Jeffrey Wright

I am on the lookout for stories about teachers and coaches.

In February I start the Sport Coaching Pedagogy unit at the University of Canberra and am keen to exemplify what I think an expert pedagogue to be.

Today, John Kessel led me to Jeffrey Wright.

The New York Times has an 11m 54s video about Jeffrey. You can find it here. (It had 50,000 views whilst I was writing this post taking it to 648,083 views in total.)

I am delighted that Jeffrey uses explosions and extols the virtues of love. I think both are vital components of expert pedagogy.

Amongst the many stories about Jeffrey, I liked:

Tara Parker-Hope’s New York Time article

The Insider Louisville

If you were looking for a story to start 2013 I think Jeffrey is a perfect choice.

Picture Credit

Frame grab Wright’s Law (1m 26s)

 

England v Wales Rugby Union Matches 1987-1992

Introduction

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, I used real-time hand notation to record performance in international rugby union games. In the 1980s I used live BBC television broadcasts, in the 1990s I had the good fortune to attend many of the games as a notational analyst.

One of my interests in that period (after playing rugby at Loughborough College, London Welsh and Rosslyn Park) was to provide some evidence about game content and game time, particularly ball in play time, in order to support the coaching of expansive rugby. I was interested specifically in kicking, passing, set piece play and stoppages for injury as indicators of the flow of activity in games.

The most comprehensive set of data I have from that period is the competition between England and Wales 1987 to 1992 inclusive.

Game Content

In these games, the totals for the activities I was monitoring were:

Year	Kicks	Passes	Lineouts	Scrums	Pens/FKs Conceded	Stoppages for Injury
1987	108	68	53	28	39	10
1988	94	183	64	27	25	15
1989	122	102	46	51	20	7
1990	84	196	40	27	24	10
1991	114	131	54	34	28	3
1992	77	182	35	39	36	12

The odd year games were played in Cardiff and the even year games at Twickenham. Wales won the games in 1987, 1988 and 1989. England won in 1990, 1991 and 1992. Three of the games were affected by rain (1987, 1989, 1992) and there were strong winds in the 1990 game.

Ball in Play Time

For the ball in play time I started my stopwatch at the kick off and stopped it on the referree’s whistle or when the ball had clearly left the field of play. I recorded time in minutes (m) and seconds (s).

Year	First Half	Second Half	Game Total
1987	7m 32s	9m 24s	16m 57s
1988	13m 43s	12m 28s	26m 11s
1989	11m 08s	11m 25s	22m 33s
1990	10m 38s	14m 11s	24m 49s
1991	11m 36s	10m 59s	22m 35s
1992	11m 14s	14m 51s	26m 05s

These total ball in play times as a percentage of total game time were:

Year	Ball in Play (BiP)	Elapsed Time (ET)	Percentage of Game BiP
1987	16m 57s	83m 45s	20.24
1988	26m 11s	88m 35s	29.56
1989	22m 33s	85m 40s	26.32
1990	24m 49s	82m 29s	30.09
1991	22m 35s	83m 30s	27.05
1992	26m 05s	89m 12s	29.24

Activity Cycles

In the 1992 game at Twickenham there were 120 activity cycles (defined as play between the referee’s whistles or the start of action without a whistle when the ball was introduced into play, for example, a scrum). Their durations of these cycles were:

Duration of Cycle in Seconds	First Half Activity Cycles	Second Half Activity Cycles	Game Total Activity Cycles	As a Percentage of all Activity Cycles in the Game (n=120)
0-4	23	16	39	32.5
5-8	9	9	18	15
9-14	12	10	22	18.33
15-19	6	6	12	10
20-24	2	7	9	7.5
25-29	4	4	8	6.67
30-39	4	5	9	7.5
40+	1	2	3	2.5

My hand notations for the 1992 game are:

A PDF copy of this hand notation Actions

and Activity Cycles:

A Pdf copy of the notation ACEW.

