Entering the Palace of Bones from Papa Sangre on Vimeo.

Papa Sangre has been in development since mid-last year, having been commissioned by 4iP as the world's first audio-only, 3D audio no less, video game for mobile:

Papa Sangre is a video game with no video. It’s a first-person thriller, done entirely in audio by an award-winning team of game designers, musicians, sound designers and developers. We’ve created an entire world using the first ever real-time 3D audio engine implemented on a handheld device. Which was BLOODY HARD.

I do like a bit of doing the opposite, a touch of Edward de Bono's 'Po' way of thinking. It means you come up with interesting ideas (that no-one else did) and new ways of perceiving the world around us. And it wasn't easy - they had to blast sound into thousands of sound sensors attached to an imaginary head to get the 3D sound experience the final game will bring.

Papa Sangre should be on the educational iPhone app list of any school as a superb source of thrilling inspiration.

Follow on Twitter and Vimeo so you don't miss more audio examples and its release later in 2010. And prepared to be scared.

Continuing on from the stimulus of an English chef who knows his vision - to eradicate obesity - and wants us to "pass it on", I saw this piece on a US school making a huge difference to its learners' potential futures:

"I never had a doubt that we would achieve this goal," King said. "Every single person we hired knew from the day one that this is what we do: We get our kids into college."

While I don't think anyone in his school would argue that they are not also about producing "rounded individuals", "a caring environment" and all the other edu-fluff that we see in mission statements from schools and curricula, this school CEO in Chicago, working with an all-male, all-black school population in a deprived area, knows exactly what vision he wants achieved.

The next action for every member of that school community - teachers, parents, students even - is clear: get our kids into college.

You might not agree with it being the core aim, and we don't know what the next step of each individual might be (exam-bashing? constant revision? inquiry-led learning? who knows...), but at least the vision is clear and tangible. At least people know what to do, in concert with each other. What's your vision going to be?

Whether through over-zealous editing, poor transferal of interview material from me, over compression of complex arguments or the fact that newspapers feel they can only put online what little will fit in the paper edition (and in the case of the TESS, put even less online than in the paper edition), After being misquoted in a national education newspaper, for which the journalist has apologised (thanks), I feel moved to clarify some of the remarks attributed to me.

I also feel obliged to point out the boon that Glow, the national schools intranet, offers, something that will not make as sexy a story as the journos might want but which, frankly, matters a damn site more than their headlines.

The original quote was lifted and, I believe, altered for Friday's Times Education piece, originally from an interview which coasted onto the subject of Glow and its Virtual Learning Environment. Glow does have a traditional VLE element, but VLEs and Glow as a whole are different. Becta, the UK technology in education agency, has its own take on what VLEs can offer and it is largely based around the administrative advantages:

VLE can help teaching and support staff manage and deliver a variety of daily tasks, including:

• general class administration and organisation
• the creation of lesson plans using existing resources
• assessment and monitoring of students
• allocation and marking of on-line assignments
• discussion and support with students on line.

The various interactive tools of VLEs can also support learners with both class work and homework, and can cater for individual learning styles. For example, students can:

• submit and track their assignments on line via a personal home page
• contribute to and participate in discussions with classmates and other schools via the various conferencing tools
• work at their own pace within and out of school – this is particularly beneficial to learners with special educational needs, such as students in hospital or children unable to attend regular classes for health reasons.

In this respect, I feel that most VLEs on the market today are like virtual filing cabinets, places where one can store virtual worksheets, PowerPoints with which to kill even more learners and summative assessment tools to finish off a few more.

Glow offers a VLE, with the summative assessment element hugely stripped back, reflecting Scotland's world renowned work in Assessment for Learning, but it packs in a heck of a lot more.

Most of Glow's impressiveness comes from its participation tools. Take, for example, GlowMeet. It is a game-changer, technologically to some degree but more through the imagination of teachers, Local Authorities and the central education agency managing the project, Learning and Teaching Scotland. In the past few months we have seen conferences between over 600 students and a world-famous author (though virtual book-signing still hasn't caught on), 1000 pupils learning about the Scottish puffin, a circus virtually attending school, and a master printmaker sharing his skill with the next generation.

It is a game-changer in that video conferencing with, say, Skype is a relatively one-to-one experience between classes. Glow encourages one-to-many and many-to-many experiences within a context, and as a result it helps spawn new connections between participating schools with a shared vision, shared outcomes and share culture that would take, relatively speaking, ions on the open, social web.

Case in point: when I was developing 22 international connections a year through blogs, wikis and podcasts at Musselburgh Grammar School I thought I was living the dream. It was just a shame that while we courted enthusiasm and links with schools on six continents, we failed to convince the teachers down the corridor that sharing materials and ideas and conversations online was a worthwhile exercise. Making international connections between learners is actually quite easy. Finding those connections within your own country can be a lot harder.

It can happen - and there's research to support this. The research is from the Higher Education world, but much of the VLE instructivist stuctures of HE VLEs like Blackboard are shared by one of the UK school system's most popular VLE platforms, the Open Source Moodle. The main risk comes from people using the VLE as their only technological tool, mistaking it for a learning tool rather than an organisational one, and not a) being aware of other potentially better tools for certain jobs out on the open web and/or b) not having access to them because of web filtering policies in individual schools or school districts.

This risk of pedagogical down-skilling is therefore very real in any environment where heavy blocking or filtering of communication and learning tools online (e.g. Web 2.0 technologies) prevents their use or prevents students and teachers experimenting to see what their potential uses might be.

Even if web access is opened, there is then a requirement to provide ample training opportunities in the pedagogical changes one might make in the light of these ever-changing toolsets on offer, especially for those who are less comfortable online. Without this, the likelihood, says the research, is that teachers will fall back to the lower, organisational baseline of technology on offer through the VLE.

