The great thing about having a weekly slot for my Ed.D. thesis on this blog is that it forces me to produce things that I would otherwise forget about or not action. One such thing is the above mindmap (click here to enlarge) – which I’ve produced to help me with the section of my thesis I’m currently writing on the ambiguity of new literacies.

It’s always wise to hold back a bit and talk down big expectations. “Under-promise and over-deliver” as someone much wiser than me put it…

You can purchase an inexpensive copy of The Art of Worldly Wisdom book from Amazon or read it online for free via Google Books. The whole set of Wednesday Wisdom images can be found in my Creative Commons-licensed Flickr set.

I spent last weekend in Turkey at the request of EUROCLIO presenting and facilitating workshops with long-time collaborator Nick Dennis. The government of the Netherlands sponsor civil society-related projects in Turkey, one of the things they’re focusing upon being the better teaching of History in Turkish schools.

At the moment, the Turkish government provide textbooks free-of-charge to schools leading to the situation where, in effect, the textbook is the curriculum. The first thing we had to emphasise, therefore, over and above showcasing ICT was that teachers don’t necessarily have to follow what’s in the textbook.

In addition, in the discussion following our presentation we found that the common lesson structure in England of having at least three parts to a lesson (starter, main, plenary) isn’t common practice in Turkey. In our workshops on the days following this discussion we felt the need to model what we meant.

We knew that we weren’t going to be able to touch on every tool we mentioned in our presentation, but including (and explaining the need for) a key question, learning objectives and success criteria, meant we could focus on only four. In addition, whilst the translation was excellent, it necessarily slowed down the natural pace of the workshop.

The Turkish educators also had to lead workshops demonstrating the innovative lessons they have been developing. These were of varying quality. Most that I saw, however, simply needed some tweaking to move them to being focused enquiries. History is a very difficult subject to teach well.

I greatly enjoyed our visit to Kizilcahamam – my first visit to Turkey. It’s a beautiful country with wonderful people. Although it’s a different experience working that being on holiday, it was fantastic to be part of such a worthwhile project and to share good practice with colleagues despite a language barrier.

You can access our presentation and workshop slides (in Turkish!) at the link below – along with some videos of Nick and I in action:

Short link: http://bit.ly/EUROCLIO

Long link: http://dougbelshaw.com/blog/presenting/presentations-archive/euroclio-third-authors-and-experts-workshop-kizilcahamam/

Finally, I’ve updated the presentations archive and my CV to include this trip (check out the Presenting icon in the sidebar!)

I’m pleased to announce that I’ve finished working on version 0.4 of #uppingyourgame: an educator’s guide to productivity. Three of the five chapters are now complete:

1. The Philosophy of Productivity
2. Productivity & Motivation
3. Productivity as ‘getting on & doing’

#uppingyourgame is the first book to be published using the OpenBeta publishing model and will be completed over the course of 2010. The chapters yet to be written are provisionally titled Productivity 2.0 and Making others more productive.

Version 0.2 is available as a preview here

Buying into the ideas that this book contains (and will contain) NOW costs £5. You will receive free updates and notifications as each version is published. Buying into the contents means you have access to each subsequent version up to 1.0. If you decide not to purchase now the price will increase as I complete each chapter (and release each version) – up to a maximum of £10.

Once you’ve completed the payment process clicking on the orange button to ‘Return to DAJ Belshaw’ will take you to the download page.

Permanent link to the book’s page at http://bit.ly/uppingyourgame

As this is published I’ll be in Kizilcahamam, Turkey, with my long-time partner-in-crime Nick Dennis. We here (there?) at the request of EUROCLIO and are doing a presentation followed by a couple of workshops around technology in History education.

http://delicious.com/dajbelshaw/TILTW11
(38 bookmarks)

As a consequence of being in Turkey between Thursday and Sunday, I’ve had to complete this post before I travelled on Thursday . So this is more like Things I Learned Between Monday and Wednesday This Week and is the reason it’s slightly shorter than usual…

Tech.

• Just as it took a long time for Bluetooth to catch on, it would seem about the time for QR codes is almost nigh. It’s something I blogged about almost four years ago now, but the support structures and familiarity are there now. James Clay blogged about Microsoft Tags this week, which seem to be more-easily-recognisable by mobile devices.
• Lifehacker has a guide to creating your own personal QR code (like the one to the right)
• Papa Sangre is a game for the iPhone coming out at the end of April. As Ewan McIntosh put it, it’s the world’s first video game without any video. It’s completely high-definition audio-only!

Productivity & Inspiration

• Dumb Little Man has a great post entitled 10 Amazing Life Lessons You Can Learn From Albert Einstein. I totally agree with the advice about following your curiosity and making mistakes!
• Parkinson’s Law: work expands to fill the time and resources available.
• As this Get Rich Slowly post points out, clutter doesn’t just lead to diminished productivity, but can hurt you financially as well!

Education & Academic

• Many educators in the USA attended TEDxNYED and posted their thoughts and reflections. I found those by Dan Meyer and Alan Levine most useful and interesting.
• Want your students to blog, but not sure about the topic? Try this list of 10 ideas from Lee Kolbert.
• Artichoke has an interesting post on curriculum with some timely questions about education, social networking and technology.

Data, Design & Infographics

• The BBC has a great visual explanation of how the internet works. I shall be using this to enlighten people in future!
• Google have launched Google Public Data Explorer which visualizes publicly-accessible data in visually-delightful ways.
• Tim Berners-Lee on how open data has spread and is being used in ways the people putting it on the web couldn’t have imagined:

Misc.

• The recent earthquake in Chile was so strong it moved the capital city, Santiago, an entire 10 feet to the west!
• There’s a website for everything on the internet, including those who want to commit adultery. An analysis by one of these websites found that those women most likely to cheat are teachers and those men most likely to cheat are doctors. Estate agents (unsurprisingly, to me) featured in the Top 5 for both men and women.
• Europa Film Treasures is a free archive of classic European films. Which is nice.

Quotations

Think like a person of action and act like a person of thought. (Anonymous)

Why you gotta act like you know when you don’t know? It’s okay if you don’t know everything. (Ben Folda)

Quality means doing it right when no one is looking. (Henry Ford)

If heiroglyphics count as infographics, then of course they are around 5,000 years old. Sumerian ‘letters’ were combined with pictures to explain concepts, provide explanations and tell stories. A little more recently in the western world, graphics have been used to represent quantitative data. One of the first examples of this is Nicole d’Orseme (1352-82), Bishop of Lisieux, who combined figures into groups and graphed them. Leonardo da Vinci was fond of mixing graphics and text, especially in his Treatise on Painting.

Modern infographics can be traced to William Playfair’s ‘information graphics’ for The Commercial & Political Atlas, published in 1786 and containing 44 graphics (mostly line, ‘fever’ or bar charts). Subsequently, Otto Neurath (1882-1945), a sociologist, developed the ‘Vienna method’. This stressed the importance of simple images to explain data. Neurath documented everything in graphic form that he researched statistically,  founding the ‘Isotype’ movement (International System of Typographic Picture Education) – an attempt at a world language without words. This, coupled with Modernism, had ‘a profound impact on graphics and design world-wide’. The London Underground map is a product of this movement:

The USA took longer to start using infographics, with the early adopters being Fortune magazine, the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times (the latter now being a leader in the field). Researchers Turnbull and Baird in 1962 realised the importance of infographics – in a world before the internet, 24-hour news and cable television:

Tests have proven that material of the same content has been received, read and acted upon in one form, but discarded in another. These examples, coupled with the knowledge that every reader is offered much more than he can ever assimilate, assert that graphic techniques are too important to be ignored.

By 1981 other newspapers were using infographics but it was the launch of USA Today in 1982 and its commitment to using graphics every day that started the real trend. Some of these, however (the types of bread – white, wheat or rye – preferred by members of Congress) were merely filler. In Germany, Der Spiegel had been experimenting with more artistic infographics since the mid-1950s.

The dawn of computers had a massive effect on infographics. ‘Desktop publishing’ became more than just a casual phrase when desktop computers, partnered with the first laser printers, led to reductions in newspaper department workloads by 15-20 hours per week. This freed up time to experiment with infographics. With programs available for the Apple Mac such as MacDraw, newspapers no longer required skilled artists laboriously hand-drawing each infographic.

As the processing power of computers grew, so did their ability to represent complex data in a visually-appealing way. In 1990, research carried out by the Gallup Organization showed that graphic elements possessed greater power than originally thought. They used computerized headgear to record what readers saw on a page, noticing that visual elements received a great deal of attention. Follow-up studies confirmed this and that readers were left with more memorable impressions than when presented with words only.

The dawn of the internet has led to an explosion in interest and use of infographics. Many and diverse software packages and web applications are available to represent your data visually. If you’re interested, try the following three:

• Google Docs Spreadsheets (‘insert chart’)
• ManyEyes
• Tableau Free

Image CC BY-NC-SA nzbuu

I grew up and have returned to live on the edge of a very deprived area. What caused its deprivation? Going from once being the largest mining village in the world to having no coal mines in the area. We’re talking (at least) third generation unemployment for many people.

But I’m surrounded by wonderfully different and independent people, proud of their mining heritage. Which is why it makes me sad when those in a position to make things better conflate two different forms of ‘culture’.

On the one hand, we’ve got a dialect (‘Pitmatic’) audibly distinct from ‘Geordie’ (that of Newcastle-upon-Tyne), along with different traditions, customs and even artwork that’s a product of the areas mining heritage.

On the other, there’s the drugs, graffiti and crime ‘culture’ that’s been a result of the decline of coal mining.

So when schools and local organizations remind young people of their area’s past, they’re doing them a favour. I was part of a local history project in Doncaster that aimed to do just that. We disseminated video interviews of people involved in the coal mining industry – leading to some wonderful learning conversations and realisations.

But when schools and local organizations allow (or even encourage) young people to graffiti, make drugs references and reward them with gift vouchers that they know will end up being spent on cigarettes and alcohol, they’re doing them a massive disservice. That’s got nothing to do with culture and everything to do with crime and social disadvantage.

We need some clear thinking and action on this. I doubt my area’s any different from others in anything other than specifics.

There’s a difference between meeting young people half-way with cultural references and capitulating to the criminal underworld.

Some people talk of ‘learning styles’ but I think that, really, we use each main type of style (kinaesthetic, visual, aural) depending on what it is we’re learning. In fact, as a teacher, I’ve observed this in the classroom.

Those (high-flyers) who have the groundwork understanding to quickly assimilate concepts need merely aural input to learn effectively.

Those (most of the class) who need some consolidation of the groundwork before assimilation need things explained visually.

Those (SEN, etc) who need to re-explain the groundwork completely before moving on need kinaesthetic activities.

Feel free to shoot me down, but that what I’ve observed. And the same is true for my own learning.

At the moment I’m trying to apply Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity to my Ed.D. thesis. Specifically, I’m interested in finding out how terms such as ‘digital literacy’ and ‘electracy’ are ambiguous. It’s confusing. So I did my equivalent of breaking out the Duplo:

Note that this is visual learning for you but kinaesthetic for me – I did something similar when doing my MA.

Thoughts/comments? Do you do something similar?

It’s all about deciding what you want to do and how hard you’re prepared to work. And by ‘hard’ I don’t mean the number of hours you put in – that’s a given!

You can purchase an inexpensive copy of The Art of Worldly Wisdom book from Amazon or read it online for free via Google Books. The whole set of Wednesday Wisdom images can be found in my Creative Commons-licensed Flickr set.

*As I explain in the video, having them in audiobook format rather than MP3 allows you to ‘bookmark’ a chapter if you don’t finish it. With MP3s you would have to start from the beginning again or fast-forward…