the Design Experience Weblog Archive

http://www.captain.clayton.k12.mo.us/curriculum/Links/1stGrdLinks/1stGrScienceLinks.html
http://www.kidzone.ws/
http://www.kids.gov/k_science.htm
http://homeschooling.gomilpitas.com/explore/sci.htm

Thanks to Ian Landsman for reminding me about the Hudson Valley Ramble. After reading his comment on last year's post I checked out the schedule for 2004. The Hudson Valley Ramble is a huge collection of events based around the Hudson River Valley in New York State. I live only a few miles from Schodack Island State Park, which is where one of the hikes takes place. This year's events are September 18-19, and 25-26, 2004.

Howard Gardner revisits and updates his theory of multiple intelligences, and addresses how to use the theory to improve learning and education.

The first half of the book reviews and updates the theory. The rest of the book is on education.

Gardner says that multiple intelligence theory is not the basis for an education, but should remind us of three key ideas: "We are not all the same, we do not all have the same kinds of minds (that is, we are not all distinct points on a single bell curve), and education works most effectively if these differences are taken into account rather than denied or ignored." The theory also "suggests that any uniform educational approach is likely to serve only a small percentage of children optimally."

On critial thinking, Gardner makes a point that critical thinking should be taught in context, not as a seperate skill, but as part of analysis of a subject or domain.

A key point repeated is that multiple intelligence theory is not an end or a goal of an education. The ideas behind MI can only be used after the goals of an education are decided. That is, once a community decides what should be learned MI can be used to enhance the learning process.

In a section on schools is the concept of an "Individually Configured Education.' The key result of applying MI theory to learning should be using the MI to make sure the education is relevant to each individual.

Goals of education is a recurring theme in this book. Gardner states that basic literacy skills are not really an educational goal, but just tools to enhance understanding of the real goals of an educations.

On technology, he makes the point that technologial means must have human ends. Technology should be used to enhance understanding, just as the other tools of learning, such as books, pencils etc. This reminds me of another concept I learned about recently regarding productivity of the classroom educational system. Productivity of education cannot increase as long as there is one teacher in front of 30 students. The best focus for techonolgy would be to increase productivity, and learning, by enhancing the delivery of individualized education. [todo find link to teacher salary/productivity]

Gardner says that one use of MI can be to improve understanding. That is instead of just learning facts, learners should gain real understanding of what they are learning. He says this understanding can be used to make the world a better place. This also ties into the educational goals idea. We need to understand what schools and education are for. What are the goals. Same thing with technology in schools. Do we want kids to learn basic office programs that will be obselete in 5 years? Or can we make a better use of technology to enhance learning and understanding?

Gardner talks about learning occuring outside schools, in places like children's museums, art museums, and the business world. The point of this is that these places offer alternative viewpoints and approaches. He mentions Project MUSE (museums uniting with schools in education) programs which allow examination of art from a range on entry points

1. Narrative (e.g., Tell the story of what you see and hear.)
2. Quantitative (e.g., Figure out the cost of the materials and how that relates to the selling price.)
3. Logical (e.g., Share your theory about why this object is important.)
4. Aesthetic (Describe the colors and shapes and how they fit together.)
5. Hands On (e.g., Design a dance about what you see.)

Next I found a reference to credentials, and the changing role of them in the workplace. He suggests, and I quite agree, that credentials will not be the only way to judge an individuals suitability for a particular job. This is already changing, I have not special computer degrees, but I definitely have learning and experience necessary to do the programming jobs I have. It is not clear that goings through the steps necessary to gain credentials is the best way to gain the necessary skills to do a job.

