Saturday, September 10, 2011

Other tools

Apart from webquests, which I will go into more detail in at some stage, the rest of the tools on this page are very similar to those already covered. Slideshare, file storage, and music, certainly have the same problems, advantages and uses.

WIKIPedia

A great tool for basic understanding. It is often written in a way that is more general knowledge and this is useful to students who are only starting to study the material. I would actually encourage its use (informally).

Google Earth

Great tool, have played with it an awful lot, including some of the extras and user defined parts. Would be excellent for history and geography. I can see the assignment to be find the historic places, or track an explorer’s path or something like that. Unless I used it to find and describe the physics of certain bridges or buildings, I think it would be way too over the top for my course :)

Podcasting

Audiofiles are not particularly useful in Physics. Would be rather boring. See my post on videos as to how I would rather do things.

YouTube

Yep, great tool. I encourage students to use it themselves, and post the links on a discussion forum. Though not compulsory or for assessment, some have done so, and I’m sure a lot more have used YouTube without reporting it.

Quizzes

I think we’ve all used quizzes in one way or another. I much prefer to use the quizzes embedded in lessons in moodle to give better feedback. This makes it a learning tool instead of just a test. For summative assessment, however, care needs to be taken about when and where feedback is given to ensure that the students do actually have the understanding required, and enough, but not too much prompting is given along the way.

I have used them with great success in a non-academic course and would be happy to move them to academia, in both formative and summative assessment. Students also say they enjoy the lessons, and that they are better than quizzes.

Animations and Simulations

NHC Science animations probably would have been good. The link didn’t work and I don’t know if my google search provided the right page… seemed to be, but I wasn’t going to download the plug-ins to make the animations work.

Dissect a frog was interesting, if the voice wasn’t ridiculously digital, it might have been worth watching all of it. I’m sure the rest would have gotten better, with more interaction which seemed to be going down the right path, asking questions and getting the student to click and then giving descriptions. Good approach.

The Gizmos was very similar to a program we had the students use in undergrad Physics, ‘Mastering Physics’. I think the Gizmos are great. Fantastic, especially in a teaching package. Subscription fees and issues seemed to be the biggest problems we had. Should the students have to buy it? Should it be provided? Another problem that was never looked into was that students would be getting 95% or better in the embedded assessment, but over half the class still failed the exam. How good a teaching aide was it really? There was no transfer to problems outside the system. This would have to be used with care. I still think it is excellent and quite unparalleled for distance and online learning. Just perhaps not by itself.

Image Manipulation

Good for it. You don’t need online technologies to do this. In fact, after my previous post, I would suggest not doing so. Yes, fancy image manipulation tools are expensive, but Microsoft picture editor is easy, simple, and comes with Office, so no extra cost. Mac has ColorSync Utility for resizing. Publisher is great for adding text, lines, circles… cropping, merging photos… and saves in several file types. So I’ll stick to those for now. Anything else, I’d want to be running a multimedia course to bother about.

Flickr

I am familiar with Flickr as my friends use it and I think I might have used it once. I can’t see particular relevance to teaching, except perhaps getting the students to take photos of something and put them up? We did this when I was at Purdue University. For research into primary school teachers’ understanding of what engineering was. We did pre and post intervention photos and they wrote a little about each photo. Flickr could be used to collate the photos.

I just tried to log into Flickr. I thought it would be easy since it takes a Google id and I had one of those. Then it asked for me to put in all my details. I was partially through that when it asked for a screen name. I tried Gemma, but that was already in use. I thought, here we go! So 6 tries later with strange combinations, I got so frustrated I had to shut down the computer and walk away!

This seems to be quite a trend with these technologies. They are SOOOO much more frustrating than I could ever have imagined and that is very depressing. While some of them would be good in my course, or other courses, until they become user friendly, I’m not touching them with a 10 foot pole!

Video

Videos are great. In this day and age, a simple video blog from the lecturer can promote engagement. Videos of document cameras are really good too, especially in my area where verbal and textural communication is just not enough. Drawing diagrams and solving problems on paper with a pen right in front of the students’ eyes is just the best. I have used that so many times in my course. I just wish there was an easier way to do it from my home office, since I lecture casually and have a full-time day job. At the moment I use the doc camera in the ISL room and can flip to lecture cam easily too. I almost want a movable desk camera that I can turn to me, put on the paper or show small experiments with. Wow, there is just nothing that will meet having the students standing there with you is there? Virtual reality, here we come!

