In 6 minutes 40, the 20 ideas I think will affect educators in a big way in the next couple of years. This appears as part of New Zealand Core Education's EDTalks:

20. QR Codes and other smart mobile means of making the real world expand into the virtual world will become commonplace in the pockets of our students. With Layar you could craft a living history of your school transposed onto existing real-world buildings viewed through a smartphone camera.
19. We will gain a better understanding the hype curve, and what types of behaviour with technology can be spotted along it.
18. This gives us a chance to shorten that lead time to get to the learning quicker
17. Anything 'touch' changes the game, not necessarily because of the device itself but because of the way it affects the design of everything else around us, especially websites.
16. More will leave the desktop and go online, whether it's MIT's Scratch heading online next year thanks to the MacArthur funding we awarded earlier this year, or
15. Making real life products that students can feel, touch and use will be where the best learning takes place. Students will stop "doing" stuff at school and will more likely "make" stuff at school.
14. We'll think about how we build more interaction into our virtual spaces but also our physical spaces.
13. Think how engagement of the senses can do something as simple as encourage people to walk up the stairs rather than take the escalator.
12. The last 30% of our planet will get online in the next year as more of the world, south of the equator, gets powered up and online. This will mean an explosion in connections.
11. These connections will nearly all come from Africa and South America initially - most African countries are at the birth of their internet journey.
10. When we start collaborating with all these new partners at scale, we'll find that the ultrafast broadband of which our schools are so proud will become, rather quickly, slow-feeling.
9. This is especially true thanks to our changing TV habits. We'll be watching more television online than we do on the television, which will contribute to this higher demand for bandwidth.
8. We'll actually watch less television, but all of it online. Television choices will start to be made for us, using algorythmns to work out what we might want to watch based on our friends' and our previous selections.
7. We'll also stop just watching the television, and start interacting even more around it, online more than with the people in the same room as us. Maybe education will have a second chance at getting television use for learning right.
6. Understanding open data will become more important than social media has been in the apst five years.
5. This means, in the next two years, we might actually find ourselves with a teaching population that is more illiterate than the youngsters they are teaching, as this basic skill of understanding complex data is mastered by young people quicker.
4. There will be less money for spending in education, and innovation will start to appear as a result.
3. Open Source technologies will increasingly make us question why we spend so much on corporations' pay-for technology when so much else is available for free from passionate communities of practice.
2. The innovation will start to appear not from big industry making big things that do things for people, but from 'small' people in their bedrooms and startups making things that empower people to do stuff for themselves, and that includes learning.
1. And the people we're empowering will come at all ages, all cultures. The lead time for people to understand how they can become collaborators, makers and doers has decreased from the years and months of the industrial age to hours and minutes for new generations. Just see it in the way my daughter reacted to Skype over four minutes, from horror to fear to curiosity to comfort.

Students who explicitly write down what they think they've learnt, what they didn't understand and what they think they need to know next time tend to perform better as a result. It makes concrete the self-assessment and peer-assessment we know help them perform better over time (cf Inside The Black Box (pdf) for details).

Learning logs were a core part of my classroom practice, having seen the effects they have on improving student performance in the bilingual schools of New Brunswick in my first year of teaching. A student there would write down what they had learnt and what they felt they'd have to learn tomorrow in order to achieve the goals of the project they had set out on. In paper format they were quite tricky to manage, and as students peer-assessed there would be paper flying all over the place.

With the emergence of easier-to-use blogs around 2002/3 I started getting students to keep logs of their learning online, instead, initially using the extra time afforded by school trips, before getting more personal blogs set up to keep track of their learning.

At the same time, Darren Kuropatwa, a maths teacher on the other side of the Pond in Manitoba, Canada, had developed an even more manageable and, I think, even more empowering means of having students think about what they had learnt: the learning scribe.

In this podcast series from Alan November, Darren explains the genesis for setting these learning scribe posts up, where one student writes down (online) on behalf of the rest of the class what he or she thinks they all learnt, and what they think they've not understood.

If you've ever doubted how a piece of technology builds upon what we know is great teaching practice, this is it. Harnessing both the online nature of transparent reflection and the constraint of not having a laptop for every child, Darren was able to create a rich experience for every student.

