(In Parenthesis

Our school has had more – much more – than its share of tragedy within the last two years, including the deaths of five current students and two members of staff. This was uppermost in my mind when I was asked to take my turn at providing the prayer / reflection for staff briefing this morning:

St George, your England looks a different place to us
At least our little portion of it. Birth and death
They are the normal way of things of course, but does
It have to be that we meet so much of the latter?
What matter, that dragons seem more plentiful than swords?
O patron of our English land, can we demand
That our share of blows be somehow deemed unfair
When blessings for the most part shower themselves on us
Compared with most who have lived, and still do, elsewhere?
But balance, or bounty, mean nothing to the bereft;
What weft can hold the warp of lives now rent askew?
Perhaps only the gossamer threads of a faith
As fragile, St George, as the legends of you.

For the past month or so I’ve been participating in this small scale action research project using the scoop.it! curation tool. I’ve been writing some reflections on the process on the project wiki and thought I’d add them here too.

Reflection – 19th February 2012

When I first signed up for scoop.it (before this project) I had a cursory glance at it and didn’t see much advantage over other bookmarking sites. Having begun to make a bit of an effort at curating some topics of interest, I’m beginning to see how it works and to get some idea of the potential it could offer. The visual attractiveness of the pages compared with a list of links probably shouldn’t be underestimated, but perhaps could also be a problem in that it may lead to links that happen to have an attractive image gaining undue prominence.

So far, my ‘curation’ has been on a pretty ad-hoc basis, with the topics chosen purely on the basis of a combination of what happens to be at the forefront of my mind at the moment, and ideas that have cropped up incidentally: a couple of the topics have been created specifically as a result of spotting something I wanted to keep (typically from a link on twitter).

Adding the scoop.it bookmarklet to my iphone has been very useful as I do a lot of my checking of Google-reader 7 Twitter etc in snatched moments on the fly.

A small niggle has been that the bookmarklet (whether mobile or on PC) does not allow you to directly add pdf pages. Either you need to add the page that the pdf you want is linked from, or add the URL of the PDF manually.

Issues I need to address further:

1. Tagging: I’m not sure my topic tags have been much good: certainly nearly all the suggested items have not been particularly relevant to the topics I had in mind. It seems to be that sources are suggested based on any tag term rather than being strongly weighted towards containing several of the terms. So, for example, my ‘Internet Access’ topic includes the tag ‘blocking’ and I found sources suggested from sports sites about blocking in American football. I could do with knowing more about how the tagging system works, and how sources are suggested from that.
2. I need to give some thought to the collaborative potential. I haven’t yet invited anyone to co-curate a topic, and I’d also like to get students involved in curating topics.
3. Titles and descriptions of topics could also probably do with a little more thought than I’ve given them. I’ve also noticed that you can set the URL of the topic. I guess it’s fairly important to get this stuff as right as possible at an early stage, otherwise there is the danger that links to and searches on the topic could be ‘broken’ if too much tinkering is done with the parameters of a topic once it’s set up.

Reflection – 26th February 2012

Most of my topics have grown steadily over the past week or so as I’ve added material I’ve come across. The issues I mentioned previously will doubtless be ongoing ones, so I’ll refer to them again:

1. I’ve read a little more about tagging, but still haven’t done much about it. I read a help forum topic that suggested using tags to organise sub-categories of material within a topic. I’ve also refined to some extent the parameters for suggested sources, mainly by removing suggestions for a single tag term. However, I’m still finding that the overwhelming majority of suggested links are not appropriate. Most of the links I add have come from google searchesl or twitter/blogs.
2. I’ve invited a couple of co-curators who’ve shown an interest in my topics, but they haven’t added anything yet. I think a more pro-active approach will be needed to get others involved, and it will only happen if there is a genuine shared use for the information. In the next week or two I’m going to set up a specific co-curation exercise with one or more of my sixth-form classes to explore the potential of the scoop.it education account more explicitly.
3. I think the titles of the topics I’ve got so far are not bad. However, looking ahead at the possibility of scoop.it becoming a key teaching and learning resource I would perhaps want to connect some of them more explicitly to particular courses, as I have done with the FM2 Film Studies topics I’ve created. This does however bring me to some of the concerns I have about scoop.it, which I will mention next.

Possible concerns:

