Pick the Strawberries! GPS Website Gold Rush

If you enjoy Science, and don’t mind reading online, you’ll never be bored visiting LiveScience.com. There is always something there that’s new, interesting, innovative and worth a read.

You might say,

I know lots of Science sites. What’s special about this one?

Well, it’s set up like a blog. Each article is a post. You can comment on the posts and discuss their content with other readers and sometimes with the author.

You could say,

Science sites I know always have the same stuff.
I don’t want to read the same stuff all the time.

LiveScience posts several times a day, so you’re never short of new things to read. You might then say,

What! Several posts per day! How could I possibly read all those?

You don’t have to. But I recommend you pop the address in your RSS reader rather than bookmark the site.

Just take your pick

The feeds are short summaries, so you can scroll quickly through six or a dozen of them on your RSS reader to see what takes your fancy.

That’s what I do. Like picking strawberries – I pick ripe and juicy ones. There’s no way I’d sit and gorge them all. But I don’t have to. There will be another pick of fresh juicies to harvest tomorrow.

You’ll maybe say,

What if I want to see what’s gone before?

You can do that too. The site has a great archive and a fine search mechanism that’s easy to use. It also has categories that you can browse, for these tabs are displayed across the header of the site:


They give access to the latest articles in the category of your choice.

What do I best like about LiveScience?

LiveScience is hosted by Imaginova, a leading digital and commerce company.The articles are well written, well sourced and invariably well provided with links to the source sites to give you more background information. It’s like a Science newscast, giving you the latest on the most recent that’s hit the news in the world of Science, with the opportunity to read more.

And it’s not all reading either. There are diagrams, displays and illustrations galore, often with informative videos or podcasts, appropriate and relevant to the topic.

So if you’d like to taste today’s selection of LiveScience fare, check out this strawberry. You might toss the address into your RSS reader for future munching.

Go on! Spoil yourself.

Pick the strawberries!

A Green Pen Society contribution

Two Golden Blogs

This month’s theme from Paul Cornies’ Green Pen Society is:

Website Gold: to recommend an enriching web site.

I deliberated long over this topic. Choosing a favourite blog site might be seen to be verging on nepotism. Selecting a series of them could suggest there is a hierarchy to the list.To risk offending any of my many blogging friends and colleagues by collating such a list would be daft and show a lack of sensitivity.

I will post only once this month about Gold Rush blog sites. I've chosen not one but two, however, both of which have the same author.

I’m a Google Blogger. Edublogs.org and Blogger.com are rival providers. Both sites I write about here are Edublogs.org sites, so my choice is not about blog provider preference.

Two gold nuggets

The Edublogger and Sue Waters Blog are two sites I recommend to anyone who is a blogger – especially to those new to blogging.

When I consider what Sue Waters offers on her sites, there is no easy way to isolate one from the other. For as much as Sue has often joked about her split personality over her commitment to her sites, they are a complementary pair, much like right and left.

The Edublogger

The Edublogger is undoubtedly a professional blog – matchless, well authored, that shares a rich cornucopia of “tips, tricks, ideas that help the educational blogging community” – yet is has a captivating appeal to the ‘occasional blogger’. Sue hosts this site as part of her work with Edublogs.org.

My special interest in elearning is often stimulated by the content in The Edublogger. There are always fresh ideas, new technology innovations appropriate to a wide range of topics on elearning, community networking and blogging.

While much of the posts are specifically aimed at bloggers who use an edublogs.org site, there abounds useful material that has universal application to blogging. Just check out this post on Top Five Mistakes made by new bloggers.

The Edublogger has a friendly quality to it. It is written in a way that makes it appealing to most age-groups, with instructive, easy-to-follow diagrams and flow-charts that are interesting and attractive without being ornate. Sue puts a lot of thought into the layout of the site, planning that she shares openly with readers, a touch that contributes hugely to The Edublogger’s engaging appeal.

Sue Waters Blog

This site is a personal blog that compliments the professionalism of The Edubogger. Though Sue’s approach has a different slant, and that’s to be expected, there is a light-hearted wink to it that is comfortable and welcoming in Sue Waters Blog.

Who but a curmudgeon would not be entertained by homespun topics like The Great USA Coca Cola and Chocolate Scandal! or share a laugh at witty blog titles like Have your Blogs.mu cake – and eat it too! Sue carries her fondness of technology throughout this site in a way that whets the appetite for more Coke and Cadbury’s milk chocolate.

What I adore most about both of Sue’s blogs are the communities attracted to them. There’s always an opportunity to meet new bloggers and commenters, and comments are never ignored nor short-changed.

So if you are looking for nuggets of gold in a blog site, just visit either of Sue’s blogs. The Edublogger and Sue Waters Blog are each a blog prospector’s dream. But then, what would you expect from a scientist?


A Green Pen Society contribution

Is it teaching? Is it learning?

detail from Le Foyer de la Danse a l'Opera de la Rue Le Peletier - Degas

During part of my professional development appraisal this year, I was urged to incorporate student learning into my goals. I resisted this, defecting to goals where accountability clearly lies with my vigilance in identifying learner needs and in giving the learner appropriate and timely access to required, available learning resources and quality teaching.

My CEO, who I have a lot of respect for, mentioned in one of his addresses to staff last year that, as a school, we were responsible for student learning. The emphasis seems to be on the teacher taking responsibility for the learning. I challenge this point of view in this post.

courtesy Make Beliefs Comix

It’s all about learning

In discussing the differences between teaching and learning in a previous post, I used the throwaway line,

“it’s all about learning - you don’t talk about teaching anymore”.

There is more to this idea than one might think.