• Part 1 (20 minutes): The genesis of the Learning Scribe
• Part 2 (20 minutes): The impact of describing one's learning online, rather than on paper
• Part 3 (14 minutes): How the Learning Scribe adds to homework quality and assessment

"This is nothing like school. In school everything runs quite smoothly… You learn a lot more [this way]. I never knew how hard it would be to fight for your own job."

These are students talking about a student-driven project around the theme of a soap opera, whereby they had to create a non-scripted soap opera production, with the story of a paper plant about to go bust. It was initiated by the art teacher, but encompassed much of the business, language and creative side of the curriculum. It's fleshed out in the video above.

The genius part is that their art lesson, rather than being a prep for recording the soap opera, became the "art club" of the bust company that in which they were playing their roles. Their choice, not that of their teacher (and, I'd argue, not something that a teacher would come up with in isolation were (s)he to be forward planning like crazy).

Alison Ferguson, the teacher, puts it like this:

"You're not teaching in isolation. You're teaching in a much more natural way, as you would if you were bringing up your own children."

This is part of a series of new videos the Scottish Government have produced to try to help parents understand how learning and teaching is changing to better equip young people for the future. I'd argue that they're ideal for those teachers who are struggling to see what it means, too, and more effective than the thousands of pages of 'guidance' and 'advice' given with the Curriculum for Excellence so far.

My other favourite in this series is Pimp My Trolley, with more on the Learning and Teaching Scotland site.

I hope we can see more of these 'first hand' accounts of what a vibrant learning environment looks like - so much more powerful than the rhetoric or PDF hell we're used to.

We all want a curriculum that ensures the key skills for tomorrow's entrepreneurs and employment are taught and caught, but which empowers children to direct their own learning, don't we?

For the past year I've been part of the Steering Group for the RSA's (Royal Society of the Art, Manufactures and Commerce) Opening Minds Curriculum, a competence-based curriculum that is perhaps finding its moment as "organised education", whereby big institutions that do things for people, are being replaced by organisations that empower people to do great things for themselves:

Opening Minds aims to help schools to provide young people with the real world skills or competencies they need to thrive in the real world. It is a broad framework through which schools can deliver the content of a national curriculum in a creative and flexible way so that young people leave school able to thrive in and to shape the real world.

Opening Minds was developed by the RSA at the turn of the millennium in response to a belief that the way young students were being educated was becoming increasingly detached from their needs as citizens of the 21st century.

It is based on five sets of competencies, including Citizenship, Learning, Managing Information, Managing Situations and Relating to People.

What is the impact of Opening Minds?

Opening Minds is now being used in over 200 schools across the country and is growing rapidly. In 2008 the RSA opened the RSA Academy in Tipton which is the first school to be designed around the principles of Opening Minds.

You can get more information on the impact of the RSA Opening Minds Curriculum in this pdf.

One of the reasons I'm particularly fond of this curriculum is its genesis, summed up in the introductory conference video from a couple of years ago by RSA Chief Executive, Matthew Taylor, above, who points out that parents, politicians and even teachers seem to be under the impression that a "bad" school will always be a school for which improvement can never happen.

There has also been a near worldwide acceptance, with the occasional ignorant backlash as yet another test or stricture is thrown in by the politicians, that learning competences is arguably more important than learning 'stuff', and the RSA Opening Minds Curriculum is all about learning the stuff through these very competences that make professionally and personally successful individuals thrive.

Find out more and shape the Opening Minds Curriculum at our October 19 Conference at the new RSA Academy

To help teachers, head teachers and those managing curriculum better understand the small revolution that's been happening over the past few years with this way of working, the RSA Academy in Tipton, near Birmingham, UK, is hosting in its new building a one-day conference. It's a superb opportunity to experience, at first-hand, how Opening Minds works at the RSA Academy and gives you a chance to help shape Opening Minds as it moves forward into its next phase of assuring quality and useful assessment in a school-owned curriculum.

