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 took the chance to get my children to get involved with the All the Seas exhibition that the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh will be showing in 2014. I came across this through the recently released Learning Experiences Catalogue in Glow - the Scottish Schools National Intranet. This catalogue is packed with a wide range of powerfully creative and original ideas that are all about impact on learning and getting learners to get involved, work together, share their expertise, explore their curiosity and showcase just what they can do. I'm really excited about the possibilities and potential of this approach and I think these rich and thoughtfully crafted learning experiences can encourage teachers and learners alike to get involved and help bring life to these superb ideas.

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

this can prove to be purposeful and inspiring ways to get learners engaged with learning. I will definitiely be sharing this resource and the others in this season's learning experience catalogue with the students that I work with.

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.

In 2006 the concept of GBL was still one that was from the leftfield and not really one that was common place in schools. I had a real interest in it though having embedded it in my practice as a classroom teacher from the mid to late 1990s (click this link then select Children's web Publishing link to hear me talk in 1998 about Nintendo's Zelda as a learning resource) and from building it in to the student experience in the B.Ed (P) and PGCE(P) course at Dundee University. Armed with my own experience and the knowledge and learning I was gaining from the growing academic interest and emphasis in this area by people such as John Kirriemuir, Angela Macfarlane, Stephen Heppell, James Paul Gee and Marc Prensky I was really keen to see if we could bring the ideas and practice of GBL to Scottish schools and to try to scale it up. At this time I was lucky enough to have had the line management of one of LTS' Directors, Laurie O'Donnell whose vision and influence helped create the opportunity and space where ideas such as mine could be imagined, explored and tried out in schools. His leadership was central to the work that I had hoped to carry out and he was ably supported by Ian Graham who was always willing to support my thinking and aspirations by supplementing the modest budget that I was initially allocated.

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.

Over the years it has been my privilege and delight to have worked with some brilliant and lovely people across Scotland as we all pulled together to try to develop a shared understanding of what effective practice with tools such as games might look like and what it was we believed this meant in terms of how it could contribute to the culture change that we felt was necessary to ensure that our schools met the needs of today's learners. It was our ideas, our practice, our expertise and learning - made by us all, shared by us all and owned by us all.  So much good stuff happened that I honestly believe we played a pivotal role in helping to change the discourse around game based learning. Much of this was documented on the LTS/Education Website and the Consolarium blog. At the time I retired my own blog as I wanted all my/our work to be associated with the National Education body who had funded and committed to this project (although I  aim to rejoin the blogosphere in my new post).

Some of what we did includes:

• Our work helped ensure that game based learning and game design was explicitly referred to in CfE documentation
  • The definition of a text includes computer games
  • Computer games refereed to as viable and purposeful contexts at Early and First level
  • Games Design explicitly stated as an expectation from CfE Second Level onwards
• Engaged with almost everyone of the 32 local authorities and helped to establish game based learning and/or computer game design in all of these.
• Consolarium visited by 26 of the 32 local authorities on at least one occasion
• Independent sector engaged with Consolarium to learn about the benefits and opportunities that the Consolarium’s work could offer
• Partnerships developed with 5 of the 7 Scottish TEIs with visits to speak to teaching students established in some University programmes
• Consolarium visited by BECTa and Futurelab and asked to help them take forward their work in this area
• Peer reviewed academic research (randomized control trial) published that showed statistically significant gains in mental maths by using the Dr Kawashima Nintendo DS game. (Methodology allowed us to make claims about generalisablity)
• Peer reviewed research published exploring the impact of our Nintendogs work and the signature pedagogies that arose from this
• Asked by Futurelab to submit Consoalrium case study to European Schoolnet GBL in schools Document
• Asked to curate European Schoolnet’s Games in Schools work. Spoke at their conference at their GBL European Parliament in Strasbourg
• Series of published case studies and blog posts helped influence a change in the discourse around game based learning with schools all over Scotland engaging in this work
• Presentation given to DfE and MPs at the Houses of Parliament
• Developed CPDConsolarium - a GBL loan service and community within Glow.
• Contributed to Hope/Livingstone Report that was commissioned by UK Government with the Consolarium being held up as an example of what could be done to help address digital skills gap in schools
• Articles in many newspapers and magazines and features on BBC TV, BBC Radio (Scotland, National & World Service) including a feature on Rai Uno with me dubbed in Italian!
• International interest with requests to speak in Australia, France, Norway, Denmark, Italy, Singapore, Qatar, Canada, Brazil, America and many other countries
• Requests form a significant number of commercial companies for consultancy support to help their understanding of what effective learning with games might look like

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.