I have just returned from listening to the First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon give a talk about the plans her government has for raising attainment in Scottish schools. She talked passionately about her desire to address this attainment gap and the resultant poorer life prospects for so many of our children who grow up in areas of social deprivation and who fail to reach their full potential. A £100 million attainment fund has been proposed with the new position of Attainment Officers being identified as significant people to help drive this aim forward. All very promising indeed.
There were no finer accompanying details of these plans but the intention has my 100% support. We must address this attainment gap and ensure that the talents and abilities of all our children are nurtured and developed to their full potential.
As I listened to the talk it made me think back to one of my early projects using Nintendo DS and the game Dr Kawashima's Brain Training. At that time we were interested to see how a game such as this one (that had basic maths elements embedded in the game play) might impact on primary school children's mental maths abilities. However, we were even keener to see how this approach might impact on children in schools that were situated in Local Authority areas where their indicators of higher levels of social deprivation. Our subsequent research found that this indeed did have significant impact and as a result of this we found ourselves exploring game based learning and subsequently helping to change the discourse around the potential that commercial computer games might have on learning - and in doing so helping to create the conditions in which better outcomes for learners was happening.
We then found ourselves in Scotland at the head of a leading momentum in to the place, purpose and nature of games based learning. Much of the success of what we did and the unfortunate and disappointing demise of this Scottish success story was detailed here.
However, a month or so ago I discovered that all trace of the body of work that we, along with our Local Authority colleagues and the children and the parents created over the years was no longer available to be viewed. Gone, deleted from the Education Scotland site...a big fat 404 when searched for - erased from trace. Is it Year Zero at Education Scotland? So if indeed I wished to share what this practice and how the underpinning methodology we used and how it may be relevant to Nicola Sturgeon or Angela Constance's thinking about their Attainment gap plans then I can't do it via this site anymore. As the Proclaimers might say, Mario Kart no more, Professor Layton no more, Guitar Hero no more...Nintendogs no more.
I still have digital copies of all this material however it would be ethically wrong of me to post these on a YouTube site for example because those videoed only agreed for it to be shared on LTS/Education Scotland's digital channels.
So much of this work is significant in the role that it still plays in helping inform teachers about innovative uses of digital technology but more importantly it has a very valuable role to play in documenting the developing narrative of approaches to using digital tech in schools, in this case game based learning. Here for example is something from 1998 that is still online via NAACE's website. I still use this to help inform students about ideas and progress.
I inquired about the rationale that would explain this decision and was simply told that there had been a review of their online services and I was subsequently given a link to the Wayback Machine from 2007 to the very first page we published.
What are they thinking of at Education Scotland in doing this? They are the custodians of such material and they have a duty to understand, respect and value the role that they play in being part of the wider collegiate and connected digital world that helps continually inform our thinking and practice. What are they thinking of with such digital book burning?
No doubt Education Scotland will be central to taking forward this planned for Attainment Gap strategy. If they do then I suggest that a discussion about their long term thinking and appreciation of what they are involved in and the importance of their central role is fully recognised and established so that in the future they cannot simply decide to erase any future work from their digital estate as a result of an online review.
I have recently commenced a research project that aims to explore how the game Minecraft can be used to enhance and enrich learning in the primary school. I was inspired by a post by Dean Groom that talked about using consoles to access the game in classrooms and to mitigate against local authority firewalls. Having had a long history of doing this very thing in educational settings I thought that it was time to explore the use of Minecraft, via Xbox and PS3, in the primary school setting. I am working with 25 P.6/7 classes in 18 schools in Dundee. There was an amazing response from the schools in Dundee when the call for participation went out and I am only sorry that I didn't have enough consoles to go around every school that wanted to join the project. The games consoles came via the old Consolarium cupboard that sits with Education Scotland (thank you to them for agreeing to loan me the resources) as well as from an incubator research fund that I received from CECHR at the University of Dundee. An introductory evening for teachers was held in September where I explained the rationale behind the project and where my daughter acted as my Minecraft expert to demo how you played the game. She even had the pleasure of teaching her own teacher (who was there on the night) how to use the game and to help him and the other teachers begin to understand just why Minecraft could be a very valuable educational resource. Anyway, here is a blogpost, aimed at the learners, from my Glow account that gives more detail about the project:
Dundee City Council has partnered with the School of Education, Social Work and Community Education and the Department of Town Planning at the University of Dundee to explore and research the potential that the game Minecraft might bring to the life of learning in our P6/P7 classrooms. We have a number of Xboxes and PS3s with Minecraft installed and we will be asking participating schools - including yours - to let their pupils use these to reimagine, design and build in Minecraft just what they think Dundee waterfront might look like. (with the city texture pack as an extra to help you build your vision.) The people from 4J Studios in Dundee (where Minecraft for Xbox and Playstation is made) have already built it based on the exisiting plans. Have a look:??
What we want you to do in your classes and groups in your schools is to ha?ve a real think about what you think the new Waterfront in Dundee should look like. We don't want you to copy the exisiting design - we want your take on what they should be building down there at the front of the city. In doing so we want you to consider a number of factors including:
Over the course of the project people from the University of Dundee will visit the participating schools in order to get a picture of what is happening as you reimagine, design and build your vision of the waterfront.
The project will begin in October 2014 and will finish late March 2015. Your school will be invited to a showcase event at the University of Dundee at the end of the project to share your designs and to talk about the experience of participating in this initiative.
Show us what you can do...
I aim to share some perspectives and experiences as the project gathers momentum and as we begin to explore how teachers manage a resource such as this (with HDMI or not) in the class setting, how the children respond to the task, how they work together when building, if a purposeful context encourages intrinsic motivation to particpate in collaborative learning in Glow and what their attitude to learning within this culturally relevant context may be (not an exhaustive list!)
“Suddenly it’s Christmas right after Halloween forget about Thanksgiving it’s just a buffet inbetween!”
This line comes from a song by the brilliant and always entertaining Loudon Wainwright III and its sentiment of irritation towards the commercial creep that now owns all our yearly festivals is one that I am feeling more and more as I get older. But for me the commercial creep is made worse by the fact that there is also a silent form of cultural imperialism happening which is denaturing what was, as I recall, the truly Scottish festival of Hallowe’en and its associated traditions.
But now we have the pumpkin. We have Trick or Treat. We have families buying costumes for their kids. We have lost what Hallowe’en was to us as Scots and in that process we have swallowed the American Disneyfied commercially driven festival and allowed it to replace something that was ours.
I’ve noticed this year on year and have muttered my concerns to myself but last night what I saw in my local supermarket drove me to write a blogpost about this state of affairs!!! There it was – a Trick or Treat fest with a full aisle of Hallowe’en costumes and props, based on the horror movie genre, to purchase. Another spendathon. Not only that but food and drinks are all being labeled with Hallowe’en style packaging. Chi-ching, chi-ching, chi-ching! Have a look!
This may seem a trivial thing to have a rant about but I do feel that we have lost something here and I wonder what it says about us a people when we can so easily allow our own traditions to be denatured in this way. Imagine what we in Scotland would say if we were given the chance to run our own affairs!
When I was a boy Halloween meant two things: guising and a neep lantern. When Hallowe’en came around my friends and I would dress up in our dads’ old clothes and wear things like our grandads’ soft hats to ‘disguise’ ourselves. We would then go knocking on doors and ask, “Any Guisers” as our neighbours’ doors were opened. Generally this motley crew of kids dressed in oversized clothes would be shown in to the living rooms where we would then duly perform a song, recite a poem, do a magic trick or tell a few jokes. This was the deal – you had to do this and in return you were given money. It was all linked to the age-old idea that mischief was afoot and us youngsters were the harmless mischief-makers bringing a bit of mirth and levity to homes just as the dark nights began to roll in. We also carried our neep lanters (neep is the Scottish word for turnip). We would have spent ages carving out the inside of the solid neep before etching out a scary face that would be illuminated by candles. String would be tied to them and they would accompany the guisers as they marched around the neighbourhood. Even that stalwart of Scottish identity oor Wullie would proudly show off his neep lantern!
Now when Hallowe’en comes around we get loads of kids in their Karloff and Lugosi outfits knocking on the door screaming ‘Trick or Treat”. I hide my Victor Meldrewesque gripe as they come in and tell their joke and hand out their plastic Hallowe’en buckets to be filled with Treats! Bah, humbug! (oops, wrong sesaon)
Although I will be faced with vampires, zombies, werewolves, creepers and the occasional Frankenstein's monster on the 31st October I fear that I will still be most unsettled by the monster that Hallowe'en has become.
Last week my daughters were playing with their friends. As a group they were all working together to make a movie and their efforts were industrious, noisy and committed. I listened in on their chitter-chatter and I could hear them make the story up as they went along and as the story unfolded, and as great ideas sprung to mind, they shared and accommodated them and collectively created their masterpiece! At one point there was a disagreement and so I, being the skilled adult who knows better, intervened and suggested that they storyboard their movie and plan it in advance. I mean, that’s how we make movies isn’t it, that is the received/perceived wisdom from the educated educator who thinks they are skilled in such matters? The reaction from them was thought provoking. They told me, “No thanks, this is much better and loads more fun than all that planning stuff!” (at least that was the gist of their response!) Remember the context for all of this: school holidays, children out playing, freedom to act as children – they weren’t in school…
A few months back I was dragged to the cinema by my youngest daughter to see The Lego Movie. Now, this was something I wasn’t too pleased about however within ten minutes I was captivated by the absolute aesthetic beauty of the thing, it’s charisma and charm and its developing plot-line that had me totally hooked. The plotline saw the main character Emmet become 'the special' who was doing his utmost, and who seemed destined to, defeat the evil power of President Business whose dark intention was to gets his destructive Lego paws on the super weapon called the Kragle. In doing so President Business would rule the Lego world forever and ever! As the film roller-coasted to its climax it cut away from the animation to a real life scene - *Film spoiler alert* - that showed a young boy in the basement of his house playing with all the Lego characters and pieces that were featured in the movie…the plot line was all from the boys creative imagination as he played with the Lego figures. He had mashed up all the different Lego kits, ignoring the plans and instructions that came with them, and created his own wonderful creative story that just flowed and flowed from him. However, the Lego basement was the domain of his father and he had deemed the basement and the Lego to be out of bounds for his son! It was his Lego, it had been built, it wasn’t to be touched, the plans and the instructions had been followed – the pieces glued down… Keep out all ye who dare not follow the plan!!!