It could be a first step towards having the support and mentorship from successful partner schools in rethinking curriculum and learning across your whole school. This is not an event for an individual maverick to go off and innovate on their own. This is a whole-school innovation process.

The morning will be classroom based, working directly with our Opening Minds Team Leaders and students. The afternoon will focus on how the RSA and the RSA Academy are working together to move Opening Minds forward.

We will be launching the Opening Minds accreditation system and the Opening Minds Award at this conference.  These are initiatives which are vital to the future of Opening Minds and we hope you will want to be part of these exciting developments.

The event will be useful for schools already developing their Opening Minds practice; those considering Opening Minds as a curriculum framework;  together with those schools who have built up a number of years of Opening Minds experience.

If you would like to attend then register your interest in advance.

The Byte Night Bedtime Story aims to beat the Guiness World Record for the world's biggest crowdsourced bedtime story in history. It's a great way to get students reading an (ever-longer) story and then adding their own 140 characters' worth, without the need to register for Twitter or another service - this makes it ideal for kids no matter how young or old they are.

What's more, you help raise money for Action for Children’s annual charity sleep-out event that takes place in various locations across the UK, this year on 8th October. There's no reason, in fact, why the sleep-out couldn't take place in other countries around the world, highlighting the plight of homeless children and raising some supporting cash in the process.

As of the time of writing you have 18 days to make your contribution to the story.

David McCandless' visualisations reveal amazing things. I've been amused, bemused, intrigued and shocked for the past few years by his Information Is Beautiful blog.

There's one example of visualisation that could help explain why my former colleague Derek Robertson has a regular meet with the press each year, at the same time, justifying (again) why video games are great stimuli for deep learning:

In the video above, McCandless highlights that news stories on violence in video games generally peak in huge numbers around November and April. Why November? It's the month that Christmas releases of video games appear. Why April? It was the month that the Columbine shootings took place and, every year since then, this is the point where the media would like to suggest to us that violent video games were responsible (even though, at the time, it was violent film that made the headlines, video games not yet having attracted that unwelcome kudos).

There you go - if we know it's coming, we can get ready for it.

It's heartening to see Mike Russell, the Scottish Cabinet Secretary for Education, cited in the latest Connected Magazine with something that's more akin to what one might have expected to see on this blog. He shares the white elephant in the room for most "education content providers" or platform-makers: you're all in competition with Facebook:

"Our young people are Glow's most demanding customers [Glow is the Scottish Schools national intranet]. They already use tools, such as Facebook, that are better than Glow [ed: insert any virtual learning environment here], so Learning and Teaching Scotland [ed: or any VLE provider or Local Authority] has a big challenge to face. It must strive to ensure that Glow is as good as anything else in the market, and do so with substantially less resources than its competitors. Great imagination is required but by continuing to listen to users and to grow and adapt, Glow will retain its relevance."

Russell gets this. He's a prolific and interesting Facebook user himself, and really knows what it does (and Glow doesn't, yet). I also know that Andrew Brown, Glow's Director, is one of the best equipped to face the challenge of developing this platform in true competition with Facebook (although he needs to brush down his blog into action again ;-)

Listening to users is vital, and something Glow could actually end up doing a lot better than Facebook. It's got to listen to more young people, every day, and share all this user group and user feedback publicly.

But, if we're to take Russell's sentiment seriously, and I do, it's also got to change attitude quite publicly from the market leader (first in the world, largest intranet etc etc) to the underdog of Facebook, an attacker. It's got to aim for global domination of its space or it might as well give up and go home. It's got to, basically, act more like a startup.

Budget-wise it's a Round C startup, rich, but not out of the starting blocks yet and burning through a lot of cash quickly. It's got about one more funding round (18 months) to explode out there. We need to see the numbers that show it's exploding, too: how many new signups every day? how many unique visitors this month and how much more is that since last month? what is that incredible dwell time people have in the service? what are the exit points (is Glow, without realising it, actually an invisible 'partner' of Facebook?)?

Now, for many reading this post, I'm guessing there will be an 'uh?' or 'eh?' moment. For a few, a few that I hope see it, it will be an "uh-huh" post. There's a ton of work to be done, but I think with the leadership of Russell indicated in this article, Glow might just be entering its most exciting stage yet.

