Giftedness

Taken from Wikipedia:

Generally, gifted individuals learn more quickly, deeply, and broadly
than their peers. Gifted children may learn to read early and operate
at the same level as normal children who are significantly older. The
gifted tend to demonstrate high reasoning ability, creativity,
curiosity, a large vocabulary,
and an excellent memory. They often can master concepts with few
repetitions. They may also be physically and emotionally sensitive, perfectionistic, and may frequently question authority.
Some have trouble relating to or communicating with their peers because
of disparities in vocabulary size (especially in the early years),
personality, and interests. As children, they may prefer the company of
older children or adults.

Reflection on the course that has concluded, but not the last you’d hear from me

Form-filling...

SCLP-related

What were some major changes to my SCLP?

The removal of our introductory video and changes to our web header image.

Why did those changes take place?

To prevent ourselves from inadvertently distributing copyrighted material.

How did I contribute to my group's SCLP?

Some project ideas. Did the website (using edublogs' templates) and its header (using GIMP), the spliced introductory video and the titles on the demonstration video (using misbehaving Windows Movie Maker), flubbed role-play in one-half of the demo, the links and anchors on the pages... and I forgot or rather never bothered to test our page on Internet Explorer all this while! The change has been made on our online site for progeny... but in line with my personal policy, all pages, SCLP or not, should be best viewed in Firefox. Get IE tab to resolve IE/FF conflicts.

What did I learn as a result of creating an SCLP?

I revisited  Scrapbook with joy. Actually, Guilian did help clarify a lot of my ideas on scaffolding and the assessment process. So yes, I think one of the strengths of our SCLP is the excellent scaffolding. Yay. And of course, lots of practice with Google Docs, GIMP, html and pretending to be a student.

What did I learn from QED522? (What was the first thing that popped into my mind?)

I've wanted to raise this question for sometime now... but I always thought Dr. Black was the one killed, and Colonel Mustard... he's just one of the usual suspects.

Student-centered learning will not kill the teacher. I actually think it gives teachers more room to play and students more motivation to learn. From the mercenary point of view, I have learned pedagogical approaches and received/created opportunities to polish rusty ICT skills, so my list of skills has expanded.

I  am still thinking unashamedly about free laptops...

Almost final, plus a note on valedictorians

It's almost the day of submission and I feel compelled to write a redundant post to remind myself of things that need to be wrapped up.

1. Capture my SCLP with a depth of 2, so that comments on "student" blogs will be saved as well for offline viewing.


2. Export the captured SCLP package to another directory for checks before burning it onto a disc.


3. Finish up our final storyboard on GIMP.


4. Export our lesson plan and clean it up for burning.


5. BURN!

I just checked the results of the NIE Valedictorian poll... a grand total of 45 votes were cast, making the outcome very representative, but the graduating cohort will have their valedictorians no less. The tribe has spoken, kind of. It just makes me doubt increasingly how well online polls that carry no perceivable benefit for the voter can work. Behavior modification does take some time and study to function in full bloom.

Maybe it’s good to sell fish once in a while?

This post has nothing to do with selling fish, actually, but I figured that it will probably have a total readership of about 3-4 people. Enough of the idiosyncratic crap that I think I understand.
How to export a web-based SCLP for offline viewing in your browser (instead of printing everything to PDF for further painstaking annotation) - my way:

1. You must have Mozilla Firefox installed. (Switch if you are using IE.)


2. Find and install a lovely extension called Scrapbook. Restart FF to complete installation.


3. Go to the homepage of your web-based SCLP, then right-mouse-click, "Capture Page as..."


4. To capture not just the page you are on but also the pages that it links to, and the pages those pages link to, you need to select a Capture Depth of at least 1.


5. Wait for it to save, grab a Kit Kat, have a coffee, or go for a toilet break.


6. Check your Scrapbook folder for the saved package. If saved correctly, the links will be relative, so they should work offline as they do online.


7. Smile to yourself, use Scrapbook to annotate the saved pages if you like, then burn a copy for submission.

*NEW* Additional instructions to myself:

• Give the folder an English name.


• Locate the file named "index" to start browsing offline.

Kanji of the Year, Word of the Term, Streams of Consciousness

Just like the Japanese pick the Kanji of the Year every year since 1995, I wonder what would be our Chinese or English word of the term?

Looking up the etymology of "overkill..."

What would happen when, days/weeks/months/terms/semesters/academic years/years/decades from now, a student/colleague/peer/superior/anybody stumbles on/finds/is directed to this blog? Will this change anything or make anything or do anything or be anything? If I have the intention of retaining this learning/sharing blog as a teaching/sharing blog, how will it evolve?

I need to go to the toilet, and that is a sensitive topic in some schools, where you need to take a short/long journey to another washroom, which is as good as announcing that you have business to do. Better still than students, whose honest and deceptive requests for toilet breaks may all be ignored as excuses for wanting time out in the open, not time-out. Better that than body damaging restraint.

Better direct than convoluted maneuvers, or direction perceived as convolution. A blog is more bulimic than it is anorexic, for whatever goes in is regurgitated, perhaps not in their original glory but rather in a perverse re-rendering of its contents, toxic or otherwise. An edublog is medicated, sanitized, sanctioned. Foucault: the medical gaze is dehumanizing, separating body from soul in its regard. And we live in a panopticon.

Cathartic catharsis. The beginning of the end, and the end of the beginning.

Metacognition, and the beginning of the end

Just a week to go before QED522 concludes in all its splendor. Some thoughts, as honestly as I can represent them, before my own subjectivity subjects my consciousness to oblivion.

Copyright: I guess working in the Writing Centre only acquainted me with how not to plagiarize in a written paper, but Prof Tan's comments on possible copyright infringement in our SCLP were really a positive eye-opener. Functioning under the paper-citation logic, I had thought that it would be okay to create a montage of clips as long as the sources are cited somewhere. After all, the way the montage is put together is "original." However, this is only half right. We were alerted by Prof Tan to the fact that putting such a video up online will still make us liable of distributing copyrighted content.

I am sincerely grateful for his helpful firefighting suggestion that we show our painful Windows Movie Maker product in an offline class instead. For a while the thought of possibly having to kill my video horrified me.

Affordances: Yes, it makes sense to edit an image with software like GIMP or Photoshop. I was so thankful that I used many layers in the source file for our original header image, which contains copyrighted images. With the help of exactly two mouse clicks, the potential infringements are now out of sight, and I have added some new design elements adapted from free fonts and royalty-free images, without killing the healthy bits of my header. Cheers!

Polling: Private opinions made public beneath the guise of confidentiality. Democracy, the allusive ideal to attain to, almost always a test of how well publicity and imaging/image sway the vote. As it is with every other election. I always doubt the integrity of polls.

Appraisal: If peer appraisal for teachers is going to be launched at its full, we may just end up playing Survivor every other day. Like Tina from the Second Season, to survive we will have to lie low until one by one the rest are eliminated. Does school have to be Battle Royale?

Threat: There are just a few more months to Practicum and several more months to school posting. I am happy to be perceived as a threat, and just sad that, as two friends and NIE seniors have already told me, that it is better to be less of a perfectionist in my work, in case I am seen as spoiling the market and get peer reviewed negatively. Since when did this culture of preferring imperfection over and above one's best effort become the mainstay in the nation's education training ground? I really do not think metacognition should be applied for the purpose of consciously downgrading one's work just to upgrade one's public standing. It is simply obscene.

Niche: I now (or, for now) think that the best way to protect myself, my sanity, my integrity, my quality, my output, my longevity, my hopes and my dreams in this line would be to find this impenetrable niche unique to me.