But, the boy is discovered in the basement by his dad! Here is their conversation:
I gave a gasp of joy and delight when I realised that the Kragle was the lid of the glue, the lid that would stop the plans and instructions from always setting the agenda, that would allow the conditions for wonderful stories and ideas to flourish and that would end the culture of things being glued down, plans and instructions being adhered to. “Put the lid on the glue President Business!” I exclaimed along with my daughter!
Put the lid on the glue. What a metaphor I thought for my experience and my ongoing reflective thinking as a teacher and educator. For years I have been influenced by my observations of children as they played computer games and as I did so I would always be impressed with how they displayed a natural ability to learn on their own and with others. These observations allowed me to lead a significant effort to promote the use of such child-centered contexts in formal educational settings however the lid of the glue, so to speak, was kept in the cupboard marked plans and instructions by some our very own President Business’ in Scotland with their mobilisation of bias agenda! Anyway, enough moaning about that and on to more important matters…
Such experiences where children show their innate ability to think and to learn without the qualified adult supervision that dominates our thinking about children and learning is continuing to make me rethink the role of a teacher and in particular our reliance on and almost uncritical adherence to a specific aspect of learning theory that is used to justify the teacher/ learner dynamic.
The teacher learner dynamic is one that appears to be heavily predicated on the social constructivist theory of Lev Vygotsky and in particular what he calls the Zone of Proximal development. In teacher education this is used to frame a theoretical underpinning that almost justifies the instruction dynamic to some extent. It argues that the ZPD is
the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers.
Now, in some cases I see this. The apprenticeship model is one that I fully appreciate and is one that would I feel allow itself to be informed by this particular theory by Vygotsky however I am ill at ease at using this to help inform and articulate my own thinking about children and learning particularly in view of how I have seen young children master the complex world of Nintendogs at age 5 or by what I see when I observe children learning together as they play Minecraft or even when they are making a movie in the summer holidays. It is generally the case that there isn’t someone who is the more skilled or experienced participant/leader. Yes there will always be a group dynamic but as far as I can see the children do tend to self-organise quite effectively without the intervention of a teacher who, for example, places them in roles in their ‘co-operative learning groups’. Hands up who wants to be time-keeper?! Yeah, me neither.
If Vygotsky were to play Minecraft for the first time what would he do? If he were to sit down with his own children for the first time and where neither of them were the more skilled or experienced how would they learn together, make progress and then reach the heady heights of a glass and gold palace with flushing toilets in every room with a creeper trap at the front door and a redstone circuited rollercoaster to take you up to your pad in the mountains!? How is it that children, very young children in so many cases make such progress and make sense of the complex environments in the world of games and in learning in various other contexts/domains without the adult intervention that we have somehow taken to be the common sense agreed norm? I am seriously beginning to question the way in which we refer to ZPD in teacher education and how we need to recognise, value and celebrate the children as learner a little more than we presently do.
In following and pinning our professional colours to the ZPD mast have we as educators lost sight of the child as a learner? Have we become too directive, managerial and controlling? Are we in real danger of being driven by timetables, uncritical acceptance of theoretical perspectives and the gluing down of learning opportunities to the detriment of the creative nature of the child?
The Lego Movie's theme song states that everything is awesome. I think our children are. Let's get that lid on the glue and enable the conditions is school to let them demonstrate just how awesome they really are.
One of the games that I have shared with colleagues and many other folks at conferences and professional development events is The Nightjar featuring Benedict Cumberbatch. I was hugely drawn to this due to the narrative driven and engaging context of the storyline but mainly because it was a game that was driven by what I could hear... Have a look at the trailer:
The idea of a game that is driven by sound and the players reliance only on what they hear makes one immediately think of accessibility for visually impaired gamers but it also made me think of how such an experience could introduce sighted game players to an experience that required that they use this sense alone in order to escape the clutches of the alien and safely make it to the Nightjar's escape pod. What opportunities there are again to get players to look at writing their own text driven games, and how they could possibly be brought to life via Garageband or Audacity. Just even switching the direction from left to right audio (panning) could be the spark to light that creative use of tech to impact on the desire to create and enhance the texts they create and how they can write for a digital audience.
This morning a BBC Click feature alerted me to the fact that Papa Sangre II has been released. One of my jobs for today is to download this and to see if I can escape the Garden of Death!
With an enhanced 3D stereoscopic engine it seems that this audio driven game experience is one that is getting better and better.
The creativity that is being shown by games developers is really quite breathtaking at times...what a wonderful context this world is, if appropriately used, to help situate learning and learners in purposeful, relevant and motivating challenges. Now, if I had any influence or way in which I could help drive transformative change within our education system I would have it that games design companies and creative digital people from our brilliant universities would have representatives on local and national bodies to not only help raise awareness of what is out there but to raise the bar of aspiration and expectation of what we can expect from our young people. Alas, maybe I'll have greater luck escaping from Papa Sangre's Garden of Death... #everoptimistic
Does anyone else remember Miley Cyrus when she was sweet little Hannah Montana? The witty girl with the double identity of famous country rock star and the ordinary schoolgirl... Well if you do you may like me by really struck by her recent and almost Black Swanesque metamorphoses into the iconoclastic new her. All traces of sweet little Hannah Montana have been obliterated by the new tattooed, twerking and all turned up Miley...
Hannah it seems is now a long since gone distant memory as Miley herself has grown into a young beautiful woman with a desire to be seen as a grown up artist with an identity and act to match. Now I could comment on her recent spats with Sinead O'Connor about how young women can prostitute themsleves to the industry in the way it has been suggested Miley did by wearing nothing but her birthday suit as she straddled a wrecking ball in her not so subtle metaphor laden video for the song of Wrecking Ball, but there is something else that I would like to comment on, something that is more insidious, complacent and destructive - in Miley's new world it seems we say 'hell yeah' to drugs...
I bought the .mp3 of her song We Can't stop. I think it is a great pop song...honestly! I was playing it on guitar and singing it with my daughters and noticed that we had to change one of the swear words at one point but then read the verse that said:
"And everyone in line in the bathroom
Trying to get a line in the bathroom
We all so turned up here
Getting turned up, yeah, yeah"
Getting a line in the bathroom...an obvious reference to drug use and one that I ended up having to carefully explain to my Hannah Montana adoring daughters what that was. Now I know Miley is all grown up now and that she must break free from the constraining old identity of Hannah and in some ways I am really happy for her but what ended up happening from that song lyric was a learning opportunity for us... I ended up sensitively explaining what cocaine was, where it came from and about some aspects of what it is like for families growing up in countries where Drug Lords and the horrendous levels of violence that we hear of impacting on family life in some parts of countries such as Colombia, Peru, Mexico in order to serve the habits of those partying and getting all turned up in Miley's grown up and sybaritic world.
What an opportunity and a doorway in to exploring the real world of drugs and drug taking... deconstructing the carefully crafted new image of a valuable commercial asset such as a pop star like Miley to reveal what they are actually saying and how the lifestyle being portrayed is in a word - ugly. How being part of the turned up world might get you years in jail as a drug trafficking mule, how corruption can become rife where you live , how fear can become a part of everyday life, how execution and murder can stop people from using their mouth to say what they want to.
I saw that a Colombian diplomat is currently giving a lecture at UK universities about how we should be Rethinking the War on Drugs. it seems that Colombia and other countries blighted with an indigenous drugs industry are looking at changes in policy to help address the challenges that they face in this regard:
"One of the main drivers behind this is that of course it is the Latin American countries which are drastically affected by a trade where the demand does not lie in their own countries, but largely in North America and Europe.
'These are countries which have been ravaged by this trade for decades and are now looking at how they can approach it in different ways. This talk will be a fascinating insight into an international debate that will have major repercussions in years to come."
Maybe it is the case that we begin to rethink the way we educate our young people about drugs and its impact on communities around the world? Maybe situating the learning in the cultural domains learners inhabit and by subverting these we can help challenge established media driven views? Maybe a more critical and empathetic understanding of global citizenship can play a small part in helping countries such as Colombia and Mexico meet their long term aspirations? Maybe there are ways in which we can raise the understanding and consciousness of our young people so that they can deconstruct the messages that are fed to them via culturally valued mega-stars such as Miley? Maybe we can create a culture in our schools that helps our young people develop a critical and informed world view that helps them recognise injustice and oppression and the way in which their actions can play any part in its perpetuation...
Maybe... meanwhile, I have two young daughters who are beginning to develop an awareness that the pop culture that envelopes their world is not as lovely and innocent as it might appear and that saddens me.
I have been spending some time playing Device 6, the new game from Simogo a studio I came across a while back when I found out about their last game Year Walk. This was a beautiful and surreal game that was unlike anything I had ever played before. Its sparse yet beautifully crafted aesthetic conveyed a sense of being lost in the wilderness that matched the narrative of the game. It was one of those games that took the game play experience in new and exciting direction. So far Device 6 has totally captured my imagination in the way that Year Walk did…have a look at the trailer and find out a bit more about the game here.
The nature of my job is such that every time I play a game I think of ways in which it can be used in an educational context, you know, how can these incredibly rich and engaging resources/contexts be used to capture learners’ imagination and then be used as the contextual hub from which intrinsically motivated learning and purposeful can take place. The developing nature of narrative driven games such as Device 6 is an area that I am really interested in and in the past I have tried to use a range of games that have a narrative thread to create contexts for rich learning that would allow writing, reading and a host of creative endeavours to come to life for learners. In 2007 I first tried this when the brilliant Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney came out for the DS. My thoughts were that such a game would encourage learners to engage with the game and then possibly be motivated enough to create their own court room type scenes that could be written or dramatized in a range of ways. Some of the schools that worked with me on this focused on characterization and wrote character descriptions for the main characters in this game. Here you can see my very first Teachmeet presentation in 2008 at BETT. It is called, ‘Objection! Games in the Classroom’ and it focus on Phoenix Wright as a learning resource.
I also did some interesting work with teachers and learners from Perth High School and Madras College (Glow login required) when we used Hotel Dusk Room 215 as the context that allowed us to explore the genre of Noir Novels. The game was given home, along with a DS, to a class of S2 learners for the Easter Holidays and they were asked to have a go at it over those two weeks. On return we found that every learner had played it and completed it! This then allowed the teacher to explore other Noire texts such as movies, books and radio broadcasts. The final one gave us the context in which learners could then write their own Noire style story inspired by Noire and mystery based radio broadcasts from the 1930s, 40s & 50s that featured characters such as The Shadow and Sam Spade as well as the stories from organisations such as The Molle Mystery Theatre. The pupils learned all about the principles and component parts of the Noir genre and used these to create their own broadcast ready audio files that dramatized their creative writing. I think that this context could work so well in schools when you consider that if learners wrote such stories and released them on a serialized basis through weekly podcast just think what this could do for situating writing within a context that has real purpose and audience. I attempted to practice what I preach when I made a ham-fisted effort at creating my own mystery style audio broadcast for an event I was presenting at last year:
Anyway back to Device 6. As devices such as iPads and Android tablets become more and more commonly found and used at the heart of learning in schools I really hope that we see a real shift from using them to carry out traditional type of activities and move towards using them in such a way that maximizes their potential. It would be great to see a continuation of the type of work the Scottish Government recently started that looked at the pulling together of a picture of the developing narrative of the use of tablet devices in schools, a narrative that would hoepfully see such resources being used to enhance and enrcih learning. There is great potential in using apps such as Device 6 to create the context that can encourage learners to write for themselves and for an audience - a global one at that, hey, you could even get them to write their own stories inspired by Device 6 using Inkle. So so much we could do here…
If anyone is using Device 6 ort any other narrative driven computer game to encourage literacy development in their school please let me know what you are doing.
We spent our summer holidays on the beautiful island of Islay this year. We were so lucky with the weather and as a result much of our week there was spent on the beautiful Kilchoman Beach at Machir Bay. This stunning beach with its untouched sands and incessantly crashing Atlantic Ocean waves was virtually deserted with the next stop West being America!
I interviewed my youngest daughter in the surf of the beach as she and her sister filled their empty plastic bottles with water from the Atlantic Ocean. Have a listen to our chat to capture a mental image of the waves and just how incredibly beautiful this place was:
As a result of this experience we had a subsequent chat about oceans and seas and continents and countries and the creatures that lurked beneath the waves. I really think that opportunities such as
If you want to get involved in this and send water to the exhibition from seas as distant as the Dead, Red, Baltic or Caspian Sea or a s close as the North Sea or Atlantic Ocean then check out the All the Seas details on the Fruitmarket gallery's website to get the submission details, BUT if you are at school in Scotland then email your details to the learncat@educationscotland.gov.uk and will be sent a special label to attach to your bottle of water to show that you learned about Tania Kovats through Glow with The Fruitmarket Gallery.
It would be great to see this exhibiton being supported and also for Scottish teachers and families to get involved with the Glow aspect of things. You can read more about All the Seas and Glow here.
Tomorrow is my last day working at Education Scotland. I have worked under this banner for the past two years but previous to that and prior to Government restructuring it was with Learning and Teaching Scotland that I earned my crust! This working relationship began in August 2006 when I left my post as a Lecturer at the University of Dundee and accepted a seconded post at LTS as National Development Officer for Game Based Learning, with the success of that seconded post leading to a permanent role from 2008 until now. Now, I am reversing that move as I head back to Dundee University to rejoin the Lecturing and Research teams in August.
At the heart of what I did and what I always do was a desire to create contexts that will impact on better outcomes for learners and it was with this in mind that I took to the floor to speak to the SICTDG key contacts in December 2006. In a 15 minute slot, I shared with them my developing thoughts and theoretical perspective on the purpose, nature and potential of game based learning and then invited them to come to the Consolarium - a space I ambitiously named the Scottish Centre for Games and Learning - to play with and learn about games and and to partner me in some GBL initiatives that I had planned. The response was a mixed one with some colleagues finding the thought of GBL quite an amusing one and others concerned that this was simply a frivolous waste of taxpayers money. Nevertheless, this experience and opportunity was a valuable one because very soon some real notes of interest came my way and before long I had to get the biscuit tin full of tasty things for visitors to scoff as I prepared for the series of visits to the Consolarium from Scottish and international educators - visits that didn't stop until the Consolarium had to close its doors in 2011.
Some of what we did includes:
It was not always an easy job trying to convince people that GBL was a good idea and it is fair to say that the occasional media swipe and a disappointingly placed FOI did unnerve those who maybe should have believed in me and my team a bit more than they did. The creation of Education Scotland in 2011 and all that that entailed meant that the Consolarium space was no longer available, the team was disbanded and the funding stopped. Nevertheless, Scottish Education has shown that it has the capacity to take informed risk and that it is not afraid to explore innovative ideas and practice with digital technology. Maybe it just needs to be wary of the inexorable, glacial march of the habitus of education and the destructive power that this can wield and not to allow itself to lose sight of how innovation and culture change needs long term commitment and high level support.
As I look at back at my time here I want to make mention of the people who without their help none of this would really have happened. First mention goes to Anna Rossvoll who when she was with Aberdeenshire Council was one of the first to visit the Consolarium. She and her team then became a hugely valuable partner in what we were doing. Many of the early ideas were given her full support with their first school tests in Aberdeenshire and it was she who came up with the idea of putting Nintendogs in to a P1 class. At this time I was introduced to a class teacher from Aberdeenshire called Kim Aplin who was the first person to take on board my Guitar Hero ideas. As a result of her continued work in the field of GBL Kim even joined me later as seconded member of my team! Other LA people who merit specific mention include Laura Compton, John Low and Margo Kerr from West Lothian, Sally Fulton, Margaret Cassidy and Joe Shaw from Stirling Council, Hamish Budge from Eilean Siar and Maggie Irving from Argyle and Bute. Great colleagues who really supported my ideas in the early days. Thank you and sorry if I missed anyone special from this list.
I'd also like to thank Graham Brown Martin for the invites to speak at the Handheld Learning and Game Based Learning Conferences in London. He gave us a great platform to share our work and to promote our ideas, Some of our Spotlight Scotland sessions were really memorable! Great to be part of that. Thank you.
Lastly I'd like to thank Brian McLaren, Brian Clark, Charlie Love and Ollie Bray who were just simply superb members of my team and who really helped to raise the profile of our work and tried to effect change in classrooms across Scotland. Thank you.
Ach well, it was good while it lasted but now it's time to move on... it's been quite an experience but I look forward to the future knowing that there are so many people in education who are prepared to continually grow their practice, take on board new ideas and use a range of digital tools that can allow learning to be situated within culturally relevant contexts that offer challenge, demand and appeal for learners. It's great to be part of that and to be a colleague to so many of them.
During the middle of last week I found myself in a Twitter discussion about the word failure. When speaking about the development and evolution of the use of tablet devices by teachers in his school one of my Twitter contacts commented that he thought that teachers should get hands on devices and fail first. You can follow the thread of that discussion to see how the conversation developed but the nub of my argument was that the word failure is imbued with negative connotations and is a term that can be oppressive, constricting and an enemy to creative thought and action. It belongs to a culture of externally imposed values and expectations, a culture that I believe is one that we as learners are socialised into as we engage with and progress through the formal world of schooling.
Tbe main factor that underpins this belief is based on the observations that I have made over the years when watching children learn - independent of adult intervention - when playing computer games. As the failure discussion ensued on Twitter last week I couldn't help thinking of the world that my two daughters had been making in Minecraft on their Xbox360 that evening. Now, my girls are 9 and 10 and I have never really shown them how to play any of the computer games that they've had over the years and from Nintendogs, to Lord of the Rings, to Little Big Planet they have worked things out for themselves with no intervention from the more skilled and knowledgeable (I think) adult in the house! The same is true of Minecraft and the world they had created with its Redstone roller-coaster, the creeper traps and the flushing toilets in every room of their glass and gold Minecraft palace were testament to that. I have left them to it very much over the past months of Minecraft mania in my house...
How have they managed to learn so much? Where did they learn all this stuff?! They are learning from the support materials built in to games, from their peers and most definitley from YouTube -that's where. I have seen my girls collaborate and work as a team with one of them watching Minecraft Tutorials and giving the instructions to the other who is in world. Their friends have been round and YouTube is on. They learn in this flattened world of collegiate creativity and never think of failure, never! This is a joyous experience and one that appears to me to show the learner in its most beautiful form: free, open, responsive, conversational, successful and confident.
A couple of years ago I gave a talk at the E-Assessment Conference at Dundee University (go to 12:15 for killer Guitar Hero solo) and the themes of intrinsic motivation, peer support, flattened hierarchies and built in support mechansims in games were explored then. I featured some videos I had made of my neighbour's son Jack who was rather handy at playing FIFA. He regularly thumped his dad and me at the game and so I asked him what he had done to get so good at it. It turned out that it was not just about practise but that he was also using the self-assessment tools that are built in to the game to identify what he was good at it but more importantly what he needed to improve on and then once this was identified he used the tools to self-improve. He was in control of his own learning - no requirement for dad to teach him.
Here is the first of two videos with Jack. What you'll see in this video is a example of how young learners/players are able to use the assessment and reporting mechanism within games to help identify and then address their development needs.
Assessment in Games: Promoting Learner Engagement from Derek Robertson on Vimeo.
Accompanying this first video is this one focusing on 'Progress and Achievement. Here we see a learner who is taking charge of his own progress by using the tools within a game environment -independent of the intervention of a qualified adult- to identify his development needs and to plot a path will that enable him to have the best chance of success.
Assessment in Games: Progress and achievement from Derek Robertson on Vimeo.
So where does failure fit, if it all, in the world of learning that young people situate themselves in? Is it a word that they use? Is failure a concept that they fear in the world of the computer game? My experience makes me question whether any of these questions can be answered with a yes...
Is it possibly the case that the concept of failure is one that has been socialised in to our young people by the formal settings that they are obliged to play a part in? By the systems they find themselves attached to and by the values of this system that are externally imposed by the qualified adults who know how to teach. By systems that require YouTube to be blocked...
Maybe Ivan Illich had a point in Deschooling Society when he argued concepts such as fear of failure helped create the conditions for an institutionalised value system to take hold and allow learnes to lose what they appear to possess naturally?
“Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting. Most people learn best by being "with it," yet school makes them identify their personal, cognitive growth with elaborate planning and manipulation.”
Maybe we as educators have lessons to learn from the way 'with it' young people learn so effectively in the meaningful, culturally relevant and hugely challenging worlds that computer games can offer. Maybe we need to take a step back from the established norm of thinking that learners need taught. Maybe, just maybe we can learn from them...they might even introduce some us to YouTube.
I have just returned from listening to the First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon give a talk about the plans her government has for raising attainment in Scottish schools. She talked passionately about her desire to address this attainment gap and the resultant poorer life prospects for so many of our children who grow up in areas of social deprivation and who fail to reach their full potential. A £100 million attainment fund has been proposed with the new position of Attainment Officers being identified as significant people to help drive this aim forward. All very promising indeed.
There were no finer accompanying details of these plans but the intention has my 100% support. We must address this attainment gap and ensure that the talents and abilities of all our children are nurtured and developed to their full potential.
As I listened to the talk it made me think back to one of my early projects using Nintendo DS and the game Dr Kawashima's Brain Training. At that time we were interested to see how a game such as this one (that had basic maths elements embedded in the game play) might impact on primary school children's mental maths abilities. However, we were even keener to see how this approach might impact on children in schools that were situated in Local Authority areas where their indicators of higher levels of social deprivation. Our subsequent research found that this indeed did have significant impact and as a result of this we found ourselves exploring game based learning and subsequently helping to change the discourse around the potential that commercial computer games might have on learning - and in doing so helping to create the conditions in which better outcomes for learners was happening.
We then found ourselves in Scotland at the head of a leading momentum in to the place, purpose and nature of games based learning. Much of the success of what we did and the unfortunate and disappointing demise of this Scottish success story was detailed here.
However, a month or so ago I discovered that all trace of the body of work that we, along with our Local Authority colleagues and the children and the parents created over the years was no longer available to be viewed. Gone, deleted from the Education Scotland site...a big fat 404 when searched for - erased from trace. Is it Year Zero at Education Scotland? So if indeed I wished to share what this practice and how the underpinning methodology we used and how it may be relevant to Nicola Sturgeon or Angela Constance's thinking about their Attainment gap plans then I can't do it via this site anymore. As the Proclaimers might say, Mario Kart no more, Professor Layton no more, Guitar Hero no more...Nintendogs no more.
I still have digital copies of all this material however it would be ethically wrong of me to post these on a YouTube site for example because those videoed only agreed for it to be shared on LTS/Education Scotland's digital channels.
So much of this work is significant in the role that it still plays in helping inform teachers about innovative uses of digital technology but more importantly it has a very valuable role to play in documenting the developing narrative of approaches to using digital tech in schools, in this case game based learning. Here for example is something from 1998 that is still online via NAACE's website. I still use this to help inform students about ideas and progress.
I inquired about the rationale that would explain this decision and was simply told that there had been a review of their online services and I was subsequently given a link to the Wayback Machine from 2007 to the very first page we published.
What are they thinking of at Education Scotland in doing this? They are the custodians of such material and they have a duty to understand, respect and value the role that they play in being part of the wider collegiate and connected digital world that helps continually inform our thinking and practice. What are they thinking of with such digital book burning?
No doubt Education Scotland will be central to taking forward this planned for Attainment Gap strategy. If they do then I suggest that a discussion about their long term thinking and appreciation of what they are involved in and the importance of their central role is fully recognised and established so that in the future they cannot simply decide to erase any future work from their digital estate as a result of an online review.
I have recently commenced a research project that aims to explore how the game Minecraft can be used to enhance and enrich learning in the primary school. I was inspired by a post by Dean Groom that talked about using consoles to access the game in classrooms and to mitigate against local authority firewalls. Having had a long history of doing this very thing in educational settings I thought that it was time to explore the use of Minecraft, via Xbox and PS3, in the primary school setting. I am working with 25 P.6/7 classes in 18 schools in Dundee. There was an amazing response from the schools in Dundee when the call for participation went out and I am only sorry that I didn't have enough consoles to go around every school that wanted to join the project. The games consoles came via the old Consolarium cupboard that sits with Education Scotland (thank you to them for agreeing to loan me the resources) as well as from an incubator research fund that I received from CECHR at the University of Dundee. An introductory evening for teachers was held in September where I explained the rationale behind the project and where my daughter acted as my Minecraft expert to demo how you played the game. She even had the pleasure of teaching her own teacher (who was there on the night) how to use the game and to help him and the other teachers begin to understand just why Minecraft could be a very valuable educational resource. Anyway, here is a blogpost, aimed at the learners, from my Glow account that gives more detail about the project:
Dundee City Council has partnered with the School of Education, Social Work and Community Education and the Department of Town Planning at the University of Dundee to explore and research the potential that the game Minecraft might bring to the life of learning in our P6/P7 classrooms. We have a number of Xboxes and PS3s with Minecraft installed and we will be asking participating schools - including yours - to let their pupils use these to reimagine, design and build in Minecraft just what they think Dundee waterfront might look like. (with the city texture pack as an extra to help you build your vision.) The people from 4J Studios in Dundee (where Minecraft for Xbox and Playstation is made) have already built it based on the exisiting plans. Have a look:??
What we want you to do in your classes and groups in your schools is to ha?ve a real think about what you think the new Waterfront in Dundee should look like. We don't want you to copy the exisiting design - we want your take on what they should be building down there at the front of the city. In doing so we want you to consider a number of factors including:
Over the course of the project people from the University of Dundee will visit the participating schools in order to get a picture of what is happening as you reimagine, design and build your vision of the waterfront.
The project will begin in October 2014 and will finish late March 2015. Your school will be invited to a showcase event at the University of Dundee at the end of the project to share your designs and to talk about the experience of participating in this initiative.
Show us what you can do...
I aim to share some perspectives and experiences as the project gathers momentum and as we begin to explore how teachers manage a resource such as this (with HDMI or not) in the class setting, how the children respond to the task, how they work together when building, if a purposeful context encourages intrinsic motivation to particpate in collaborative learning in Glow and what their attitude to learning within this culturally relevant context may be (not an exhaustive list!)
“Suddenly it’s Christmas right after Halloween forget about Thanksgiving it’s just a buffet inbetween!”
This line comes from a song by the brilliant and always entertaining Loudon Wainwright III and its sentiment of irritation towards the commercial creep that now owns all our yearly festivals is one that I am feeling more and more as I get older. But for me the commercial creep is made worse by the fact that there is also a silent form of cultural imperialism happening which is denaturing what was, as I recall, the truly Scottish festival of Hallowe’en and its associated traditions.
But now we have the pumpkin. We have Trick or Treat. We have families buying costumes for their kids. We have lost what Hallowe’en was to us as Scots and in that process we have swallowed the American Disneyfied commercially driven festival and allowed it to replace something that was ours.
I’ve noticed this year on year and have muttered my concerns to myself but last night what I saw in my local supermarket drove me to write a blogpost about this state of affairs!!! There it was – a Trick or Treat fest with a full aisle of Hallowe’en costumes and props, based on the horror movie genre, to purchase. Another spendathon. Not only that but food and drinks are all being labeled with Hallowe’en style packaging. Chi-ching, chi-ching, chi-ching! Have a look!
This may seem a trivial thing to have a rant about but I do feel that we have lost something here and I wonder what it says about us a people when we can so easily allow our own traditions to be denatured in this way. Imagine what we in Scotland would say if we were given the chance to run our own affairs!
When I was a boy Halloween meant two things: guising and a neep lantern. When Hallowe’en came around my friends and I would dress up in our dads’ old clothes and wear things like our grandads’ soft hats to ‘disguise’ ourselves. We would then go knocking on doors and ask, “Any Guisers” as our neighbours’ doors were opened. Generally this motley crew of kids dressed in oversized clothes would be shown in to the living rooms where we would then duly perform a song, recite a poem, do a magic trick or tell a few jokes. This was the deal – you had to do this and in return you were given money. It was all linked to the age-old idea that mischief was afoot and us youngsters were the harmless mischief-makers bringing a bit of mirth and levity to homes just as the dark nights began to roll in. We also carried our neep lanters (neep is the Scottish word for turnip). We would have spent ages carving out the inside of the solid neep before etching out a scary face that would be illuminated by candles. String would be tied to them and they would accompany the guisers as they marched around the neighbourhood. Even that stalwart of Scottish identity oor Wullie would proudly show off his neep lantern!
Now when Hallowe’en comes around we get loads of kids in their Karloff and Lugosi outfits knocking on the door screaming ‘Trick or Treat”. I hide my Victor Meldrewesque gripe as they come in and tell their joke and hand out their plastic Hallowe’en buckets to be filled with Treats! Bah, humbug! (oops, wrong sesaon)
Although I will be faced with vampires, zombies, werewolves, creepers and the occasional Frankenstein's monster on the 31st October I fear that I will still be most unsettled by the monster that Hallowe'en has become.
Last week my daughters were playing with their friends. As a group they were all working together to make a movie and their efforts were industrious, noisy and committed. I listened in on their chitter-chatter and I could hear them make the story up as they went along and as the story unfolded, and as great ideas sprung to mind, they shared and accommodated them and collectively created their masterpiece! At one point there was a disagreement and so I, being the skilled adult who knows better, intervened and suggested that they storyboard their movie and plan it in advance. I mean, that’s how we make movies isn’t it, that is the received/perceived wisdom from the educated educator who thinks they are skilled in such matters? The reaction from them was thought provoking. They told me, “No thanks, this is much better and loads more fun than all that planning stuff!” (at least that was the gist of their response!) Remember the context for all of this: school holidays, children out playing, freedom to act as children – they weren’t in school…
A few months back I was dragged to the cinema by my youngest daughter to see The Lego Movie. Now, this was something I wasn’t too pleased about however within ten minutes I was captivated by the absolute aesthetic beauty of the thing, it’s charisma and charm and its developing plot-line that had me totally hooked. The plotline saw the main character Emmet become 'the special' who was doing his utmost, and who seemed destined to, defeat the evil power of President Business whose dark intention was to gets his destructive Lego paws on the super weapon called the Kragle. In doing so President Business would rule the Lego world forever and ever! As the film roller-coasted to its climax it cut away from the animation to a real life scene - *Film spoiler alert* - that showed a young boy in the basement of his house playing with all the Lego characters and pieces that were featured in the movie…the plot line was all from the boys creative imagination as he played with the Lego figures. He had mashed up all the different Lego kits, ignoring the plans and instructions that came with them, and created his own wonderful creative story that just flowed and flowed from him. However, the Lego basement was the domain of his father and he had deemed the basement and the Lego to be out of bounds for his son! It was his Lego, it had been built, it wasn’t to be touched, the plans and the instructions had been followed – the pieces glued down… Keep out all ye who dare not follow the plan!!!
But, the boy is discovered in the basement by his dad! Here is their conversation:
I gave a gasp of joy and delight when I realised that the Kragle was the lid of the glue, the lid that would stop the plans and instructions from always setting the agenda, that would allow the conditions for wonderful stories and ideas to flourish and that would end the culture of things being glued down, plans and instructions being adhered to. “Put the lid on the glue President Business!” I exclaimed along with my daughter!
Put the lid on the glue. What a metaphor I thought for my experience and my ongoing reflective thinking as a teacher and educator. For years I have been influenced by my observations of children as they played computer games and as I did so I would always be impressed with how they displayed a natural ability to learn on their own and with others. These observations allowed me to lead a significant effort to promote the use of such child-centered contexts in formal educational settings however the lid of the glue, so to speak, was kept in the cupboard marked plans and instructions by some our very own President Business’ in Scotland with their mobilisation of bias agenda! Anyway, enough moaning about that and on to more important matters…
Such experiences where children show their innate ability to think and to learn without the qualified adult supervision that dominates our thinking about children and learning is continuing to make me rethink the role of a teacher and in particular our reliance on and almost uncritical adherence to a specific aspect of learning theory that is used to justify the teacher/ learner dynamic.
The teacher learner dynamic is one that appears to be heavily predicated on the social constructivist theory of Lev Vygotsky and in particular what he calls the Zone of Proximal development. In teacher education this is used to frame a theoretical underpinning that almost justifies the instruction dynamic to some extent. It argues that the ZPD is
the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers.
Now, in some cases I see this. The apprenticeship model is one that I fully appreciate and is one that would I feel allow itself to be informed by this particular theory by Vygotsky however I am ill at ease at using this to help inform and articulate my own thinking about children and learning particularly in view of how I have seen young children master the complex world of Nintendogs at age 5 or by what I see when I observe children learning together as they play Minecraft or even when they are making a movie in the summer holidays. It is generally the case that there isn’t someone who is the more skilled or experienced participant/leader. Yes there will always be a group dynamic but as far as I can see the children do tend to self-organise quite effectively without the intervention of a teacher who, for example, places them in roles in their ‘co-operative learning groups’. Hands up who wants to be time-keeper?! Yeah, me neither.
If Vygotsky were to play Minecraft for the first time what would he do? If he were to sit down with his own children for the first time and where neither of them were the more skilled or experienced how would they learn together, make progress and then reach the heady heights of a glass and gold palace with flushing toilets in every room with a creeper trap at the front door and a redstone circuited rollercoaster to take you up to your pad in the mountains!? How is it that children, very young children in so many cases make such progress and make sense of the complex environments in the world of games and in learning in various other contexts/domains without the adult intervention that we have somehow taken to be the common sense agreed norm? I am seriously beginning to question the way in which we refer to ZPD in teacher education and how we need to recognise, value and celebrate the children as learner a little more than we presently do.
In following and pinning our professional colours to the ZPD mast have we as educators lost sight of the child as a learner? Have we become too directive, managerial and controlling? Are we in real danger of being driven by timetables, uncritical acceptance of theoretical perspectives and the gluing down of learning opportunities to the detriment of the creative nature of the child?
The Lego Movie's theme song states that everything is awesome. I think our children are. Let's get that lid on the glue and enable the conditions is school to let them demonstrate just how awesome they really are.
One of the games that I have shared with colleagues and many other folks at conferences and professional development events is The Nightjar featuring Benedict Cumberbatch. I was hugely drawn to this due to the narrative driven and engaging context of the storyline but mainly because it was a game that was driven by what I could hear... Have a look at the trailer:
The idea of a game that is driven by sound and the players reliance only on what they hear makes one immediately think of accessibility for visually impaired gamers but it also made me think of how such an experience could introduce sighted game players to an experience that required that they use this sense alone in order to escape the clutches of the alien and safely make it to the Nightjar's escape pod. What opportunities there are again to get players to look at writing their own text driven games, and how they could possibly be brought to life via Garageband or Audacity. Just even switching the direction from left to right audio (panning) could be the spark to light that creative use of tech to impact on the desire to create and enhance the texts they create and how they can write for a digital audience.
This morning a BBC Click feature alerted me to the fact that Papa Sangre II has been released. One of my jobs for today is to download this and to see if I can escape the Garden of Death!
With an enhanced 3D stereoscopic engine it seems that this audio driven game experience is one that is getting better and better.
The creativity that is being shown by games developers is really quite breathtaking at times...what a wonderful context this world is, if appropriately used, to help situate learning and learners in purposeful, relevant and motivating challenges. Now, if I had any influence or way in which I could help drive transformative change within our education system I would have it that games design companies and creative digital people from our brilliant universities would have representatives on local and national bodies to not only help raise awareness of what is out there but to raise the bar of aspiration and expectation of what we can expect from our young people. Alas, maybe I'll have greater luck escaping from Papa Sangre's Garden of Death... #everoptimistic
Does anyone else remember Miley Cyrus when she was sweet little Hannah Montana? The witty girl with the double identity of famous country rock star and the ordinary schoolgirl... Well if you do you may like me by really struck by her recent and almost Black Swanesque metamorphoses into the iconoclastic new her. All traces of sweet little Hannah Montana have been obliterated by the new tattooed, twerking and all turned up Miley...
Hannah it seems is now a long since gone distant memory as Miley herself has grown into a young beautiful woman with a desire to be seen as a grown up artist with an identity and act to match. Now I could comment on her recent spats with Sinead O'Connor about how young women can prostitute themsleves to the industry in the way it has been suggested Miley did by wearing nothing but her birthday suit as she straddled a wrecking ball in her not so subtle metaphor laden video for the song of Wrecking Ball, but there is something else that I would like to comment on, something that is more insidious, complacent and destructive - in Miley's new world it seems we say 'hell yeah' to drugs...
I bought the .mp3 of her song We Can't stop. I think it is a great pop song...honestly! I was playing it on guitar and singing it with my daughters and noticed that we had to change one of the swear words at one point but then read the verse that said:
"And everyone in line in the bathroom
Trying to get a line in the bathroom
We all so turned up here
Getting turned up, yeah, yeah"
Getting a line in the bathroom...an obvious reference to drug use and one that I ended up having to carefully explain to my Hannah Montana adoring daughters what that was. Now I know Miley is all grown up now and that she must break free from the constraining old identity of Hannah and in some ways I am really happy for her but what ended up happening from that song lyric was a learning opportunity for us... I ended up sensitively explaining what cocaine was, where it came from and about some aspects of what it is like for families growing up in countries where Drug Lords and the horrendous levels of violence that we hear of impacting on family life in some parts of countries such as Colombia, Peru, Mexico in order to serve the habits of those partying and getting all turned up in Miley's grown up and sybaritic world.
What an opportunity and a doorway in to exploring the real world of drugs and drug taking... deconstructing the carefully crafted new image of a valuable commercial asset such as a pop star like Miley to reveal what they are actually saying and how the lifestyle being portrayed is in a word - ugly. How being part of the turned up world might get you years in jail as a drug trafficking mule, how corruption can become rife where you live , how fear can become a part of everyday life, how execution and murder can stop people from using their mouth to say what they want to.
I saw that a Colombian diplomat is currently giving a lecture at UK universities about how we should be Rethinking the War on Drugs. it seems that Colombia and other countries blighted with an indigenous drugs industry are looking at changes in policy to help address the challenges that they face in this regard:
"One of the main drivers behind this is that of course it is the Latin American countries which are drastically affected by a trade where the demand does not lie in their own countries, but largely in North America and Europe.
'These are countries which have been ravaged by this trade for decades and are now looking at how they can approach it in different ways. This talk will be a fascinating insight into an international debate that will have major repercussions in years to come."
Maybe it is the case that we begin to rethink the way we educate our young people about drugs and its impact on communities around the world? Maybe situating the learning in the cultural domains learners inhabit and by subverting these we can help challenge established media driven views? Maybe a more critical and empathetic understanding of global citizenship can play a small part in helping countries such as Colombia and Mexico meet their long term aspirations? Maybe there are ways in which we can raise the understanding and consciousness of our young people so that they can deconstruct the messages that are fed to them via culturally valued mega-stars such as Miley? Maybe we can create a culture in our schools that helps our young people develop a critical and informed world view that helps them recognise injustice and oppression and the way in which their actions can play any part in its perpetuation...
Maybe... meanwhile, I have two young daughters who are beginning to develop an awareness that the pop culture that envelopes their world is not as lovely and innocent as it might appear and that saddens me.
I have been spending some time playing Device 6, the new game from Simogo a studio I came across a while back when I found out about their last game Year Walk. This was a beautiful and surreal game that was unlike anything I had ever played before. Its sparse yet beautifully crafted aesthetic conveyed a sense of being lost in the wilderness that matched the narrative of the game. It was one of those games that took the game play experience in new and exciting direction. So far Device 6 has totally captured my imagination in the way that Year Walk did…have a look at the trailer and find out a bit more about the game here.
The nature of my job is such that every time I play a game I think of ways in which it can be used in an educational context, you know, how can these incredibly rich and engaging resources/contexts be used to capture learners’ imagination and then be used as the contextual hub from which intrinsically motivated learning and purposeful can take place. The developing nature of narrative driven games such as Device 6 is an area that I am really interested in and in the past I have tried to use a range of games that have a narrative thread to create contexts for rich learning that would allow writing, reading and a host of creative endeavours to come to life for learners. In 2007 I first tried this when the brilliant Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney came out for the DS. My thoughts were that such a game would encourage learners to engage with the game and then possibly be motivated enough to create their own court room type scenes that could be written or dramatized in a range of ways. Some of the schools that worked with me on this focused on characterization and wrote character descriptions for the main characters in this game. Here you can see my very first Teachmeet presentation in 2008 at BETT. It is called, ‘Objection! Games in the Classroom’ and it focus on Phoenix Wright as a learning resource.
I also did some interesting work with teachers and learners from Perth High School and Madras College (Glow login required) when we used Hotel Dusk Room 215 as the context that allowed us to explore the genre of Noir Novels. The game was given home, along with a DS, to a class of S2 learners for the Easter Holidays and they were asked to have a go at it over those two weeks. On return we found that every learner had played it and completed it! This then allowed the teacher to explore other Noire texts such as movies, books and radio broadcasts. The final one gave us the context in which learners could then write their own Noire style story inspired by Noire and mystery based radio broadcasts from the 1930s, 40s & 50s that featured characters such as The Shadow and Sam Spade as well as the stories from organisations such as The Molle Mystery Theatre. The pupils learned all about the principles and component parts of the Noir genre and used these to create their own broadcast ready audio files that dramatized their creative writing. I think that this context could work so well in schools when you consider that if learners wrote such stories and released them on a serialized basis through weekly podcast just think what this could do for situating writing within a context that has real purpose and audience. I attempted to practice what I preach when I made a ham-fisted effort at creating my own mystery style audio broadcast for an event I was presenting at last year:
Anyway back to Device 6. As devices such as iPads and Android tablets become more and more commonly found and used at the heart of learning in schools I really hope that we see a real shift from using them to carry out traditional type of activities and move towards using them in such a way that maximizes their potential. It would be great to see a continuation of the type of work the Scottish Government recently started that looked at the pulling together of a picture of the developing narrative of the use of tablet devices in schools, a narrative that would hoepfully see such resources being used to enhance and enrcih learning. There is great potential in using apps such as Device 6 to create the context that can encourage learners to write for themselves and for an audience - a global one at that, hey, you could even get them to write their own stories inspired by Device 6 using Inkle. So so much we could do here…
If anyone is using Device 6 ort any other narrative driven computer game to encourage literacy development in their school please let me know what you are doing.
We spent our summer holidays on the beautiful island of Islay this year. We were so lucky with the weather and as a result much of our week there was spent on the beautiful Kilchoman Beach at Machir Bay. This stunning beach with its untouched sands and incessantly crashing Atlantic Ocean waves was virtually deserted with the next stop West being America!
I interviewed my youngest daughter in the surf of the beach as she and her sister filled their empty plastic bottles with water from the Atlantic Ocean. Have a listen to our chat to capture a mental image of the waves and just how incredibly beautiful this place was:
As a result of this experience we had a subsequent chat about oceans and seas and continents and countries and the creatures that lurked beneath the waves. I really think that opportunities such as
If you want to get involved in this and send water to the exhibition from seas as distant as the Dead, Red, Baltic or Caspian Sea or a s close as the North Sea or Atlantic Ocean then check out the All the Seas details on the Fruitmarket gallery's website to get the submission details, BUT if you are at school in Scotland then email your details to the learncat@educationscotland.gov.uk and will be sent a special label to attach to your bottle of water to show that you learned about Tania Kovats through Glow with The Fruitmarket Gallery.
It would be great to see this exhibiton being supported and also for Scottish teachers and families to get involved with the Glow aspect of things. You can read more about All the Seas and Glow here.
Tomorrow is my last day working at Education Scotland. I have worked under this banner for the past two years but previous to that and prior to Government restructuring it was with Learning and Teaching Scotland that I earned my crust! This working relationship began in August 2006 when I left my post as a Lecturer at the University of Dundee and accepted a seconded post at LTS as National Development Officer for Game Based Learning, with the success of that seconded post leading to a permanent role from 2008 until now. Now, I am reversing that move as I head back to Dundee University to rejoin the Lecturing and Research teams in August.
At the heart of what I did and what I always do was a desire to create contexts that will impact on better outcomes for learners and it was with this in mind that I took to the floor to speak to the SICTDG key contacts in December 2006. In a 15 minute slot, I shared with them my developing thoughts and theoretical perspective on the purpose, nature and potential of game based learning and then invited them to come to the Consolarium - a space I ambitiously named the Scottish Centre for Games and Learning - to play with and learn about games and and to partner me in some GBL initiatives that I had planned. The response was a mixed one with some colleagues finding the thought of GBL quite an amusing one and others concerned that this was simply a frivolous waste of taxpayers money. Nevertheless, this experience and opportunity was a valuable one because very soon some real notes of interest came my way and before long I had to get the biscuit tin full of tasty things for visitors to scoff as I prepared for the series of visits to the Consolarium from Scottish and international educators - visits that didn't stop until the Consolarium had to close its doors in 2011.
Some of what we did includes:
It was not always an easy job trying to convince people that GBL was a good idea and it is fair to say that the occasional media swipe and a disappointingly placed FOI did unnerve those who maybe should have believed in me and my team a bit more than they did. The creation of Education Scotland in 2011 and all that that entailed meant that the Consolarium space was no longer available, the team was disbanded and the funding stopped. Nevertheless, Scottish Education has shown that it has the capacity to take informed risk and that it is not afraid to explore innovative ideas and practice with digital technology. Maybe it just needs to be wary of the inexorable, glacial march of the habitus of education and the destructive power that this can wield and not to allow itself to lose sight of how innovation and culture change needs long term commitment and high level support.
As I look at back at my time here I want to make mention of the people who without their help none of this would really have happened. First mention goes to Anna Rossvoll who when she was with Aberdeenshire Council was one of the first to visit the Consolarium. She and her team then became a hugely valuable partner in what we were doing. Many of the early ideas were given her full support with their first school tests in Aberdeenshire and it was she who came up with the idea of putting Nintendogs in to a P1 class. At this time I was introduced to a class teacher from Aberdeenshire called Kim Aplin who was the first person to take on board my Guitar Hero ideas. As a result of her continued work in the field of GBL Kim even joined me later as seconded member of my team! Other LA people who merit specific mention include Laura Compton, John Low and Margo Kerr from West Lothian, Sally Fulton, Margaret Cassidy and Joe Shaw from Stirling Council, Hamish Budge from Eilean Siar and Maggie Irving from Argyle and Bute. Great colleagues who really supported my ideas in the early days. Thank you and sorry if I missed anyone special from this list.
I'd also like to thank Graham Brown Martin for the invites to speak at the Handheld Learning and Game Based Learning Conferences in London. He gave us a great platform to share our work and to promote our ideas, Some of our Spotlight Scotland sessions were really memorable! Great to be part of that. Thank you.
Lastly I'd like to thank Brian McLaren, Brian Clark, Charlie Love and Ollie Bray who were just simply superb members of my team and who really helped to raise the profile of our work and tried to effect change in classrooms across Scotland. Thank you.
Ach well, it was good while it lasted but now it's time to move on... it's been quite an experience but I look forward to the future knowing that there are so many people in education who are prepared to continually grow their practice, take on board new ideas and use a range of digital tools that can allow learning to be situated within culturally relevant contexts that offer challenge, demand and appeal for learners. It's great to be part of that and to be a colleague to so many of them.
During the middle of last week I found myself in a Twitter discussion about the word failure. When speaking about the development and evolution of the use of tablet devices by teachers in his school one of my Twitter contacts commented that he thought that teachers should get hands on devices and fail first. You can follow the thread of that discussion to see how the conversation developed but the nub of my argument was that the word failure is imbued with negative connotations and is a term that can be oppressive, constricting and an enemy to creative thought and action. It belongs to a culture of externally imposed values and expectations, a culture that I believe is one that we as learners are socialised into as we engage with and progress through the formal world of schooling.
Tbe main factor that underpins this belief is based on the observations that I have made over the years when watching children learn - independent of adult intervention - when playing computer games. As the failure discussion ensued on Twitter last week I couldn't help thinking of the world that my two daughters had been making in Minecraft on their Xbox360 that evening. Now, my girls are 9 and 10 and I have never really shown them how to play any of the computer games that they've had over the years and from Nintendogs, to Lord of the Rings, to Little Big Planet they have worked things out for themselves with no intervention from the more skilled and knowledgeable (I think) adult in the house! The same is true of Minecraft and the world they had created with its Redstone roller-coaster, the creeper traps and the flushing toilets in every room of their glass and gold Minecraft palace were testament to that. I have left them to it very much over the past months of Minecraft mania in my house...
How have they managed to learn so much? Where did they learn all this stuff?! They are learning from the support materials built in to games, from their peers and most definitley from YouTube -that's where. I have seen my girls collaborate and work as a team with one of them watching Minecraft Tutorials and giving the instructions to the other who is in world. Their friends have been round and YouTube is on. They learn in this flattened world of collegiate creativity and never think of failure, never! This is a joyous experience and one that appears to me to show the learner in its most beautiful form: free, open, responsive, conversational, successful and confident.
A couple of years ago I gave a talk at the E-Assessment Conference at Dundee University (go to 12:15 for killer Guitar Hero solo) and the themes of intrinsic motivation, peer support, flattened hierarchies and built in support mechansims in games were explored then. I featured some videos I had made of my neighbour's son Jack who was rather handy at playing FIFA. He regularly thumped his dad and me at the game and so I asked him what he had done to get so good at it. It turned out that it was not just about practise but that he was also using the self-assessment tools that are built in to the game to identify what he was good at it but more importantly what he needed to improve on and then once this was identified he used the tools to self-improve. He was in control of his own learning - no requirement for dad to teach him.
Here is the first of two videos with Jack. What you'll see in this video is a example of how young learners/players are able to use the assessment and reporting mechanism within games to help identify and then address their development needs.
Assessment in Games: Promoting Learner Engagement from Derek Robertson on Vimeo.
Accompanying this first video is this one focusing on 'Progress and Achievement. Here we see a learner who is taking charge of his own progress by using the tools within a game environment -independent of the intervention of a qualified adult- to identify his development needs and to plot a path will that enable him to have the best chance of success.
Assessment in Games: Progress and achievement from Derek Robertson on Vimeo.
So where does failure fit, if it all, in the world of learning that young people situate themselves in? Is it a word that they use? Is failure a concept that they fear in the world of the computer game? My experience makes me question whether any of these questions can be answered with a yes...
Is it possibly the case that the concept of failure is one that has been socialised in to our young people by the formal settings that they are obliged to play a part in? By the systems they find themselves attached to and by the values of this system that are externally imposed by the qualified adults who know how to teach. By systems that require YouTube to be blocked...
Maybe Ivan Illich had a point in Deschooling Society when he argued concepts such as fear of failure helped create the conditions for an institutionalised value system to take hold and allow learnes to lose what they appear to possess naturally?
“Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting. Most people learn best by being "with it," yet school makes them identify their personal, cognitive growth with elaborate planning and manipulation.”
Maybe we as educators have lessons to learn from the way 'with it' young people learn so effectively in the meaningful, culturally relevant and hugely challenging worlds that computer games can offer. Maybe we need to take a step back from the established norm of thinking that learners need taught. Maybe, just maybe we can learn from them...they might even introduce some us to YouTube.
I have just returned from listening to the First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon give a talk about the plans her government has for raising attainment in Scottish schools. She talked passionately about her desire to address this attainment gap and the resultant poorer life prospects for so many of our children who grow up in areas of social deprivation and who fail to reach their full potential. A £100 million attainment fund has been proposed with the new position of Attainment Officers being identified as significant people to help drive this aim forward. All very promising indeed.
There were no finer accompanying details of these plans but the intention has my 100% support. We must address this attainment gap and ensure that the talents and abilities of all our children are nurtured and developed to their full potential.
As I listened to the talk it made me think back to one of my early projects using Nintendo DS and the game Dr Kawashima's Brain Training. At that time we were interested to see how a game such as this one (that had basic maths elements embedded in the game play) might impact on primary school children's mental maths abilities. However, we were even keener to see how this approach might impact on children in schools that were situated in Local Authority areas where their indicators of higher levels of social deprivation. Our subsequent research found that this indeed did have significant impact and as a result of this we found ourselves exploring game based learning and subsequently helping to change the discourse around the potential that commercial computer games might have on learning - and in doing so helping to create the conditions in which better outcomes for learners was happening.
We then found ourselves in Scotland at the head of a leading momentum in to the place, purpose and nature of games based learning. Much of the success of what we did and the unfortunate and disappointing demise of this Scottish success story was detailed here.
However, a month or so ago I discovered that all trace of the body of work that we, along with our Local Authority colleagues and the children and the parents created over the years was no longer available to be viewed. Gone, deleted from the Education Scotland site...a big fat 404 when searched for - erased from trace. Is it Year Zero at Education Scotland? So if indeed I wished to share what this practice and how the underpinning methodology we used and how it may be relevant to Nicola Sturgeon or Angela Constance's thinking about their Attainment gap plans then I can't do it via this site anymore. As the Proclaimers might say, Mario Kart no more, Professor Layton no more, Guitar Hero no more...Nintendogs no more.
I still have digital copies of all this material however it would be ethically wrong of me to post these on a YouTube site for example because those videoed only agreed for it to be shared on LTS/Education Scotland's digital channels.
So much of this work is significant in the role that it still plays in helping inform teachers about innovative uses of digital technology but more importantly it has a very valuable role to play in documenting the developing narrative of approaches to using digital tech in schools, in this case game based learning. Here for example is something from 1998 that is still online via NAACE's website. I still use this to help inform students about ideas and progress.
I inquired about the rationale that would explain this decision and was simply told that there had been a review of their online services and I was subsequently given a link to the Wayback Machine from 2007 to the very first page we published.
What are they thinking of at Education Scotland in doing this? They are the custodians of such material and they have a duty to understand, respect and value the role that they play in being part of the wider collegiate and connected digital world that helps continually inform our thinking and practice. What are they thinking of with such digital book burning?
No doubt Education Scotland will be central to taking forward this planned for Attainment Gap strategy. If they do then I suggest that a discussion about their long term thinking and appreciation of what they are involved in and the importance of their central role is fully recognised and established so that in the future they cannot simply decide to erase any future work from their digital estate as a result of an online review.
I have recently commenced a research project that aims to explore how the game Minecraft can be used to enhance and enrich learning in the primary school. I was inspired by a post by Dean Groom that talked about using consoles to access the game in classrooms and to mitigate against local authority firewalls. Having had a long history of doing this very thing in educational settings I thought that it was time to explore the use of Minecraft, via Xbox and PS3, in the primary school setting. I am working with 25 P.6/7 classes in 18 schools in Dundee. There was an amazing response from the schools in Dundee when the call for participation went out and I am only sorry that I didn't have enough consoles to go around every school that wanted to join the project. The games consoles came via the old Consolarium cupboard that sits with Education Scotland (thank you to them for agreeing to loan me the resources) as well as from an incubator research fund that I received from CECHR at the University of Dundee. An introductory evening for teachers was held in September where I explained the rationale behind the project and where my daughter acted as my Minecraft expert to demo how you played the game. She even had the pleasure of teaching her own teacher (who was there on the night) how to use the game and to help him and the other teachers begin to understand just why Minecraft could be a very valuable educational resource. Anyway, here is a blogpost, aimed at the learners, from my Glow account that gives more detail about the project:
Dundee City Council has partnered with the School of Education, Social Work and Community Education and the Department of Town Planning at the University of Dundee to explore and research the potential that the game Minecraft might bring to the life of learning in our P6/P7 classrooms. We have a number of Xboxes and PS3s with Minecraft installed and we will be asking participating schools - including yours - to let their pupils use these to reimagine, design and build in Minecraft just what they think Dundee waterfront might look like. (with the city texture pack as an extra to help you build your vision.) The people from 4J Studios in Dundee (where Minecraft for Xbox and Playstation is made) have already built it based on the exisiting plans. Have a look:??
What we want you to do in your classes and groups in your schools is to ha?ve a real think about what you think the new Waterfront in Dundee should look like. We don't want you to copy the exisiting design - we want your take on what they should be building down there at the front of the city. In doing so we want you to consider a number of factors including:
Over the course of the project people from the University of Dundee will visit the participating schools in order to get a picture of what is happening as you reimagine, design and build your vision of the waterfront.
The project will begin in October 2014 and will finish late March 2015. Your school will be invited to a showcase event at the University of Dundee at the end of the project to share your designs and to talk about the experience of participating in this initiative.
Show us what you can do...
I aim to share some perspectives and experiences as the project gathers momentum and as we begin to explore how teachers manage a resource such as this (with HDMI or not) in the class setting, how the children respond to the task, how they work together when building, if a purposeful context encourages intrinsic motivation to particpate in collaborative learning in Glow and what their attitude to learning within this culturally relevant context may be (not an exhaustive list!)
