In passing, these were mentioned in the symposium:
I mentioned today that schools are modelled on industrial era and factories. Probably didn’t make a lot of sense. So here’s a simple way to understand this. You’re in Year 7. The Year 7 says the maths curriculum is x, English y, and so on. But most students are variable in their abilities and where they are up to. That 13 year old actually gets on better with 11 year olds. That 13 year old finds English easy (and so is bored), but the maths very hard, and so struggles and feels, well, incompetent. Ideally, this student isn’t a ‘Year 7’ student. They should be doing an english student with people at level whatever (higher than Year 7) and maths with people at level x, which is probably lower than the Year 7 average. But school’s can’t do this. At the end of they year you will find yourself in Year 8, with a new English and maths curriculum. You might still find English unchallenging, and end up even further behind in maths. The structure of the system just can’t accommodate how we actually learn, it’s designed around 4 classes of Year 7, 8, 9, etc, most progressing through, with no ability to let those doing really well in Maths do more, or even teach those struggling, and same for English and other subjects. It is, basically, a single speed system. Yet we all know that we learn different things at different speeds. Some schools can do this, they’re quite radical in their educational approach, but it is perfectly doable.
HTML is what is known as a declarative markup language, and it isn’t quite really ‘coding’ in that you don’t write anything in HTML that ‘runs’. But knowing some basic HTML really is a basic literacy if you’re wanting to do things on the Web. Ellen has been wanting to do this for a while, and would like to do more. Fair enough, let’s see where we end up. The essay you’re writing can certainly be HTML pages, and once you have done one page and realised it is just markup around text, it’s simple to find a list of the basics (begin here, progress to here.)
Nethaniel gets stuck since we’re using OS X (which is actually UNIX) and he’s on PC. This is simple network literacy at work, all FTP and SFTP clients work the same, they want a server address, a username, a password. Where they ask for them, how you do it, might vary, but these are given. The key here is knowing this. A google search on “recommended free ftp clients for windows” seems to give a good list. Writing code? You need a text editor. That is all. Not Word, a text editor. EVERY computer has one. On Windows it is Notepad. Just make sure you save the files as text (and name them with .html). Or again, Google ‘text editors for windows” if you want something fancier.
Rebecca is also enjoying it. Sounds fey, but knowing how to write HTML is empowering. Much more empowering than knowing how to set up a FaceBook account, or even change your theme in a blog. I’m hoping you’re all bright enough to begin to see why.
From The Guardian a little riposte on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) which got mentioned last week. It is a tad bitter, but in general it is a good article in that it shows how the Web (remember Nelson’s enthusiasm) gets made odd by efforts to commercially exploit it. In this case the only thing being exploited is trying to make Google treat your stuff as more important than it is…
Lisha finds a definition of network literacy (which I find sort of uncanny as to the best of my knowledge Jill Walker and I were the first to coin the term when we wrote an abstract for a conference at RMIT in the early 2000s, the paper never got written unfortunately, a couldabeen moment).
Seonaid I think nails things pretty well about network literacy, and I think the Japanese example at the end is spot on. This is what we call critical thinking, not because it criticises but because it thinks through and with (for you newbie coders, that was the emphasis, aka em tag back there) the terms and implications of an idea.
From an email I have just read based on a recent The Chronicle of Higher Education comes:
Steve Kolowich, in “Confuse Students to Help Them Learn”, uses the example of a physics teacher who by trying out clear versus ambiguous presentations discovered that “if you just present the correct information, five things happen…. One, students think they know it. Two, they don’t pay their utmost attention. Three, they don’t recognize that what was presented differs from what they were already thinking. Four, they don’t learn a thing. And five, perhaps most troublingly, they get more confident in the ideas they were thinking before.”
Seonaid on Ted Nelson’s speculative and critical arguments for what computers could and should do. George on choose your own adventure and hypertext. Rachel likes linear (many of us do) and its rules. Unfortunately we won’t be getting very far into hypertext (I used to teach an entire semester of only hypertext), but it too has its rules, they’re just different rules. Caitlin is surprised by Nelson’s ideas, and surprised that her mum was taught typewriting at high school (yep, still remember the room full of typewriters and the sound of a class, it was a subject nearly only girls did back in them olden days)
Rachel has another one about why numbers (quantity) versus who/what (quality) is probably a better measure of authority. Once upon a time one person said the sun was the centre of the solar system. Once upon a time one person said there was a general theory of relativity. Once upon a time many people said Jews, gypsies and homosexuals could be executed on an industrial scale. Extreme examples sure, but in each case if you looked around to see what everyone else was saying, you would have been wrong. Louisa with a tale about vitality and news, which is also why lots of people saying the same thing doesn’t equal it’s true. Mia with another story of how it is not hard to trick people if you address them the right way (and it isn’t). Evan on common sense (it goes a surprisingly long way, and is also so easily dissolved), and finally Kelsey has an excellent list of things to pay attention to.
Next week is the HTML exam (password is comm2219). You must pass this to receive a result for network media. The exam is done in class. As a part of the exam you will also assess a class colleague’s completed work, confirming that all has been done correctly. You will be able to correct any mistakes found.
A random audit of completed work will be done. Any errors found (i.e. forms have been signed stating that work is finished and correct when it isn’t) will mean both the assessor and maker will record a fail. (We expect you to be able to read someone’s code as well as write your own, the simplest way people code is to read and reuse someone else’s. And you are expressing trust in you which we expect to be respected.)
The test is exactly as the page above describes, which you’ve been able to rehearse and practice with for several weeks. (Anecdotally students who are anxious practice and practice and do it on the day in a snap. A small group think they know what they’re doing and leave it for the day, they are the ones still making mistakes an hour into the class. In six years, on every occasion, they have been male, what’s that about?)
Questions? email.