Teacher: As much as this statement may disgust, I am first a teacher, then a Chinese teacher. We do not want to be politically incorrect by being racist, Occidentalist or Orientalist. We do not have to be politically incorrect to the extent of finding Chinese teachers who use English like drinking tea, and who cannot let a day go by without playing with some ICT tool, an anomaly and a cyst.

Pleasure: At the risk of sounding like a boot-licker or even more incorrect and incongruous, I really, really, really enjoyed myself in QED522. Easily the best taught and most fun course I've taken in NIE. I blog and I play in my sandbox because I like it, and am motivated. I am at the center of everything, because I am not just a student, but the student at the center of student-centered learning, which respects the individuals we are.

I am who I am, because I am made by I AM and an image of that which is I am.
Yes, the above issues will still haunt me in the school(s) I will be posted to. But Rule#1 says, there are no ghosts. Amen to that.

SCLP development thus far - it’s almost the end of the module!

We are almost at the end of the road that leads to new ones. For the past week, Guilian and I have been discussing the peer evaluation, critiquing, and blogging mechanism for our SCLP.

For instance, she helped me sharpen my thoughts on the rubrics design by asking whether it would be better to just have a common set of rubrics for "Agents" and "Guides" since many criteria overlap. I thought however that having two sets of rubrics would be clearer, since the tool I advocate using (Forms on Google Docs) does not allow us to redirect students to different questions based on their answers (e.g. "If A, go to Q5").

We did have some cordial disagreements over the best ICT tool for peer evaluation rubrics. Aesthetically, I agree with Guilian that there are many free online survey tools that can do the job much better. She also managed to locate some sites which provide pie charts and other graphical representations of the survey results. My reasons for sticking to Google Docs' Form tool is that it actually links the survey to a Google Docs Spreadsheet which not only lists all collected responses so far, but also timestamps every response i.e. there is an automatically generated column that displays the time at which each set of responses was received. By adding fields for the names of the respondent and critiqued student, we can also match each set of responses to their owner, unlike other free online surveys where this is not possible. Furthermore, you can keep customizing your form without having to create a new one.


At present we are happy that we are developing an SCLP for e-learning (thank you, Prof Tan, for the idea) that can also be adapted for face-to-face classes. Having an SCLP that resides online also allows many other possibilities for future expansion, not the least through hyperlinking to other hypertexts.

GIMP layer effects test

Font: Bleeding Cowboys

Email etiquette…

Not that I am always correct and polite, but here are some common examples of bad email etiquette:

-Replying to queries with "Hi" without addressing the other party (it's too informal, impersonal, and impolite). I just got a reply like this to my query regarding the recent PBP. It does not help that the reply is vague and ignores what I said as well. This is what I hate about writing to a email address like ***_RU_*** - sometimes you get good and clear replies, sometimes you don't.

- CC-ing the entire school when a message only concerns PD tutors of level X/CCA or whatever ICs. Not recommended, but always advised and done. Why? For the purpose of cover, if you like, as Just Follow Law states it. Another example: why does one teacher's email about a spoilt school laptop have to be CC-ed to at least 2 HODs on top of the TAs?

I really think I am very cynical and critical of late. The most productive and destructive time to blog. Does this even fit edublogging? Perhaps not.

Do not upload your notes only the day before class at an unspecified time!

The affordances of Blackboard have been exploited, sometimes forcing us to be on standby more often than necessary.

Since whatever they are uploading has been prepared long ago with much dedication and care, it does not do them any justice either to surprise us with late uploads (or, uploads they preloaded, but timed for late appearance on our student page).

Personally, I also hate it when an upload I have just downloaded is overwritten
later by a newer version but without any announcement. What kind of
signals are they sending? That it is better late than never, and always
better to be just in time than early?

Even if we can learn anytime, anywhere, we should not be coerced into non-learning, time draining tasks like this all the time, everywhere. Please do not make self-serving assumptions about students' computing habits.