Writing without Pencils

In 2003 I read this BBC article on teaching children to write using computers, rather than pencils and paper. I haven't heard much about the practice since, but following a conversation with my mother (an ex-primary school teacher) on how myself and my brothers and sisters learned to read and write, I became interested in it again.

In Norway, 18 schools decided to teach children how to write just by using PCs. So instead of spending hours and hours being taught how to draw the 26 letters of the alphabet using one hand, the children are taught how to type using all ten fingers. This makes the act of writing a lot easier for children.

Arne Trageton, the associate professor in education at Stord/Haugesund College says he is not opposed to handwriting. But points out that in the 'real' world, hardly anyone writes by hand anymore. Yet in our schools small children are forced to handwrite at a time when it is a challenge to their developing motorskills.

Traditional hand-writing skills are taught in the Norwegian schools - but they are introduced at the age of 8, when the children pick the skill up much more quickly.

The director of the school district, Vidar Aarhus, describes the practice as 'learning by playing' and believes that the children become better writers because they avoid 'technical difficulties' of mastering the physical act of writing.

Handwriting still matters in today's school system. Despite the fact that most pupils will graduate into a world where the occasional scribbled post-it note is likely to be the most they will have to hand-write, they must take exams by hand. Research has shown that pupils with faster handwriting get better exam results. The researchers who discovered this have recommended that we teach handwriting throughout school. Why? Why not teach children the keyboard skills they're going to need - the skills that will give them an advantage in the 'real' world? And why not let them take exams by PC?

But back to Writing without Pencils. I really like the idea that children can spend time becoming creators at an early age, rather than consumers. And instead of making small children sweat over recreating a legible 'q', you can free them to explore creating words and sentences, to expressing themselves.

Has anyone experienced this method of teaching a child to write?

Left-brain, Right-brain and Learning

I've been taking a bit of time out to get my place in Belfast redecorated and as near to finished as I'll be able to do, so I've not been focusing on my e-learning work. But I have been thinking about some discussions I've read on the left-brain, right-brain theory. It started with Donald Clarke's reaction to Clive Shepherd's Neuromyths post.

I only know the basics of how the brain works, although I've bought some books and bookmarked some sites so I can read up on the subject when my DIY torture is over. My interest in how the brain learns isn't just academic or professional. In my early 20s I acquired a brain injury. The first thing I was told about my brain injury is that brain damage is permanent. That what has been destroyed will never come back. That I might be able to 'compensate' for my losses, but I would never get anything 'back'.

This is a frightening situation to be in when you can't remember your second name, what you did five minutes previously, or how to finish the sentence you have started. When you don't know how to tie your shoelaces, how to make a cup of tea or even feed yourself. I didn't know the names of objects like a cooker, fridge or chair. At 23 I was bedbound, feeling like a toddler with a whole world of learning in front of me. Except my brain wasn't the information-hungry tabula rasa of a child. It was full of holes. Damaged.

Recovery has taken years. And in the event I feel I have learned a lot about how I learn, how I retain information and how you it's possible not just to 'compensate' for brain damage, but how you can overcome it.

One of the things i feel very strongly is that my brain has two very different basic modes, which may be labelled as 'left' and 'right', but would probably be more usefully described for me as 'verbal' and 'non-verbal'.

After my brain injury I had difficulty in perceiving depth. I would walk into a shop or down a street, and if I was unfamiliar with the space, I could not see any depth - it was as if a poster was in front of my nose, and I could not tell what was 2D or 3D. Every step felt like a step into an abyss. I overcame this simply by forcing myself to enter spaces and making my brain work. A lot of early recovery felt like this. Brute force. Making my brain work but not understanding how it was working.

Prior to the injury I was a very good portrait artist. Afterwards my depth-perception problem meant I could copy from a 2-D picture, but really struggled with drawing from life. After several frustrating years of trying to recapture my drawing skills, I found a book called 'Drawing on the Right-Hand side of the Brain'.

This book is full of the cheap pop-psychology of left-hand, right-hand brain...but the book works. It will teach you how to switch your brain into the non-verbal mode that best helps you draw. It taught me how to switch consciously into the mode best suited for the activity I was doing. It also taught me how to draw again, a skill I thought I'd lost forever.

Learning to drive was one of the last big achievements I've made since my illness. I've posted earlier about how I found this a difficult process, as it felt to me like a 'right' brain activity - non-verbal, but I felt my brain to be in constant conflict as I was being taught how to drive verbally. Since getting my licence my driving has improved leaps and bounds, because when I'm in the car, my learning is not interrupted by having to talk or listen. I simply drive and absorb what I'm doing without words. This mode is non-verbal or 'right-brain'.

The brain is an incredibly complex organ - we can't pretend to understand much more than the basics. And as humans, we like simplifications. What could be nicer than pretending that this mysterious mass of nerves and neurons can be divided into two parts and easily understood? After all, don't we have men and women, darkness and light, rain and sun?

Left-brain, right-brain isn't correct. The advances in neurology we're currently seeing will of course reveal to us a much more complex picture - after all, it wasn't so long ago that we were taught that we only use 10% of our brains.

But for me, I found that the simplification of left-brain, right-brain helped me recover from my brain injury. It has helped me immeasurably since. Of course it doesn't help any learner to apply a strict theory to how they should learn - an intuitive approach is best.

Site downtime

My apologies for the site being down yesterday. I'm back now and will be posting some new thoughts later.

In the meantime, check out Jay Cross's Top 10 Learning Tools at the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies. I'm going to put together my own list...of which the top ten will consist entirely of Google tools.

Jane Knight's blog is well worth a look too. As she updates it every day, there's always something of interest no matter what your area.

My First (Formal) e-Learning Experience

When I was a wee thing, I was lucky enough to have a father who was both a maths teacher and a gadget lover. He liked any new technology, which is why we had a radio/cassette/mini tv player at a time when we couldn't afford a new roof for the house.

It's also how we got a BBC Micro computer when I was just a tot. These were great educational machines, and we spent hours in front of it. I remember learning about grids in a game that we called 'Find the Rhino', which consisted of an 8x8 grid, somewhere in which a rhino was hiding. We all took turns in keying in a co-ordinate, and eventually someone would find the rhino, which would flash up large and green on the 2-colour screen. We LOVED our BBC micro, and used to spend hours coding and debugging games for it.

But all that was just fun...the first learning experience I remember identifying as a formal learning experience was trying out a demo copy of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. The demo only taught one row of the keyboard - asdfghjkl; - but we were hooked. Why did it work so well? It was simple, repetitive and visual. The programme had the feel of an arcade game, so the six of us would sit around and compete at who was fastest and most accurate at typing.

When I went to secondary school I had to take typing classes. How did we learn? On manual typewriters. The teacher had a book from which she'd shout out the letters we were to type. We had a keyboard diagram stuck on the blackboard. Everyone was stuck at the same pace. And it took years for us to learn what we'd learned at home in just hours.

I was frustrated then. I felt slowed down and held up. I wonder how today's students - with access to a huge range of online learning materials - feel? Perhaps like the student who explained that 'Whenever I go into class, I have to power down'.

In this digital age, will home schooling become the choice of education for tech-savvy, informed parents?

Blood Flow and Learning

Did you know that when you sit down for more than 20 minutes your blood pools in your behind and feet?

If you get up and move around your blood recirculates, and inside a minute, your brain gets a hit of about 15% more blood. This helps you think.

So to learn better, we should get out of the seat and onto our feet...which is not necessarily good news for e-learning, which often requires physical inactivity in front of a PC.

I haven't seen any e-learning that incorporates physical movement into the learning experience (send me links if you know of anything!), but it's something I'd love to try out...particularly using mobile technologies.

The Briefcase is Dead...long live the Blackberry

If it makes financial sense, it'll be adopted in the business world...which is why more and more employers are mobilising their workforce. Mobile phones, smart phones, PDAs, Blackberrys and other devices are changing the way in which we work, communicate and learn. And businesses everywhere are interested the knock-on effects of a mobilised workforce: more effective working hours and greater team efficiency.

A study by Ipsos Reid found that:

- Blackberry users produce an extra 56 minutes of effective work a day (that's an extra 196 working hours a year)
- work teams with mobile communications found themselves to be 29% more effective

So what about use of mobile phones in education? Well, not all educationalists view mobile phones as a great learning opportunity, with mobile phones being lambasted as Offensive Weapons that should be banned from the classroom.

But there are some interesting things happening. In the ALPS project, 900 students in the north of England are using T-Mobile MDA Varios for mobile learning and assessments during work placements. Using T-Mobile’s Web’n’walk service, students can access learning resources from a central virtual learning repository and blog their work experience as part of their assessment. And this project will roll out to 9,000 students in the next three years.