Flying Off the Twitter Handle

Ever wish you could have one or two extra characters for a tweet?  You could if some people shortened their username, aka their Twitter handle.  The maximum length that a Twitter handle can be is 15 characters.  The average length of a Twitter handle is typically 10 characters with the @ included so people in the 11-15 characters bracket could certainly consider cutting their username down.

My Twitter handle used to be @mynameisdermot (15 characters!), but I have now changed it to @dfdonn (7 characters).  My handle @mynameisdermot was created when I first signed up to Twitter and had very little knowledge of what Twitter involved or what a 'Twitter handle' was.  Hence, I had no knowledge that my Twitter handle would eat into the 140 characters that someone else had to send me a tweet.  My new Twitter handle might not be as distinctive as the previous, but it is definitely more considerate of those who tweet me, by a whole 8 characters that is!

So would you consider shortening your Twitter handle?  Some people might have established Twitter handles, but a bit of change never hurt anyone.  In fact, it could add a bit of lift  to your account and give you something to talk about to your followers.  Also, it gives your followers a few extra characters that they previously could have done with.  So all in all, I think it would be a win/win situation for everybody on Twitter.

Despite my enthusiasm for such a change, it is important that if you do change your Twitter handle to not forget to update your Twitter handle on other websites you may have advertised it on, e.g., a blog, Facebook, etc.  Just in case people start to wonder where you went.

What do you think?  Should Twitter handles be shorter than 10 characters?  If your Twitter handle is longer than 10 characters and you do not think it should be changed, why?

Don't Say My Name

 

Is it a bad idea to have students call a teacher by their first name?  It is typically the norm in primary (elementary) and secondary (middle/high school) school classrooms for students to call the teacher by Miss or Mister, sometimes alongside their surname.  Why?

The exclusion of a teacher's first name from classroom interactions is often associated with aiding effective classroom management.  The use of titles can be viewed as a simple and benign way to keep visible demarcations between teachers and students (Rosenblum-Lowden, 2000).   There is the risk and fear that students may view teachers on a more personal level if the teacher's first name is used, and in turn, result in behavourial issues that upset the classroom learning environment.  Despite these assertions, classroom management is still 'a murky area of conflicting ideas and vague rules' (Konca & Otugen, 2009, p.7).  The reason for such vagueness is generally equated with the fact that each teacher is unique and has distinct preferences based on their beliefs (Konca & Otugen, 2009; Rosenblum-Lowden, 2000).

One of the most important aspects of classroom management is establishing clear rules and expectations of the students in terms of their behaviour, and consistently enforcing them (Konca & Otugen, 2009).  Such rules and expectations can be teacher or student generated depending on the teacher's approach (Woolfolk-Hoy & Weinstein, 2006).  Through consistency and continuity these rules become part of the classroom routine and can ensure the effectiveness of classroom activities, as students are aware of what is required (Konca & Otugen, 2009).  From these points on classroom management there appears to be little basis for why a teacher should be called Mister or Miss.  Is the use of such titles just a culturally embedded norm of what student and teacher roles should be?

An important aspect of rules and expectations around classroom management is to consider how many are simply 'ritualistic practices to be strictly adhered to' (Widdowson, 1987, p.85) and that may not be necessary.  It is engaging students in interesting learning activities that is the most significant way of avoiding classroom management issues (Kyriacou, 1998).  Widdowson (1987) distinguishes between two types of engagement that he felt need to synchronize for effective classroom practice: interactional and transactional.  An interactional purpose is focused on roles of appropriate behaviour where it is the mode of interaction itself that is meant to have the educational effect, i.e., socializing students into existing school norms.  A transactional purpose is concerned with meeting specific learning objectives, where norms and expectations are pedagogically based and roles are determined based on achieving such objectives.

There is often an incongruence between these two types of engagement where a proposed change in one conflicts with a protocol governing the other.  Interactional engagement is associated with enforcing things such as labels and titles (teacher, student, Sir, etc.) and in many ways goes against the nature of more student centred approaches that focus on transactional engagement.  Having students address the teacher as Mister or Miss may be seen as a necessary interactional engagement, but it could be argued that such a protocol goes against a transactional focus on student initiative and ownership.  Such visible demarcations like the use of titles keeps a control on what students may be willing to do.  For example, Mian (1995) noted that a student teacher found students had enhanced engagement and felt greater respect when they were addressed as Mister or Miss by their teacher, as opposed to only the teacher being addressed in such a way.  It is worth considering the use of titles such as Miss, Mister, etc., in the school context and the effects it has on interactional and transactional engagement and the alignment between them.