Having students take the lead on not just what they learn, but how they learn and when they learn, is the headline of any keynote, masterclass or set of critical conversations teachers and I undertake together. Throughout our latest New Zealand, Australia and California tour we spent 80% of the time making our brains hurt with the notion that teachers need to teach less to let more learning happen, and explored some of the structures, attitudes and project ideas that might help whole schools make that transition.

Sugata Mitra's TED Talk is making waves for reminding us that, left to their own devices and left to follow their passions, young people will learn without a teacher. No real shock and horror there, other than the fact that schools, by and large, have been built around the opposite - perpetuating the notion that there is content to be learnt first and foremost, and experts who will curate and prime that content for different ages and stages.

The question we're still left with after Mitra's inspiring experiments is: what does it mean for me?

Well, Core Education in New Zealand have just released another of my EDTalks on the notion of student-led learning, and how many schools, particularly in early years/kindergarten and primary/elementary, have been teaching less to learn more:

I think there are some important examples to go and see from this short video to see how we can make a seismic change happen with smaller actions: the Tinkering School, North Lanarkshire's approach to mitigating risk in early years/kindergarten and creating a Learning Wall at high school to explore how we collaborate across department areas.

Ian Gilbert in his TEDxDubai talk is helpful in his idea of how we might engage in "antiteaching" without teachers doing themselves out of a job: he gives some lovely examples of 'Thunks", impossible questions with no right answer designed to get children thinking about why and how rather than what (and helping avoid a generation of average knowers rather than erudite thinkers:

TEDx Dubai 2009 - Ian Gilbert from Giorgio Ungania on Vimeo.

What other practical means do we have of helping students to leave the room feeling they have more to learn than when they entered it? What other ways do we have of making learning less easy, being less helpful?

Sugata Mitra is a keynote at this year's Scottish Learning Festival.

Changes happen all the time in schools. But, in the same way as it’s hard to realise that the flight you’re on is moving swiftly through the air until either all 24,000 kms are up, I think change in education often goes unseen. And those iterative changes cost a lot of dosh. I reckon this lack of marking time could be costing us millions of education dollars, pounds and euros, but could be resolved by every teacher undertaking one simple challenge.

Why is marking time on our learning important? This lack of awareness makes every professional development course a potential financial liability. In one room three weeks ago we worked out that between staff present and staff covering lessons, not to even mention the cost of my time there (and by comparison I’m incredibly cheap) that somewhere near $80,000 was being invested in that one day. If nothing BIG happens off the back of that day then we have an expensive problem.

Research proves that most professional development does very little developing at all, since we rarely do anything significant with the input and conversations we have: Professional Development - A great way to avoid change is a pretty seminal paper in that respect (pdf). And most of those buying in professional development are not interested or empowered in budgetary terms to take the long-line approach that's required to make a difference, that Sheryl outlines in her long post (the clue is in the length - learning is a complex beast that requires more than 60 minutes of brim and sparkle from a keynoter).

This is serious. It’s not that I think we should all be patting ourselves on the back every moment we tweak (or overhaul) our work, but unless we know where we’ve come from and how far then we cannot hope to build upon what we have learnt and achieved in the future. Marking time and distance in change is important. That’s why I think more of us should be setting ourselves the 100 hour challenge.

Less effort, more action

I had thought years ago that all schools, once a year, could aspire to achieve 100 innovations in 100 days. But then, when I sat down and thought about it, it would need coordination, voting, people collaborating to get it all done, more organisation to carve out that time together… Basically, in most school environments I know, collaboration of this nature would end up being 90% management, 10% action.

However, if instead of trying to organise the effort, and instead allow the forces of our ‘education market’ within the school community to take hold, we might see something different. What would happen if everyone in the school community decided to undertake their own, personal, 100 hour challenge – working on something they’d like to learn how to do, one hour per day, every day, for three months or so.

Matt Webb was the chap who framed it this way for me, pointing out that 100 hours is an incredibly long time to learn something when, say, compared to learning how to drive (30-50 hours-ish) or the total time spent walking the moon (160 hours) - the pic above is from the marvelous Nasa Moon set.