I think it is clear that this book coincides with my feelings on learning and education. I didn't talk about his ideas on assessment. Basically he thinks standardized tests don't assess understanding, and the goals of testing must relate to the goals of the learning. If MI supports the idea of individualized learning, it also must support individualized assessment. Assessment for understanding is most important. This leads to a very interesting article I recently read. State Learning Standards as Productive Curricular Objectives subtitled, SOLs (standards of learnign) Aren't Destroying Teaching and Learning, the Tests Are. This article addresses the standards of learning that were introduced in one state. The author thinks the standards of learning, that is the decision on what needs to be learned, and a good foundation for educating children. His takes issue with the standardized tests, and their irrelevance to the learning standards. One interesting point is that the students and teachers have no idea what will be on the tests. This seems to be opposite to the goals of the standards of learning. If there are standards of what should be learned, it should be clear what students should understand at the end of a year.

Searching for stuff on mind maps, I found a review of web sites offering plain old geographic maps, with interactivity.

Mayomi is an online mind-map creation tool. It also is a community that allows users to share their maps with others.

Quite interesting. This is sort of what I was talking about, but it still uses the mind map style tool for creation. I wonder if there would be a way to import linked data into it.

It would be interesting to find a tool that could show and let you browse a web site through a mind-map style interface such as that in FreeMind. Freemind could probably even do it. I think I'd prefer a browser based interface, but then you might need Flash or something to render it. Maybe it already exists.

My main motivation for thinking up this idea, which I am sure is not original, is that I really don't like the Freemind interface for entering data. I am more learning towards a more Wiki style for entering the kind of linked data used in an app like Freemind. I think the visualization possiblities are very interesting with that type of interface.

I'll have to do some research to see what already exists.

I have so far written two customized advanced search interfaces for the OpenACS search package. With one, it was easy because all searchable items are subtybes of one object_type. In addition it is a content repository content_type so we have one unified view to query for additional search attributes.

So, what I have is a hard coded list of columns that are legal to add in for advanced searching. This works fine, but I imagine I can generalize it a little bit by adding a table to configure the advanced attrbutes. This way a search keyword could be tied to a query fragment to add to the SQL query for the search. It would specify what table to join with, and also any optional order by query fragment.

It makes sense to register a tcl procedure for that, instead of actually storing the query bits in the database. That way the callback could refer to an XQL file for a database specific query. Actually it might end up as a search engine driver specific query.

In this case a table probably isn't needed. Just a magically named tcl procedure, such as search::advanced::${keyword} where the existance of the procedure itself would implicitly "register" the availabilty of a keyword. It could even have a search::advanced::${keyword}::help_text subcommand to return some documentation for users. I think a possible first set of necessary procedures is:

search::advanced::${keyword}::query_fragment
search::advanced::${keyword}::join_fragment
search::advanced::${keyword}::order_by_fragment
search::advanced::${keyword}::help_text

This should also be extended to allow full text indexing of additional columns besides the "main content" of an item. I have tested a setup where title, description, and content each have a sepearate full text index column. Because the query querying of the full text index is abstracted through the search driver, there would need to be a way to abstract it from the advanced search client as well.

I'll keep thinking.

Build-it-blocks is a library of reusable,
functional building blocks and construction tips.

It is developed by Build-it-yourself and the MIT Media Lab.

Build-it-yourself sells kits and has plans for building near inventions for kids.

I looks like this stuff is a year or more old. That is too bad, because it looks like a really great idea.

Related papers (the links from the build-it-blocks site are broken)

Closing the fluency gap http://llk.media.mit.edu/papers/archive/cacm-3-01.html
Beyond Black Boxes: Bringing Transparency and Aesthetics Back to Scientific Investigation http://llk.media.mit.edu/papers/archive/bbb/

More papers at Lifelong Kindergarten.

The Map of Creativity is a nice flash interface onto a list of links to innovative projects for learning, creativity, and play. You can sort the data geographically, and also by rating. It looks like its faily new and there aren't too many ratings yet, but I really like the idea of the interface. It is from the Next Generation Foundation (all flash interface) (HTML interface to Next Generation Foundation)

From there I jumped to the Lego Learning Foundation which has a very interesting collection of papers on learning.

Thanks to the Digital Divide Network Mailing List for the links.

