edinburghmsc: via @jar: 1st DiCE seminar underway - @rossparry is talking about designing a distance learning programme in digital heritage.
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.
I'm selling a bunch of iPad ideas to my investment panel tomorrow on behalf of my client companies and looking forward to producing some fun, engaging and hopefully profitable little apps early on in the new marketplace, before it, too, gets over-over-overcrowded.
This example of how Alice in Wonderland will be iPadised has a budget well above our prototypes, but creates the kind of eye-popping engagement for reading that most of us learning and teaching reading in any language wouldn't want to miss.
Way back last autumn my former colleague Claire McArdle came to the 4iP table with an idea that involved the world's authority on performing Shakespeare, Twitter and a mad little company we had played with before. Such Tweet Sorrow has just been born, and is something every school in the land could be using as an injection of amusing accessible literature before this year's diet of death-by-examination:
More than 400 years ago William Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet , introducing “a pair of star-crossed lovers” who defy an “ancient grudge” between their two families with romantic and ultimately tragic results.
As well as numberless stage versions, it has been retold in film, opera, ballet and musical forms. In this ground-breaking experiment, it is coming to life across and through a social network, Twitter.
If you have a Twitter account already, you can simply choose to follow any or all of the six main characters in Such Tweet Sorrow.
If you aren't on Twitter yet, this might be the perfect opportunity to discover what all the fuss is about. It is easy to join!
Throughout the five weeks of this performance, you will see and read the “tweets” - Twitter updates which may be thoughts, messages, links or confessions - of Romeo, Juliet and four other characters .
They are being brought to your Twitter-stream by six actors from the Royal Shakespeare Company. Each of them has a “script” designed by Mudlark's writing team of Tim Wright and Bethan Marlow, under the direction of the RSC's Roxana Silbert.
The actors will write their actual tweets themselves, using the rich backgrounds the writers have given them, along with a detailed diary that tells them where their characters are at any one moment of the adventure- what they are feeling, who they are with, who they want to talk to.
This may be as ordinary as telling us what they had for breakfast or as remarkable as announcing a deep, deep love.
It will all take place at the time (GMT) it would in real life.
To catch up, look at the Live Timeline and The Story So Far on this Such Tweet Sorrow site - also look out for events in the storyline that you can join in with and have more talk of these sad things.
edinburghmsc: via @jar: First DiCE seminar on Friday - Dr Ross Parry on designing a digital heritage degree http://bit.ly/d5qiLB - a few spaces left!
edinburghmsc: via @jar: online discussion with Henry Jenkins, 15 April, 7pm EST - collective intelligence in the classroom. http://bit.ly/cLxtfho
edinburghmsc: via @sbayne: Liminal Landscapes symposium looks good - Liverpool 1-2 July. http://bit.ly/bxFe0f
Earlier this week at Game-Based Learning 2010 I was talking about how play mechanics and attitudes could perhaps do as much offline as on (Part 1; Part 2), in terms of raising expectations of how young people and adults learn, socialise and live... with some sense of enjoyment and engagement. Via Rory at Ogilvy comes news that the winner of the FunTheory call to action on YouTube is the example, above, of how to make people keep to the speed limit.
What play theories or fun theories could we introduce in your schools to help Good Things Happen?
edinburghmsc: via @jar: chatroulette as punk - RT @bbctech: Bill Thompson sees the punk ethic alive and well online http://bit.ly/d6HeFT
[A summary of my Game-Based Learning talk, with all the bits that I didn't manage to cover in 18 short minutes]
Gaming affects and infects so much of our lives to the extent many of us don't recognise its beneficial effects any more. It's no surprise that educators need to push a "games-based learning" agenda just to help education communities and leaders start to realise some of the untapped potential that comes when we look at games from the point of view of creating systemic changes in learning and learning spaces.
For a start games seem to raise our expectations from the moment we launch them, like a Hollywood blockbuster, and then engage us for as long, sometimes longer. I'll long remember the day I returned from a day teaching to find my wife, newly adorned with a copy of the Sims, still in pyjamas and rather hungry - she'd been too busy feeding, washing and dressing her virtual friends to do any of the above to herself. Or my mother, who, on a stay over with us could still be found at 2am fighting Eastern European-type terrorists in Call of Duty.
The fact is that the opening of a game lets us know that we're in for as much joy as the drah-drah, drah-drah of the 20th Century Fox drums:
Games also manage to help us achieve two things that are also essential for learning. Firstly, we get quite quickly into a sense of flow where, like my wife playing Sims, we lose track of time around us and are absorbed into in-game time. Secondly, we're provided with challenges that are, it seems, perfectly pitched at our zone of proximal development - not quite too hard to understand, not quite too easy to make them boring.