Everywhere I look in education, I see the teacher being charged with the responsibility for learning that occurs in the student. It is seldom that teaching is discussed. Even raising the matter of pedagogy (which incidentally is to do with teaching rather than learning) causes some concern among educators and sparks discussion that is more to do with learning than teaching.

Learner centred

There’s no doubt that the learner is where it is at, but the learner centeredness of today’s education suggests, perhaps erroneously, that teaching is not as important as learning. While I believe that teacher centred education is not what’s needed, the focus on the learner, brought about through a learner centred mind-set, has moved the teacher so far out of the spotlight that the learner is beginning to suffer.

I’ve been told on good authority that it’s not like this in some cultures. In Spain, for instance, even the idea that teachers take on leadership roles in working with groups of learners, rather than the more prominent function and traditional role of a teacher, is thought to be culturally strained. But in New Zealand, Australia, Britain and America the role of the teacher seems to be morphing into the background – a resource rather than a force.

Assessing the players

Part of the change in the limelight is to do with the idea behind the sage-on-the-stage. Even the guide-on-the-side has been slid behind the curtain. It is as if the teacher has become more a stagehand than a player, leaving the learner to extemporise in full view of everyone else.

I wonder that assessment has perhaps been a contributor to this shift. It certainly takes the emphasis off teaching, while forcing an undue importance onto what is assessable by a teacher. However, the subsequent effect only appears to put the spotlight on the learner.

Summative assessment is rightly seen as being to do with what’s been learnt, but it is not really learner centred. Formative assessment is to do with what’s yet to be learnt while giving positive feedback and encouragement to the learner on what’s been learnt. It is truly learner centred, yet it is often upstaged by summative assessment.

Learner engagement

The essential aspect of learner engagement comes into its own when considering what’s important for it to happen. This is where learner centeredness is appropriate and necessary.

A learner has to be interested in what’s being taught for engagement to be sustained. But the content of that teaching has to be relevant to the learner for interest to be initiated in the first place. When these conditions for engagement are met, the learning becomes entirely the responsibility of the learner.

It takes good teaching to identify what interests a learner and what content will be relevant to that interest, as well as appropriate to required learning.

This is the supreme skill that is part of good teaching. It is being overlooked while acting out a script that is supposedly learner centred.

You Learn Something New Every Day

portrait 1580 artist unknown - public domain

This month could well be historical in a truly revolutionary way and in more ways than one. Nicolaus Copernicus was an astronomer whose life spanned the 15^th and 16^th centuries. His brave claim went against the belief of the time that the earth was the centre of the universe. He put the sun there instead.

In his revolutionary book, On The revolutions Of The Celestial Spheres, Copernicus explained the observed motions of celestial objects in a theory that earned the name Copernican Revolution.

After almost four hundred years, he could be immortalised in the name that’s suggested for the heaviest known element, number 112 in the Periodic Table of the Elements. The new element, first created in 1996 by the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research, is 277 times heavier than the lightest element, hydrogen.

Following recent confirmation of its existence, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) has recommended that it be named Copernicium, and gave it the symbol Cp.

If there is no significant objection, within six months Copernicium will become the official name for a special element – a fitting accomplishment in the International Year of Astronomy.

Professor Martyn Poliakoff, Associated Professor Peter Licence
Research Fellow Meghan Gray, Nottingham University

What Do You Do When You Find A New Site?

This morning I came across an unfamiliar site through a post-link I’d followed on a familiar blog. As usual, I did a perfunctory scan of the header and layout of the page. That took a few seconds. Then I got into reading the post. It was well written and the topic was fresh and interesting.

I was almost through the second paragraph when the inquisitor in me took my attention to look for the date of the posting. It wasn’t prominent nor was the post date easy to find. I flicked down to the comments section and picked the date of the first comment: October 21, 2008.

I resumed reading, having sorted in my mind the post’s place in time. About a third way through the text, I started inspecting intermittently the blogroll, names of commenters, checking out links to other sites, while continuing to read. I recognised that I was looking for links to sites or blogs that I might know.

Priority

It was then I realised that I was subconsciously prioritising my time, and my reading, by checking out the authenticity of the writer before getting further into what was quite a meaty post. In particular, I was scrutinising what I had gleaned from the post so far, weighing that against what I already knew.

I recalled doing this many times in the past when I had come across commercial sites and others that might waste my time while reading cogent story lines that amount to nothing - or worse, pernicious propaganda. The ‘trust’ mechanism within me kicks in fairly rapidly these days. It tends to be vicious if I suspect my time is being wasted.

Do young learners need this?

It also occurred to me that the routine I’d just accomplished was one difficult to explain to a young learner who may need to discover a thing or two about appraising the authenticity of information found on the Internet.

By flitting through what to others may seem a jumble of unrelated checks, I sketch an overview of where the post lies in relation to what I already know. This amounts to my knowledge of the topic and associated writers or sites familiar to me, as well as the possible up-to-date-ness of the information likely to be proffered by the content of the post.

How do you recognise baloney?

My usual reaction to bogus information, once it’s identified, is instantly to wipe all that I’d held in the temporary enquiry channel of my thinking to do with what I’d read in the post or article, and move on.

Over the years I’ve developed what Carl Sagan referred to as a baloney detection kit. It is only part of the routine I practice when checking out information or ideas new to me. It kicks in at an advanced stage for there is no need to use it if I’d already identified bogus information from perfunctory checks and judicious hunches.

What do you do when you come across a post on a blog new to you or article on an unfamiliar site on the web?

Do you use a routine to check out authenticity?

What would you do if you found that all your commonly used checks and routines returned insufficient information for you to form a useful opinion about the authenticity of an article, or of the information contained there?