Little Big Planet 2 has just been announced by Sony, setting its fans into a spiral of oozing admiration and excitement. They've made two million levels already on the crowd-sourced game/gaming engine. Now kids are being encouraged to make more, with the Hastac/MacArthur Foundation competition.
While you wait for the release of LBP2, and given some of the impressive and ambitious work that has already taken place in primary and secondary schools with Little Big Planet and Spore, the latest call to action from the Hastac/MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media Competition is worth looking into, for a chance to win PSPs or even a visit to Electronic Arts' studios. Teams of two or three students can create a level on LBP or on Spore, submitting their entries before May 21st.
I thought I'd share some of my love for the great books I've been reading lately (and further back), in a semi-occasional book review.
The first one up comes from someone who, over the years, has become a strong online friend, despite the fact that we've only ever met a half dozen times at various random cities across Europe. He was one of a merry gang who helped change my life, too, back in Copenhagen in 2007 when he and Mrrs Moore and Semple suggested that I should set up my own company.
Antony's premise then was that the things we were doing online as an added extra created enough value, eventually, to employ them in the centre of everything we do.
His new book, Me and My Web Shadow: How to Manage Your Reputation Online
Antony set about writing Me And My Web Shadow to help inform the kind of person "who doesn't quite get Twitter yet", or who thinks privacy issues on Facebook are a good enough reason to avoid it. It was for his wife, amongst many others. It's pitched in the kind of way that wouldn't patronise a proficient user of social media but which is also accessible to newbies. If there were a French translation I might even purchase a copy for my mother-in-law, to help her understand the grey areas between private and public, friends and Friends.
Despite having risen through the ranks of PR to a Senior Vice President position at iCrossing, the world's biggest SEO company, he talks his reader through privacy and openness in a blog-like, non-corporate, friendly way. This book reads for itself, combining practical tips and examples of people getting it right (and wrong), along with some Thinking Man's theory of why all this is so.
And his tone of voice means that Me And My Web Shadow is the ideal starter book and reference tool for people both in education and in the corporate world. It's a tough balance to strike, and Antony's nailed it.
If you want to provide some quick, light, intelligent reading to parents or colleagues who don't quite get all this malarky yet, then Me and My Web Shadow (UK)
Follow the book on Twitter or, if you prefer humans, Antony himself.
Me And My Web Shadow: How To Manage Your Online Reputation is launched May 15th in the US Store: reserve your copy now in my book store.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.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.
"...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.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."
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.
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
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.