And yet, 100 hours only represents an hour a day for three months, something most of us would be happy to sacrifice in order to get really good at something.

Change requires invitational leadership

I’d add to this a point for school leaders and managers, which employs my favourite leadership style: the policy of invitation. The most important thing with these personal 100 hours challenges is that the school leaders, from department heads to school principals, resist the temptation to tell staff what they should spend their 100 challenge on. This has to be learning of the DIY variety (not the HIDTY (Have It Done To You) genre). If a member of teaching staff wants to learn how to tango, then by goodness let him learn to tango. If another wants to learn how to write great apps in C++, then let them go for it.

Next, provide a place (physical and maybe also virtual) where students, teachers, admin staff and even parents can post their 100 hour challenge title on a post-it note. Let them move others’ post-its around. Encourage it as a leader by moving a few around yourself when no-one’s looking, finding where people have common graft in mind. Make it a real learning wall.

The 100 hour challenge might, for everyone, begin on the same day, and crescendo towards some kind of celebration of change, of a community of people clustering into mini communities, pairings, loosely grouped individuals pulling together to make their world that little bit better, more interesting or engaging.

The point is to make the most of the learning already going on in our lives, or to unlock the learning we've always wanted to do as teachers - too many teachers think that teaching comes first and learning, if there's time, comes after. If we're not to waste $80,000 one day, $60,000 the next on professional development that fails to develop anyone then we need to find some kinds of practical strategy that allow us to check and mark time on our learning thereafter.

Don't just read this post. Do something.

Here’s my challenge. Right now, put aside 100 hours starting at some point in the next twelve months. Do it right now, in your head. Put that time aside. 100 hours. 7 hours a week for 14 weeks. One hour a day, or one working day a week. It’s one term out of your entire life, it’s nothing. Okay, you’ve got that 100 hours?

Now for the next two days, go to talks (or listen to them online) and start conversations with people you don’t know, and choose what to spend your 100 hours on.

I guarantee that everyone reading this can produce something or has some special skill, and maybe they’re not even aware of it.

Ask your friends, colleagues and students what their’s is. Find out, because you’ll get ideas about what to learn yourself, and decide what to spend your 100 hours on.

Because when you contribute, when you participate in culture, when you’re no longer solving problems, but inventing culture itself, that is when life starts getting interesting.

Some 100 hour challenges we're already seeing emerge:

• Killer Marathon
• Lifestreaming teaching
• Writing that book: a science book for youngsters
• Exploring time and energy and why we don't engage with technology
• Learning to play bass guitar (Rachel C's doing her's on Facebook)
• ... tell me yours in the comments ...

One of the most important areas of teacher development must surely be working out how to save time, create more time, drop some of the less meaningful activity in our days to create more, higher energy time to engage with students or improve our own professional learning? 9 times out of 10 the main barrier to teachers doing what they really want to do is 'time'. I think that we could transform teacher time and energy by crowdsourcing some of our most mundane duties.

I attempted a few sessions in New Zealand on this subject I can confirm, though, that most educators find it mind-numbingly irrelevant, perhaps even boring, to look at their working day and decipher what's important, urgent, necessary, unnecessary. Most educators I work with feel under seige from demands outside their control (or seemingly outside their control) and swiftly resign themselves to trudging on best they can.

I began wondering latterly, though, about what would happen if more teachers knew about and made use of virtual PAs, or some kind of educational equivalent. I pay mine about $25 an hour (and they charge by the minute) to handle the things that take up my time, but which don't need me to do them. For me, that's buying travel tickets, sorting receipts, filling in tax return information, handling my dry cleaning, getting foreign stamps for the post sorted out etc.

For a teacher there are endless tasks they have to undertake that they don't have to undertake:

• insertion of grades into systems
• typing report card comments (most teachers would take longer typing up their thoughts than dictating them for someone else to handle later)
• spotting downward trends in student grades
• compiling school reports and annual report information
• creating standard letters to parents about school trips, unexplained absences, charity events
• insert yours here...

I then wondered about using Mechanical Turk to handle some of the larger scale time-suckers that we have in education.

Mechanical Turk is Amazon's technology solution that isn't a technology solution: you submit a task and any necessary material and set a price per minute for the work. Then, in exchange for a few cents for a small chunk of that work you have interested parties, students, academics with some spare time, housewives and all sorts of other strangers take a tiny chunk of that work to complete. Mechanical Turk then brings all those bits back together again and sends you the completed work, along with a tiny bill. It's named after the machine of old, whereby a mysterious Turkish man would take any equation you gave his magical machine and it would then tell you the answer; in fact, there was a man hidden inside who'd work out the answer quickly.

For example, education conferences are happening every week, it seems, and are recorded increasingly in video and/or audio with slideshare visuals, but the art of conference blogging has more or less dropped off as a result. Skimming these videos and audio is a no-go, and so we find ourselves actually getting less from this increased number of conferences, recorded conversations and Elluminate sessions (well, I do anyway).

So if we took all those conference talks and submitted them to Mechanical Turk as we went along, for about $15 per seminar talk we could have a searchable, skimmable transcript that we can link to, highlight, annotate and build upon far easier than the video.

This is just one new problem that we've created, that Mechnical Turk thinking could crack, saving us all some more minutes in the day. What other areas of teaching and learning are Mechanical Turkable?

Photo of the Crowd

Ever want a compelling reasoned argument for those we meet who'd rather "young people learnt how to play outdoors in the sun and get away from all this technology"?

John Connell vents some mild frustration at the Luddite brigade who proclaim that all this technology is good and well, but…:

"Call me a grumpy old man, but I want my students to engage with ‘old’ technology – books, journals, articles, conference proceedings. face-to-face discussions in real time, learning to think on their feet…too often ‘new’ technologies get reduced to gimmicks and Wikipedia – I want students who can operate the tool between their ears (another piece of pretty old technology)…"

The eloquence of Stephen Fry in this BBC Virtual Revolution rush, above, provides some common sense to even out the 'grumpy old men' and women who proclaim the computer between our ears is what needs played more often.

The bit I particularly appreciate when dealing with grumpy olds is this:

"Where people make their fundamental error and criticise all this I think it's a danger and it's reducing our capacity to act as proper human beings is they think it's all this. Either sit in front of a screen of some kind tapping away all your life, going lol and, and, and being childish and not writing in proper English sentences or, you sit in an old fashioned study with books and you read properly and you engage property and you go for walks. Well I do both! And most people do both, it is not one or the other.  "

You can download more rushes from the BBC Virtual Revolution programme and make your own version of the documentary. In fact, what a great exercise for students learning how the media can alter the outcome of a set of interviews purely by editing.

My good chums at Mint and Channel 4's Adam Gee have come up with a beauty of a service, finally providing a beautiful, slick home for the world's best quotations. It's a brilliant resource for any student of history, English language, Classics, science, or PowerPoint 101.

Never again will I have to suffer inaccurate citing in keynote presentations, or dinner parties where people quaff fine wine while stealing great one-liners with the catch-all "I don't know where this comes from, but...".

Quotabl.es is born.

Says Mr Gee on his blog this morning:

Ever tried looking for a quotation online (of the literary as opposed to the insurance variety)? Wasn’t much fun was it? Not that easy to find what you want. And just how accurate was it? And why does it look like the site was made by a geek with no design skills in his stinky bedroom?

But you love great quotes don’t you? On your Facebook profile. In that presentation. You know, those ones you keep in that file – the one on your old computer. They’re everywhere – on the tube, in that advert, on that building, in that caff.

So why don’t we get the quotation sites we deserve and desire? Although there are several in the Alexa top 5000 most are labours of love, evolutions, accretions of amateur solutions stuck one on top of another like the proverbial sticking plaster.

It's even more close to my heart since this brazen little startup is based out of Glasgow and, I feel, it's providing an education service. Where can you see yourself using this? What do you want the team to do for you this coming year? What toys do you want them to offer you this Christmas? Don't spend too long answering here - jump over and have a play now. Or, as Spike Milligan would have said:

“Well we can’t stand around here doing nothing, people will think we’re workmen.”