I mentioned mirroring a Wiki to a PDA using Plucker, but that really isn't enough. It is only one-way. A read-only Wiki is good for reference, but to capture thoughts and ideas you need to be able to write as well as read.

Importing some other Wiki intoWikiPad or one of the other Palm OS wiki's might be a solution.

Points more and more to an internet-ready PDA.

As soon as I posted the previous entry I though of some more. The trick is knowing what to index, and what is important in something such as an email. I suspect a machine might have to learn this, or at least that would be nice. Any time I have to specify what to index or how, is a chance I could screw it up.

I will have to go out and find some research on this topic, I am sure it is out there.

For a while I have been trying to find a tool that lets me organize and remember information, as well as get it back when I need it. There are a few tools already that can help out, but none has really done the trick for me.

I have a Palm OS PDA that really doesn't quite do it. I have recently used it to keeps lists based on Getting Things Done, and that works somewhat, but its a PITA to use that information from my compter. I haven't found a decent desktop interface for that information.

Planner Mode for emacs is another interesting tool. It is based on a Wiki and that seems handy. At the most basic level it creates a new Wiki page for every day. I haven't gotten into the hang of it yet. It works best for people who use emacs for everything. I usually stick to emacs just for development, so it doesn't fit into my workflow right now. That is too bad because along with planner mode is a remember mode that lets you take notes, and can record what you were doing when you made the note. This allows you to takes notes based on an email you have received, a web page you are browsing, or an IRC converstaion you are having, if you do all those things within emacs. I have not found an easy way to get the Planner mode files into a PDA so I can see what I need to do when I am away. You can publish the information to a web page, so maybe an internet connected PDA/phone would be one solution. Or perhaps using Plucker or some other tool to grab the published Wiki pages would work.

Closely related, and still based in emacs is the Remembrance Agent, which is even smarter, in that it automatically reminds you of items that are related to what you are currently working on. This is neat, but one of my main resources is email, and I use IMAP which means my email is not on my hard drive. I am thinking of using Offline IMAP to have my email on my laptop all the time. This is nice because it stores all the email in a Maildir, one file per email. Unfortunately Thunderbird doesn't support Maildir, so I'd need to run an IMAP server on my laptop, or find a new mail client.

Another idea I had was to combine some of these tools with a full text index of interesting files on my disk. I have been working with Postgresql and tsearch2, which is a pretty neat full text indexing solution. Postgresql is the database behind Storage, so it would be fun to experiment a little with this, although hopefully the Gnome folks will have it sorted out one of these years. Closely related to Storage is Medusa, the indexing part of the solution. For myself, I can imagine a script that runs when new email is received that indexes the email. Besides email the main other resource I use is the web. I have this weblog, along with the OpenACS IRC Weblog which I use more as a list of links I might want to refer to later. Being able to refer to those items in combination with information on my hard drive would be very interesting.

Well that is all for now, i just wanted to get these ideas saved somewhere, and hopefully I can start to use the compter to help me make some sense of all the information I am collecting. It is the links between the information that are really useful. Google and amazon.com are good examples of what you can learn for the links between. Using a computer to automatically find the links, without having to enter then explicity is the way to go. Apple and Microsoft are going that way, but I think to be really effective, the solution will have to be very personal, and optimized to work the way you do.

Instiki is a wiki built on Ruby by the developer behind Basecamp. I tried to install on debian and it was not quite as easy as the author claimed.

Here is what I had to do.

apt-get install ruby
apt-get install libwebrick-ruby
apt-get install libstrscan-ruby
apt-get install rdoc
apt-get install libzlib-ruby

Download instiki http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=186

You also need to edit instiki.rb to point to /usr/bin/ruby or run it as "ruby instiki.rb"

Then it works. Apparently if you install ruby from source it comes with all those goodies.

More later after I actually try it.

I will just ask though, why has noone figured out that it would be nice to synch a wiki to a PDA?

I guess the answer is an internet enabled PDA.