Education

Why Ozymandias?

I have this poem on the door of my lab.

Why Ozymandias?
Obviously it’s one of my favourite poems. I am always reminded of the final scene from Planet of the Apes where Taylor comes across the upper half of the Statue of Liberty buried in the sand.

You maniacs! You blew it up! Damn you! Goddamn you all to hell!

 

No matter how important I think I am,
No matter how important we think this civilisation is,
No matter how important we think the human species is,
No matter how important we think the planet Earth is,
In the grand scheme of things we are only here for a very short time.
Let’s make the most of it.

The central theme of Ozymandias is mankind’s hubris. In fourteen short lines, Shelley condenses the history of not only Ozymandias’ rise, peak, and fall, but also that of an entire civilization. Without directly stating it, Shelley shows that all works of humankind – including power structures and governments -eventually must pass into history, no matter how permanent they may seem at the apex of their influence. Ozymandias’ short-sighted pride seems amusing at first – until the reader realizes that the lessons conveyed are equally applicable today. All things must pass.
From Wikipedia

I like this website for poetry because it includes readers’ comments which are educational in themselves. I’m sure there are other such sites out there – if you know of any you would recommend please let us know.

BBC Horizon: What on Earth is wrong with gravity? Tuesday 29 Jan

This program looks intruiging; may have to ask if I can stay up late to watch it.

What on Earth is wrong with gravity?

From the website:
“Tuesday 29th January 2008, 9pm, BBC Two

Particle physicist and ex D:Ream keyboard player Dr Brian Cox wants to know why the Universe is built the way it is. He believes the answers lie in the force of gravity. But Newton thought gravity was powered by God, and even Einstein failed to completely solve it. Heading out with his film crew on a road trip across the USA, Brian fires lasers at the moon in Texas, goes mad in the desert in Arizona, encounters the bending of space and time at a maximum security military base, tries to detect ripples in our reality in the swamps of Louisiana and searches for hidden dimensions just outside Chicago.”

Check out Brian Cox’s rather cool biog

Why so few blogs from teachers?

I have been searching for Irish educational blogs lately and there seem to be very few about.

Matt Reville is a Primary School resource teacher and has an interesting blog here, while www.anseo.net is a wonderful diary of primary school teachers and their experiences.

http://www.pedablogy.com/ is a blog from Seoghan Moriarty about, as he says himself, “An eclectic collection of articles, links and remarks about the potential of ICT to enhance education.”

St Columba’s College in Dublin have a wonderful blog which exemplifies all that is good about this technology..

There are other forums where teachers talk to each other, like dictat, which again is for Primary schools with ICT queries, or the Physics teachers’ forum here.

And there are various forums like boards.ie, but all in all it’s a little sparse.

Pity

youtube again

It’s not just me

Some reasons to unblock Youtube:

  1. Free. Purchasing school videos is an expensive business. Channel 4learning is one of the better resources.
  2. Short. Lord knows students don’t have a great attention span, and Youtube’s policy of keeping videos to ten minutess or less works well.
  3. Being short means you are straight in to the relevant concept, no long-winded introductions.
  4. Videos can be critiqued and rated, although the language can be a little choice.
  5. Easy access. No fast-forwarding or rewinding  to find the start, and no last minute realisation that your colleague is using the same DVD just when you need it most.
  6. Sharing of resources. Favourites can be saved online using del.icio.us tagged for future referencing and sharing with colleagues.
  7. No valuable storage-space required, as would be the case with tapes or DVDs.
  8. The collection is extensive, and only getting bigger.
  9. Many are both highly entertaining and educational – not like the old ‘Open University’ titles which were a turn-off to all but the most dedicated.
  10. Safe. Youtube knows that its reputation is on the line and  as a result it is one of the most regulated video sites out there, although there are no absolute guarantees. 
  11. Rewards. While the educationalists mightn’t appreciate this one, a promise of 5 minutes on Youtube if the rest of the class goes well is a very nice incentive for students.

For some strange reason the numbers appear correctly (10, 11 etc) when writing this, but not when it gets published. Strange . . .