The value of titles is worth assessing in the classroom.  To finish, here are some quotes on the use of titles to consider...

• The clouds may drop down titles and estates, and wealth may seek us, but wisdom must be sought. ~Edward Young
    
• I am not interested in medals or titles. I don't need them. I need the love of the public and I fight for it. ~Olga Korbut
   
• People don't follow titles, they follow courage. ~ William Wells Brown
  
• I didn't come into the business to get awards or titles. ~ Julie Walters
   
• Titles are but nicknames, and every nickname is a title. ~ Thomas Paine 

Image taken from: Image


References:
-Konca, M. & Otugen, R. (2009). Effective classroom management in relation to classroom routines and rules. In 1st International Symposium on Sustainable Development, June 9-10, 2009, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina.
-Kyriacou, Chris, (1998). Essential teaching skills (2nd Ed.).
-Mian, T. (1995). Classroom discipline and management perceptions of a TESL student teacher
-Rosenblum-Lowden, R. (2000). You have to go to school... you're the teacher!: 300+ classroom management strategies to make your job easier and more fun. Corwin Press, Inc. A Sage.
-Widdowson, H. (1987). The roles of teacher and learner, ELT Journal, 41(2), 83-8.
-Woolfolk-Hoy, A., & Weinstein, C. (2006). Students' and teachers' perspectives on classroom management. In C. Evertson & C. S. Weinstein (Eds.), Handbook for classroom management: Research, practice, and contemporary issue (pp. 181-220). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Thoughtful Quotes on Teaching

1. It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.
   ~ Albert Einstein
   
2. We spend the first twelve months of our children's lives teaching them to walk and talk and the next twelve telling them to sit down and shut up.
   ~ Phyllis Diller
   
3. Modern cynics and skeptics see no harm in paying those to whom they entrust the minds of their children a smaller wage than is paid to those to whom they entrust the care of their plumbing.
   ~ John F. Kennedy
   
4. A true disciple shows his appreciation by reaching further than his teacher.
   ~ Aristotle
   
5. A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
   ~ Henry Adams
   
6. I like a teacher who gives you something to take home to think about besides homework.
   ~ Lilly Tomlin
   
7. If a child cannot learn the way we teach, maybe we should teach the way they learn.~ Ignacio Estrada
   
8. Who dares to teach must never cease to learn.
   ~ John C. Dana
   
9. A good teacher is a master of simplification and an enemy of simplism.
   ~ Louis Berman
   
10. The test of a good teacher is not how many questions he can ask his pupils that they will answer readily, but how many questions he inspires them to ask him which he finds it hard to answer.
    ~ Alice Wellington Rollins

Real Science Real People

History of Science

One of the most enjoyable and interesting things about learning science is the history behind it, in particular the human endeavour and the circumstances that drove such scientific discoveries.  Such a knowledge of the scientific enterprise throughout history is important in facilitating a deeper understanding of science itself.  Such knowledge shows that science is a complex social activity done by ordinary people (albeit some with unique proclivities) and that this activity is not isolated from the personal, cultural, and political factors throughout any stage of history.   Also, despite some universal aspects to scientific ideas they are not authoritarian, are open to change, and can evolve interactively alongside technological developments.  Importantly, science cannot provide complete answers to all questions, but it is in the determination and curiosity to answer such questions that the scientific enterprise flourishes. 


Unfortunately, in many school textbooks the history of science is pushed to the background with oftentimes only the name of the discoverer given and the year they made the discovery 'Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-Rays in November 1895.  The end. Now here is the theory.'  There is little context given to the story behind the discovery.  At least putting the story behind the discovery as an appendix in a textbook would be great for students to read in their own time.  I believe that it is in the knowledge of such stories that a real appreciation of science develops and an understanding that science is not a body of foregone conclusions.  Deeper understanding is also possible in learning about the history of science, as students can see misconceptions that scientists previously had in relation to certain phenomena and how such misconceptions were overcome.  


