From the Guardian:

BBC news journalists have been told to use social media as a primary source of information by Peter Horrocks, the new director of BBC Global News who took over last week. He said it was important for editorial staff to make better use of social media and become more collaborative in producing stories.

"This isn't just a kind of fad from someone who's an enthusiast of technology. I'm afraid you're not doing your job if you can't do those things. It's not discretionary", he is quoted as saying in the BBC in-house weekly Ariel.

Our country's spies and spooks are also under pressure to learn how to use, publish and research on these tools, too. Presumably that means that schools teaching youngsters English, politics, geography and history are doing them a disservice if they don't teach them how to write for the real world, social networks and all. What's your school doing to teach writing and research in the real world, as arguably the world's greatest broadcaster and news provider sees it?

Pic from Luc

This Wednesday, April 21, I'll be hosting the second of my GETinsight Office Hours, this time taking some of the inspiration from Game-Based Learning Conference in London and exploring how leaders might approach supporting colleagues in schools in some of the most exciting learning going on these days. The session is at 12 noon/PST; 3:00 p.m./EST; 8:00 p.m. GMT), and you should register your interest beforehand.

Why bother?

The last event we had was small and beautifully formed - and the participants got a great deal out of it, me included. The discussion is of a high level, with people informed from their personal experience or perhaps just popping in for the first time on a particular subject, using my blog post as a starting block.

• Merlin John, journalist, said: Great start and very important messages which is why there must be more people here
• David Noble, an inspiring teacher in Scotland: in terms of social media that was new to me, and GLOBAL!
• Tom Barrett, Depute Head Teacher/Principal in an elementary school: Since taking part in #GETideas session with @ewanmcintosh I've been reflecting further on how my leadership role will change in next few wks

What time?

If you're wanting some East coast US lunchtime professional development, some after-school discussion on the East Coast, or post-dinner rants in the UK and elsewhere in Europe, please join us to share your own strategies, findings, great stories from the classroom, and importantly let us know what the barriers to innovation in your classroom might be and what leaders could do to make more game-based learning happen.

How do I join in?

Register your interest now. This takes only a couple of minutes. At the time of the event make sure that you are near a mobile or landline telephone, as this is as hi-tech as things need to be - you'll be called back so you can take part and pose your questions to me and other participants. The computer will let you see the chat and any web links participants share.

Try to join the chat a few minutes before the conference starts and make sure you share your name and location with me in the chatroom so that I can bring you in on the discussion.

Hope to see you there!

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David Randall's epic journey from Italy back home to England worked where thousands have failed because he believed in doing two things:

There is no moral to this story other than this: keep moving in the right direction and talk to people.

In the last three days of traveling the country the slow way, in 19th Century transport where my 20th Century wings have been forced to nest-down at sea level, I've found that the transport is not the only thing that has changed. People have talked more to each other than they ever do, stone-faced in airport departure lounges, sharpening their elbows to get to the boarding gate before anyone else, claiming under-threes as their own so that they can jump the queue and get a precious aisle-window seat.

When people travel by train when they didn't expect to, en masse, something happens to their relationship with each other.

When we travel slow, we have the opportunity to take it in, talk about the journey, for sure, but also discover that the woman next to you is part of a group of 30 over-70s taking the train from Aberdeen to London to perform their keep-fit dance routine at the Royal Albert Hall, something they do every five years, that the man in the aisle, who's been standing for three hours already and will be standing for three hours more, is trying to get home from the north of Scotland to his home in Brittany, because he's got a flight out of Nantes Sunday morning to head on his Easter vacation (and how little the oil industry actually looks after its employees when they're stuck at the end of their shift).

All this has got me thinking that I might start adopting (and encouraging others to adopt) a more 19th Century approach to collaborative working and communication. I already hold most business meetings in cafés, so I'm part way there. But they key is talking to random strangers sharing a similar experience in order that new connections can be made, stories shared.

But imagine if learning could learn to slow down a little. Fewer (or no) tests we have to meet (like unpredictable timetables and trains to new, uncharted destinations), and more talking to strangers who might be interesting, useful (or might not, and necessitate some diplomatic manoeuvrings onto the next conversation).

The last time this volcano erupted it kept going for two years. I'd have to change my business plan if it did, but I'd probably embrace the ash as a means to talk to more folk and learn something new. Would learning change its business plan, too?

Pic from Grapevine's Julia Staples.

Over the past four years it has become de rigeur for any educational conference to wheel in unsuspecting students for a day out with the 'groan ups', have them present their highly-rehearsed and impressive version of what they've been "doing" in class (occasionally they can even tell us what they learnt), and then wheel them away again with a nice lunch in the their tummies.

At BectaX's (Becta Exchange) event at the end of March we didn't wheel any students in the room (apart from one very welcome one, on "holiday", with a working dad-cum-babysitter ;-). The main criticism of the event thus far has nearly solely been on a perceived lack of 'listening' to young people.

But I reckon we're listening to their voices more intently and memorably than any "learner voice" event I've ever attended. It's just that we - teachers and students together - have never really been very good at it, or doing anything much with what we find out from each other.

Having student's voices recorded, online and for some period of time, allows us to digest, reflect and follow up in a way that show and tells just do not afford. This is a task we're in the middle of doing in a quick and dirty way. Over the coming months we'll glean more detail, I hope, and hope that Becta might act on some of the gems hidden in there.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of having learners in situe at an event?

Having real live learners at an event allows a small number of the attendees present to communicate with them at breaks, intervals and question and answer sessions. Having them on Twitter allows the adults in the room to have a conversation at any time, on any subject, if the adults and the learners want to. We blow apart the constraints of the physical and open up the infinity of online conversation. Better still, we keep that conversation or that virtual talk and can come back to the bits we didn't see, hear or pay attention to the first time around.

There is one huge advantage of having students visible in the front row, and that is that anyone delivering a talk or talking on a panel is constantly reminded of the audience whom they are addressing - a few points along the way, myself included, we either forgot about this or found it too hard to take truly complex issues and "do a Newsround" on it, kiddifying the language so that it can be understood by all.

That said, BectaX was about the panel sessions and keynote speaker least of all - it was all about the attendees, virtual and physical, and their backchannel. That's why we invited the people we did; that's why there was such a huge online debate as well as the face-to-face debate. If some of the physical sessions were best received in the hall and not at all engaging down a video link, that's not too much of a loss, frankly, particularly when the backchannel itself was where the action took place.


Why did people feel they weren't hearing learner voice (or being heard)?

This is where, if you're in the same room as the people you're talking with, I'm sure one has the distinct impression that everyone is listening intently. You'd be right. Where you're virtually communicating, through Twitter, there's no guarantee, no intent gaze from the audience, no smiles or nods. It's much harder to see a room full of people listening to you without these cues.

Most people communicating on the backchannels at BectaX were not receiving overt cues that people were listening to them. They might see their thoughts retweeted or perhaps rephrased further down the line. It was relatively rare to see a back-and-forth conversation between anyone.

Perhaps, then, when we're dealing with online "listening" skills with learners and with adults in an intense one-day conversation mode. Perhaps we need some kind of way of showing that "virtual hearing and listening", and thumbs up, thumbs down isn't going to cut it. We tried to show 'listening' in a kind of "thumbs up" way by prompting schools to retweet the comments of other schools; doing this made the original comment show on a large map in the main hall which itself made conference attendees take note, laugh, prompt change on the panel (above). But it was a first step, rather than the ideal final means through which we have our attention grabbed by what virtual attendees are saying.

Dave Stacey again has some useful ideas about we could 'listen' and engage more intently:

"...for us the biggest improvement for any future event based on this model (and I really hope there are) would be other ways of integrating the conference and the schools – perhaps by the kind of voting that we tried to throw together, or perhaps by developing some kind of Etherpad style page on particular issues that would allow the schools to pull together their viewpoint."

Doing his kind of live, online survey or voting and having an in situe "Twitter panel moderator" somehow summarise the results of online action is a must for future events, and something I've done in the past for Online Information Conference, for example. It needs one person in situe at the conference doing nothing but virtual moderation to get the mental bandwidth that can make sense of big issues and condense them down for conference attendees both there in person and online.

What this comes down to, though, is how individuals, not some kind of amorphous abstract 'conference' or 'event', use the tools at our disposal to engage with learners. Whose job was it to 'listen' to learners during that one day conference and the subsequent weeks and months ahead? The conference organisers? Becta? Teachers? Learners themselves? It's certainly all of us, but there's a lot to be said for teachers and learners working out how to listen to each other in the longer term - I'm firmly from the school of thought that it is at least equally the responsibility of teachers, learners and parents to push things the way they want to see them going, as it is for policy units and politicians.

