Saturday, May 20, 2017

Social Learning - it's what the Internet is for (CoETaIL blog tour)


“Is this the latest version of Windows movie maker?” Freddie asks me in class. “What is the population of Luxembourg?” Marie wants to know. TWIF I tell each of them. They know what I mean; they’ve heard it before.


[caption id="attachment_226" align="aligncenter" width="300"]just twif it made on festisite.com[/caption]

In answer to questions like these, others say sarcastically: “Just let me Google that for you“. The point is that the reliable and accurate answers to these questions are available to anyone in almost an instant. We no longer have to ask the teacher. TWIF stands for: That’s What the Internet is For. Just twif it, I tell the kids. And they get it.

New technology has changed our relationship with knowledge itself. Our students have access to every resource. No wonder some argue that teachers will become redundant. And yet…


…every school I have worked in looks quite like the one I went to during the industrial revolution (well, Leeds in the 1970s). Grades, tests, insular subjects, content-focused teachers. Of course, there are pockets of creativity, but they don’t add up to a bag of innovation. It’s really difficult to change things; even difficult to imagine what it would look like if they were changed on a grand scale.


There is always more than one way of looking at things.


You might sign up for CoETaIL because you’re interested in the challenges of education and change. From the start, you are immersed in many of the best ideas about teaching and learning. You join a community which is speaking the same language and asking similar questions. But you will not come away with simple answers.

morpheus-samr-memeIn course 1, we jump right in and investigate models of educational technology. Personally, I believe that SAMR is a useful model, but it is frequently misappropriated. My PLN suggested one I prefer which I wrote about on my CoETaIL blog (Way of the SAMR eye). Making a case is an excellent way to rehearse your understanding. And the comments from the colleagues you are learning with will make you think again: they don’t necessarily agree with you.

If the education we want for our children is critical, creative and collaborative, then our learning must be like that too. Most questions aren’t googleable; instead, they lead to deeper thought and open up possibilities rather than closing them down. Most solutions are improved by the clash and compromise of difficult conversations.


CoETaIL walks this talk. You can question assumptions, express doubts, try out some new ideas, not alone but with fellow learners. If we believe our students should learn socially, then we must too.

Sunday, May 14, 2017

What the 1 to 1 classroom has taught me


"Despite their growing popularity, laptops may be doing more harm in classrooms than good." (Mueller and Oppenheimer, 2014)


multitask memeThis grandiose conclusion was drawn when the authors tested groups of students taking notes either on laptops or longhand. "Those who wrote out their notes by hand had a stronger conceptual understanding and were more successful in applying and integrating the material than those who took notes with their laptops." (Professor Cindy May, Scientific American).

At least two important questions went unaddressed:

  1. Were the subjects in the experiment equally experienced in paper and electronic note-taking? If not, maybe you are actually measuring their aptitude with the medium.

  2. What do you mean by 'classrooms'? In the experiments, only podium lecturing was tested (recorded TED talks and verbatim reading of scripts). That's not what the classrooms look like in the schools I know.


What have I learned from 1-to-1?


In nearly all of the lessons I have taught since 2008, the students have used devices for nearly all of the time. Before then, not at all. I changed abruptly because my school did and I was interested to see how far I could take the new model.

You may be an interesting teacher, but you can't compete with the Internet


interesting memeOne sees the truth of this even in staff meetings if teachers have their device lids up. They are not paying proper attention because your brain can't process two information streams at once. In lessons, it's the same. When I talk to my students, I insist they should not be looking at their screens. A strategy which works for me has been to organise my class as an 'inverted horseshoe' with desks around the edge of the room, laptops facing outwards. This means that when I talk to the group, I can ask the students to face me and turn their backs on their screens.

And then I shut up so that they can get on with it. Ergonomically it's an advantage too. When the students are all working, I can stand in the middle of the room and get to anyone quickly. Not every colleague has been convinced, but it works for me.

You are already an expert


You are already an expert memeI had been teaching Physics for several years before I landed in a 1-to-1 classroom. The internet had become a cornucopia of excellent teaching materials. There were assessments, simulations and videos; there were resources produced by great teachers, inspired students and world-renowned physicists. I started a wiki and embedded, linked and organised all of the assets I had found, but after I had planned my courses there were many I hadn't used even though I knew they would be great for the students. I took a step back from my role as gatekeeper. I flung back the gate. No! I took it off its hinges. In their own time, the students who wanted to know more browsed the wiki and found materials which suited their learning style and because it was online, the site also welcomed up to 5 000 visitors per day.