So what else is there to know about Röntgen?  Röntgen is commonly portrayed as discovering X-Rays by accident, when he noticed cathode rays (streams of electrons from a vacuum tube) caused fluorescence on a nearby small cardboard screen painted with barium plantinocyanide.  He was colourblind so he actually noticed more of a flickering on the screen.  However, Röntgen had strong investigative skills and he would most likely have discovered X-Rays either way, as he had planned to use the same screen in a following stage of his investigation.  He was in fact such an 'investigator' that he had to prove to himself beyond all doubt that what he was observing was not an hallucination.  It was not surprising that he thought he was going a bit mad as he was able to see through different things: he could see a key in a book, see through wooden boxes, and even see the bones in his hand.  He did not jump to tell people about his discovery, but instead spent a number of weeks in his laboratory meticulously investigating the phenomena further.  He wanted to ensure that he had objective results.  

X-Ray of Bertha's hand

One of the more well-known things about Röntgen is that he did an X-Ray of his wife's hand.  She saw it as an omen for death and refused to go back into his lab again.   Other physicists were very skeptical about his discovery at first, but he had done such a thorough investigation that he was able to answer to any objection, highlighting the strength of his investigations and the importance of such objective results to the scientific pursuit.  Some other interesting aspects about Röntgen was that he was very modest and benevolent.  He wanted the rays he had discovered to be called X-Rays and not  Röntgen rays.  He donated all the prize money from winning the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1901 to his university and he refused to take patents out on his discovery so that it could benefit mankind.  Unfortunately, he later became bankrupt after World War I.  In 2004, element number 111, formerly called unununium, was re-named roentgenium in his honour.




Further Reading:


-Gribbin, J. (2002) Science: A History. Penguin Books Ltd, London.
-Kean, S (2011). The Disappearing Spoon and Other True Tales from the Periodic Table. Transworld Publishers, London.


Images retrieved from Understanding Society and Wikipedia.

What Did You Learn (At School) Today?

What did you learn at school today?  I heard a parent say this to her child the other day while walking in their direction.  The child said he learned 'Nothing', but his mother pushed him for an answer 'You had to have learned something!'.  I saw the contemplation on the child's face as I passed him and his mother, but never got to hear his response as I walked on.  Witnessing this event gave me flashbacks to my own school days when my parents, some aunt or uncle visiting, or indeed a neighbour would ask the same question.  It felt like talking about the weather, but laboured small talk between a grown up and a child.  In many instances (not all!), I never really felt the person cared if I genuinely tried to answer the question.  Hence, I would avoid the effort required to think, reflect on, and articulate what I had actually learned, and would retort 'Nothing'.

The question 'What did you learn at school today?' typically does conjure up the image of an older family member asking a child such a question.  Why is it that such a question does not immediately conjure up the image of a school teacher or that of a classmate asking a similar question?  Even if the 'at school' was removed from the question one may still not think of a teacher first.  An important way in which people learn is by reflecting on their experiences (Dewey, 1933). Hence, it would be expected that this is something that should occur very often in schools.   However,  many classes end with the bell ringing while the teacher is still in mid-sentence and/or the students are only a few minutes into a new activity.  Planned activities can go on longer than expected and a teacher may decide to just carry on from where they left off in the previous lesson.  In such instances, students have not been given the opportunity to consolidate new ideas covered in the lesson with their previous understanding.  However, such consolidation may be expected to be done as homework.  Homework can certainly play a role in encouraging student reflection, but the beginning of such reflection would be better started in the classroom.

Simply taking five minutes at the end of a lesson for reflection can very valuable.  The five minutes is not a recap in asking students generic questions about the content or activities, but involves asking students what they learned from today's lesson.  This is valuable to every student in that they can articulate what they have learned, but also see what they may have missed from their peers' responses.  Students could also ask each other in pairs or threes what they learned today and then contribute it to the rest of the class through a whole class discussion. Such activities would certainly prepare students to answer what they learned today or what they should have at least learned.

It is also good to ask students questions that they still have from the lesson and they should still have questions if the lesson has in any way been thought-provoking!  These questions are best not answered, but are left with the students as food for thought until the following lesson and in many ways can serve as the basis for much more meaningful homework than assigning questions from a workbook.  As Richard Feynman once said 'It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn't get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man.'  Schools should develop an equal student appreciation of both answers and questions.  Maybe some day the question most associated with a parent talking to their child after school will not be what did you learn but 'What questions do you have after school today?'.

Reference:
Dewey, J. (1933). How we think: A restatement of the relation of reflective thinking to the educative process. Boston: D.C. Heath. 

Wikispaces for Student and Teacher Spaces

A wiki.  What is it?  There is no single definition or description of what a wiki is, but it comes from the Hawaiian phrase 'wiki wiki' which means to hurry.  Franklin and Van Harmelen (2007, p.5) define a wiki as 'a system that allows one or more people to build up a corpus of knowledge in a set of interlinked web pages, using a process of creating and editing pages' (p.5).  The use of the most well-known wiki, Wikipedia, within education can be a contentious issue due to the ability for anyone to edit the pages.  However this 'issue' (if you view it as such) can be overcome as there are various wiki websites available that allow for restrictions on who can access, view, or contribute to the wiki.  Wikispaces is one example of such a wiki being used in education.  

Wikispaces is a free (for educational purposes) wiki host that can provide a private or public (whatever you want!) space on the internet for use in the classroom or indeed with other teachers to share and discuss practice.  From my own experience of wikispaces, there are pros and cons to using it.  I have outlined some of these below.  Overall, I find wikispaces very useful in that the layout is simple and it is relatively straightforward to figure out.  If you have never used a wiki before, but might be interested, I would certainly recommend trying it out.

Pros

• You can name the wikispace whatever you want (as long as the url is not already in use) and so it can be named something that is unique to the group you are setting up.
•  Content is easy to organise.  Any pages that are created can be organised under common folder tags, e.g., pages related to the topic of Light can all be given the tag 'Light' and will appear in that folder.  You can add hyperlinks to other pages within the wikispace or links to pages elsewhere on the internet.  This is particularly useful when the aim is to keep the focus on the text without simply collecting a list of websites.  Many other things can be embedded on the pages such as images, video clips, and links to uploaded files, etc.
•  There are various colour schemes and different layouts for the wikispace, so the wikispace can be given a look and feel that reflects its content.
•  Changes are tracked so you can see who has made changes, when, and where.  Particular pages of interest can be followed so that you receive e-mail notifications if changes are made to these pages.  You can also view how many people have visited the webpages to get an idea of peoples' use of the wiki.

Cons

• The wikispace pages do not support landscape view.  Excel Sheets or Google docs can be embedded within a wiki but, it would be quite useful if a wiki page did not have to align with a traditional view of a page in a textbook.  Albion (2008) notes that we tend to recreate older social forms of organisation in new technologies and not supporting landscape pages on wikispaces is such an example.
• When downloading PDFs of pages, the text does not appear on some PDFs or appears too small.  This issue with text can be particularly prevalent on pages that have tables on them.  Not being able to download material from the wiki diminishes the value of the wiki. 

References
-Albion, P. R. (2008). Web 2.0 in Teacher Education: Two Imperatives for Action. Computers in the Schools, 25(3-4), 181-198.
-Franklin, T., & Van Harmelen, M. (2007). Web 2.0 for content for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education. Bristol: JISC. Retrieved from: http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/148/1/web2-content-learning-and-teaching.pdf.

  

Embracing the Twit(ter) in Education

Wondering if Twitter has any real value in education?  If you are reading this blog, you probably use Twitter already, but here is to just in case.  Twitter has educational value depending on how you decide to use it and if you are willing to invest the time to engage in it.  Twitter is a useful learning tool for teachers, for students, and as a medium through which teachers and students can have shared learning spaces that go beyond the physical walls of the classroom.

Things I find Twitter useful for are:
1. Following people who have similar interests that I can share and receive useful information from.  If you feel there is an information overload from the number of tweets, you can create lists to filter what information you want to see.
2. Having conversations following certain hashtags.  You could talk about education 24/7 on Twitter if you followed all the various education hashtags!
3. Complementing the use of other social media such as blogs, Pinterest, wikis, LinkedIN, Google+, and Facebook.

On a broader level, from analysing the tweets of 45 higher education academics who had over 2000 followers on Twitter, Veletsianos (2011, p.1) found seven different ways academics used Twitter.  Academics who used Twitter:

'1. shared information, resources, and media relating to their professional practice;

 2. shared information about their classroom and their students;

 3.  requested assistance from and offered suggestions to others;

 4. engaged in social commentary;

 5. engaged in digital identity and impression management;

 6. sought to network and make connections with others; and

 7. highlighted their participation in online networks other than Twitter'.

In terms of Twitter as a medium through which teachers and students interact (with each other and potentially a wider audience), there are many strategies that can be adopted.  The following two links highlight 50 ways to use Twitter in the Classroom and  50 ways to use Twitter in the College Classroom.

Now can you say that Twitter has no value in education?


Reference:
Veletsianos, G. (2011). Higher education scholars' participation and practices on Twitter. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning.