A little while ago I was in a meeting of Year 12 English teachers, discussing how the course is going, and planning for next year. One thing that got agreement from everyone was that we needed to improve the way we distributed newspaper articles to students for the language analysis task.

In essence, what we did this year was collate a booklet of articles that the library had found for us their online databases. We were asking students to analyse the language the media had used in their coverage of the issue of whaling over the Australian summer. We had a nice little booklet of articles, letters, editorials and news stories at the end, but it was the format that bothered us. Because the articles had been derived from an online search they were in that online format; a single headline in about 14 font, in one column with no accompanying photographs or artwork. Just text.

In fact, they didn’t look like newspaper articlea at all. We decided next year to use the databases to find the articles, then go and find the originals, and cut them out! With scissors, through paper.

So I thought about that conversation again today when I received a trial subscription to the Australian Online, not the website, but an online version of the newspaper that looks like the newspaper. You can scroll through it, look at a whole double page spread and then click on an article to read it, albeit in text form at that stage. The site also offers 90 days of back issues, advanced search and audio of each article (if you like your articles read in that robot voice from Radiohead!)

I’m not sold on the proprietary nature of the viewing platform, maybe Adobe has a chance to snaffle this market if they’re quick, and I know that various newspapers are taking up this challenge in a variety of ways, but I read through the various sections of Friday’s Australian very easily, and more easily than I would have thought. It certainly provides the visual context that was lacking in the print outs we gave our students, but also the visual context that is still lacking in the online version of most newspaper sites.

Maybe I wont need those scissors after all?

VITTA have got their act together. They’ve gone from being the home of the rarefied world of IT teachers, Excel spreadsheets and working smarter in Access databases to incorporating the World Wide Web 2.0. In much the same way as librarians have cast of their dowdy image and remodelled themselves information knowledge constructors, VITTA have taken the running with the new web and embraced the change. I’d do the same thing if I was them.

And they run a pretty good conference too. The 2007 program is online HERE.

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One thing I like is the ability to TAG things inside a page, and for those tags to be customisable. At the New Imagery Conference last week I took my computer into all my sessions (I’m always suprised when I’m at teacher professional development or conferences just how few notebook computers are there) and used OneNote to record my note and impressions.

OneNote is hierarchical in structure (hey, it’s Microsoft) and I’d set it up as below with a NOTEBOOK called PD and Conferences and a SECTION in that notebook called New Imagery and then sessions as separate pages in that section as seen here.

Tagging things with my notes make it easy to find those things later. You can easily customise the tags but mine below are only sligtly adapted from the standard set. I like to remember good words and good quotes so I set up a tag for them. As I’m taking the notes I tag them so that I can easily find them later.

It works well, and you can find all tags within a page, section, notebook or your entire OneNote files. The window below shows some of the tags from the conference and you click on the tag to access the original note. Works well for meeting notes too.

Oddly enough it hasn’t helped me yet to get back to those sessions or find the time to blog about them individually. Luckily Hey Jude has already written up some sessions, including the really interesting Michael Furdyk presentation Digital Kids and Michael Fullan’s session on School Leadership.

Well worth a look, and I’ll get something up too eventually!

One article this week, looks at the ‘gender’ of the brain, how girls think differently from boys, and how those differences, some of which protect girls from extreme risk-taking behaviour, may also limit girls in other ways, including the kind of risk taking that’s likely to lead to success in some areas. Another ‘visiting expert’ (I must add a tag to this blog with that title!) JoAnn Deak, says in the AGE this week that:

GIRLS must resist their brains’ innate biology if they are to be happy and successful, according to a visiting expert on neuroscience and learning. JoAnn Deak, a US psychologist told a group of year 8 and 9 girls at Ivanhoe Girls’ Grammar last week that the part of the brain known as the amygdala, which regulates survival reactions, is more active in girls, making them, on average, more fearful when faced with challenges.

Conversely, boys respond to threats with a surge of testosterone, which, she says, makes them more competitive and aggressive. While this can make boys restless during high-school years, Dr Deak says it can help when dealing with conflict in adult life. As a consultant to Outward Bound in the US Dr Deak says she has observed the different reactions of boys and girls to being lowered off a ledge on a rope. Boys tend to be less afraid, she says, as their prefrontal cortex, which mediates inappropriate risks and thinks about rational details, is not mature, plus there is a testosterone surge. In contrast, the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex of girls becomes more active. “You can see them thinking, ‘I could become a quadriplegic’ and so they feel more fear.”

As well, she says girls produce oxytocin daily, which makes them care for others. Oxytocin is best known as the hormone that surges at childbirth. “The problem is that it can make them care about the opinion of their friends too much.” Oestrogen can make girls favour co-operation over competition. Dr Deak says these factors explain the paucity of female chief executives. “For many it is a rational decision of ‘why would I want to put myself in a situation of constant conflict?’. Yet for men it’s an exhilarating experience.”

My fear with some of this new brain based learning theory is that, like some of the kinds of ‘categorising’ and generalising I’ve seen in the past, that it becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy; ‘oh, you would think like that wouldn’t you’ or worse, that we ignore the individual in our new knowledge which tries to make scientific the innately human interaction of how people think and learn.

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The new Avatar feature of the edublogs posed some confronting problems. What picture should I post of me? Something casual; strolling along a beach contemplating the universe, or at work posing at a whiteboard or hovering around the edge of a group of students? Or what about a comic look: a unicorn, or a martian or my favourite Skype avatar, the everyman heroic journeyman of Kubrick’s 2001?

These things can haunt you in the late hours! In the end I went for a conservative approach; head, shoulders, collar and tie, and look, identity-tag! I belong!

I was sorely tempted to create an avatar with a Simpsons look using the new tool on the movie web site but after three go’s I couldn’t get anything like me. Have a go yourself at the Simpsons Movie Site