Again, in Glow, things are a bit different. There is a toolset that is a) already far more than simply organisational, b) opens up both experienced and less experienced web users in the teaching population to learning opportunities afforded by video conference, shared whiteboards and asynchronous discussion through forums, for example, c) actually designed for learning and collaboration, not organisation, and d) constantly developing (since autumn 2009, at least) to offer tools more akin ot those available on the wider web, but with the added value of a Scottish education community (through authentication) with shared values, goals and outcomes.

3. We're missing the real story: internet filtering is our biggest challenge

Glow will gain more power to its elbow, however, when the abilities of teachers and students to incorporate more of the freely available, but currently blocked, content to their learning journeys.

This is not a Glow issue, though, and it's a mistake to blend the issue of filtering with the use of a VLE or communications and learning platform like Glow.

However, Glow's infrastructure offers an enviable world first in terms of reach and depth: not only is there a technical infrastructure, but there is a human one, one that can help set up those lessons of how to navigate the big, wide, wild web out there. To do it, though, we need the courage of Local Authorities to open up their access more and more, and empower this glowing network of trainers, students, teachers and enthusiasts to take the lessons we all must learn on web literacy and pass them on.

The way things are going, though, it looks like Scotland will be the envy of the world for its national intranet and the ugly duckling for its 20th Century approach to modern literacy. While England and Wales take the issue of opening up networks from blocked to managed to student/teacher-managed web access, Scotland's policy document doesn't even mention it - in fact, it copies the English statement word for word and strips out mention of how filtering should be approached.

This is the story. This is the sexy headline. This is the issue that we need to tackle much more aggressively.

I hope this is clear. I hope that it makes enough sense for people, should they wish, to challenge it or support it. I, frankly, want to move on, to explore and challenge this filtering issue. And, no, you can't quote me on that.

Failure is an option, but fear is not

What I see with increasing regularity is that education leaders are gripped by the notion that failure is not an option (à la Nasa) and that fear will prevent that happening. Meanwhile, on the ground we see teachers prepared to take measured risk, putting their previous fears to one side, and accept, as they ask their students to do in learning, that there will be some degree of failure before we get to where we want to be.

I'm quite clear on who I think needs to change their game.

Jamie Oliver is more well-known in the UK for his crusade against fast food in schools here, and he's doing the same through a new television series in the US. I'm only amazed that his passionate and shocking TED video, above, hasn't been mentioned by more educators in my own aggregation of 1650 blogs (and the one that did, a Canadian, home of the dark hole that is Tim Horton's). Food, after all, is responsible for far too many of the behavioural and learning problems we have in our schools.

He won the TED Prize this year for his "Pass It On" philosophy: teaching kids how to make 10 healthy tasty meals would eliminate America's $150bn extra cost for food-related illness.

Take this idea and tell three people. If we all did this 25 times over, then the whole population of the US would know about it.

It's simple, and there's a target we can all imagine reaching in the near future. This is the kind of sharing, too, that needn't take a long time or a huge effort, and whose outcome and benefit is clear to all: I'm finding that sharing in and of itself is still something the value of which many teachers need convincing.

What's the succinct vision you'd like to share and can you find a tribe of three other people to take your message forward?

The Telegraph reports that the average Briton sees 10 extra days of work added to their year as a result of always-on email through devices like the Blackberry.

Yesterday, in a workshop that included an overview of some productivity tips for coping with more information, I made the point that for teachers more than any other profession, the notion of push always-on email was abhorrent:

• Always-on email uses up mental bandwidth that, in teaching, is needed to concentrate on the 30 different learning challenges in front of you;
• Always-on email encourages disorganisation in the sender's world: no email should ever be sent requesting a meeting any sooner than 24 hours ahead. If you need to see someone that soon, go and knock on their door. If you need a meeting with that person then the subject matter should be of such importance (and not urgency) that you can leave it so others can have time to prepare;
• Always-on email is a distraction from doing the task in hand. If you don't think focus is important, then just spend some time in the world of Merlin Mann.
• Always-on email outside the normal working day means you are working for free. If you need more time to do parts of your job that are not teaching then either a) ask for less contact time or b) lose some of your job that does not contribute to teaching your youngsters. Don't ask permission to do this. You're the professional, after all.

I was astonished, though, at the resistance to this concept. I'd have thought that good email management was a release for everyone, yet a few folk still felt that they had, in the course of the workshop and my keynote, received some useful emails which they wanted to think about. Fair enough, but they weren't concentrating, weren't able to concentrate, on the really challenging stuff I was trying to get them to think about. Their choice, and one I often make in a conference situation.

But we must always give ourselves the opportunity of maximum mental bandwidth at least once in the day to deal with the complex goals we're trying to achieve.

Pic from Kendriya in Andy Polaine's Lost In Text Flickr group (permission pending).

1 in 5 Glasgow parents wants to be able to communicate with teachers about their children's work via Facebook and other social networking sites, reports the Glasgow Herald.

I think this is potentially an underestimate: there are more than one in five parents in East Lothian, I'd guess, who take advantage of the online 'coverage' of what their kids have been learning at school through the eduBuzz Word Press blogging platform. I'm sure that more than 1 in 5 sets of parents whose classroom teacher has started a learning log wherever they are, check in to see what their child has been doing, or what their teacher is planning.

I wonder, though, whether Facebook (and its verb form) have become the new 'Hoover', the interchangeable Proper/Common noun that has permeated the mainstream so as to mean "communication device", in the same way as "Hoover" is a "cleaning device for the floor".

In Glasgow, this misappropriation and lack of geek jargon to describe the right too for the job is particularly likely. The same day we are told that Glasgow is the UK's least tech-savvy city, with 2% of the population thinking you need special eyes to receive HD TV.