JDMcDsblog

Einstein’s blackboard

Originally uploaded by rich_w

If you make a theory…you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it….the idea is to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.”

Richard Feynman

As teachers we all have theories about what makes a good curriculum, what makes for effective learning, what makes some children more challenging than others.Subject or interdiscipinary? Setting or Mixed ability? Chalk or laptop? The current paradigm emphasises the development of lifelong skills, but surely content is vital if learning is to be rooted in a body of acquired knowledge and generations of expertise. Learning can be hard work, repetitive and sheer graft; understanding is not like an instant message; revelation and enlightenment must be earned.

It is the job of all independent minded teachers to question othodoxy and ask difficult questions. What’s the evidence? Where’s the beef? Who says this is a good idea, and why? Are they doing the same in other countries; why? why not?

Photo credit; Flickr,  piru22_jp

“What do you want?

“Information

“You won’t get it

This memorable piece of interrogation was part of the opening credits of The Prisoner, cult TV series of the 60s, whose start Patrick McGooghan died last week.
We all want information. We all use IT. We listen to CDs and watch the TV and DVDs. We send and receive inumerable bits of information each and every day. Wev text and e-mail obsessively. But what is information?

Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, in The Mathematical Theory of Communication discuss the idea of communication and information. Information, for them, is any message,  measured in bits and transmitted from one source and received by another. Between transmission and reception there can be noise, things added to a signal that were not intended-sound, static, distortions of image or, indeed errors in tranmission. I was struck by their point that information is not to be confused with meaning. Meaning implies some underlying structure to the information, perhaps a pattern, or a trend, a set of rules. Meaning may require the information to be analysed, compared, decoded or deconstructed. Units of information need to edited and filtered, and background noise eliminated. It is the teacher’s job to lead a pupil or a class into making meaningful sense of information.

They also stress a very significant concept; that the information content of a message is related to its suprise value, in other words, if the recipient already knows most of what is being said/texted/e-mailed, then the information content is slight. If the message contains information new to the recipient then there is a much greater surprise element. In lofty terms, that surprise may represent an epiphany or moment of revelation when an idea takes root in a mind, and the point is  grasped

Surely good teaching should examine this concept of surprise; a lesson where no new information was imparted would be redundant, or at any rate stale, but equally one where there was information overload could be overwhelming. Effective teaching should involve timing the release of information; enough to challenge, excite and inspire, while allowing time for consolidation, revision and reflection.

Glasgow Harbour, October 07

Resources: Summary Booklet, S1&2 Geography, acess to laptops (Plan A) or to digital projector (Plan B)

Aim: To recognise and describe the characteristics of Glasgow’s land use zones;

        to develop familiarity with Geograph as tool for searching for geographical images.

Background We have learned that Glasgow has four main land use zones:#

1. Central Business District

2 Inner City

3. Inner Suburbs

4. Outer Suburbs

We have made a land use map that shows the location of land use zones in Glasgow. This map should be pasted into your jotter.

Purpose: What we want to do is to LINK your map with some images of Glasgow.

Exposition: You are going to compare the descriptions of land use on pages 6 and 7 of your Summary Booklet with a selection of photographs on the photoshare website Geograph.

Tasks

Bring up Geograph home page. It should say “Welcome to Geograph”

In your jotter, put the heading Geograph exercise

Have your summary booklet open at page 6.

1. Copy out the definition of Geograph

2. Put the sub-heading, Geograph images of Grid Squares in Glasgow

Now click on this link here to get a map of Glasgow.

You will see that each grid square on the map has a small purple circle; Click on the map to bring up more details about that particular grid square.

Spend some time getting used to this feature-click on various squares around Glasgow. You will see that some have more photos than others. Notice that every grid square in Glasgow starts with the 2 letter code NS.

Now select two photos that you feel BEST represent the features of each of Glasgow’s four land use zones, ie two for the CBD, two for the outer suburbs, etc-8 in total.

Write out your results as follows:

Zone: CBD

1 Grid Square: NS____  <Title> by <photographer>

Featuresof the CBD that are shown in this photograph are …………………………………………

Repeat this for the other 7 photographs.