In about two months I'll be unveiling my latest commission with Channel 4's Innovation for the Public Fund.
Broadcast reports that we are commissioning Dan and Adrian Hon’s Six to Start to develop a creative writing game for the iPhone and iPod Touch, backed by national education agency Learning and Teaching Scotland. The game, currently under development, aims to help users tap deep into their imaginations and develop their creative writing skills by responding to writer challenges through their iPhone. They say we all have a novel in us, and ‘All Write’ will help users find it.
Six to Start is a highly successful developer specialising in digital storytelling with recent notable successes such as the We Tell Stories series for Penguin Books. Learning and Teaching Scotland have over the past three years developed a world-leading reputation for developing gaming for learning. The partnership will lead to both a mainstream game available in the iPhone App Store, and a teens' version for use in schools.
This is how Adrian puts it:
Alderman was also a lead writer on the Hons' previous success, alternate reality game Perplex City.
All Write is the latest in a series of projects developed in Scotland by Channel 4’s Innovation for the Public fund (4iP). Announced as part of the Channel’s Next on 4 strategic blueprint and endorsed by the Government’s Digital Britain Report, 4iP is a major new initiative to encourage innovation on digital platforms.
By helping young people and new audiences to discover the joy of reading and creative writing, All Write illustrates how digital media can serve a meaningful public purpose.
My former colleague Derek Robertson, now National Adviser for Emerging Technologies and Learning at Learning and Teaching Scotland, was quoted:
All Write will be launched worldwide this August on the iPhone App Store. Pic credit: New iPhone
I'm in the process of contracting, planning and soft-launching a beautiful web arts platform in my work with Channel 4's Innovation for the Public along with the talented guys at ISO, which will provide a really meaningful and inspiring space, we hope, to learn about and publish one's own art, digital media and films. More on that soon, although you can catch a sneaky peak at our session, The Digital Express, in the Edinburgh International Film Festival.
It means that my eye is increasingly heightened on all things design and artistic, and this has just distracted me, Morgane and Catriona for most of the latter's tea-time. It's one reason to let your two-year-old onto that MacBook Air touchpad. Go on. You know you want to.
Seth Godin doesn't just 'do' marketing but he teaches it regularly, too. His latest rant is on the insidious growth of the business of textbook writing and publishing, as a result, he believes, of laziness in the market and cynical money-grabbing by a select few from an ignorant system.
The argument is certainly not that books are inherently wrong in a schooling environment (Seth has sold his share of millions of books). Books such as those I read offer insights from leaders in their fields, normally insights which are relatively up-to-date (give or take 12 months) and which would be a nightmare to try and consume on a 500 pixel-wide blog posting.
But textbooks, written as they are, out-of-date, error-ridden by mistype or time passing, curations of general knowledge rather than journeys through learning with personal insights, almost always are the professor's/teacher's lazy option. Says Seth:
The solution seems simple to me. Professors should be spending their time devising pages or chapterettes or even entire chapters on topics that matter to them, then publishing them for free online. (it's part of their job, remember?) When you have a class to teach, assemble 100 of the best pieces, put them in a pdf or on a kindle or a website (or even in a looseleaf notebook) and there, you're done. You just saved your intro marketing class about $15,000. Every semester. Any professor of intro marketing who is assigning a basic old-school textbook is guilty of theft or laziness.
This industry deserves to die. It has extracted too much time and too much money and wasted too much potential. We can do better. A lot better.
Seth's assumption is the same as mine, and the underlying pretext of the eduBuzz platform: that teachers are paid to share their knowledge, not just with those students in front of them but with anyone in their learning communities, and sharing with this community will make us all better teachers and learners.
Arnie's got the right end of the wrong stick: it's not a question of changing the media through which the textbook is published, it's about changing the very notion of the textbook.
By far the easiest way to do this is to blog regularly, in bite-sized, timely learning chunks that can be read, commented upon, linked to and adapted by students, their parents and your peers. It is much harder for everyone to publish this in a textbook, ends up much more inaccurate and, above all, is less accessible due to cost than an internet connection in every home.
Sharing, and sharing online specifically, is not in addition to the work of being an educator. It is the work.
Educators have a reputation for generally saying 'yes' to doing things they are asked to carry out. The expectation is that if a peer or more senior member of staff asks or tells, the teacher does. It's not a healthy place to be. We need to say no more often.
To be honest, I hate saying no, most of the time. Yet, in my current job: of the 400 or so ideas I've seen in the last six months, only about 4% have resulted in a development of that idea.
Everyone else got a 'no'.
Most have had the heave-ho within minutes or days, some have had an instant yes, but there's a troublesome group in the middle, about 30% of ideas at a guess, that need looked at in more detail before being sure if they're worth taking forward. This group of ideas need at least a day's worth of thinking done by the company proposing the idea and a day or more of my time. It's only when we do the figures, work out the business case, see the approach action-by-action, explore the legal and compliance risks, that we realise the idea is a dodo. All that "for nothing".
What I wonder, sometimes, is whether it's worth just pushing back on anything that is not a clear 'yes' at the first sighting. Those "might work" ideas nearly always fail to get through the hurdle of being 'spec-ed' out, yet involve a disproportionate amount of thinking to get them to a point where we can ever know if they're likely to work.
However, there's always that grumble that maybe, just maybe, one might be saying 'no' to the best idea since sliced bread.
Seth Godin suggests we're indeed better off saying no more often to pick out the obvious gems the moment they appear:
You can say no with respect, you can say no promptly and you can say no with a lead to someone who might say yes. But just saying yes because you can't bear the short-term pain of saying no is not going to help you do the work.
Saying no to loud people gives you the resources to say yes to important opportunities.
What do you think - are we right to say 'yes' to the "might work" ideas to see if we can discover a hidden gem, or are we better to concentrate only on those 4% we feel instantly happy with?
Pic: No Way Out