1. Capacity. The increase for education accounts in the number of topics that can be created to 20 is obviously welcome, and at the moment I only have 7 topics. However, if I wanted to use this as a systematic resource curation tool to be used on an ongoing basis I could easily exceed that number very quickly. On an English Literature course I might want at least a separate topic for each book studied (and perhaps multiple topics, eg. one on the author, one on critical responses, one on social & historical context etc). For English Language, I might want topics on different theories of language acquisition, Some kind of ‘nesting’ of topics and sub-topics, and the ability to easily share resources across multiple topics simultaneously would be useful here. As noted above, tagging could be part of that solution, but only part, I think.
2. Cost. The offer of an extended free trial for this project is also welcome, and $6.99 may not seem a huge amount to continue the subscription. However, I would almost certainly have to pay that out of my own pocket: my school is not set up to allow credit card payments. The cost of online services and apps etc is an interesting area. I think people (and I include myself) tend to balk at the idea of paying relatively trivial sums that we wouldn’t think twice about paying for physical goods such as text books, or services directly from people. Nevertheless, something is a lot more nothing and the added value of a service like scoop.it needs to be clear and significant compared with free alternatives.
3. Longevity. Having got an email last week about the closure of amplify.com, and having seen other tools come and go, the question of whether scoop.it will survive long term is an inevitable one, and if not, what happens to the time and effort that has gone into curating the topics hosted there?
4. Portability. Even assuming that it is viable long-term, I wouldn’t want the resources I’d curated to be available only in a single place (whether that be scoop.it or anywhere else). I had thought I’d found a solution in using the RSS feed for each topic, which can then be imported into a Google spreadsheet, thus. However, the URL given is to the scoop.it post, not the original source.

Positives:

1. The ‘social’ aspect of scoop.it are already proving their worth as I beginning to discover other worthwhile topics to follow from other users and to re-scoop their sources. I’ve also found that a number of my sources have been re-scooped, and shared when I have autoposted on Twitter. I noticed that Dr Jane Setter, Senior Lecturer in Phonetics at Reading University had retweeted a couple of my sources so I invited her to be a co-curator of my ‘Researching Language’ topic. She has signed up to be my first (and so far only!) co-curator, though she has yet to scoop any sources. A few days ago a teacher in South West England tweeted: “@**AntHeald** I have just got my media students to bookmark your scoop it page!”, and it is obviously satisfying to find that something I’m spending a little time is having value beyond my own immediate context.
2. The process of using scoop.it as part of this action research project is prompting careful reflection that I might not otherwise make time for, and also causing me to consider other practices. But for this I wouldn’t have learned how to use the ‘importfeed’ function in Google spreadsheets, and it’s also caused me to return to Diigo to look again at the annotation and collaboration tools available there which I knew something about but have never got round to exploring thoroughly.
3. I have been able to use the topics on e-safety & internet in schools in the course of a meeting with our school systems manager as we discussed ways of moving forward with more extensive and innovative uses of learning technology. I found the ‘magazine’ style layout particularly useful when giving an overview of my thinking on the subject and , and it was then easy to share the resources with him after the meeting in the form of a couple of single links.

The blogging crusader that is David Mitchell @DeputyMitchell came up with a wonderful idea for the day that we are still only just about in in the UK, but being a global project there is time for plenty more posts yet. Here is my contribution:

http://feb29th.net/2012/03/01/happy-quadrennium/

Happy Quadrennium
I can’t remember what I was doing on February 29th four years ago, but thanks to this wonderful blogging project I’ll always be able to remember this one.

I teach English four days a week at a secondary school, and yesterday I remember walking into the staff room and thinking how lucky I am to be doing a rewarding job that I (mostly) enjoy, and to be living in probably the safest and most civilised period in human history in one of the most prosperous places on earth.

Really, I can’t believe my good fortune at times.

Then today, the special day of 29th February fell on my day off, so after a leisurely breakfast and a couple of espressos spent reading some of the earlier posts on this blog, I got changed into my cycling gear and set off on this ride: http://www.mapmyride.com/routes/view/71847190

Turning those pedals through the near-deserted South Yorkshire countryside it felt so good to be alive.

I know that many people don’t have the blessings in life that I’ve got, and that makes me all the more determined to enjoy mine, and to try and share them in whatever small ways I can.

While spring cleaning some old blogs today as part of an attempt to make my digital footprints less muddy, I came across some posts relating to a GCSE English group I had four years ago, and it heightened yet further my sense of being dispirited at the way my teaching is going under the Controlled Assessment regime (see here for some excellent discussion of this from David Didau (@LearningSpy) together with my depressed comment).

Here are some examples of blog posts with student discussion on Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ that we were doing for coursework.

Into the Heart of Darkness

Through the Heart of Darkness

More Heart of Darkness

What’s in a Title?

I recall much more discussion and debate with the whole class than the online taster you can see there.  I know a top set, like the one I had back then, is a very different proposition from the set four classes I have now. Nevertheless I find it difficult to see a way that, even with the best students,  I could engender the depth of reflective thinking about and exploration of a text that most of these students were able to produce, now that our curriculum that currently requires us to romp through six CA’s in Year 10.

Is it even allowable to negotiate individual titles with students (within the broad parameters of the prescribed task banks) for CA, as I did with those students for their coursework?

(I’ll have to find out.

The colleague that I share an AS Level English Language group with is off school at the moment, just as our deadline for submitting their coursework is coming up.

As I was leaving school yesterday for the weekend, I noticed that she had sent in some drafts that she had commented on. I’d asked the students to complete the coursework by this coming Monday.

What a pity that many of them would be handing in that coursework, or working on it further over the weekend without the benefit of those comments.

So, I’ve just spent a few minutes snapping the pages on my iPhone using the JotNot Scanner Pro app, and emailing them as PDF’s to the students directly from within the app.

(I just hope they heeded my injunction yesterday that they should be checking their school email on a daily basis, or – as I do, having it auto-forwarded to an email address they do check regularly.

I’ve made a monumental meal of this task, and I’ve still only done the first part of it, as the deadline swings round with assignment 2 already up and running.

My first thought was to bang it out quickly in a few moments before going to sleep by seeing what I could find in the way of vector graphic apps for the iphone. After I’d trawled through the options (I didn’t really want to pay what with not knowing what I was looking for, and being a bit of a cheapskate and all) I downloaded the ‘lite’ (ie. free, and – it turns out – pretty useless) version of miniDraw.

I sort of know what layers are, though not how to utilise them, but Bezier curves mean nothing to me. I thought that even though the iPhone screen is only small, that it wouldn’t be a problem for the simple shape-based graphic that was suggested as the outcome for this assignment, but it turns out I was horribly wrong. Maybe if you know what you’re doing with this kind of software and have an eye for design it might be OK, but I just found myself fiddling aimlessy with it for ages. I’d also had a quick look at  some of the keenies who’d already posted their assignment results, complete with sketchbooks and mind-maps and what-have-you outlining the ‘creative process’. I’m not mocking that, honest: I’d love to be able to plan something coherently and then get the damn thing done, but I’ve always struggled to work in anything like a systematic way.

So what actually happened was that I was playing about and kind of accidentally drew a line that curved in a way that reminded me a bit of  the sweep of a page of an open book, and I thought, well – I’m an English teacher: that’ll do.

I figured out how to copy the line, and then mirror it to produce a number of  ’pages’ and then it all got incredibly frustrating. Once I’ve started something like this, though, I can’t let it go, even when it’s not really working. What I should have done is learned from the experience that the iphone wasn’t really working as a tool for this job, and transferred straight to one of the tools recommended in the assignment. I did actually try that at one point, but couldn’t quite replicate the curve of the line that I’d by now become rather attached to.

There followed several comedy hours where things happened that were a complete mystery to me. I couldn’t work out how to select multiple ‘objects’ so every line was completely separate when it came to wanting to recolour the image (though I could resize and rotate the whole thing). And somehow I’d created multiple objects on top of each other so I had to keep moving and deleting them until there was only one left so I could apply colour.  I guess it probably gave me a little taste of what many of my students must feel when I’m asking them to do something that to me seems obvious, but they just don’t get it (sorry, year 11 set 4, about all that ‘varying sentence structure’ stuff).

Also, being an English teacher, I couldn’t quite stick to the injunction ‘no words’, so by Saturday morning I had this:

after faffing about for ages on my iphone, this is as far as I'd got

I ended up having to pay £2.49 for the full version of the app just to export it in a format that the free Inkscape software could read, as it became clear that I was going to drive myself insane carrying on as I was. I did begrudge that £2.49, particularly as I’m unlikely to use that app again in anger (with anger, perhaps!), but then I reflected that I was paying about the price of a coffee for a piece of software that not so long ago would have cost tens of times more for similar functionality, so I stumped up, and then spent ages more trying to work out how the gradient editor works in Inkscape, and fiddling about with all those little lines.

Here’s what I wound up with in the end:

That's all folks!

I ‘evaluated’ it by showing it to my Y12 English Language & Literature class on Monday morning. It seems I’m the only person who sees that squiggle as the page of a book. After an embarrassed silence, one of them ventured: “Is it, like, train tracks or something, sir?”

Oh well.

After a little explanation of my thinking behind it (much of it post-rationalised, I have to say), one of my charges was kind enough to say, “Wow, that’s really intelligent, sir.” I don’t think she was being sarcastic, but I do think she’s easily impressed.

Having seen Nicola McNee’s contribution to this assignment, we appear to have experienced very similar frustrations, and to have been thinking along very similar lines, although I do think her sign is much more elegant than mine.

(I wonder if our idea behind the colour scheme was the same?

I like the idea of being part of a collective. It’s a good, solid, wholesome word. I’m not a self-starter, so I’m hoping that being part of a collective will give a bit of focus and direction to my meddlings.

I like the euphony of ‘collective’ and ‘creative’.

I don’t expect that anyone has read through this blog thus far, and I certainly don’t expect anyone to do so now. But if you did, you’d see that I’ve blown hot & cold, and hither & thither with it. I also have other bits of online projects scattered in various bits of cyberspace. I want to be a bit less of a flibbertigibbet and a bit more of a getupandgetit.

To be creative, I think I need constraints, as well as cues. So, a collective it is then.

(I just hope, and – as far as I am able – intend, that this will be, for me, not just another kind of failure.

My A-level students, and doubtless some others,  have had the experience at one point or another of me going berserk about someone using the word ‘flow’ to describe a piece of text, followed by my theatrically banning its use, usually to the accompaniment of a less than edifying toilet-based description of how ‘flow’ can take so many different forms from the trickle to the torrent that it’s pretty useless in any discussion that’s aiming at analytical precision.

I am re-reading G K Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. It contains these words:

“If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If, in your bold creative way, you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe.”

For much of the sixteen years that I have been a Catholic, I have been trying to draw a giraffe with a short neck.