During the day we made a significant effort to keep the content, activity and long line of conversation that we had hoped to set out on at the beginning of the day while also changing, adding to proceedings to highlight more of the learner voice, especially for those not engaging both in person and with a laptop or blackberry backchannel. I think these suggestions are totally right on many levels, and that's why we made the changes we did.


What are the advantages of keeping the students in their own place of learning?
I also think that, in the age of "wheel in the students to share their story" we increasingly see at education conferences, we're overlooking the power and potential of not 'hearing' students literally, but rather hearing them digitally and delayed, leaving them thinking time on their own patch and then hearing back a self-curated, and slightly delayed version.

Why do students need this time to reflect? Because most people, kids or adults, need that time.

Many people at the BectaX event were kind enough to thank me for my live curation of tweets coming in at 275-per-hour, the live conversation of digital media industry leaders and educators, the questions from the audience in-house and online, and the messages coming live from 14 schools around the country at about 10 per minute.

It's a head-spinning job, and one I love to do. But it's not for everyone, and is something you learn from doing it very often, day-to-day. And, as I experienced for five minutes or so at the end of the day, you feel very much "out there", "in the nude" almost when you lose track of the multiple conversations going on.

Most of us, especially some of the younger kids with whom we were engaging, find it tricky to manage these multiple conversations, particularly when the subject matter is so dense and complex. It's one thing to be on MSN chatting about the telly while doing one's homework and playing a game, but it's quite another with the more complex mix of issues, people known and unknown to us, people of different ages and industries and biases as us, who we were attempting to bind at BectaX. We all need time to think and reflect - to suggest otherwise is disingenuous.

A national conference having an effect in a school's own environment

At BectaX there were discussions we were not hearing in the auditorium or online, discussions taking place in classrooms across the country before digital scribes communicated their thoughts to the world. Dave Stacey points to the fact the conversations in his classroom quickly turned to what the implications of the panel discussions at the London conference might be for their own practice in school:

"One of the real successes for us was some of the school specific conversations that spun out from the event. In particular we got some great ideas from the students about how we should be teaching e-safety (it should be much more embedded in our PSE programme) and some interesting feedback on some ideas for future developments. So much so, we’re planning on keeping this group of students together as an advisory board to the ICT strategy group. It was also great to see so many members of the school management team pop in throughout the day. It showed off our students in the very best light, and showed how important to the school the whole issues of technology in schools is."

There was, in effect, real learning going on, not just learners who had learnt-by-rote their heart-warming spiel and were now presenting their pre-crafted view of the past learning to a group of admiring educators and teary-eyed romantics from the media industry. We were hearing stuff that was rough around the edges, genuinely revealing some truths around what students think of their learning and technology's role in it.

So, while we only managed to overcome technical, time and scope-based challenges of literally seeing and hearing from the schools with Cramlington Learning Village at the end of the day, and I would love to have seen more of that, this event needed the headspace and mental bandwidth that having kids in a different room afforded.

Virtual means we have a fairer spread of geography

Having this virtual arrangement also allowed more schools from more geographical locations to take part than we would have managed otherwise - when you wheel in students for London-based conferences, then all too often they're from the South East of England or London itself. It's hardly representative of the range of issues seen in rural, suburban, Welsh, Scottish or island schooling. That said, I'm not sure we used that geography as much to our advantage as we could have done - another one for the little black book of improvements. Indeed, we could have saved time, money and energy of even more active educator and media participants in the same way.

Does all this listening lead to action?

I'm a bigger fan of action than talking, and the lasting thought I tried to leave attendees at the event with was that Becta, tied by its election bolt down on any action being taken, needed the people in the room to take forward the principles and actions that they thought needed tried out and built up. The workshop sessions set the tone for this action, and already

