Monthly Archive for November, 2006

Teachers should be at school

Published
by
Michael
on 29/11/2006
in education and government
. 10 Comments

160px-John_Howard_May_2006.jpgsays our Prime Minister, John Howard. According to the Age article, PM criticises teachers stop work meeting in Victoria:

“They shouldn’t be gathering in Melbourne on Thursday, they should be at school on Thursday,” Mr Howard told federal parliament.

“it’s this kind of behaviour by teachers that gives government schools a bad name,” he said.

“If they want to demonstrate against our laws, do it in their own time.”

Like the PM, I’m also a product of the public education system, as well as a parent of two pre-school kids and a teacher in the public education system. My problem is, I don’t understand these comments by my PM.

In fact, I don’t understand the whole situation very well. Here’s my perspective (please help me learn and correct me where I’ve misunderstood):

  1. Schools will be open so that parents work commitments are not disrupted.
  2. IMHO Government schools don’t have a bad name because of teachers striking - but because of the gradual degradation of the public school system over the past 10 years as the private school system has flourished (not unrelated to government policy - I’m still trying to understand the public-private education debate)
  3. People striking on Thursday are doing so in their own time in terms of pay. They will either be docked and not paid for the time absent, or in some cases they will apply for leave to attend the strike.

So all I am left thinking that our Prime Minister wants teachers to receive bad publicity for the strike by blaming the apparent “bad name of government schools” on those naughty teachers who are jigging school for a fun day in the park with a free Jimmy Barnes concert (same Age article as above):

Instead of attending a “Jimmy Barnes concert” at the Melbourne Cricket Ground teachers should be in their classrooms, Mr Howard said.

It makes me sad that our current system relies on this type of rhetoric (and it comes from both sides) rather than a transparent and honest debate.

I’ll be at the stop-work meeting at 8:30am tomorrow morning (at Katoomba RSL)… even though I don’t agree with everything the union does (more on that later), even though I do believe that strikes have been abused in the past, but I want to be counted: I think the current IR laws are one-step-forward-two-steps-backward for our country.

That said, I’ll be crawling back to the classroom by 10am where I belong straight after the broadcast without my free Jimmy Barnes concert. I do think the demonstrations after the broadcast are important, but I’ve got students who have their last day of a 1-year Web Design course - and that’s important too.

What’s your perspective? Do you think teachers should stay at school tomorrow or join the protest?

Should learners be learning intro to Javascript?

Published
by
Michael
on 15/11/2006
in asides, webclass and webdesign
. 5 Comments

Should learners be learning Javascript?

From Christian Montoya:

It is my opinion that we should not introduce Javascript to these students at all. There isn’t enough time to teach them how to use Javascript correctly, and there are more useful things we can teach them related to CSS and PHP. I think Javascript should be avoided altogether.

We do have time to learn a little more in our course… with activities like the JavaScript challenges for input validation, but it’s still a struggle for most people given that it’s their first taste of programming. I think most of us in the course just learn the basics - enough to learn more if we have time/are keen.

Perhaps we should do PHP first? Hmmm… unfortunately our new national qualification structure doesn’t allow it. (Note to self: add unobtrusive Javascript to challenges!)

Demonstrating Webdesign

Published
by
Michael
on 8/11/2006
in education, learning, reflection, tafe, webclass and webdesign
. 8 Comments

In our on-going effort to improve our Web Design learning experience we’ve been trying to listen very carefully to the feedback from our learners and update our program in response.

Back in June this year we started restructuring the learning pathway through the course into smaller yet holistic levels with individual deadlines/milestones. This was in response to feedback that, although participants enjoyed the freedom of learning with real projects and at a pace that suited their own needs, the resulting

  • lack of milestones to work towards and
  • the difficulty for the learner to gauge how far through the course they are themselves

were sources of frustration for learners!Now, after having run with the levels of webdesign for the past six months and listening to on-going feedback from our participants, I think it’s safe to say the following: (if you have other thoughts, please add a comment with your thoughts!)