Methodological Note

The data presented here are from real-time hand notation. I had been doing hand notation in rugby union since 1980 and by the mid-1980s had established a stable set of game events to notate on a single sheet of landscape A4 paper.I used one sheet per half of the game. The example shared here from 1992 is a transcription of two halves onto one summary sheet. I made a separate record of activity cycles and they are transcribed onto a single sheet here too. In all games I had two stop watches running, one for total game time and the second for ball in play.

During this period I was keen to profile teams in terms of two ratios:

• kicks: passes
• lineouts: scrums

I was very keen to identify those teams that played rugby handball more than rugby football.

I was mindful of the literature on systematic observation in educational studies and physical education and sport. I was a trained observer and was confident that my observations were valid and reliable. My aim was to provide real-time information to coaches if required.

I did not undertake any intra- or inter observer reliability studies of the data presented here.  I was aware of Paul Croll’s (1986: 154) argument that:

Stability of observations depends primarily not on characteristics of the observer or observation system but on the naturally occurring patterns of whatever is being observed … It seems unsatisfactory that an observation procedure that provides a highly accurate description of classroom events should be described as unreliable. In some cases the extent to which a characteristic is a stable feature of individuals and the extent to which it varies for different people may be of interest to the researcher and is itself a focus of analysis rather than a constraint upon whether the data are sufficiently reliable. (Systematic Classroom Observation. Lewes: The Falmer Press.)

In 1987, the ball was in play for less than 21% of the total game time. Given the relatively small number of game events I was monitoring there was ample time to record events. I was very aware that using a temporal measure required close attention to accuracy in starting and stopping the stopwatch. I was aware of the potential of mathematical error of using stopwatches. I used new batteries for each game recorded and prior to all games compared the performance of watches.

Throughout my real-time notation I was conscious of observer drift. No game lasted longer than ninety minutes and no half of a game was longer than 48 minutes. I used breaks in play and half time to refocus my attention. Real-time hand notation does require concentration and as a trained observer I felt comfortable with the cognitive load of the activity. I had clear operational definitions for all items to be notated and had made a very conscious decision not to try to capture granular details in real-time. With improvements in video technology in the late 1980s and 1990s I was able to undertake detailed lapsed-time analysis of performance for research purposes.

Conclusion

This post presents some of the data I captured in real-time twenty years ago. My overall aim was to develop a notation system that might offer decision support to coaches within games and subsequent opportunities to reflect on performance. During the period discussed here I immersed myself in the literature on observation. I was fortunate that at that time I was researching and writing Using Video in Sport (1988. Huddersfield: National Coaching Foundation) and completing a PhD that used ethnographic methods to record observations.

There is a story within a story here. By coincidence the data presented chart the rise of the England rugby team. In 1987 Wales defeated England in the 3rd/4th play off game at the inaugural World Cup. In 1991, England won in Cardiff for the first time since 1963 (there had been a draw in 1983) and at the end of the year contested the World Cup final against Australia at Twickenham.

Photo Credit

The National Stadium Cardiff (Walt Jebsco, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Following and Learning

I have had a Twitter account since 2008. I used TweetDeck then as my aggregator.

My use of Twitter has been limited to peripheral participation for much of the time since 2009 although my WordPress blog has a default to Twitter as does my lIASIng Scoop.it feeds with a focus on high performance sport stories.

I have used Twitter #tags to tweet live from conferences and workshops.

I follow 475 Twitter accounts mainly in educational technology and sport. I am awe struck by the insights they share and the links they provide to other creative thinkers.

In the last year I have been using Paper.li as my daily Twitter aggregator and have found it an outstanding resource. It has become an important start of the day read for me (along with Stephen Downes’ OLDaily).

Today’s Paper.li brought me some great links including:

• Terry Heick’s 9 Characteristics of 21st Century Learning
• Johnny Bevaqua’s Technology Embedded Pedagogy
• Ed Chat Radio’s Reinventing the Classroom; What’s Next?
• JISC’s Digital Media
• Jay Cross’s Don’t you see it?
• William Draves and Julie Coates’ Nine Shift

The latter two links were shared by Harold Jarche. He has been an important guide for me since my first days on Twitter. Harold’s latest post (30 December) is Tools and competencies for the social enterprise.

In preparing this post I have revisited TweetDeck, downloaded the 2.1.0 version for Mac and will start using it again in 2013.

In 2012 I have enjoyed a remarkable diversity of learning opportunities by following thought leaders and sharers on Twitter. With a change in my responsibilities at the University of Canberra in 2013, I am looking forward to following more of my Twitters leads.

Thanks to a tweet by Paul Wallbank I am mindful that I follow no residents of Jakarta and Tokyo. Both these cities led the tweets around the globe in June 2012. (Semiocast monitored 1.058 billion public tweets posted from 1st June to 30th June 2012.)

Photo Credit

Twitter Visualization (Ross Mayfield, CC BY-NC 2.0)

Essence then Form?

Just before Christmas I received several alerts to Erica Smith’s paper, The Digital Native Debate in Higher Education: A Comparative Analysis of Recent Literature, in the Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology.

Over the holiday period I have had an opportunity to read the paper.

Erica analyzes “key themes and issues emerging from contemporary research on the Net generation as digital natives”. She identifies eight characteristics of digital native behaviour present in the literature:

• Possessing new ways of knowing and being.
• Driving a digital revolution transforming society.
• Innately or inherently tech-savvy.
• Multi-taskers, team-oriented, and collaborative.
• Native speakers of the language of technologies.
• Embracing gaming, interaction, and simulation.
• Demanding immediate gratification.
• Reflecting and responding to the knowledge economy.

She draws upon a range of research that questions the homogeneity of digital native behaviour. She notes, for example, Sue Bennett, Karl Maton and Lisa Kervin‘s posit that  there is “as much variation within the digital native generation as between the generations”.  Erica identifies “an opportunity for new research that informs theory and practice by investigating whether and how undergraduate learners see value in emerging technologies within their own diverse learning contexts”.

My own take on the debate is that we have much to lose if we impute behaviour solely to chronological age. I have seen an enormous range of dispositions to digital behaviour across and within generations. I think it is imperative that we understand personal learning journeys and their contexts.

A TedX San Diego talk by Ken Blanchard about collaboration helped me clarify my thoughts about dispositions. His consideration of essence equates with  my use of dispositions (8 minutes 25 seconds into the video).

In his discussion about effective collaboration, Ken proposes that essence (heart-to-heart, values-to-values) conversations must precede form (how you are going to do it) conversations.

I am starting to think about the Sport Coaching Pedagogy unit I am teaching at the University of Canberra in February 2013. It has a significant digital demand on the participants (myself included) and I am hopeful that I can support participants’ different experiences of learning and technology within the unit by recognising the heterogeneity of their generation. I am particularly keen to learn how each of them has innovated in and adopted digital behaviour. In doing so I hope to learn about their learning and the values that have guided them.

This is Ken’s talk with three insights into collaboration:

Photo Credit

Innovation – 3 (Hyoin Min, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

 

Augmented Reality Links

A Diigo alert today took me back to Jodi Harrison’s post from September. In it Jodi links to an Online Universities post about augmented reality.

Of the twenty links shared in the Online Universities’ post, I was particularly interested in:

The School in the Park Project (San Diego) that “shifts the location of “school” from a traditional classroom setting in an inner-city school, to the resources and educational opportunities available at museums in Balboa Park”. The School in the Park Project works with Qualcomm, the developers of the Vuforia augmented reality platform.

Gwynneth Jones’ QR scavenger hunt post that contains a host of ideas to facilitate discovery. I like the potential of QR Voice.

Google’s Project Glass (with this recent video) and through a tangental link Throwable Ball Camera.

Comments on the two posts led me to:

FreshAir and Layar and the discussion of geolocation-based Augmented Reality and vision-based Augmented Reality.