PowerPoint

This tutorial could be helpful if you have no idea about powerpoint. If you have some idea, it would be hard to just find the bits you don’t know about. The formatting was very painful in a thin column on one side and a lot of scrolling. This could be avoided.

There is a lot of information in there – so comprehensive indeed. If you were using that as a tool in a guided way to help your students learn powerpoint it would be good. On its own, perhaps a bit overwhelming. Not very interactive either. Yes, there are quizzes, but it should be used in conjunction with activities designed to have a practice at using powerpoint.

It is a bit condescending with the people and the words. Maybe a story is helpful for engaging?? but it could also be a turn off. There is no quick way though it. Wow, and the more I go through it, the more insanely boring it gets!

OK, so I get the point of a tutorial – start from the beginning and cover everything. But now I know what not to do!

Pontydysgu

My first impression was ‘holy crap what a jumble of stuff!’

I did look through some of it. This time there is a landing page, although a crazy one with no explanation of what is what. It looks like an interesting collaborative space and there seem to be great projects going on. It would, however, take some doing to trawl through it and find what you want. Then I guess RSS would be a good idea!

I’m not sure of the point of this particular page, but it does give the idea that this might be useful for a class as a class project. Create this page where there are different group projects where all participants can contribute and do so in different media – photos, text, videos. Perhaps a tad more interesting, if not confusing, than a standard group project? Also more creative and available to the whole class and afterwards the whole world as a consolidation of learning than a typical wiki? Might need a fair bit of facilitation with techno-novices as students, so might work better in a course focussing on technology, and would still need to be clear and easy to use. I could, potentially, see students setting up this page with different people responsible to different tasks in different weeks, such as the news bites – all members of group 1 have to contribute a news bite in week 1, a personal blog in week 2, a critique of an article in week 3, etc. This would all be in a consistent format but end up creating a fabulous resource.

elearningspace blog

This is an interesting approach. It puts all of the learning into a blog by the lecturer. I guess that is good since it means that the lecturer is engaged, HAS to be engaged to some extent to keep blogging (or copying and pasting) and that probably does create a rapport with the students, especially if they are blogging too.

On the other hand, I went to the blog and was a bit confused as an outsider looking in. That would probably not be the case for new students who start at the beginning, except for students who start late. There is no “landing page” with information about what to do, where to find help… all the things we like on our Moodle sites.

Oh, and talk about the scroll of death :)

RSS

I already use Google reader and it is fantastic. It is a great way to keep up with friends and colleagues blogs – once you know where they are! So I did do it with last term’s blogs, but that got rather ahead of me, but was so easy to see. Then I have added that portlet to my igoogle page that is my home page so every time I open up the internet on my computer I get my RSS feeds. Easy :)

Creating Digital Books in Excel

While it was all very interesting to have a nice pretty book, is it useful for my context? I can see for kids, yes. I think it might be able to incorporate graphs and if I lock cells and only leave certain cells open for editing then it would change variables and that would be useful to show cause and effect in basic Physics. I did already know this and have made reporting packages for a couple of applications, one for emissions from the Stradbroke sand mines and the other for aligning an Instron testing machine.

What was pointless was that I have a Mac and even in the Help search, I could not find “speak cells”. I think that is a little condescending for uni students though! Great for young kids, especially since they are using computers more at younger ages and this could help them even write their own books, or complete sentences or stories.

Authentic Learning and Assessment

The link went to a site that was down for upgrades, so couldn’t access the article. This is a reminder that if ever I put a link to an article in my Moodle course to make sure that I put the full reference there so that students can find it even if that particular link is down. I also think that it is not useful to put links directly to articles within password protected databases in the CQUni library as this makes it difficult. I have had some difficulty at home because it doesn’t ask me for my password, so I have to trawl the databases to try and find the article, so actually describing which database and how the article was found would be significantly more useful than a link (even though many might think that is easiest).

Blogs

One thing that I have found is that I can’t use blogspot.com while in the CQUni mail system as they require different log ins. Now that is mostly because I already had a gmail account before CQUni gave me another one. Means a fair bit of swapping around.

Saturday, August 6, 2011

The Machine - Us

The Machine is Using/Us

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE&feature=player_embedded

Just watched this video.

