Was introduced to this last weekend. It made me laugh, and think about the admirable effort that's gone into making something I almost believed. For just a second.
I was simultaneously pleased and concerned to see that storytelling has earned is place in the qualifications diaspora in Scotland with the UK's first storytelling qualification being launched next term.
But given it's designed for, amongst others, the master storytellers of them all - teachers - it should be a hoot. It was doing my MA dissertation in fairytales with Graham Dunstan-Martin that got me as good a degree as I ended up receiving. I really do have a lot to thank storytelling; it's quite right to earn its place on a new generation''s exam certificate.
When it comes to technology simplicity sells. That's the title of David Pogue's TED Talk which provides the basis of discussion at the third Inspiration Session for Learning and Teaching Scotland employees. But this time, with Scotland's teachers on holiday and clearly with nothing else better to do, we're inviting you along.
With apologies for the late invitation, if you fancy a trip to Glasgow or live nearby, you are welcome to join members of the Glow, online services and technology teams, as well as Development Officers and Knowledge Management colleagues from across the organisation:
This session will feature a team viewing of the, ahem, sideways look of technology and what 'simplicity' actually means. We'll then have a fairly loose discussion around how LTS could do its job better by finding its simplicity bone. Your input here would be most valuable. I do hope you can come along. If you want to see what we've done so far in our inspiration sessions, please flick over to Connected Live.
For the past three months I've been hosting these Inspiration Sessions, providing regular "thinking pitstops" for nearly half the staff in this time, getting to grips with what new technologies' potential might be for their own projects and mining the staff at all levels, from administrator to Director, for their creative ideas. Several new blogs and web services have been launched with the growing confidence of staff, and internally we're beginning to see much better sharing of information using the likes of social bookmarking on del.icio.us, an internal wiki and weblogs.
The blog has been really quiet this past couple of weeks, down to the quantity of face-to-face, travel, canoeing and wrapping up of some major projects that has somewhat swamped me. Coming up over the next few weeks will be a series of small-ish blog posts, covering my thoughts, workshops, films and presentations that I've been developing this past month in the States. In the meantime, to reassure that I have not indeed expired, please let me take Christian Long up on his invitation from last June.
Way back in the beginning of June, Christian posted an interesting meme: what's the "worst job" you ever had that, ironically, helped prepare you to one day become an educator? For me, hands down, it was one of the best worst jobs I had as a student that wins the accolade: copy taker at the Edinburgh Evening News "Pink".
The Pink was a Saturday newspaper published by the Scotsman family of papers which, within 15 minutes of the final whistles being blown on football matches around the country, was sitting on the shelves of Edinburgh newsagents and being shoved into the hands of fans as they left the stadium. It's no surprise that such a high-speed print operation became defunct in 2002, an age where people began to get full-time results as text messages on their mobile phones and, increasingly, video highlights and match commentaries through the same devices within seconds of the events occurring.
However, the flow of work there was a great lesson in making a crust through speed, accuracy, good humour and, yes, homework. Let me explain.
The reporters out around the country would phone in to the Scotsman offices around five times each over a Saturday afternoon: the pre-match period about 30 minutes before kick-off with the team names (all those Eastern European ones with no vowels being spelt out at great pain to the reporter) and an atmospheric team news paragraph, which would be para number two; the first half full-time scores (these would arrive within as much as twenty minutes of the actual half-time whistle in a slow-moving match) and two more paragraphs; the beginning of the second half (with any team changes and fresh scores); just before full-time, with the 'final score' (in inverted commas since we were going to press without knowing for sure) and then, only if something changed in the dying moments of the match, a fifth and final call would be made with great excitement and the fresh score news.
The person who got all this information and had to get it through into a system that the sub-editors could work with, and apply to the actual page, was the copytaker. I was one of a team of about six. I was the only male. And the only one under 50 (and some: I was only 17 when I started).
Worse still, kids, I had lied to get the job, saying I could touch type at sixty words per minute. I could go fast but, much like today, I went to the "go-as-hell-a-fast-as-you-can" school of typing, which necessitated three things: nerves of steel, great confidence in one's fingers to 'feel' it and, finally, sight of the letters on the keyboard.
When I came down for the initial interview and typing test I was read a story from the day's paper. As Margaret Turner, my superb but nippy potential boss, began to read, I looked down to begin rattling the keyboard.
Shit. No letters.
I had never come across the problem certain female computer users must face every day. With long artificial nails, these 50 plussers had managed to scrub out any sign that had ever appeared on those grey-with-dirt keyboards. They were now completely blank.
I kicked my memory into overtime as I spent at least three sentences-worth of job interview and typing test starting, backspacing and restarting my efforts, as I worked out where on earth 'q' and 'p' were. Once I found my flow I had my memory catch up with Margaret. I finished the test barely six words behind her, an impressive speed of 58 words a minute. It was good enough for her, and bloody impressive for me given that I had spent about 20 of those words working out the blank keyboard in front of me and that, until that minute of reading out loud, had never heard what sixty words per minute sounds like (it's rather fast).
So, every Saturday at one, I'd head over the Meadows in Edinburgh down to the Scotsman offices on North Bridge, now some swanky hotel, and take up my place at the window which overlooked the whole of Princes Street and Waverley Station (we saw the guys jumping off the Bridge every four months or so - always on a Saturday afternoon it seemed). I was subjected to some of the most profoundly proud moments of my professional life - ever - as rather well known sporting reporters would let me know that I was the best copytaker they'd ever had (within two months I knew how to spell the names of all the footballers in the four main leagues and various juniors and seniors leagues). They appreciated the effort I had put in to go from being pretty awful, meriting the curses of every screaming reporter at the biggest stadium in the country as he tried to file the 90th minute goal in time for the final print, to being pretty damned good. I was able to decipher meaning quickly despite the fact 80,000 fans were screaming rather loudly behind the reporter. It was as much my report, I sometimes felt, as the reporter who had attempted to make himself heard down the phoneline at Ibrox, Celtic Park or Dens.
I stuck at the job for two years, eventually ending up writing for the paper thanks to some help from a generous sports editor, Paul Greaves. He's now the Editor of the whole operation.
I learned how to fulfill your promises, get better at something you had no interest in and enjoy doing it, how, as a young and 'worthless' rookie, to wag chins with the people you admire, and not let them know you admire them. Above all, I learned what it felt like to earn your own good money by putting in the hours no-one else wanted to do. I worked overtime, back shifts, evening shifts and even did the night shift at election time. I earned double time, triple time and bonuses, for three of the House's newspapers. I learned how to take down farming reports, the most demanding literature I've ever had to write, getting them colon, comma and dash correct from the garble down the phoneline despite having given up maths aged 16.
Basically, I learnt what it means to work: nothing stays the same so you always have to relearn it (even typing), no-one will do you any favours (unless you ask the Sports Editor for one) and you'll end up with the Editor's desk with the nice view when you least expect it. And you may never even notice that. It was the first time that, as a paid employee, I had the confidence (encouraged by Margaret Turner) to occasionally tell writers, editors and subs - all of them senior to me - that they were wrong, and I was right, and that they really should just go back to their desk and get out of my office. My office. In time, they stopped taking their problems out on the lad (me) at the bottom of the food chain, and asked for favours from me instead to cover their mistakes over.
Those couple of years were a hoot and, I guess, that remains the main raison d'etre of work for me. If work doesn't feel like escapism, play, fun... then it's not something I want to be doing. If it's not fun any more, I've not done it any more. I've found or made up something else and made it happen. If those reporters, writers and subs attempt to put barriers in my way, I tell them to get out of my way. Fast. Before the barriers become too big to overcome.
Not a bad set of lessons from the bottom of the newspaper foodchain.
I'm borrowing electricity and wifi at the back of a Marco Torres and Alasmedia film-making spectacular, delving into filmmaking of another kind.
I found the Steampunk movie below, from Alice, as beautiful and enchanting as many of the 'real' movies I've seen recently. It would make great creative fodder for some creative writing of the kind I was talking about yesterday, taking your mind away to another universe for 4:30.
On Monday I helped kick off the Pre-Conference workshops at Alan November's Building Learning Communities week in Boston, with a four-hour workshop on using video games, text-based games, alternate reality games and consoles as a stimulus for creative writing, art, design and the sciences. The updated notes from Thinking Out Of The x(Box) are now available.
I was ably assisted from 6000 miles away by a Skyping Tom Barrett, who shared his experiences having just come off a four week Myst writing project. His use of one-to-one laptops and Google Docs to coordinate collaboration was interesting, especially since the group back in Boston shared my initial view that 30 laptops in a classroom would have killed the energy visible in Tim Rylands' class. The jury's out (permanently perhaps), and Tom's Google Doc work shows that great things are possible either way.
The updated notes for the session (minus the ARG stuff - that deserves a post on its own, to come soon) are available now, including some of the amazing Guitar Hero work done by Ollie and colleagues at MGS and the Nintendogs project that covered a term last year in Aberdeenshire. Enjoy and, if you decide to set out on an adventure with games in your classroom, please do tell me about it here.
I didn't even know I had been nominated (who dunnit?) but you can now vote this blog as your favourite Public Sector IT blog over at ComputerWeekly. Good friend and round-the-gran-piana singer Ian Usher is also up in the same category. Not a bad rating for educayshun.
My fellow Fellows at the RSA have just put online 55 minutes of video goodness of a humble Ken Robinson giving his acceptance speech for the Benjamin Franklin award. Enjoy.
He also does a great job explaining why someone like me was asked to become a Fellow, and why many of you would probably have much to offer from being a Fellow yourself.
What is learning? For the past few nights I've been enjoying my time with Marcie and her boss, Chris Lehmann, Principle of the Science Leadership Academy, taking a look inside their school's way of thinking.
Learning and teaching is about what the students can do, not what the teacher is able to do. It's about what questions we can ask together, about being inquiry-driven, through questions which are authentic, to which we don't know the answers.
It's about being passionate and whatever we're learning has to matter. Chris' students were cutting sheet metal, part of a project to create a new type of biodiesel which would be more efficient than existing methods. The class applied for two patents this year, and two communities in Guatemala are developing the product to provide fuel for real.
It's got to be meta-cognitive, everyone's got to think about what they did, how they did it, what they could do better the next time. It's got to be technology-infused, technology which is ubiquitous, necessary and invisible. We've got to choose technologies not on the basis of what's new, but what is good for a given task. It's also about being on the same page as the community with whom you wish to interact.
What do certain tools do the best?
Lehmann's approximate and reasonably false taxonomy:
Research: RSS, delicious, Google, Wikipedoa
Collaborate: wiki, google docs, moodle
Create: blogging, drupal
Present: podcasting, uStream, Flickr, iTunesU
Network: Twitter, Skype, Facebook, email.
But tools don't teach
We need strong pedagogical frameworks to see the whole learning experience, onto which we can slot the right tool for the right job. It's categorically the wrong approach to come up with an idea for a "blog project", "a podcasting project", "a social networking project", in the same way as it's wrong to approach pedagogy from a starting point of "what pedagogical proof is there that social networking improves attainment". You start with the pedagogy and use an appropriate tool to fit the pedagogical bill.
In Chris' school, every member of staff and every bone of curriculum is hung on Understanding By Design, with all the teachers using and all the students understanding the same metalanguage of the oeuvre. By doing this, students are able to reverse engineer the work they have done within the pedagogical framework the teachers have used, in the same way as assessment for learning strategies aim to promote. They are able to learn about learning.
Planning
So, planning is undertaken along these five structures:
Desired results: where do you want to go
Learning objectives
Understandings: the big ideas - why are we teaching or learning this?
Essential Questions: The throughline - what do we keep coming back to throughout the inquiry?
Skills and Content: What is the stuff that we have to know to get to those big ideas?
Assessment
If, after a period of learning, you assess by giving out a test, you are not doing project-based learning. Tests and quizzes are but a dipstick, a quick snapshot of where everyone is at. The projects themselves, the projects that are the creation of the students themselves, are the main assessment tool. They are constant, they are ongoing.
What Chris is describing seems to me, albeit in other meta-language, to be what Scotland's Assessment for Learning and Assessment as Learning programmes are beginning to achieve throughout our small corner of the world. The ambition of his school's learning approach reflects the Curriculum for Excellence. I really shouldn't be so surprised that Chris is one of those here at NECC with whom I'm the most comfortable chewing the educational fat.
David Jakes and Dean Shareski show us that it's not just what you say, but how you say it. It's 21 years since PowerPoint was invented, 21 years since we've had to relearn how we communicate, to get away from the bullet-point death into which many of us were induced throughout the nineties and right up to the current day.
1. Teach them biology
When we experience a presentation we experience it in two ways - through the auditory nerves (ears) and the optical nerves (eyes). The brain is geared up to seeing above all else: 30% of the cortex is devoted to visual processing, only 8% for touch and 3% for hearing. So, biology tells us that our presentations must be, above all, visual.
2. Teach them to make it visual
PowerPoint doesn't kill presentations. Bullet points do. We need to move our students away from text-based presentations. The text is in what we say.
"Why would you use words on the screen when they do just fine in your mouth?" Seth Godin.
It's not about killing all the words in a presentation, but if you remove most of them then the presenter has to internalise the content. Great for learners. But great for listeners, too. Our cognitive load will tend to move into overload if we have too much going on through the screen as we listen to the words from the presenter.
3. Teach them how to find images
Flickr is great for finding images, but Flickrstorm is another alternative, which makes it easier to search within the creative commons images contained on Flickr, add them to your tray of photos, and download all of them at once, providing you simultaneously with the original URL of each picture. iStockphoto is a pay-for site but gives an exceptional quality of image. The best part for presentations, is that images can be searched for with white space in particular areas. Tell the advanced search that you want to have images with whitespace in the top left corner, so that your text there can be legible, and it will return images that suit your means perfectly.
4 Tell them how to respect Creative Commons
Creative Commons is the licence that tells people how they can use your content in their own sites or project, legally. There are several types of licence which are important to understand. Not everyone does, so it needs taught, not caught.
5. Teach them design
Design is often seen as the thing that we get around to eventually, "if there's enough time to get to it". Design is key. It's the first thing we need to consider. It changes the way we develop our original idea so fundamentally, we're best to approach things from a design perspective from the outset.
The first thing we need to do is strip away the template that came with the presentation package. We also need to strip away anything that's minor, that we can simply add in passing. Then, can we reduce what's left to once sentence, with an image that speaks 1000 words telling us everything we need to know, along with the oral presentation that we're giving.
6. Teach them to sell
In libraries we see children copy and paste chunks of text, learning nothing about that particular topic. Children need to learn how to craft and sell a message. Communication is the transfer of emotion (another Godin-ism).
7. Colour and font choice matters
Fire trucks are becoming yellow - it's the most noticeable colour in our spectrum. Green signifies renewal for most cultures. Red signifies alertness or anger in most cultures. Americans do indeed seem to have a preference for the colour blue, deep blue signifying trust. Combining national preference with the most flashy colour leads Blockbusters and Goodyear to the logos they have.
"Comic sans is illegal in 34 States," says Jakes. Serif fonts help you move from one word to the next, great for when you're reading. But in presentations you don't want your audience to be reading - you want them to be listening to you. Therefore, in presentations we need to use Sans Serif fonts. With American audiences, avoid the use of Helvetica - it's used by the Inland Revenue Service.
8. Teach them to incorporate multimedia
Everything on the web these days, if it's worth watching, has the word <EMBED> next to it. But if YouTube or Google Video is blocked in your school district then students need to learn how to use Vixy or ZamZar to convert online video at home to a hard file they can import into their presentation.
9. Teach them some PowerPoint secrets
Pressing the button B makes the PowerPoint go blank. W makes the screen go white. Typing the number of a slide will take you to a slide, even if it's a hidden slide that we didn't see in the main presentation.
10. Teach them to share
Dan Roam's new book is the quickest read (it took me a Sunday afternoon) but one of the most valuable if you present.
Pic: Presentation Skills
In Greenville last week Chris Craft led one of the best presentations I've ever been in on (it was about how to present effectively, so had an interest in being top of the game). His work on cognitive load theory is, this week at NECC, striking a chord with me. There's. Too. Much. Noise.
