by far the most active.

My little dream

I totally want a Drobo. It would be super sweet.

It’s the little things…

A lot of small things can add up to big gains in productivity.
Copy message URL in Mail.app is huge for me. I just found it. So if I get emails about events that are already in my calendar (I use iCal and sync to GCal) I can easily add them to the event then archive knowing I can bring them up later in the required context if required. Roughly translated it means I can forget about them AND not worry about whether I can find them again when needed. This is better than diazapan for my psyche. As a MailTags addict this is usually a non issue as I create the calendar event or task from the mail message (not the other way around.) But if someone sent me an invitation to a meeting, then sent me further details about that meeting it didn’t fit my system! Now I just create the link and maintain my inner tranquility.