The result of these three factors - raised expectation, flow and Vygotskyism - is a level and intensity of engagement with content that film, TV, books, even live football matches fail to achieve to quite the same level. I'll take suggestions of any of the above that achieve the emotion of a video-game for 20 straight minutes - about the least amount of time we spend on one.Take a look at the Toledano pictures, above, that illustrate what I mean.
But these faces are not just exhibiting 'fun', and in some cases would suggest the opposite. Games offer more than just fun, and for leaders this is vital to understand. It might even be worth stressing that fun is of secondary importance of all to the notion that games challenge in ways traditional linear media (from feature films to textbooks to PowerPoint presentations) generally do not at such regularity with such power and impact.
Gaming is not just about offering challenge, which nearly always indicates learning. Gaming, and specifically play, make up a large part of our understanding of media literacy, and engaging the senses on more fronts would, I'd like to suggest, make for some fascinating transmedia learning experiences.
A good model to think about where gaming fits into the new media literacies our youngsters (and their parents and teachers) need are Henry Jenkins' New Media Literacies. They can be summed up thus:Some games make no attempt to teach our youngsters about the wider connected world, being more about skills development in a particular (subject-focused area) e.g. Dr Kawashima's Brain Training. But generally, video games are superb at hitting a lot of these new media literacy bases, beyond the obvious ones of play, simulation and multitasking. In this paragraph from a stream of enthusiastic consciousness about game-based learning in a Scottish nursery/kindergarten room, we see that the game itself is secondary to game-inspired activity, and this is how games tend to hit so many of our literacies framework:
Caring for goldfish in playrooms, bringing in fish from fish counters on ice and investigating these, children’s drawings and paintings inspired by pet pictures by artists such as Monet and Andy Warhol, visits to Pet shops, visitors in to nursery linked to pets, photographs by children of their own pets and home links, use of video camera and digital camera by children in playroom, pet corner made and designed by children where they dress up as pets to be sold, use money etc etc, sensory area with linked activities, emergent writing and mark making at all areas in the nursery where the children record what they are doing, the list goes on.
This is why an over-emphasis on 'play' as a reason to harness the potential of gaming could be unhelpful in understanding why games are so powerful as learning contexts or tools; there's a lot more than play involved in effective learning that has gaming at its core or point of inspiration.
Therefore, to make sure we can stretch the literacies of our youngsters we, as teachers, might think about how we shape the social and learning environment in our classrooms and online to start filling in some gaps.
Good question, with an easy answer. The creative industries are the fastest growing and already significantly large sector in most of the Western world, and increasingly in the Far East, too. In South America it has arguably been the profession of choice for many years, creating a world-class advertising and marketing industry throughout the continent.
Yet, I feel, the largest differential in this set of industries, spanning fashion to design to technology to games manufacture to filmmaking, will not be the cost of doing business - quality counts above price for the products and services of these industries, and outsourcing is generally done to highly paid niche experts, not to lowly/under-paid mechanical Turks on the other side of the planet. The differential factor will be the ability of its practitioners, accounting for a pace of growth twice that of the rest of the British economy, to continually out-smart competitors with a global understanding of these wide skills bases. Filmmakers have to understand the potential of gaming, game-manufacturers will have to understand how data sets and social networks can make their experiences ever more rich and realistic, fashion designers will have to understand how core technology can make their clothing better or help sell it more effectively.
Therefore, the largest differentiator is possessing 'hybrid talents'. Hybrid talents are ones that understand the potential of other sectors' work, but also where it fits within a larger systemic understanding of how users/customers/learners operate within a complex set of literacies. Without this latter understanding, how are we going to produce media that is both challenging while not being out of the user's depth, and how are users of that media (learners or customers) going to be able to understand ever more complex games and narratives of the kind Janet Murray describes in the brilliant Hamlet on the Holodeck?
This is a genuine challenge. In the past two years I've seen that the success ratio for digital media to gain investment is about 1.5%. That is, for every 250 ideas generated by people only 4 manage to bring that understanding of the wider digital ecology in which they will survive. A lack of hybrid talent means most people lose out, it means our creative industries lose out.
Games that achieve this understanding of the wider digital ecology meet with phenomenal success. While most of the Routes Game flash minigames played in isolation through Miniclip receive huge numbers of plays, the repeat engagement with the subject matter remains far less than when those same games are played embedded within the context of a long-line narrative, community challenges and a murder mystery.
Sneeze, pictured, a game designed to understand the spread of disease, is an example of this phenomenon, having received over 15m plays alone.
Similarly, traditional linear movies are increasingly using games as a means not just to market the film but to add to the experience of watching the film. Last year's Sherlock Holmes release was accompanied by an online flash game 221b.sh.