“Suddenly it’s Christmas right after Halloween forget about Thanksgiving it’s just a buffet inbetween!”
This line comes from a song by the brilliant and always entertaining Loudon Wainwright III and its sentiment of irritation towards the commercial creep that now owns all our yearly festivals is one that I am feeling more and more as I get older. But for me the commercial creep is made worse by the fact that there is also a silent form of cultural imperialism happening which is denaturing what was, as I recall, the truly Scottish festival of Hallowe’en and its associated traditions.
But now we have the pumpkin. We have Trick or Treat. We have families buying costumes for their kids. We have lost what Hallowe’en was to us as Scots and in that process we have swallowed the American Disneyfied commercially driven festival and allowed it to replace something that was ours.
I’ve noticed this year on year and have muttered my concerns to myself but last night what I saw in my local supermarket drove me to write a blogpost about this state of affairs!!! There it was – a Trick or Treat fest with a full aisle of Hallowe’en costumes and props, based on the horror movie genre, to purchase. Another spendathon. Not only that but food and drinks are all being labeled with Hallowe’en style packaging. Chi-ching, chi-ching, chi-ching! Have a look!
This may seem a trivial thing to have a rant about but I do feel that we have lost something here and I wonder what it says about us a people when we can so easily allow our own traditions to be denatured in this way. Imagine what we in Scotland would say if we were given the chance to run our own affairs!
When I was a boy Halloween meant two things: guising and a neep lantern. When Hallowe’en came around my friends and I would dress up in our dads’ old clothes and wear things like our grandads’ soft hats to ‘disguise’ ourselves. We would then go knocking on doors and ask, “Any Guisers” as our neighbours’ doors were opened. Generally this motley crew of kids dressed in oversized clothes would be shown in to the living rooms where we would then duly perform a song, recite a poem, do a magic trick or tell a few jokes. This was the deal – you had to do this and in return you were given money. It was all linked to the age-old idea that mischief was afoot and us youngsters were the harmless mischief-makers bringing a bit of mirth and levity to homes just as the dark nights began to roll in. We also carried our neep lanters (neep is the Scottish word for turnip). We would have spent ages carving out the inside of the solid neep before etching out a scary face that would be illuminated by candles. String would be tied to them and they would accompany the guisers as they marched around the neighbourhood. Even that stalwart of Scottish identity oor Wullie would proudly show off his neep lantern!
Now when Hallowe’en comes around we get loads of kids in their Karloff and Lugosi outfits knocking on the door screaming ‘Trick or Treat”. I hide my Victor Meldrewesque gripe as they come in and tell their joke and hand out their plastic Hallowe’en buckets to be filled with Treats! Bah, humbug! (oops, wrong sesaon)
Although I will be faced with vampires, zombies, werewolves, creepers and the occasional Frankenstein's monster on the 31st October I fear that I will still be most unsettled by the monster that Hallowe'en has become.
Last week my daughters were playing with their friends. As a group they were all working together to make a movie and their efforts were industrious, noisy and committed. I listened in on their chitter-chatter and I could hear them make the story up as they went along and as the story unfolded, and as great ideas sprung to mind, they shared and accommodated them and collectively created their masterpiece! At one point there was a disagreement and so I, being the skilled adult who knows better, intervened and suggested that they storyboard their movie and plan it in advance. I mean, that’s how we make movies isn’t it, that is the received/perceived wisdom from the educated educator who thinks they are skilled in such matters? The reaction from them was thought provoking. They told me, “No thanks, this is much better and loads more fun than all that planning stuff!” (at least that was the gist of their response!) Remember the context for all of this: school holidays, children out playing, freedom to act as children – they weren’t in school…
A few months back I was dragged to the cinema by my youngest daughter to see The Lego Movie. Now, this was something I wasn’t too pleased about however within ten minutes I was captivated by the absolute aesthetic beauty of the thing, it’s charisma and charm and its developing plot-line that had me totally hooked. The plotline saw the main character Emmet become 'the special' who was doing his utmost, and who seemed destined to, defeat the evil power of President Business whose dark intention was to gets his destructive Lego paws on the super weapon called the Kragle. In doing so President Business would rule the Lego world forever and ever! As the film roller-coasted to its climax it cut away from the animation to a real life scene - *Film spoiler alert* - that showed a young boy in the basement of his house playing with all the Lego characters and pieces that were featured in the movie…the plot line was all from the boys creative imagination as he played with the Lego figures. He had mashed up all the different Lego kits, ignoring the plans and instructions that came with them, and created his own wonderful creative story that just flowed and flowed from him. However, the Lego basement was the domain of his father and he had deemed the basement and the Lego to be out of bounds for his son! It was his Lego, it had been built, it wasn’t to be touched, the plans and the instructions had been followed – the pieces glued down… Keep out all ye who dare not follow the plan!!!
But, the boy is discovered in the basement by his dad! Here is their conversation:
I gave a gasp of joy and delight when I realised that the Kragle was the lid of the glue, the lid that would stop the plans and instructions from always setting the agenda, that would allow the conditions for wonderful stories and ideas to flourish and that would end the culture of things being glued down, plans and instructions being adhered to. “Put the lid on the glue President Business!” I exclaimed along with my daughter!
Put the lid on the glue. What a metaphor I thought for my experience and my ongoing reflective thinking as a teacher and educator. For years I have been influenced by my observations of children as they played computer games and as I did so I would always be impressed with how they displayed a natural ability to learn on their own and with others. These observations allowed me to lead a significant effort to promote the use of such child-centered contexts in formal educational settings however the lid of the glue, so to speak, was kept in the cupboard marked plans and instructions by some our very own President Business’ in Scotland with their mobilisation of bias agenda! Anyway, enough moaning about that and on to more important matters…
Such experiences where children show their innate ability to think and to learn without the qualified adult supervision that dominates our thinking about children and learning is continuing to make me rethink the role of a teacher and in particular our reliance on and almost uncritical adherence to a specific aspect of learning theory that is used to justify the teacher/ learner dynamic.
The teacher learner dynamic is one that appears to be heavily predicated on the social constructivist theory of Lev Vygotsky and in particular what he calls the Zone of Proximal development. In teacher education this is used to frame a theoretical underpinning that almost justifies the instruction dynamic to some extent. It argues that the ZPD is
the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers.
Now, in some cases I see this. The apprenticeship model is one that I fully appreciate and is one that would I feel allow itself to be informed by this particular theory by Vygotsky however I am ill at ease at using this to help inform and articulate my own thinking about children and learning particularly in view of how I have seen young children master the complex world of Nintendogs at age 5 or by what I see when I observe children learning together as they play Minecraft or even when they are making a movie in the summer holidays. It is generally the case that there isn’t someone who is the more skilled or experienced participant/leader. Yes there will always be a group dynamic but as far as I can see the children do tend to self-organise quite effectively without the intervention of a teacher who, for example, places them in roles in their ‘co-operative learning groups’. Hands up who wants to be time-keeper?! Yeah, me neither.
If Vygotsky were to play Minecraft for the first time what would he do? If he were to sit down with his own children for the first time and where neither of them were the more skilled or experienced how would they learn together, make progress and then reach the heady heights of a glass and gold palace with flushing toilets in every room with a creeper trap at the front door and a redstone circuited rollercoaster to take you up to your pad in the mountains!? How is it that children, very young children in so many cases make such progress and make sense of the complex environments in the world of games and in learning in various other contexts/domains without the adult intervention that we have somehow taken to be the common sense agreed norm? I am seriously beginning to question the way in which we refer to ZPD in teacher education and how we need to recognise, value and celebrate the children as learner a little more than we presently do.
In following and pinning our professional colours to the ZPD mast have we as educators lost sight of the child as a learner? Have we become too directive, managerial and controlling? Are we in real danger of being driven by timetables, uncritical acceptance of theoretical perspectives and the gluing down of learning opportunities to the detriment of the creative nature of the child?
The Lego Movie's theme song states that everything is awesome. I think our children are. Let's get that lid on the glue and enable the conditions is school to let them demonstrate just how awesome they really are.
One of the games that I have shared with colleagues and many other folks at conferences and professional development events is The Nightjar featuring Benedict Cumberbatch. I was hugely drawn to this due to the narrative driven and engaging context of the storyline but mainly because it was a game that was driven by what I could hear... Have a look at the trailer:
The idea of a game that is driven by sound and the players reliance only on what they hear makes one immediately think of accessibility for visually impaired gamers but it also made me think of how such an experience could introduce sighted game players to an experience that required that they use this sense alone in order to escape the clutches of the alien and safely make it to the Nightjar's escape pod. What opportunities there are again to get players to look at writing their own text driven games, and how they could possibly be brought to life via Garageband or Audacity. Just even switching the direction from left to right audio (panning) could be the spark to light that creative use of tech to impact on the desire to create and enhance the texts they create and how they can write for a digital audience.
This morning a BBC Click feature alerted me to the fact that Papa Sangre II has been released. One of my jobs for today is to download this and to see if I can escape the Garden of Death!
With an enhanced 3D stereoscopic engine it seems that this audio driven game experience is one that is getting better and better.
The creativity that is being shown by games developers is really quite breathtaking at times...what a wonderful context this world is, if appropriately used, to help situate learning and learners in purposeful, relevant and motivating challenges. Now, if I had any influence or way in which I could help drive transformative change within our education system I would have it that games design companies and creative digital people from our brilliant universities would have representatives on local and national bodies to not only help raise awareness of what is out there but to raise the bar of aspiration and expectation of what we can expect from our young people. Alas, maybe I'll have greater luck escaping from Papa Sangre's Garden of Death... #everoptimistic