I’m using maps to plan lessons more and more. This one is getting a bit out of hand with the links between topics!

FreeMind by Jörg Müller and a team of contributors is an open source mind mapping tool written in Java. It is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

The package makes Buzan style mind maps with some repositioning of nodes and a variety of symbols. You can ‘fold’ nodes with a mouse click and insert a new node at the currently selected node by pressing the Ins button on the keyboard. FreeMind 0.8.1 (the current Windows release) can add notes to nodes. The only format that seems to export notes with the nodes is the OpenOffice Writer export format, and this produces an .sxw file. The resulting file gives an error when importing into OpenOffice 3.1, however the map does load as an outline view with the notes in place.

Because FreeMind is written in Java, I’m hoping I can get a copy to run off a USB stick on IT room student computers at College. That way, we can have students producing mind maps.

“... why am I completely incapable of putting non-verbal marks on a page so they do the same? What neural channels are so blocked that my ducks don’t just look wonky, they look like scribbles? Why does eye-mind-hand work about as well in me as I contemplate a teacup or imagine a tree, as it does in my two-year-old nephew?”

and

“This must be what a lot of real beginner-writers feel. There’s stuff in their head or before their eyes which they yearn/burn to get down on paper. And when they try? It reads like scribbling. Awkward, ugly, incompetent, even incomprehensible. The one writerly skill I’ve always had is the capacity to bend words to my purpose (I just had to learn everything else about writing fiction). So I’ve never really had the feeling that the words in my hands won’t do what my mind wants them to. Now by analogy I know how it feels, and as a teacher that’s a lesson worth its weight in red biros.”.Emma Darwin, It doesn’t matter

All teachers should have something they do that ‘doesn’t matter’ and that they have to learn from scratch. That’s me and my piano, Darwin and her drawing. Then we can understand students better. What’s your thing that does not matter?

• Is Google Making Us Stupid by Nicholas Carr
• Get Smarter by Jamais Cascio

Both reference Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf.

The crux of the problem. Active learning is known to be more effective than receiving information, but we don’t use the active tools in Moodle. Geoff Petty gives out a large number of handouts on the downloads page of his Web site. The pyramid above was found in the Word file called Active Learning Works, which is the first download on the page.

Diana Laurillard is professor of Learning with Digital Technologies at the London Knowledge Lab. Laurillard wrote a very influential book called Rethinking University Teaching, published by Routledge, second edition with updated examples and a few modifications was released in 2001. Roger Rist has provided a brief summary of the conversational model from which I have taken the graphic above. There is a review of the second edition by Stephen Bostock – I’ve linked to the Google cache version as the original is in RTF.

The slide I intend to use on Wednesday is taken from the PowerPoint presentation that Professor Laurillard used for her inaugural lecture at the LKI. The whole presentation is available and worth looking through.

You can also read or listen to Kevin Donovan interviewing Professor Laurillard. I’d be interested to know if you went for the text or the audio. I went straight for the PDF transcript, a colleague instinctively clicked on the audio button.

The table below compares the two lists (my headings). Please read the originals, each commandment has a paragraph of context. Each post distils a lot of experience.

People	Content
Cath Ellis	Clive Shepherd
Put the pedagogy (not the technology) first	Structure into modules.
Be aware of workloads and work patterns (yours and theirs)	Keep each module to one main idea
Balance risks with safety	Hook the learner in
Balance obligations with rewards	Build on the learner’s prior knowledge
Make ethics a priority	Present your idea clearly and simply
Model good practice	Eliminate all unnecessary detail
Make expectations clear	Put the idea into context using demonstrations, examples, cases and stories
Establish patterns and stick to them	Encourage the learner to work with the idea
Keep spaces available for students to use and shape to their own needs	Assess knowledge if you must
Use/develop protocols	Bridge to the next step

.

I think I’ll be using a table like this (but with more of the context in each of the commandments) to explore models of e-learning in the Technology Supported Learning module next year. The two contrasting views make multiple connections with educational ‘theory’ but start from the role of the facilitator | author and the learners | participants.

Nice, thanks. I picked up on this when scanning Clive Shepherd’s ‘twits’. I’m assuming permission to reuse (in full, with attribution) because these are public blogs.

Thanks to Geoff Rebbeck for telling us how PebblePad is used in his college. PebblePad is a rich system, so I should not have been so surprised that the way its being used at Thanet is so different to the way I’ve seen the system for assessed portfolios.

If you do, then read Learning styles and pedagogy in post-16 learning
A systematic and critical review by Frank Coffield, David Moseley, Elaine Hall and Kathryn Ecclestone.

A group of them were building Excel spreadsheets into which they’d dump all the information they’d gathered about how each boss behaved: What potions affected it, what attacks it would use, with what damage, and when. Then they’d develop a mathematical model to explain how the boss worked—and to predict how to beat it.

From How Videogames Blind Us With Science, an article in Wired by Clive Thompson. This provides me with an example of the scientific method in an everyday context. The conversations between the players were available for later reading…

...the conversations often had the precise flow of a scientific salon, or even a journal series: Someone would pose a question—like what sort of potions a high-class priest ought to carry around, or how to defeat a particular monster—and another would post a reply, offering data and facts gathered from their own observations. Others would jump into the fray, disputing the theory, refining it, offering other facts. Eventually, once everyone was convinced the theory was supported by the data, the discussion would peter out.

So what I need now are examples of that discourse in laboratories that ‘do’ actual science.