1-to-1 intimidates many teachers because they assume that students are more comfortable with devices than adults. This may be true, but it's not important. A teacher is an expert explainer; he is knowledgeable about his subject; he knows good teaching ideas when he sees them. A good teacher who doesn't use technology (yet) is still a good teacher. Technology is just another tool he should use to become the best teacher he can be.

Let go


trust your students memeSo technology enabled me to improve what I was giving to my students. It also freed me to interact with them in my version of the flipped classroom. Some of the instruction was flipped to the home, but more importantly, it was flipped to the virtual classroom I had made. As the students learned from my curated resources, I could spend time with those who needed support.

To do this, I had to trust in the students' wish to learn. I wasn't standing at the front commanding their constant attention. What they were doing instead is still called note-taking, but it only vaguely resembles the activity which Scientific American said laptops don't do well. Alongside their text, students dragged in images and graphs straight from the wiki. They added photos of my sketches on the whiteboard; links to my curated videos; their own found resources (which we could then add to the wiki).

open up the kitchen and the larder, not just the dining room


The traditional classroom is like a restaurant. The visitors consume what the chef produces because she has the knowledge and expertise. But what if the clientele were allowed to choose ingredients from the shelves and then prepared their own meals under the tutelage of the chef? Of course it's inconceivable; the result might be nourishing, but is unlikely to be sophisticated. This, however, is what we have done to the classroom when we gave the students access to the same resources the teachers have (but not the expertise). The metaphor sounds outrageous, which shows what a radical change education has seen.

Of course, if all we do is try to use devices to replicate the activities which were developed for paper, we will, like Professor May, be disappointed by them.

Monday, May 8, 2017

Never mind the bubbles - a future fable


Graduating Class of 2035! My name is Indira Xi. I was born, like most of you, in 2017.


This was around the time that many of our teachers themselves graduated from school. We have heard their stories of 1-to-1 classrooms; mobile devices; MOOCs and learning journeys. Looking back, it is obvious that our forebears came up with some great ideas for education, but they didn't find a way to scale them up in practice (the average completion rate of MOOCs was 15%, and for the larger enrollments, it was typically much lower). Of course, we now know how to get it up to 100%!

FANGBack in 2017, the big technology companies (their vampiric acronym was FANG) were dabbling with algorithms, serving up content which matched the interests of their users, and they had begun to accumulate information covering many aspects of people's lives (by studying location data, they knew who 90% of all adults were spending the night with). In those years, however, they didn't yet realise what power they had!

soap-bubble-824576_640By 2022, five years later, everything was different! The FANG engineers had introduced recursively self-improving algorithms which very quickly sharpened the personalisation of everyone's Internet experience (it took milliseconds). When the optimum content was not available, the programs set about manufacturing and distributing stories (so much more efficient than waiting for your friends to recommend the very best videos and articles). They made digitally-generated movies which varied the cast and storyline depending on the preferences of whoever was watching. The FANGS did not survive this revolution as separate entities; they united into one huge engine called Facebubble.

Then, as you know, self-improving algorithms were introduced into education and they immediately unified every MOOC into one enormous course representing the sum of all human knowledge (the type which can be taught online, at least). They used their knowledge of every past interaction to analyse each teaching moment and to perfect a learning path for anyone to learn anything and to enjoy it. They knew their students' needs through a combination of metadata, Facebubble clicks and information from wearables (pupil dilation, skin conductivity and heartrates).

[caption id="attachment_210" align="aligncenter" width="540"]epystematic produced with festisite[/caption]

Governments were delighted. They called the new program Epystematic: a system to organise all knowledge and to personalise for each citizen exactly what society needed them to learn. Then by tweaking people's known motivations, they made the process maximally efficient. We didn't even need public exams any more: the Epystematic already knew what we could do. Universities loved that! And once the machines started calling every election result perfectly, there was no point holding votes any more. So they didn't.

Fellow students, this is the learning world we entered.


The classroom was so personalised that no two students were learning the same thing at the same time. We put on our VR goggles and Epystematic knew us better than our own parents, friends or teachers (whose role had been reduced to handing out the equipment). There was no social contact with other children in the class; why would we need anyone else when the output from our headsets was so finely tuned to our own brains? We made no choices. And the more we used Epystematic, the better it did its job. It was personalisation, but it was not personal.

This time was called, as you will remember, The Great Sedation.

So what changed?


[caption id="attachment_209" align="alignleft" width="221"]siouxsie Back in the day[/caption]

After five years, in 2027, came the punk teachers and their Personal Unfiltered Network of Knowledge. There were some in every school; the punks took on the Epystematic dinosaur. Happily, they had some excellent weapons (which had been around since 2017) to help them in their battle.

Ad Nauseam, the application which simply and silently clicks on every single ad link to make the data they are gathering about us completely useless. The punks taught their students to obfuscate their digital contrail.

Solid, the decentralised web tools, built by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, which make sure that our personal information is kept in a vault so that web companies must request our permission for access when they need to consult it. The punks showed us how to take back ownership.

Wikitribune, a platform which unites journalists and volunteers to produce news stories which can be easily verified and improved.

A DIY sensibility: Inspired by the historic upheaval in music half a century earlier, the punks rejected the status quo.

The tide turned. The punks had no need of large institutions and began small independent schools which decided for themselves how they would organise their learners, like the one we are graduating from. We recognise learning as a social process; personalisation gives way to personal learning; we all have a role in deciding what and how we learn; we recognise that learning is sometimes a messy and difficult experience. And every day, our punk teachers help us negotiate that process.

[caption id="attachment_213" align="aligncenter" width="635"]NMTB produced using ransomizer.com[/caption]

With their heads no longer in the bubble of an algorithmic feed, people started thinking for themselves again and democracy returned.

Fellow students, our journey has only just begun.


Yes, technology may be your friend, but it is only people who can teach and learn!

Saturday, May 6, 2017

Beware the poison butterflies

[caption id="attachment_199" align="alignleft" width="215"]The high point of my gaming life The high point of my gaming life[/caption]

Last week, teaching my Middle School students some basic coding (in the land of the blind... etc), I programmed a game, at least I think that's what it is. If you get all the way through this post, you can play when you get to the end.


For their official IB internal assessment, every ToK student must make a presentation according to stringent IB requirements. The descriptor for the top grade requires students to be sophisticated and insightful while using convincing argumentsdifferent perspectives and an analysis with significant outcomes. A tall order.


Furthermore, the basis of the presentation is a real-life situation (RLS) which suggests to the student a knowledge question (KQ). The KQ has particular qualities: open-ended; about knowledge; in ToK vocabulary.


The stakes are high because there will be no second chance and a student's final IB score and therefore her higher education could depend on it.



why all the long faces? Let's at least make it fun!


On a whim last year, I made a set of 40 vocabulary cards for each student containing IB's prescribed 8 Ways of Knowing (green cards); 8 Areas of Knowledge (red) and 24 useful words which I selected (blue). The students have become quite used to consulting these cards during lessons and we have speculated how we could use them to make ...

...A game.




Matt Baier gamified PD at his school by:

'creating a list of skills in which our faculty should be proficient. Our challenge was determining how faculty would demonstrate their knowledge.'


This is my challenge also. Here are some elements of ToK in which students should be proficient.


  1. KQ-RLSReal-life situation




  2. Knowledge Question




  3. ToK vocabulary




  4. Other RLSs




  5. Other KQs




  6. Arguments




  7. Perspectives




  8. Analysis




- But wait, you can't gamify unless it's electronic.

- Excuse me?

- Oh yes, it's well known that only computer games count when we are talking about gamification.

- It's true that the majority of books on this topic such as Gamify your classroom by Matthew Farber devote most of their pages to the digital realm, but the writers do not specify this medium in their discussions about game theory and the importance of play.

 - Oh, OK then.

All games share four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system and voluntary participation (Reality is Broken, McGonigal, p21)


So we will use the vocabulary cards as a tool to help each student to construct an initial plan for her presentation. The goal is to brainstorm a structure for their assessment. The game models I am using are the card-game Patience or the digital sandbox The Sims. I have devised simple rules and a playing surface so that they can construct a network of ideas based around the vocabulary. When this stage is completed, each student will provide suggestions on a small number of the others' plans and then return to their own plan to process the feedback they have received.

It resembles in many ways a normal brainstorm, but I am trying to harness some of the elements which make games so motivating.

Everyone is a participant... A 'need to know' challenges students to solve a problem... embrace a process of testing and iteration... share their work, skill and knowledge. (Quest to Learn School website)


I hope the activity will benefit from a feeling of community in the class as they all begin the daunting quest to deliver a sophisticated and insightful presentation. Whilst every presentation must be unique (though group members will share identical grades in the end), in the preparation stage a collective effort may contribute extra dimensions to everyone's thinking (if they are prepared to see it). The ToK presentation is a non-zero-sum game, which means that no-one gains marks at the expense of anyone else - there is no strategic benefit in being competitive.

In the 1990s, a puzzle video game called Chip's Challenge was bundled with Windows. After many late nights, I completed all 149 levels. Since you can't progress to a subsequent level unless you have finished the previous one, it gave me great respect for the motivating power of mastery. Over the years, when I have considered gamifying my lessons, it is this feature of computer games that I have focused on: a testing, rather than a teaching environment.


There is an important difference between games that teach a learner how to do something and games that test what a learner already knows (The Gamification of Learning and Instruction Fieldbook, Kapp et al, p49)


Interestingly, then, the game element, which I am now implementing, is not a test but a teaching game...


... unlike 'Beware the Poison Butterflies'




 

Thursday, April 27, 2017

Dewey want to Seymour Learning? It's not Godin be easy

PART 1


Does this ring a bell?

"The subject-matter of education consists of bodies of information and of skills that have been worked out in the past; therefore, the chief business of the school is to transmit them to the new generation"


This is how John Dewey (Experience and Education, p17) characterised the traditional model of schools.

In my experience, the situation has not progressed very far in the eighty years since Dewey was writing. As a teacher in the 'university-preparation' stage of an international secondary schooI, I have spent most of my time in classrooms upholding this model for which:

"the attitude of pupils must, upon the whole, be one of docility, receptivity and obedience". (p18)


The goals are fixed (we make common cause with students, parents and administrators to attain the highest scores in public examinations). We do not ask whether the examining body's criteria benefit the student, we simply train her to jump through the hoops.

Dewey then contrasted tradition with 'certain common principles' of 'new education' which are:

"cultivation of individuality ... learning through experience ... acquisition of [skills] as means of attaining ends which make direct vital appeal ... making the most of the opportunities of present life ... acquaintance with a changing world." (p19)


That description of an education will appeal to many people who read it, but since we appear to be powerless to change the goal, the means we employ to achieve it also remain largely the same as before.

PART 2


Project-based learning is inspired by Dewey's philosophy of education as a social activity. The differences between Project/Challenge/Problem based learning methods are not really significant; their similarities are the important issue. Each of them helps students to:

learn about Real-world issues


"students are pulled through the curriculum by a Driving Question or authentic problem that creates a need to know the material" (Introduction to Project Based Learning, Buck Institute of Education)


Reflect on how and what they are learning


"Judge it by what the whole system learns, and that includes the teacher." (Interview with Seymour Papert)


choose how they learn


"Emphasise student independence and inquiry" (John Larmer on Edutopia)


Sustain Focus on a topic


"Challenge Based Learning slows down the experience to allow for full participation, ongoing reflection, and self-discovery." (CBL and personalized learning, digitalpromise.org)


PART 3


But it is easy to say what is wrong with an institution; much more difficult is actually to bring about change for the better. Generations of educators have nodded along with John Dewey but, unlike most areas of society in which change has been rapid, very little progress has been made. I think this is because we are prematurely congratulating ourselves on seeing the problem, not realising that it is only the first small step in a journey with no map.

Dewey knew this:

"The general philosophy of the new education may be sound, and yet the difference in abstract principles will not decide the way in which the moral and intellectual preference involved shall be worked out in practice". (p20)


In other words, can we set some new goals? If we don't (and usually, in schools, we try to skip this most difficult step), then the change we say we want will not occur. We have people like Dewey and Papert to help us, but we must listen and let them teach us to think deeply about the reasons for what we are doing.

PART 4


Something has to give. There are only so many hours in a student's career. If you're going to do a new thing, you have to retire an old thing.

"The trend towards portfolio-based, so-called authentic assessment is very good, but it's very limited unless it goes with throwing out the content of what we're testing." (Seymour Papert)


If you've ever seen a conversation between teaching subject-specialists as they try to identify content to throw out, you'll know how hard this will be. Yet it has to happen.

Furthermore, let's not kid ourselves that projects will be easier to implement. On the contrary:

"we're going to have to work very hard to make the stuff that they're going to learn. It's not going to come about just by teaching the old stuff in a more, "constructivist" way." (Papert)


PART 5


So, like our students, we have to read; we have to work hard.

And we have to think and learn.

"Please ask someone, “what is school for?” and don’t stop asking until we can agree on the answer and start taking action" (Seth Godin in Stop Stealing Dreams)


You can read Dewey's answer in Article 2 here.

This is what my family said (and no-one mentioned exams):

  • School replaces human nature with more society-friendly characteristics (in his 20s)

  • School is there to prepare you for adult life. And I'm not sure it does that for our lot... (50s)

  • I think school is there to teach children to read, so that they can go out and choose their reading, whether it be fiction or non-fiction, freely and independently. (50s)

  • School gives children their first opportunity to live in a society away from their home surroundings and to build relationships beyond the family. (70s)


What do you think school is for?

Monday, April 10, 2017

Learning 2 integrate technology

makering croppedImagine going to an educational conference where, although technology is central, in many sessions it is not even mentioned because everyone is too busy talking about teaching and learning.


Imagine every presenter being a current educator (or student!), in touch with the concerns of their audience.


Imagine that there is no celebrity keynote speaker, nor any outsider delivering plenary talks; just those aforementioned practitioners.


Imagine a style of session in which the presenters have the freedom to give you, say, half an hour to just try stuff out or chat or read or whatever is right for you.


For a lot of teachers, that is the PD they wish they were getting.


I'm in Poland and the Learning2 Europe conference at the American School of Warsaw has just finished.

On Thursday, I signed up for Maker Your Own Learning. Right from the start, Mark and Sarah told us they wouldn't be giving much direct instruction. As a result I was a bit stuck. So I found a template to make a simple circuit on a piece of paper. I didn't know why I was doing it. But it worked, and now I could see some possibilities. The beauty is that I'd had to figure them out for myself. The final version can be seen in Sarah's tweet below. My polychromatically luminous badge is not exactly an innovative form of 21st century communications technology, but I am proud because four days later, despite much handling, it still works perfectly.

For the rest, I had a very CoETaIL time. The other sessions over the weekend I attended were with graduates Nicki HambletonSonya TerBorg and Diana Beabout. Each time, technology was never far away, but it was integrated, in the words of Mary Beth Hertz, seamlessly.

"Students use technology to learn content and show their understanding of content, not just their expertise with a tool." (Hertz)


That, of course, is what technology integration should always be. I have been wondering how often my lessons look like that. I teach two widely differing classes: Grade 11 ToK (an externally assessed IB Diploma course) and Grade 6 Get Set (an introduction to the 1-to-1 classroom). My colleague Becky and I also run #islconnects (a series of workshops for teachers).

During Unit 1 of this course, I wrote a blogpost (WAY OF THE SAMR EYE) comparing the common models for evaluating tech integration.

SAMR (not my favourite);


TPACK (which I've used the least);


and PATER (which is least well-known but, being a cycle, the most effective to use, in my view).


 

Here are some learning activities involving technology which I have recently taught. I shall consider them with a TPACK eye.

Ancient Civilisation Facebook profile (bit.ly/islfacebooktemplate)


We use a facebook profile to highlight some facts about a historical figure. Aside from the factual content (which our Social Studies colleagues handled), we wanted the students to gain experience with technology: online search and citation; shared Google Drawings (the template); and simple photo-editing (the profile picture). Pedagogically, it was a challenge to manage the students juggling several tools at once while maintaining focus on the learning of history. Ideally, the students would have more choice of tool and their research questions, but we concluded that the restriction would serve our goals.

Knowledge Question Film Festival (bit.ly/tokkqff)


In a one hour lesson, we watch a playlist of clips, one chosen by each student to exemplify, as content, the sort of knowledge question ToK is interested in. The students reflected on the questions in an online back-channel. The discussion was too distracting: a victim of my desire to incorporate technology at all costs. Next time, the students will reflect alone and compare notes later. Pedagogically, a paper-based See Think Wonder would have been more appropriate.

The Power and the Point - of documents in the cloud (bit.ly/powerandpoint)


This activity has been through a number of iterations, each time giving the attendees more time to use technology to try things out. It remains a content-heavy session which is delivered largely from the front. Pedagogically, I would like to keep contact with the teachers while they implement what they have learned in their upcoming lessons.

L2-Warsaw-Poster2After a foray into the upper echelons of administration, I returned to the classroom around ten years ago and was excited by the obvious possibilities inherent in educational technology. Like many other colleagues, I have consciously tried to find as many different ways as possible to integrate technology. We sometimes make mistakes and go too far. Usually, the first people to notice this failure are our students.


New ways of teaching and learning will need new ways of developing professionally in supportive and flexible models with transparent and flat organisations. I hope many teachers consider attending a Learning2 in the near future, in November in Shanghai...


...or in March 2018, I hope we can welcome you to Luxembourg is Learning2.


Friday, March 3, 2017

Learn design theory - then follow your heart

It's so easy to create your own new blog or website: a handful of clicks to give it a cool name, choose a groovy template, create some pages or posts and suddenly you are an author publishing on the web. I've done it many times, but I sometimes later regret my initial aesthetic decisions. Maybe I went with the defaults and my blog looks too much like all of the others; alternatively, perhaps I threw together a palette of colours which I later feel doesn't marry with the message I want my audience to take away.

[caption id="attachment_153" align="alignright" width="300"]KA_homepage_March_1st_2017 The blog before I changed it[/caption]

In a previous post, I described how I initially decided on the look for my Knower's Arc blog. Now everything has to change: function, layout, appearance and content. It's nice when you get it right at the start (which I didn't). Otherwise you need to intervene and fix it. Here goes.

a new function


There are two ways in which I generate material for my Theory of Knowledge course: I create online slideshows to support the teaching and I collect online stimuli to inspire student presentations. I would like to curate all of these materials in one place. Thus, the blog needs to acquire pages where my resources will live.

[caption id="attachment_154" align="alignleft" width="300"]KA_layout_change_2_March Now it's a blogsite[/caption]

a new layout


I considered a few alternatives (Google sites, Wordpress, Weebly, Wix, Wikispaces, Squarespace...) but eventually decided to stay put on Blogger rather than re-build the site from scratch. Beside the existing blog and tag cloud, I have created pages to house resources for each of the main topics (about 20). It's pretty text heavy, but that seemed to me the most efficient way for all of the links to be on the homepage. The categories are based on the course organisation which all of its users understand. You can't tell, maybe, but there were many versions of the layout before I arrived at this which works best for me. I also changed the picture but I couldn't say why I chose the new one. It looked right.

a new appearance


[caption id="attachment_155" align="alignright" width="300"]Goethe wheel Goethe's wheel connects colour and emotion[/caption]

Leonardo, Newton and Goethe all had theories which expressed their beliefs about what colour is and the emotion it evokes. They did not agree. None of them knew anything about hexadecimal colour codes which reduce all colour to a logical system understood by websites. Nonetheless, it is generally agreed by modern designers that colour and emotion are related. Do all cultures react the same way to colours though? Some research suggests not. So maybe someone's colour theory tells us more about the person than about colour itself. If you're going to break the rules, though, it's better to know them.

My first colour scheme combined colours from van Gogh's paintings. I suppose I thought that one of art's great aesthetic sensibilities couldn't be wrong, but why should that work for an entirely different purpose? Time to try something different. I'm not going to use someone else's palette. I'll make my own.

[caption id="attachment_156" align="alignright" width="300"]palleton_wheel_001 Paletton.com's wheel is based on logic[/caption]

Paletton.com is an amazing free tool. This is my chance to play with it. I used it to make some themes.

  1. Monochromatic blue based on a tone in the banner photo which I sampled with the excellent ColorZilla Chrome extension.

  2. Triad yellow based on van Gogh's sunflowers + two adjacent colours chosen by eye).

  3. Triad purple based on the colour of my Physics website + two distant colours chosen by eye.

  4. Tetrad of colours separated by Golden Ratio.


Flick through the slides to see the four schemes I tried.




In this process, I have learned a lot about colour; triads and tetrads; brightness, saturation and hue. In the end though, I will use the green theme just because it looks right to me. The colours are quite restful which I think may be due to their proximity in the wheel (but it's an emotional rather than a rational choice). I am too close to the result to judge whether it is actually an upgrade.

What I have learned about resources which are created online is that they are never finished. If you look at the KA blog today, you will probably see a different version from the one below.

[caption id="attachment_159" align="aligncenter" width="1335"]KA_finally The final version for now[/caption]