Impressions Scholarcast

I now have the link to the impressive panorama taken by Aaron Spence of the attendees of BarCamp Gold Coast 2 on Saturday 29 November 2008 (see previous report) and published on his Panedia site. I appear in the circle but you have to be patient to see me with PhD student Matt Carter and undergraduate CJ Petrich as we appear at the end of the 360º sweep. The quick and efficient way these panoramas are captured in a vertical shot and 6 horizontal shots on the straightforward tripod mount is always marvellous to see.

Aaron also took many still photos and has put up his BarCamp collection on his photos site. It was very easy for me to subset the photos with which I had a link by signing up for a free account at the Zenfolio site and creating my own BarCamp Gold Coast 2 gallery (click the Slideshow link). The photos feature me, Matt and CJ.

I would very much like to thank Aaron for the excellent job and the work he did to put up the photos and panorama.

Another informative section of the Sarah Perez post mentioned by me was about continuous partial attention. I thought I understood this condition but the much-revised and authoritative wiki page by Linda Stone describes how continuous partial attention is different from multi-tasking that I had assumed was a synonym.

Linda gives an excellent discussion although why she commits the typographical sin of setting whole paragraphs in italics is surprising. I eventually found a more concise definition of continuous partial attention on the father of all wikis, Ward Cunningham’s C2:

An activity or mental state of accommodating multiple information streams. A survival strategy for today’s youth. An opportunistic strategy similar to, but not the same as, multitasking (which is more about productivity/efficiency than scanning for opportunity).

A term coined by LindaStone …

Note that one side effect is "knowing about a lot of things, but not knowing a lot about any one thing".

I’ll be more careful in future when describing students as multi-tasking – a term used commonly in computer science and hence in the forefront of my mind.

40 years ago this year in my own student days I recall my Oxford lecturer, Christopher Strachey, giving sage advice about accessing information. In essence he said ‘No need to commit facts to memory, just remember who to ask or where to find it quickly’. He was prescient as this advice is so much more relevant to today. Currently the ‘who’ is Twitter followers and the ‘where’ is the searchable Internet, with a judicious touch of information literacy to allow us to judge the quality of the returned results.

It has taken me a while, though, to follow through the ramifications for teaching the students of today. A blog post from Sarah Perez of ReadWriteWeb entitled ‘Education 2.0: Never Memorize Again?’ brought the point home that ‘rote learning is a waste of time’. She points us to Don Tapscott’s Times article ‘Google generation has no need for rote learning’ with some juicy quotes (truths?):

Teachers are no longer the fountain of knowledge; the internet is.

and

Kids should learn about history to understand the world and why things are the way they are. But they don’t need to know all the dates. It is enough that they know about the Battle of Hastings, without having to memorise that it was in 1066. They can look that up and position it in history with a click on Google.

Although I have never articulated in exactly this form I have been using this approach for my final examinations in all my web application subjects over the last two teaching semesters. Using the online test engine in our local Blackboard LMS I have been setting what I term ‘open book and open Internet’ exams. Between 40% and 50% of the marks are allocated to practical programming/designing tasks for producing parts of web applications during the exam. However, the remaining marks are allocated to short answer questions where the students have full Google and any other searching capability.

I have been careful to set parts of questions that I feel are not easily answered by a quick Google search (no definitions required in answers, and students asked to give informed opinions about topics and technologies that can apply in given example situations/problems). So far the spread of marks has been typical of those for written exams, so I believe the experiment is working well so far. Certainly none of my students need to employ rote learning, thus hopefully mirroring the context of their future careers more closely.