  • Organising individual learning levels/learning agreements and setting corresponding short-term milestones with learners has been very helpful for many (not all) participants - giving short-term deadlines to work towards and breaking up the learning into manageable yet relevant chunks.
  • The individual learning levels have generally not helped to gauge how far through the course a learner is in terms of assessment (even if they have done so in terms of learning).
  • It requires substantial time to set up and manage 15-or-so individual learning levels with learners (but in my view, worthwhile).
  • It can be difficult for multiple facilitators to work with an individual to plan the learning levels. (Initially we were using electronic Learning Agreements - Word docs in a shared folder that learners could view but not edit - but this had a number of problems. We now create a new TODO list in our BaseCamp project whenever a student starts a new level. This means that potentially all the facilitators and the student can provide input, students can assign tasks to facilitators and negotiate their milestones.)

Now we’re also beginning to think about the possibility of offering the Diploma in Web Development second semester next year, so it’s a good time to take stock of student feedback and try to improve the learning experience once more! After talking with our students over the past while, there are two current issues that I can identify (but again, if I’ve missed something or you have other thoughts, please add a comment!):

  1. “What do I need to do to finish?” - As mentioned above, it’s difficult for learners to gauge their progress towards completing the course within a self-paced, project-based learning environment. Although the Learning Levels are helping students to gauge their learning progress, they don’t necessarily help gauge their assessment towards the qualification (the difference between learning skills and demonstrating competence in a certain unit). We do keep a folder for each student where we collect evidence for each unit and identify the units that they have already demonstrated, but it is a “teacher’s folder”.
  2. “Do I need to learn this?” or “Have we actually learned that?” - It is difficult for learners to gauge whether what they are learning is relevant/required for their qualification, or whether they are in-fact learning everything they require for the qualification - learners just have to trust me as the facilitator. As much as I’d love learners to jump at every opportunity to learn, they also have time constraints and need to focus their attention on what needs to get done to gain the qualification.

Demonstrating Webdesign: A possible solution

Up until this point, we’ve been using Evidence Sheets to help learners gather evidence for each unit of competency, but it’s always been under the control of the facilitator. I would sit down with the student and find evidence from the sites that they’ve been working on or the activities/challenges that they’ve completed, document it on the evidence sheet for that unit of competency before storing it in the folder.

My main reason for doing this was to protect the students from the Units of Competency, which, in the IT training package are often incredibly difficult to decipher and generally confuse learners.

Enter the new Demonstrating WebDesign site: (Edit: Moved to Wikiversity)

The purpose of DemonstratingWebDesign is to help you gather evidence to demonstrate your skills in Web Design as they relate to the following Australian qualifications:

  • ICA40305: Certificate IV in Information Technology (Websites)
  • ICA50605: Diploma in Information Technology (Website Development)

These resources are not designed to help you learn web design-related skills - although they may help you focus your learning. The resources that you find here at DemonstratingWebdesign are designed to help you demonstrate that you have learned the required skills, by gathering and documenting evidence of your skills in practise.

The idea is to build up a resource that will help students understand how each unit will benefit them, provide ideas for how they can demonstrate their competence, provide a link to the official unit of competence, and provide an evidence sheet for each unit that they can use to document their evidence against the criteria (with help where needed of course!)

I’m hoping that this, together with the current Web Design resources and processes will help learners gauge their progress through the course (in terms of knowing exactly how many units they’ve left to demonstrate and what they can do to demonstrate each unit), and provide a way for learners to keep me accountable in terms of what I “teach” (for want of a better word).

If you have a spare 5 minutes, please read the introduction on the Demonstrating Webdesign hope page and the example resource developed for the Australian Certificate IV in Websites. Especially if you are a student! I’d love to get feedback/comments as to whether you think this resource might help some of the issues that you’ve identified.

Edit (15/11/06): After discussion with others, I’ve moved the DemonstratingWebdesign resource to include it as part of the already established WebDesign@Wikiversity resources. Initially I thought that it would be good to use Wikispaces as the target audience is only Australian people learning web design, but then why not generalise the concept to include qualifications from other countries - and open up the channels for feedback and improvement?