I mean noise in the physical sense and in this metaphorical one. At EduBloggerCon conversations were cut down in their prime as people moved on to other, in my case, less engaging ones. In the Bloggers' Café conversations are fantastic but interrupted with urgent meetings or "you gotta see this"s or just someone having loud fun two feet away.
My cognitive load is constantly tipping over into extraneous. Let Chris's talk explain:
Intrinsic load is the natural load required to complete a task. It can be easy sometimes (driving from home to school) or heavy on others (being an air traffic controller), but we can be trained to cope with it.
The Germane level of load is the optimum level we can cope with, where we maximise the load we are under. In lessons and projects we can feel that Germane load as 'flow', where everything's going in our favour, and then...
Extraneous load comes along, where we all go wrong, especially when we are communicating information in, say, a presentation. It's when, mid flow, the grass starts getting cut outside. Or when someone has to leave a meeting early.
Overload occurs here. The person who missed the earlier part of the meeting, or left early, or the sensation that someone is talking at you when you're in deep conversation with another person opposite, or the kid who doesn't understand where you're at, who isn't with you because they didn't understand the initial point of the project...
When they reach that breaking point they default, they default to the only reaction that's available. They default to an old familiar way, an automatic behaviour, a kind of behaviour where we immediately kick ourselves and ask: "Why on earth did I say that? Where on earth did that come from?"
This is what has been happening to me for the past two days. I've become someone I hate: snarky, off-task, unproductive, unthinking. I've started caring about whether people are streaming video around me where I never did before (I can't have a chat in confidence without 40 people in cyberspace listening in - just happened). Worst of all, I'm finding that without my usual 'white space' or 'beta time' to think, I have nothing to say to people. I have no ideas for the article on the state of social media in education that was due on Friday, that I want to get finished for tomorrow.
I feel like the glass that's got water gushing into it from the tap - despite all that water this particular glass is always going to be half empty when the tap eventually turns off. Most of the input will have fallen off down the drain.
I'm proud to spend nearly all of my time working in public service, with Learning and Teaching Scotland, with a team that is endlessly passionate and knowledgeable about how technology and learning intertwine, and that never goes for the easy option or lowest common denominator. My boss, Laurie O'Donnell, has had his role recognised in the changing face of Scotland's learning technology, having been nominated one of the Lucas Foundation's Global Six most influential educators.
He's been suitably bashful about it all, saying it reflects as much about Scotland's teachers as anything he may or may not have done. Not to take away from his achievement, I think it's a bit of both. I've certainly been lucky in many of the bosses I've had so far, and Laurie's no exception, placing a huge amount of trust and confidence in his team finding out what works, innovating, making the occasional mistake and learning from it for the good of the larger picture. You can't ask for more than that.
I'm not sure, though, if he's more proud at having appeared in the Scotsman national paper or his local Dundee Press and Journal. For him to say and us to speculate...
You can read a Connected Live interview with Laurie regarding our most ambitious project in the long term, Glow, the national schools' intranet for 750,000 teachers and students.
This year the Scottish Learning Festival seminar choices were made by an anonymous panel, so only now are there some hints towards an enticing programme for the country's premier learning event. Last year there were about 7000 attendees, hearing around 150 top-class seminars.
I've just had news that my two seminar proposals were accepted, one on digital storytelling using games, digital images and social media as an enabler for more creative work, the other on how a teacher can start out building their own worldwide professional network. I know that a few other seminars have been accepted on a social media or gaming vein, with a spattering of Glow 'futures' type discussions in store, too.
I'll also be on the lookout for anyone wanting to blog, vlog or podcast for Connected Live, which last year attracted a significant audience to its blog, video coverage and short podcasts as it relayed the various viewpoints of what was going on around the huge conference space. Wifi this year will hopefully be further improved, with extra fast access for those wishing to publish with us.
If you're writing about your proposals or the event itself, the tag this year will be SLF2008 (futureproof, too). Please do tag all your blogs posts, photos and videos that might relate to your presentations or informal discussions outside the event. Importantly, start tagging any relevant presentations on Slideshare with SLF2008. We're starting this week to publish some of last year's presentations, many with audio, too, on the Connected Live blog, to whet your appetite.