How this relates to my learning - I'm afraid I'm still a bit of a static learner. I don't find the idea of being able to edit Wikipeda exciting. I don't even really like thinking about the fact that this blog may be being read by many people. At least I know that this blog is for my ideas, and while people might or might not like my ideas, that doesn't matter. If I have to put facts out there, or reports... that would be different.

How this would relate to my teaching - I could imagine the pressure students would be under if their Physics assignments were somehow to be published on the web, in the 2.0 environment where it could be changed. Even as a class group. Students don't like looking stupid in front of other students. They don't ask questions on forums and even if they just email me, they are always saying something like "sorry, it is probably a silly question, but..." Could they then really put something on a wiki and then have other students changing what they said because it was wrong, or answering the questions...? And my students range in grades from pass to high distinction, and while I want to change them all to HDs, making them put working on a wiki so that the other students can help, wouldn't be doing much for their self esteem.

How this relates to learning in general - with all of the information out there, we are already struggling to help students understand what is academically rigorous literature. The more blogs and sites like Wikipedia that are out there, the bigger our challenge. Great for synthesising and critical reflection, especially in areas that are 'opinion' driven, but not for 'fact' driven areas. You just have to read the newspaper to find crazy, unsupported, unsubstantiated, mis-represented statistics. Did you know that 45% of the Capricornia electorate are homophobic? Too many people just accept that and don't ask about the method, the terminology... the rigour of that data.

Wednesday, August 3, 2011

Edutopia and technology in curriculum design

Video

George Lucas and Robert Thurman

www.edutopia.org

They documented ideal learning environments.

Project learning

Cooperative learning

Integrated studies

Comprehensive assessment – multiple measures

Teachers – the human touch – the most valuable element

Higher ed gives more self control over what they are learning.

Learning is a fun thing to do if you are interested in the material

Students don’t always know what their passion is, and like George, can stumble on it by chance.

Using stories in film in learning.

Tell the story of how to integrate technology into schools.

Don’t put computers in a classroom and teach students how to use them once a week. Use computers as a tool, like a pencil, to learn other subjects, and cooperate.

Lots of great theory, but there are holes.

Kids want to be adults – so give them adult tasks. Don’t teach them maths, tell them to design a plane, and they will want to learn the maths and science to do so.

Using the knowledge to do something.

Website shows you how to organise the classroom around the technologies.

Edutopia

Looking through the website it seems that there is a lot of information on integrating technology, but pretty much only in person. Cameras, probes, photogates, video, heart rate monitors… How would we get students to use that sort of equipment when studying at a distance?

One thing that I did love about it was the encouragement of integrated learning. They took the data from the cheerleaders heart rates etc and graphed that in Maths and then talked about velocity and acceleration in Physics using videos. Since all we can work with is that the students have computers, it would need to be carefully considered exactly what we asked of them. Yes, we can put up the videos, but of course that won’t be as meaningful as if they were in the videos. We can get them to graph data, but that’s not the same as if they had generated the data to start with.

Sunday, July 24, 2011

Blogging on blogging

I’m not so sure about blogging for collaboration. Examples in the material about T charts and Y charts, PMI analysis are all more for wikis than blogs. Blogs are very good for individual thinking and analysis. Yes, someone can follow someone else’s blog, but they also have their own where they are more likely to put their own thoughts. I have found that commenting on other people’s blogs is quite a rare thing. Everyone has their own space and reading someone else’s thoughts means having to go to each of those spaces, unless using Google Reader. Using a wiki or Google docs would be better for collaboration.

The other side, to enhance critical reading and writing skills blogging is a pretty good idea. It is a first step. It is a non-threatening environment to allow free writing, which I believe would encourage writing. To have blogs for assessment in university would be a slippery slope, depending on how. If it was marked on content, I think it would take away the whole point of blogs. If it is marked on a few key criteria, like includes critical reflection and must be a certain length, or reference 2 papers or similar. The material had some good ideas about blogging for school students. This can work – if used properly. Kids can be mean, so the fact that other kids can comment on a blog would need to be monitored for negative feedback or bullying. It could also make kids scared to blog the assignment as it will be open for all, or, it could raise standards if monitored and promote quality.

