Entries from October 2007 ↓

All happy and positive again today! Managed to keep the taught session down to a quick whizz through adding links and maintaining a blogroll, before everyone had the better part of an hour to work on their blogs.

I was pleased to see a lot less copying and pasting going on this week and a lot more self-written content going up (along with plenty of spelling errors mind you, but at least there’s a proper genuine feel there. Spelling we can fix.)

Spent a lot of time with one group helping them add images, and was intrigued by the amount of time spent selecting just the right image from the Creative Commons tagged content on Flickr. A nice sense of pride in their work developing there.

A few people were struggling with what to write about, including one poor soul who’d found themself the only member of their group not absent!

I resorted in some cases to having them print out a website on relevant a topic of interest and get out pen and paper to summarise in their own words before posting.

I’ve seen a nifty tool at http://www.diigo.com which looks like you can do something similar actually online, but haven’t had a chance to play with it myself yet and have a gut feeling that some of the less confident learners need something down on a physical bit of paper to give them the impetus to start in any case. The feeling of having to make it up on the fly which posting online engenders is off putting to some of them.

One tool which I did find useful for those who were having trouble thinking of what to write is the ThinkTank from the 4Teachers website.

This allows you to enter a generic research topic and depends on type of topic (history, place, person etc) narrow it down to a list of questions. This then forms the outline of your topic and gives you something to go away and research online or type up.

The learners who were keen but found their chosen topic of, say, “My Town” too broad to start off with, found this useful, as it could be narrowed down to something more specific like “If I visited this place, what things would I want to see the most? What is interesting about this place?” or “When was this place founded? Who founded it? Who settled it? Why was this place chosen?”

Two to three questions seemed about right for a single blog post.  More questions or detail could be added for a full length Key Skills Project, and I may recommend this to some of them later on.

I’m finding my own enthusiasm for the blog project, waxes and wanes dramatically with the learners reactions and workload!.  Having to chivvy several less enthusiastic learners into their groups with at elast one bluntly commenting “We’re not doing that now are we”, did not put me in a particularly postive frame of mind, although the learner in question regularly and loudly expresses their disinterest even during those projects such as the maths classes  which they’ve chosen to attend!

We were looking at adding images this time and most people were keen as they’d been asking how to do this from the start.

As usual there were a fair number missing and one group complained that their absentee had their folder of resources they’d been putting together.  I may have to remind people to not take those sort of things home.

We went through it initially on the “sandpit” practice site I’d set up to practise on, then they had the remaining half of the lesson to conitue with their own blogs.

They seem to be moving quite slowly.  I think I may have to severely compress the list of things I wanted to teach them in order to allow them enough time to actually contribute content.

I’ve also been informed that this is now going to be a regular “thing” every group starts, and we’re going to use it towards their Key Skills qualification.  Thats means that since we’re on a rolling programme and I’m the only one who teaches it I think I’m going to have to crop the taught sessions down to one month’s worth rather then three in order to be able to cover the content quickly enough to be able to turn the later groups loose while I work on showing the newer groups the basics.  I’m not wild about that idea as it’s taken longer than expected to cover even enough to get them going.

The nice long copyright discussion we had last week will have to be reduced to “don’t copy, or if you must, give credit where due” for a start!

I’m a bit gloomy about this news, as part of the point as I saw it was to broaden the learners’ experience of IT in a relaxed and interesting way, not just jam out another qualification.

Funding however trumps all, so it’s back to the (lesson planning) drawing board.

I’m using group discussion work with the class a lot more than usual during this project and it’s starting to work quite nicely. They always start out a bit stilted but soon relax into it. I’m hoping this is proving helpful to them, verbal skills are often a ’soft skill’ not really taught, and which could well be one of the things holding them back from work. If you can’t converse with your peers how on earth are you going to handle a job interview?

So hopefully it will prove helpful to them in the longer term, even though we’re not primarily a basic skills centre.

Today the discussion was on copyright and I had prepared some handouts for them to list all the things they could think of to which copyright might apply, and a definition in their own words of what “copyright” meant.

In order to get across the idea of copyright as being about “control” rather than a blanket ban on copying I asked them to make a list of things they want to stop people doing with their own work.  They came up with pretty much all the things that can typically feature in copyright statements, such as “keep my name on it” “don’t make money out of it” “ask my permission”.

I thought this was quite successful.  We came back together as a class and I clarified some of the detail and talked variously about the idea of “fair dealings” and how it various across the world — and that since the Internet is worldwide the issues of jurisdiction and potential pitfalls.

Some of the fair dealings stuff is so very vague here that I suspect a lot of it is too much of a judgment call for most of the students.   We therefore came up with some simple rules such as “don’t quote more than a paragraph of so”.  “make sure it’s clear i’s a quote and from where.” and “Link back to the original website rather than copying and pasting content.

I also explained about the alternatives, that some people have explicitly decided to allow copying and reusing of their work, and showed some examples, in particular the Creative Commons project.

I next sent them off to look up the copyright statements on a variety of websites.  I’d chosen these in advance for two reasons.  One, a good selection of different restrictions and allowances, and two, for being (relatively) short and easy to understand.

I’d wanted to get around to some practical work actually uploading images and setting up links on the blog sites but this took the whole hour and a half session so I didn’t manage that.

After the session I was playing with the WebQuest creation tools at http://www.zunal.com and thought that might be an interesting way of tackling this topic next time — having them look stuff up themselves, and being able to integrate the links from a single site rather than have them type them in from a paper handout.