Professor Matt Bower

Full program is available from: http://www.educ.mq.edu.au/2010SydneySymposium/agenda.htm

Notes:

• Note that the Curriculum Corporation & Edu.au merged to form Educational Services Australia
• Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL): http://www.aitsl.edu.au/
• AITSL has money to support technology integration into learning and teaching, but will not disseminate without referencing ACARA and ESA
• David Saltmarsh: 101 reviews of education in Australia since 1976
• Some great feedback on my presentation:
  • Search for “Classroom Action Research”
  • Two other advantages include helping pre-service teachers to better understand how to implement inquiry-based learning, and helping Education faculties to better understand which strategies work best (for instance by researching the efficacy of research-based learning).
  • Lookup “Teacher work sample methodology” – an approach to adapting teaching based on analysis of student products
    
• Mobile devices: Wireless Universal Resource File allows the mobile device type to be detected (in the same way as it is possible to identify the computer type when sending an http request). The only limitation is that it is only for phones, not ipods.
• “Augmented learning” – adapting learning based on student context, eg integrating authentic mobile data GPS, or providing them with media types that suit their preferences.
• The importance of teaching education students with respect – understanding that they have a lot to offer.
  

Today is my first day of annual leave in quite some time. I’m in Melbourne and it is a good time to reflect. Not only did I buy my first two recreational books in ages (The Audacity of Hope and The Hidden Brain), but I’m starting to think about ideas I would like to pursue for writing books.

For some time I have wanted to investigate relationships between the Bible, the Qar’an, and the Buddhist scriptures. I would like to draw out parallels, to strike at the fundamental similarities in those texts, and show that the differences are far less. As well, I am interested in drawing together research on the different areas of society (education, health, economics, justice and so on) and propose a vision for each of these areas.

But the third and final book I would like to write would integrate the findings from each of these. It would aim to show how the fundamental spiritual principles which are embedded in all of us can be used to inform how we construct and govern our society. While it could be structured in terms of different areas of society (education, health etc) and how our spiritual principles inform each of these, in order to emphasise the importance of starting with spiritual principles (honesty, love, forgiveness, etc) and to create an integrated work, the text should almost certainly be structured in terms of these principles and then show how these can underpin our different areas of society.

Present:

Mark Silva (ITS)
Chris Barrett (Senior Web Designer Marketing)
David Morgan (AVTS)
Fabianne Astora (AVTS)
Quinny Yang (Marketing)
Jenny Peasley (Library)
Hillary Beckmann (Sustainability OFM)
Ian Brew (Sustainability OFM)
Andrew Alprek (LibIT)
David Gandrel (U@MQ Digital Signage)
Maree Gosper
Elaine Huber
Rodney Grant (AVTS – has video conferencing)
Terrance Collins (Manager Learning Systems)
Marc Bailey (ITS)

Notes:

• We need an MQ style Youtube with a) flexible permissioning, b) variety of quality, c) file types and standards d) asynchronous or live streaming
• Teachers and students need space
• Research as well as L&T and signage

Other notes:

• IGMP – Internet Group Management Protocol : Allows multicasting (streaming)
• H264 – Advanced Video Coding (compression standard)
• Silverlight – Microsoft plugin for browser multimedia
• HTML5 – latest XML HTML standard for structuring and formatting information on the web

LEADING ICT IN EDUCATION PRACTICES A CAPACITY BUILDING TOOLKIT FOR TEACHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS IN THE ASIA-PACIFIC

(CHER PING LIM • CHING SING CHAI • DANIEL CHURCHILL)

An outstanding document for integrators of ICT.

Citations for outstanding contributions to student learning and awards for teaching excellence

Due date: April 30

• · Citations use one or two criteria, Awards use all of them.
• · What they wanted to see was the way students, teachers and teaching philosophy were brought together at all stages.
• · Important to get across a subject that is sometimes difficult to people who may not feel confident in the area.
• · Talking about aligning objectives, curriculum and assessment so that students are set-up to succeed.
• · Put students in an active role – what I do (agent) to have students act in particular ways that facilitates their learning.
• · Not making a big deal if students don’t understand – create an environment where it is OK not to know but where students are enthusiastic to find out.
• · Make sure teachers actions and students actions are included at all points and linked.
• · Talk about giving students learning strategies.
• · Talk about difficulties encountered and solutions.
• · Characterise learners in a positive light.
• · Concrete examples of how I operate.
• · How do you situate yourself in terms of students and student learning?
• · A blasting philosophical argument.
• · Students as coming to life rather than recipients.
• · Don’t focus on the materials but rather on how the teacher and students are coming to life by virtue of the materials.
• · Talk a lot about people, giving concrete examples.
• · But have a sophisticated philosophy about looking at the subject and what it can achieve.
• · Note the difference between applying for promotion (which is more evidence based) and applying for an award (which emphasizes student actions)
• · Interspersing quotes from students, that show how I’m doing what I’m doing.
• · Potentially collect reflective evidence in your class as a way to improve the quality of student feedback harvested.
• · Build an argument to demonstrate the central thrust of what my teaching is about – present how the parts contribute to the one theme.
• · Short, sharp, direct, personal voice.
• · Norman McCulla about awards where they observe you.
• · Refer to document ALTC Award Program 2009 Assessment report and the award specification document at http://www.altc.edu.au/awards-how-to-nominate
  

There is no technologies in school education conference in Australasia. It would be useful to have the ICT Innovations Centre host such a conference.

Some possible conference names:

• Research on ICT in Schools Australasian conference (RICTSA)
• Research on Technology in School Education Australasia (RTSEA)
• Research on Technology Enabled Learning in Schools Australasia (RTELSA).

There are several directions educational technology research can take:

* There is some research that can be based on improved interfaces (hardware, software, eg multitouch, multi-user smartboards) TECHNOLOGY
* Others focuses on improved access to content (Knowledge bases, archives eg globaltelescope) CONTENT
* Improved access to others (eg Google Wave, Web-conferencing) INTERACTION

BUT these should all be focused on another more important underlying question – what is it that students are learning LEARNING and how do the approaches improve what they learn PEDAGOGY.

The PEDAGOGY is the management of the TECHNOLOGY, CONTENT, and INTERACTION, and this affects LEARNING.

Some awesome new sites/products include:

• Photosynth.net
• worldwidetelescope.org
• Kodu
• officelabs.com (eg pptPLEX)

Office 2010 new features:

• PPT: easier embed of videos into ppt from file, site or clip art and perform some minor editing (styles, shapes, trim, crop, fade)
• PPT: broadcast capabilities eg Skydrive or Sharepoint
• Can save any files direct to Sharepoint
• Word now has true simultaneous editing
• OneNote has new collaboration features, such as user identification when collaborative editing
• Ink-to-Math

Multipoint is an SDK that will work with Office 2010 allowing up to 25 students to use a mouse (eg wireless) at a time on the one computer. The server edition will allow keyboards to also be simultaneously used.

Microsoft Surface – a multi-touch-table with software running on top of Windows 7 (collaboration with nsquared)

Statistics notes from Statistical Methods on Psychology by David Howell

Central Limit Theorem: Given a population with mean mu and variance sigma squared, the sampling distribution of the mean (distribution of sample means) will have a mean of mu and a variance of sigma squared divided by n. The distribution will approach the normal distribution as n, the sample size, increases. (pg170)

Note that “standard error” is the same as the “standard deviation” of a sampling distribution.

If the standard deviation of the population is known then statistical tests can use Z scores (although larger n does help as the distribution will be closer to the normal distribution.

If the population standard deviation is unknown then the distribution of the mean has a Student’s t distribution, where

and    .

Note the degrees of freedom for the test statistic is n-1 where n is the number of observations that are made to derive the sample mean.

Chapter 6 – Categorical Data and Chi-square

• A multinomial distribution is one that has a range of possible mutually exclusive and exhaustive outcomes for each event, for instance rolling a number greater than three, a number starting with the letter T, or a one. The probability of an event is given by
  
• A chi-square distribution is a particular type of mathematical distribution used for several statistical tests. Probably the most common of these is the Pearson’s Chi-Square test. The chi-square distribution is related to the gamma function which is very much like a continuous form of the factorial function. It’s formula is given by:
  Note the chi-square distribution has only one parameter k which becomes the degrees of freedom when performing statistical tests. The distribution only takes on values for x>0 and becomes more spread out as k increases. As a matter of fact, for the chi-square distribution the mean is k and the variance is 2k   !!

  

• A chi-square goodness of fit test asks whether observed frequencies in different categories are significantly different from the expected frequencies if the null hypothesis were true. The chi-square test statistic is given by
  
  For one-way categorisation of data the degrees of freedom = C-1.
  For two way categorisation where we are testing contingency tables (whether the two dimensions are independent of one another) we calculate Eij = RiCj/N and the degrees of freedom is = (R-1)(C-1).
• If measuring continuous data Yates suggests correcting for continuity by reducing the absolute value of each numerator by 0.5 before squaring, however some statisticians argue against this.
• Small expected frequencies mean that the distribution is unable to accurately approximate the chi-square distribution, so a general (conservative) rule of thumb is to expect that all expected frequencies should be at least 5 (pg 149)
• An alternative to the chi-square test is Fisher’s Exact test, which is useful in situations where there are few observations because it does not based on the chi-square distribution.
• Another alternative is to use likelihood ratio tests, which sum  obs* ln(obs/exp) to calculate the chi-square statistic. The
• Chi-square tests require independence of observations – for instance that two observations are not from responses by the same participant. This is distinct from testing independence of variables, for instance that a person’s weight and height categorisation are independent. Be sure to always include non-occurences (for instance people who do not like the idea of daylight savings time as well as those who do).
• Effect sizes can be measured using differences between groups or levels of the independent variable (d-family measures) or the correlation between the two independent variables (r-family). D-family measures of effect size include the risk ratio and odds ration. R-family measures include phi and Cramers V.
• The Kappa statistic does not use the chi-square distribution but is based on contingency tables, and is used to measure agreement between two measurers.

At Macquarie we are developing a system to record micro teaching sessions and have students provide reflective comments about them. The videos are going to be captured using Podcast Capture, Photobooth, or some such tool. Then students will upload them to the new video server that has been setup. Finally an Eportfolio tool such as Mahara will be used for students to view recordings and write reflective comments (either relating to their own performance or of the presentations of others). For example the video below may be created:

The students’ reflective comments could be placed here (they could be given a template to semi-structure these reflections) and then peer reflections could be added as comments on the page).