Saturday, July 23, 2011

INTJ

Rational Matermind

http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp

This is the same result as I always get on this test. I have done the proper Myers Briggs test and done a whole day of activities showing how the different types work together, or don’t. It was extremely valuable. What it did highlight was that we do things according to our personality without even thinking or realising, and these can not only mean that other people don’t understand, but it can confuse and create misunderstandings. So knowing that everyone is different and how they are different, it important especially for working together. It is also important for group work. Often we, as lecturers, assign group projects without teaching students how to work as a group, or even alerting the students to the fact that people do work differently in groups and what to do when different personalities arise.

We might be aware of our preferences, but we are often not aware of those of other people and it can result in us thinking that other people are just being difficult or uncooperative. This, of course, is completely unproductive. Steps could be taken for a homework activity or similar, just to ease the tension.

Felder's learning styles

INDEX OF LEARNING STYLES (ILS)

http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/ILSpage.html

I am a 9 in reflective, on the Active/Reflective scale.

This actually surprised me because I do like to be active in my learning. I guess I just prefer to think about it first. I don’t like to jump in when I don’t know what I’m doing. I found that when I was living in Norway and learning the language. I didn’t talk much until I knew the words and could form a complete sentence. I do also like to read instructions and make sure I know what I need to do before, say, putting together flat pack furniture!

I know I need time in class to reflect and think about things. Go too fast and ask me a question, I can’t think fast enough. Exams are terrible because there is never enough time to think and work through things.

Active learners on the other hand would get bored with sitting in lectures, or with being given too much time to think without doing anything physical. So a mix of both would be best in lessons. Online learning, however, allows students to take their time if they are reflective, so having some activities is not so bad, so long as there are not so many that reflective learners get a bit overwhelmed by how many things, or how much there is to do.

I am a 7 in sensing, on the Sensing/Intuitive scale.

This does make sense to me as I do like working through things very methodically. Although I prefer that method, I am still open to new ways, especially if it means improvements. These, however, might have to have some factual base to back them up, rather than being completely out of the blue.

In learning, then, it would not be good to do a lot of repetitive activities, such as tutorial sheets with many of the same questions, nor would it be good to just involve a few experiments for exploring new ideas. There would need to be a combination of both. If question sheets are put into online courses, then enough could be put up to satisfy the sensing, but with emphasis that they are not compulsory, so the intuitive don’t get bored. Also in the mix, a number of ‘think outside the box’ experiments or activities.

I am a 9 in visual, on the Visual/Verbal scale

Yes, I love graphs and diagrams. I can work thinks out from reading, but it is more difficult, and I often end up drawing a diagram.

For learning, it is quite easy to include both in any course. What is difficult, however, is getting the students to understand the need to diagrams. The first step in most Physics problems is to draw a diagram. Many students don’t take it seriously or draw half a diagram. I find it hard to believe that so many students are not visual. I guess using this quiz would help!

I am a 9 in sequential, on the Sequential/Global scale

I can tell that I like to do things in a logical order. If the information doesn’t show some sort of logic and progression, I do find it hard to follow. I can understand global learners, however, and appreciate the need to a big picture.

So with any course, an overview is essential, and then a logical progression through the material is needed, with a comprehensive summary at the end.



Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Engagement theory and technology

Engagement Theory:

A framework for technology-based teaching and learning

Greg Kearsley & Ben Shneiderman

This article starts by basically saying that engagement can be without technology, but really technology makes it better. Hmm, let's think about that a little. In Physics, yes, technology can help, but there really is no substitute for the real thing. Measuring distance, feeling velocity and acceleration, feeling force and torque, experimenting with levers, making electric circuits with LEDs of varying brightness, wave tanks and lasers...

Then, of course, there is the problem solving as the paper goes on to talk about. Yes, technology can be very useful in problem solving and helping students work towards correct answers.

Ooh, I'm skeptical of collaboration online! Personally, I think it is good to link people geographically apart, but actually getting groups to really work together with technology is another thing. I've tried to teach Physics with tute groups with group projects... it was terrible. Most groups met together or phoned each other - phones are technology I suppose! Now, these were quite small problems, 2-4 people, 2 weeks and a 2 page report.

I tell you, that is one thing about several articles that I have read that really get my goat. Saying that using technology in internal courses is better than not using technology in internal courses. Well of course! This is not really collaboration, and yes, it is more interesting, therefore more engaging. Whether technology can be used for engaging - solely technology, that is the real question.