Seaghan Moriarty has written recently about the negative reaction towards ICT in Irish education and cites an anticle which “. . . is a much more balanced view of social networking, and a welcome counter to the defensive and reactive positions heard from Irish education and media.”
Seaghan Moriarty: Pedablogy.com

He has also spotted a newspaper report of a school which is using Youtube constructively in their classrooms.
Youtube course is a class act

My del.ic.ious links are here

Ken Robinson on Ted.com

This talk is beginning to develop cult status, and rightly so.

I can’t embed from ted.com, so this is from youtube (not sure how they managed to post up a 20 minute video).

Do schools kill creativity?
“A must-see for every parent and teacher. Education guru Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining (and profoundly moving) case for creating an education system that nurtures creativity, rather than undermining it. Sir Ken Robinson is author of “Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative,” and a leading expert on innovation in education and business. (Recorded February, 2006 in Monterey, CA.) More TEDTalks at http://www.TED.com ”

Henry Reed: Naming of Parts

One of my favourite poems is Naming of Parts, by Henry Reed. It encapsulates so much of what is wrong with our education.

It is about an army instruction lesson on the parts of an army rifle, where the poet is half listening to the instructor, and half looking outside the window at the beautiful japonica flowers. For me some of the best lines are here:

And this
Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see
When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,
Which in your case you have not got.

So many Physics concepts are interconnected and we often find that we teachers introduce one concept in terms of others which students have still not covered and are therefore not familiar with.

Of course the more obvious message is the contrast between the dry-as-dust lesson and the wonderful world outside.

It’s also nice to read the comments below the poem; different people take completely different messages from it. And of course there is no one ‘right’ answer or interpretation, in spite of the answers which (some of) my English teachers wanted me to learn off so many years ago.

Henry Reed and Frank Duncan reading “Naming of Parts” here

Film adaptation of poem here

 

Youtube – is it just me?

I have had access to youtube in my classroom since last September and it is by a country-mile the geatest ICT resource I have in my arsenal.

You could take away the Interactive Whiteboard, the dataloggers and the DVD player, but I would cry if I lost youtube.

The irony is that I bought a VHS-to-DVD converter last year and it has taken me a full year to convert all my library. At the time I had probably 75 programmes, many on the same VHS cassette, and I was excited at copying each program on to a seperate DVD for easy access.

The big advantage of DVD was that I could scroll straight through to whatever part of the program I wanted – no more rewinding and fast-forwarding. I was also considering putting everything from there onto a large external hard-drive, for even easier access. All of this would take an inordinate amount of time, but would at least encourage me to use the resource more, where previously I would use it sparingly because of the hassle.

I think that for many students a video of anything more than ten minutes would lose their attention.
Hence my fascination with youtube.

This resource is available to everyone, there doesn’t seem to be anything too dodgy on it, or at least if there is it isn’t thrown at you; you would have to go looking for it.

All clips are under ten minutes. My favourites are Quantum Physics clips, because this stuff is not on any leaving cert syllabus (except maybe Religion) and the comments themselves are often revealing.

I wish I had this resource when I was growing up. If nothing else it allows me to see there are so many people out there who are as fascinated by science as I am, and unlike text-books and teacher conferences these people are all only too happy to express their wonder. It really is inspiring.

There are also wondeful demonstrations which can I can incorporate into my own lessons, and the videos usually include all those small but vital bits which text-books and demonstration-books often omit.
I feel like crying when I realise this resource is blocked in most schools.

I have spent quite a while loading up my favourite clips onto the online favourite program delicious.

CESI (Coputer Education Society of Ireland) are having their conference next month so my homework over the next week is to put together ten top reasons for unblocking this site.

Or is it just me?

del.icio.us site tagged with my youtube links are here
CESI homepage

Apology to Students: Matlab from Hell

To every student who ever gave up Physics – especially those who left my own class over the years; I feel your pain. My very last class in 2007 was involved an experience just like this with Alex and his calculator trying to use the formula for geostationary satellites.

I’m not so old that I don’t remember what this feels like, in my case it was accounting.

Had a happy 2007.
The highlight was getting to see three of biggest living heroes; Steve Earle (Midlands Music Festival), Guy Clark (Johnny Keenan Banjo Festival) and John Prine (NCH), all within six months of each other.

I am only allowed to say that now because in two days I am getting married.

Have a happy 2008
 

Guy Clark:

John Prine

Steve Earle: