Last month, I used swine flu as a test-case for Wolfram|Alpha. This month, with my next-door neighbour’s school already closed due to the ‘flu, I’m getting more concerned about the pandemic itself.

Here are the charts. You can see from the shape that the previous straight line has now become an exponential.

Notice how the two curves have about the same shape. The ratio of infections to deaths has remained approximately constant at 0.5%. Before you say “oh, that’s only in Mexico” let me give you the figures for the USA; 27,698 confirmed cases and 127 deaths. That’s 0.46%.

In previous ‘flu pandemics, pretty much everyone in the world has been infected in the end. So, let’s do the arithmetic on what that means:

• In a ‘bog standard’ comprehensive of 2,000 pupils, 10 pupils will die.
• In the UK, (pop 60M), 30,000 will die.
• In the world (pop 6Bn), 30 million people will die. This would make it the second-worst pandemic in history.

What’s really bugging me is the complacency of the authorities, here in the UK and in many other countries. Because there have been relatively few deaths so far (Wolfram says 279 worldwide) the media is putting out the message that this is just a scare, and it will go away if we ignore it. Alternatively, the notion is promulgated that now the genii has escaped from its Mexican bottle, there is nothing we can do, so why worry?

Neither is true. The Chinese government has shown that this major threat can be effectively countered. They are using mandatory quarantine to buy themselves time whilst a vaccine is developed. Even if they can only buy themselves six months, the vaccine should be ready, in bulk, before a significant death rate kicks in in China. At the cost of inconveniencing a few hundred people for week or so each, they may be saving as many as 5 million lives.

So, what can you and I do to compensate for the incompetence of our elected representatives? We can insist on the maximum possible quarantine for any suspected case in school. Faced with clear evidence that one infected child in 200 is likely to die, fear of litigation may succeed where fear of infection failed.

Nielsen (famous mainly for collating TV viewing stats) have just launched this interesting report (below, or pdf) on teenage media-usage habits.

The report does a thorough job of debunking the ‘digital native’ myth, but the thing that really caught my attention is hidden away on page 7:

Teens are prolific online publishers, too. Sixty-seven percent of teen social networkers say they update their page at least once a week.

Here is a powerful social motivation that is driving our students to higher levels of literacy. And what are we doing to encourage this trend?

Um, banning Facebook in school.

Please help me with this decision: when I started Yacapaca, I used the term “student set” instead of “class” because it is more general. In particular, I hoped it would encourage teachers to create sub-groups for more targeted teaching.

Did it work, or does “student set” just mean “class” to you? Please vote for your preference.

Why do you still teach knowledge? With the launch of Wolfram|Alpha, you are going to find yourself squirming more than ever when asked this question at the dinner table.

Einstein famously asked “Why should I clutter my brain with information that is readily available from reference sources?” And that was in the days when recovering such information required a trip to a (physical) library. I would much rather spend my time instilling into young minds the habit (and skills) of reflexively hitting Google, Wikipedia and, now, Wolfram whenever they find themselves wondering about the date of this, the composition of that, or the method for the other.

So, what is the difference between these three sources of information? To get an idea, I investigated a current topic, Swine Flu, via each. My particular interest is I want to know the likelihood of contracting it myself when I visit Brazil this Autumn.

• Google returns a rich mix of news, scientific information and adverts for Tamiflu. All useful background, but little to help make a prediction.
• Wikipedia has a fantastic history of swine flu back to 1918, but very little numerical information of any kind.
• Wolfram just gives me the numbers. To date, only 11 cases in Brazil compared to 137 in the UK. Graphs of cases worldwide since the start of the outbreak show that growth is roughly linear and not exponential as it would be in a true epidemic. Based on this, I can extrapolate that there will be approx. 20,000 cases and 100 deaths per month worldwide. Of these, perhaps as few as 10 cases per month and no deaths will be in Brazil. So, safe to travel.

I don’t propose that Wolfram has the answer to everything but it does have its place amongst tools your students are using now, and tools they will use in future. I do hope that you will encourage your students to take delight in what it can do for them.

P.S. Your best educational use of Wolfram|Alpha in the comments please!

Here’s a question I get asked a lot:

How can I create a quiz with more than 100 questions in it?

Answer: don’t.

100 questions is your limit, but I recommend you make quizzes much shorter than this. Here is why:

• A typical quiz cycle is based on 1 minute per question. Very few children or teenagers can sustain the total concentration required for more than 20 minutes before then need at least a couple of minutes’ break.
• If anything goes wrong, all marks to quiz are lost. For a 10-question quiz, kids will moan but get over it. But for 100 questions? Crushing.

My recommendation is to cut your questions into groups and make quizzes that will take max 20 minutes each. Put all the quizzes together in one course, and it is easy to assign them all at once. Now, students can still take them in sequence, getting a short break between each.

You probably already know that Phorm is a nasty, sneaky way for ISPs (including mine, Virgin) to voyeuristically peek into everything you do online. A while ago I (and 21,402 others) signed a petition to the Prime Minister asking him to prevent this gross invasion of privacy. Here is his full reply, but to save you reading it, here’s a precis: “Go stuff yourselves. Signed, Gordon.”

Here it is! Recognising tenses - a last-minute approach is part of the course GCSE Spanish vocab part 3 by Nick Verney of Standish Community High School.

Before you try the quiz, read the notes!

Remember this is a preview: no answers!

This stops students rehearsing an assessment by using the preview.

Here is why Nick won

The judges were by no means unanimous; each of the entries seems to have caught someone’s fancy.

But Nick scored highly with three of the four judges. A couple of their comments give a flavour:
clever to use the “whiteboard” picture of terms as a location exercise – simple, effective, and introduced colour and variety into what could have been a dull question.

Martin Molloy

Very clear. Variety of question types to keep interest. Felt I learned loads (and I’m a linguist!). Especially liked the use of the “location” type to locate a word.

Katharine Wright

The judging panel

Huge thanks for the hard work and difficult decision-making to:

• Dawn Cox, Orwell High School, Suffolk.
• Katharine Wright, Colonel Frank Seely School, Notts.
• Mark Ricketts, St. Luke’s C of E School, Portsmouth.
• Martin Molloy, St. Paul’s School, Milton Kenyes.

The full list of entrants

You can view (and use!) all 11 entries here.

This was the original competition brief. Which is your favourite, and why?

Dave Evans from Christleton High School is an excellent author you are going to be hearing a lot more of. The other day, he wrote in and asked:

Why is the score for a checkbox question a fraction of the number of possible responses rather than a fraction of the number of correct responses?

I’m pretty sure only about 1% of Yacapaquistas has noticed this, so if you have too, give yourself a pat on the back. Here’s why:

Reason #1

Suppose we only did count the number of correct ticks, and ignored items that were supposed to be correctly-ticked? Your students would quickly (very quickly!) learn that they could pass these questions by ticking all the boxes. Students are so much more motivated to get good grades than they are to actually test their own knowledge, that checkbox questions would become worthless.

Reason #2

Logically, a Checkbox question is really a list of yes/no questions. You can see this more clearly with the following example.

• [ ] Red
• [ ] Green
• [ ] White
• [ ] Blue

Can be re-written as:

• Does the Union Jack contain red? Yes/No
• Does the Union Jack contain green? Yes/No
• Does the Union Jack contain white? Yes/No
• Does the Union Jack contain blue? Yes/No

You can now see that each statement has a correct answer, either “Yes” or “No”. In a Checkbox question, this is indicated by either checking the box, or leaving it blank. The absence of the check is as significant as its presence.

So why not separate them into four discrete questions?

Sometimes, you want to group these yes/no questions just for neatness. Other times, it’s because you are testing knowledge of a combination. For example, would you want to give even a 50% mark to someone who said the Union Jack was red, white and green? Especially as the average mark from simply guessing yes/no questions is 50%?

There is a further refinement that you don’t notice until you analyse the final marks. The actual recorded score is calculating by halving your point for every incorrect option, thus:

• All correct: 1 point.
• One incorrect: half a point.
• Two incorrect: quarter of a point:
• etc, until
• None correct: no points.

This gives us a nice balance between over-rewarding simple guesswork and a punitive ‘no points unless completely correct’ approach. It also has the advantage that plain guesswork on 4-option checkbox questions (the most commonly-authored) will result in an average of 0.25 points per question. That’s the same average as you get with four-point multiple choice. This makes it much easier to calibrate a quiz comprising a mix of choose-one questions and checkbox questions.

One of the things that distinguishes Yacapaca from other eLearning systems is the astonishing amount of high-quality assessment content that is available, completely free, to all users of the system. As of this evening, we have 4,411 courses containing 8,717 automarked quizzes and 4,080 writing tasks.

But until now, we have hidden all thus under a bushel called “login”. Only members could see it, and there was little incentive to become a member because you didn’t know what was available.

Finally, that’s changed. The content has moved outside the ‘login wall’, and the login itself has been moved to the top of the page.

In fact, we have gone one step further. New users can set assignment for their students without creating an account at all. The system will create an access key for the students (so they don’t need logins) and a temporary login for the teacher to pick up the results. This does not give all the privileges of a full account, but it can be upgraded when the teacher gains confidence in the system.

One limitation we had to introduce was to hide quiz answers. It’s now easy for a student to find a quiz in the content repository, so to prevent cheating we hide the answers in quiz previews. That’s a little frustrating for a teacher discovering the system for the first time, but I really can’t see any way around it.

So, if you want to show colleagues some particular course or quiz on Yacapaca, you can now simply copy the page url and send it to them. If we have done our job properly, your colleague will immediately see how to use it with their own students. When they see their students’ responses to the system, I think they will become converts.

One of the restrictions of delivering content on screen rather than on paper is the size of images you can use. Even the best modern screens have far lower resolution than normal colour printing, and of course a screen may be larger than A4, but it can hardly compete with a poster.

Or can it? By getting interactive, you can allow the viewer to zoom into a very high level of detail, even in a small space. A new free service, Zoomorama allows you to upload enormous images, and then spits them back as embeddable widgets like the one above.

The widget is really clever. Not only can you zoom and pan, you can even snap it to full screen and then zoom and pan.

I ran up a short demo essay task. Just two essays, each related to a large image that I had uploaded to Zoomifier. It was really easy to do, and made an effective, enjoyable, high-order assessment task.

Zoomifier is easy, great fun, and I think your students will enjoy it too. Give it a whirl!

Update 14/04/09 I am slightly less impressed now that my image has disappeared, with no word from Zoomifier as to why. To give them the benefit of the doubt, they are a new service and still very much in beta - but I would not like to have a lesson depend on this working.