Now, I must object to one thing... In the bulk of the article, it refers to 'authentic focus' and in the conclusion to 'non-academic focus'. Are these supposed to be the same thing? Are academic and authentic exclusive domains? In Physics, I beg to differ. It is the 'academicness' off the situation, whether it be authentic or contrived, that makes it Physics - I believe makes it interesting!

Friday, May 27, 2011

8 step Learning Management

Well, finally we see the word andragogy. Very interesting, though. What is it about adults that mean they can’t learn the same way as children? I guess in this model, it is the prior learning, the pre-conceived ideas. It could also be the metacognition that adults are more capable of, or the less trusting nature of adults. Tell an adult that the sky is red, or that water flow up hill or that the gravitational force between two bodies is proportional to the mass of each and inversely proportional to the distance between them, they just won’t take your word as truth.

I guess I’m kind of lucky to be teaching a course where they don’t have to believe every word I say and that I can demonstrate many of the concepts they are learning about.

The rest of the model seems pretty straight forward, if not a little oversimplified. As in my last blog, it is quite a bit more interrelated than a step by step process.

Planning for Learning and Assessment

The planning process that is given at the start of this presentation does promote some sort of an order:

  1. Select the learning outcomes on which to focus
  2. Select strategies to promote consistency of teacher judgment
  3. Make explicit what students need to know and do to demonstrate the learning outcomes
  4. Choose the context/s for learning
  5. Select and sequence learning activities and teaching strategies
  6. Identify or design assessment opportunities
  7. Identify how to gather and record evidence
  8. Identify when and how judgments will be made
  9. Identify when and how reporting of student progress will occur

It then circles back to the beginning. There is nothing in the middle but cross linking arrows, I guess depicting linking between any of the steps.

I’m not sure that I would do it quite in that order. From Engineering, and Engineering Education, I am familiar with design cycles. A very succinct one of those is

Ask

Imagine

Plan

Create

Improve

These are all surrounding the Goal. The goal is the most important thing, so when you are asking questions about the context, it is with the goal in mind. When you imagine, well, the imagination can run wild, but there is no point to grand imaginings without keeping the goal in mind. Through to improving so that the solution better meets the goal, not just improves in a haphazard way. No point making it faster, when you actually need to make it stronger.

It is also necessary to make the learning as authentic as possible. This also means that the goal, the context, is the most important.

So my order might actually be more like this:

  1. Choose the context/s for learning
  2. Make explicit what students need to know and do to demonstrate the learning outcomes
  3. Select and sequence learning activities and teaching strategies
  4. Identify or design assessment opportunities
  5. Identify when and how judgments will be made
  6. Identify how to gather and record evidence
  7. Select strategies to promote consistency of teacher judgment
  8. Identify when and how reporting of student progress will occur

At the centre would be the learning outcomes. Of course these learning outcomes would be context driven.

I think the diagram with curriculum intent, pedagogy and assessment is meaning that all three areas are intricately linked. The planning questions:

What do I want students to learn? (CI)

How will they learn what is intended? (P)

How will I know when they have learned? (A)

How will I use what I learn about the students’ performance? (A)

are inseparable. What and how they learn are very close and if done well, if they have done the ‘how’ then it naturally follows the knowing when they have learned it.

In Engineering terms, the goal or solution or outcome, can’t be separated from how to achieve it, and the success is just not there until it is there. No point having a goal of being able to transport goods and people across a river and only building a bridge half way or a barge that holds everything, but just before it makes it across it gets swept away by a strong current. “Oh that’s OK, the goods nearly made it. It was a fantastic idea and so that’s fine, that’s all we were looking for.”

Is this blog rigorous enough?

Kathleen Gray on WEB 2.0 and authorship and academic integrity

http://ezproxy.cqu.edu.au/login?url=http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2008.03.001

This paper talks about appropriately referencing web 2.0 content. Yes, there is more and more of that content, but surely there are referencing guides out to cope with that? I know that guides do tend to focus on rigorous academic material, but it is updated often (eg APA and Harvard) and don’t seem to be struggling too much.

What possibly is missing from the referencing is a discussion about the integrity and qualifications of the author. They talk about how hard it is to say whether the material has come from a particular source, but that alone is not what the material should be judged on. If a well renowned researcher is commenting in a blog, it is not the fact that it is in a blog that is the issue, it is the fact that you can rely on the authors credibility. It is a mix of where it comes from and who is the author.

Plagiarism. Now there is an interesting statement they make: “is a symptom of an emerging mode of reading and writing” (p113). I guess this is saying that it is easier than ever for students to copy and paste chunks of text and that a whole lot more is accessible. Perhaps it is also a symptom of lectures giving the students a whole lot more work?? In the past, perhaps the students would have to read and review an article for a lecture. Now, due to so much being available, the lectures just link to a whole heap of relevant articles and set that for the students each week. It is easier to pull material together, students are expected to synthesise a large number of papers and the student’s time is just getting shorter and shorter for composing papers. Student are under pressure.

Another point in this paper is that web authoring tends to be discussive rather than objective. So be it. In any assignment, the context of the material should be taken into consideration and discussed. Academic assignments are far from reciting facts with dutiful references after them backing up the facts. Assignments should be just as discussive and evaluative. Even scientific papers need to evaluate the subjective nature of the authors and the context. This should happen whether it is a peer reviewed, level A journal article, or Stephen Hawking’s blog.

Oh Great and Powerful Leader

Academic Leadership

Askling, B. & Stensaker, B. (2002). Academic leadership: Prescriptions, practices and paradoxes. Tertiary Education and Management, 8, 113-125.

Try this link (then click on the PDF link)
http://ezproxy.cqu.edu.au/login?url=http://www.springerlink.com/link.asp?genre=article&id=doi:10.1023/A:1015612510179

Saying that public management ideals may be difficult and dangerous in higher education because higher education is complex and paradoxical, implies that business are simplistic and that the leadership of both are mutually exclusive. I have no experience in business, but this sounds a little degrading of businesses and CEOs.

In fact, they are saying that the whole managerial environment is so very different that influences from corporate management have had little success in the university environment. What they do say is that leadership is the key to the success either way, and that the style of leadership should, by necessity, differ in each case. Corporate leadership is a role: strong, meaningful and set. Academic leadership is a process: fluid, guiding and integrally linked to the situation.

A difference that is important to the ability of the institution to change, is that academic leaders be able to adapt to difficult and complex situations that they may never have seen before, and that the very set (not to say bad) leadership of the corporate world may not be able to cope with those situations.

Interesting they talk about dispersed leadership and lower level leaders. While that might increase the pressure on these leaders, my own experience at this university is that it can lead to ‘too many cooks in the kitchen’. To run a multi-faceted, whole of university event – orientation – the ‘leaders’ I must approach are: 2 Executive Deans, 10 Deans, 3 Pro-Vice Chancellors, 4 Directors and at least 6 Managers. So I need good leadership skills and I am only, as they say, a lower level leader myself.

It is the same that I have noticed with ‘quality’ as this article talks about. Not only do you need quality leaders, to obtain across institutional ‘quality learning and teaching’ all of those leaders must agree. So do we need even stronger academic leadership at the top? As the control that is increasingly going down the chain, is it going to be an impossible task to ‘lead’ a university into the future? Perhaps, as the paper says, that would be detrimental… but there is no way I would like to work for any organisation, academic or otherwise that doesn’t have strong leadership through change and improvement processes.

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Apples and oranges

Analysis of Academic Expertise
Try this link (then click on the PDF link)
http://ezproxy.cqu.edu.au/login?url=http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13664530000200099

This journal article is interesting in discussing issues of Academic Expertise: Backmore, P. (2000). Some problems in the analsyis of academic expertise. Teacher Development. 4(1), 45-63.

This article doesn’t really say much. It basically says that if you measure different things, you get a different result. I agree that it is difficult to analyse ‘what is in an academic’s expertise’. Do we ever really need an analysis that is apart from a reason? It says to keep the purpose in mind. Why else would you be doing the analysis? If we did it for AUQA or for restructuring, of course we’d get different accounts. That’s fine! If I say the colour of the shirt is navy blue, and you say it is dark blue, does it really matter? Yes, if you are wanting to reproduce it, so you would probably get a spectrometer and measure the wavelength. If you are just talking about the person in the dark blue shirt as opposed to the person in the light blue shirt, hmm, no. Apples for apple sauce, oranges for marmelade.