SMART Notebook 11.4 on Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite requires Ruby 1.8

I upgraded my Mac to OS X 10.10 Yosemite and SMART Notebook 11.4 started to crash upon opening it.  SMART doesn't provide a patch or any information on why that is, except that you'd basically need to buy a newer version of Notebook (which I wasn't about to do).

So with some investigation it turns out SMART Notebook 11.4 requires Ruby 1.8 to work.  Except installing Ruby 1.8 from, e.g., Homebrew doesn't work.  I guess SMART had statically linked Notebook 11.4 against the particular Ruby library that was distributed by Apple.

A bit of research online turns up a post describing the same problem and the solution: copy Ruby 1.8 from a pre-Yosemite Mac over to Yosemite in the same directory.

The directory is /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/.

Someone even made an installer and posted a link in the comments in that post, although I can't say whether you should trust using that installer...  Not feeling comfortable using that installer, I dug up an older Mac and zipped up the 1.8 folder from the above directory and copied it over to my Yosemite machine.

Leave a comment here or message me if you want a zipped copy of the Ruby 1.8 folder.  Or else if you feel comfortable with using that unvetted installer, then go download it from that comment.

Problems with this fix

Note that this method of making SMART Notebook 11.4 work will make the program less stable.  I've had crashes from time to time.  It also makes the toolbar unusable, and in fact, it won't even show up on the screen!  So get used to picking tools the long way via the menubar instead.

I do wish there was a better software solution to what I'll call the "Projector Transparency Roll - Writable (50 feet)".

Worries over losing deep conceptual knowledge: Better teaching in any subject, part 4

• This is part of the "Better teaching in any subject" series:
• Part 1: Problems with modern inquiry based methods
• Part 2: Meaning is use
• Part 3: Facilitate learning through the inner game of meaning as uses
• Part 4: Worries over losing deep conceptual knowledge

A concern some may have with facilitating learning through the inner game of meaning-as-uses is that it seems to turn everything into decomposed techniques and skills, lacking in holistic, deep, conceptual, or otherwise "meaningful" knowledge.

A moment's thought should give you comfort that that's very far from the truth.

Imagine complaining that by breaking tennis up into the various forehand and backhand techniques, players will lose sight of the holistic meaningful concepts required to understanding tennis.

I'd imagine a lot of the worry comes about from not "seeing" the holistic concepts being taught or learned when seeing only the individual techniques being learned.  Traditionally, we'd see the worksheets for practicing factoring quadratics but never see the worksheets for learning what quadratics are conceptually, or what the meaning of factoring is.  From that, we might be led to believe that there must be something wrong with worksheets or with not teaching concepts and meanings (as if we could even directly teach concepts or meanings at all).

Facilitate learning through the inner game of meaning as uses: Better teaching in any subject, part 3

• This is part of the "Better teaching in any subject" series:
• Part 1: Problems with modern inquiry based methods
• Part 2: Meaning is use
• Part 3: Facilitate learning through the inner game of meaning as uses
• Part 4: Worries over losing deep conceptual knowledge (forthcoming)

The inner game of meaning: a lesson from tennis

A lesson from the Inner Game of Tennis (Gallwey) we might draw from is that consciously and intellectually solving the problem of "what is the instructor doing" is like a fool's errand. Because the actual problem the student is trying to solve is "how do I [the student] hit that tennis ball in that situation".  Solving the former problem may help with solving the latter, but there is no guarantee of effectiveness or efficiency.

Because of the unique cognitive and physical characteristics of each student, the solution to the actual problem is always unique anyway.  It always require each student to solve it anew.  The instructor can only point in a general direction, but the student has to go the final distance to arriving at a personalized solution.

If a student's energy is devoted to solving the problem of "what is the instructor doing", then the student will have little energy left for what is more important: solving the actual problem anew for themselves in a way that fits their own unique cognitive and physical characteristics.

How to facilitate learning proper meanings from proper uses

"Meaning is use" means that meaning comes from a variety of particular uses, and students need to look and see while teachers show the varieties of uses properly in order to learn the proper meanings from their proper uses.  But because every student brings with them a different set of prior learning and experiences, a way of conceptual thinking (and physical doing) that works for one student may not work for another.