• Kristian has pulled the stops out in terms of engaging with the industry on making one of those workshopped ideas come to fruition.
• David Muir has started soliciting ideas for what Initial Teacher Education needs to start doing to prepare its students better, with a view to changing practice and policy perhaps in his own institution.
• Bev Humphrey sees herself as a small tug boat pulling that tanker down the river with her small actions as a librarian.
• Doug hopes, but doesn't say how, that he'll be able to contribute something to changing policy in his own way (you have the force, Doug, just tell us what you're going to do with it ;-).
• Dave Stacey and his students have shown what one spread of young people expect out of their school networks and policies: valuable inspiration for a larger national survey, perhaps, to see if the same is true nationally, and how it differs across age groups.
• Clumie thinks that academia will have to start fundamentally changing its theoretical understanding of how we learn (and teach) when we take on board the opportunities new media affords us.
• Dai says what the first panel easily concluded: there is a desire amongst many educators for a national steer on filtering that re-professionalises the teacher as someone who can be informed and trusted in terms of accessing the net. There is an equal desire amongst head teachers and others for more training on the balance of this freedom of use, consequences of error and how to handle media literacy.
• Nicola McNee, superb librarian and inspiration on the day, agrees and wants to see filtering more nuanced, more intelligent and more malleable by educators, not IT technicians and non-educators - she wants a form of risk assessment framework to be provided to act as a basis of the discussions required to lead to that. Chris Harte, whose Cramlington students took part all day in the discussions, shares similar visions.
• Tom Barrett outlines some practical suggestions anyone can take forward in their own school in order to "whisper change".
• Mr Stucke sees some success in helping the media industry understand a little better why their products may well be blocked and filtered - for no apparent reason.

I think that next time, if there is a next time for this event, we need both physical, video/audio and entirely virtual, asynchronous communication, not one or t'other. But what I wouldn't want to see is a discontinuation of having students listen in on a discussion, talk about it in their own groups around the country and join in the discussion on an equal footing with the adults in the room. Likewise, though, in the ongoing BectaX conversation I think we need more than just Twitter. We need spaces like our blogs where we can let out more complex, messy, unfinished ideas and work with others to see them through. As Dean said this morning, sometimes 140 characters just doesn't cut it.

I'm left with the conclusion that no matter how hard politicians, policy units, schools and other institutions want to try to "listen" to constituents, citizens, workers and learners, the ball is really quite firmly in the court of the constituents, citizens, workers and learners to take action into their own hands. I want to see how this wordmap on Wordle changes over the next three, six, nine, twelve months.

It's not about your thoughts being listened to so much as making sure your actions are heard.

I'm selling a bunch of iPad ideas to my investment panel tomorrow on behalf of my client companies and looking forward to producing some fun, engaging and hopefully profitable little apps early on in the new marketplace, before it, too, gets over-over-overcrowded.

This example of how Alice in Wonderland will be iPadised has a budget well above our prototypes, but creates the kind of eye-popping engagement for reading that most of us learning and teaching reading in any language wouldn't want to miss.

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Way back last autumn my former colleague Claire McArdle came to the 4iP table with an idea that involved the world's authority on performing Shakespeare, Twitter and a mad little company we had played with before. Such Tweet Sorrow has just been born, and is something every school in the land could be using as an injection of amusing accessible literature before this year's diet of death-by-examination:

More than 400 years ago William Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet , introducing “a pair of star-crossed lovers” who defy an “ancient grudge” between their two families with romantic and ultimately tragic results.

As well as numberless stage versions, it has been retold in film, opera, ballet and musical forms.  In this ground-breaking experiment, it is coming to life across and through a social network, Twitter.

If you have a Twitter account already, you can simply choose to follow any or all of the six main characters in Such Tweet Sorrow.

If you aren't on Twitter yet, this might be the perfect opportunity to discover what all the fuss is about. It is easy to join!

Throughout the five weeks of this performance,  you will see and read  the “tweets” - Twitter updates which may be thoughts, messages, links or confessions - of Romeo, Juliet and four other characters .

They are being brought to your Twitter-stream by six actors from the Royal Shakespeare Company. Each of them has a “script” designed  by Mudlark's writing team of Tim Wright and Bethan Marlow, under the direction of the RSC's Roxana Silbert.

The actors will write their actual tweets themselves, using the rich backgrounds the writers have given them, along with a detailed diary that tells them where their characters are at any one moment of the adventure- what they are feeling, who they are with, who they want to talk to.

This may be as ordinary as telling us what they had for breakfast or as remarkable as announcing a deep, deep love.

It will all take place at the time (GMT) it would in real life.

To catch up, look at the Live Timeline and The Story So Far on this Such Tweet Sorrow site - also look out for events in the storyline that you can join in with and have more talk of these sad things.

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