The agency who created this were at pains to make sure that the film/brand of Sherlock Holmes would "be in a better state after their work than when they picked it up". That is, the game they produced had to extend the storytelling in ways linear film could not. If you take one of the many comments of players/viewers of the film, they succeeded:
If you were to only read the red-tops you'd believe that the only behavioural change that games can engender was one of feral violence and sleep deprivation. Looking closer, though, we can see how the ingredients of good games can work in the real world, by making 'fun', engaging and even challenging acts as simple as choosing to take the stairs instead of the escalator:
Adding play to signage is more likely to achieve the desired result, too (picture, right). Across the UK we see anti-speeding signs that achieve results not by telling us off, or snapping us and punishing us at a time long after the offense, but by smiling or "looking sad" when you speed. The results of this playfulness have been disproportionately more successful than punitive measures.
Likewise, a gaming philosophy underpins our attitudes towards the punishment for speeding. In the UK, it is nearly a machismo statement to claim you have earned three or six points on your licence. In Italy, where any measures to reduce machismo in driving will be used to great effect, you start off with 12 points and then lose them as you speed or break the law in other ways.
More directly, we see gaming elements at play in social apps designed to inform, educate and spread around the web, creating more change in habits - MirrorMe is a good example of this.
[This is Part 2 of a summary of my Game-Based
Learning talk, with all the bits that I didn't manage to cover in
18 short minutes. Part 1 was published earlier, and explains some of the terms used here.]
One of the things that I always find helpful is to take 'standard' ways of thinking, standard documentation, and then do a "find and replace" on it, borrowing ideas from another sector.
What happens when we take gaming, which we've seen has so much promise for learning, and take the national curriculum or guidance documents (I've borrowed the new English primary curriculum), and then make a new curriculum? I think the results are interesting, and I wouldn't mind trying to design a curricular approach along these lines. Swap curriculum for 'game', curriculum phase for 'level' and, vitally, learner for 'gamer':
The statutory game should establish an entitlement for all gamers and promote high standards.The purposes of having a statutory game are:
- to establish an entitlement for all gamers, regardless of social background, culture, race, gender, differences in ability and disabilities, to develop and apply the knowledge, skills and understanding that will help them become successful gamers, confident individuals and responsible citizens
- to establish national standards for gamers’s performance that can be shared with gamers, parents, teachers, governors and the public
- to promote continuity and coherence, allowing gamers to move smoothly between game levels and phases of gaming and providing a foundation for lifelong gaming
- to promote public understanding, building confidence in the work of game levels and in the quality of compulsory gaming.
In particular, the game should:
- promote high standards, particularly in literacy, numeracy and ICT capability
- provide continued entitlement from early years to a coherent, broad and balanced game
- instil in gamers a positive disposition to gaming and a commitment to learn
- promote and pass on essential knowledge, skills and understanding valued by society to the next generation
- be relevant to gamers and prepare them for the here and now, for the next phase of their gaming, and for their future
- widen horizons and raise aspirations about the world of work and further and higher gaming
- make gamers more aware of, and engaged with, their local, national and international communities
- help gamers recognise that personal development is essential to wellbeing and success.
What other curricula around the world make more sense, and will engage more learner-gamers-teachers, when they're find-and-replaced?
Pic: Andrew Mason
A few weeks ago I was listening in on a session from the Swedish arm of agency DDB, who had undertaken some experiments for VW on how one might inject fun into products and life: The Fun Theory. Two experiments made me smile, and I began thinking how ingenious they'd be for helping students in schools happily do the things we'd prefer them to.
For years, one of the behaviour touch points in classrooms and schools has been on the administration of movement and organisation. We've told kids: don't run, don't walk the wrong way up those stairs, don't bring the dirt into school - wipe your feet, take your jackets off when you're in the classroom... All this despite knowing with fifty years experience that telling people not to do stuff doesn't work.
With three videos, I started having some subversive ideas about how we could help youngsters change their behaviour at school and have great fun at the same time:
Management of movement: Management of clothing: Management of feet:
There's a chance that by the dawn of the 2010-11 school session, the beginnings of iPhone app-making as a curriculum activity begins to take traction in Scottish classrooms.
The other day I entered into a prolonged twitter debate with Graham Brown Martin and Joanne Jacobs on how we could encourage a change in technology teaching and learning by encouraging more coding. But, if we did this, what kind of programming would we expect students to learn? And is the point that they should learn programming languages or simply how to learn how to programme?
My tuppence worth was that creating apps was an easy entry point that gives relatively quick results and gratification for one's efforts, and which could lead to greater (more complex things).
Well, the good people at Adventi and new Scottish education startup re-wire are offering a chance for schools to win iPhone training courses and Apply hardware, along with courses on the entrepreneurship and innovation strategies that work with Apple development.
To qualify you have to submit a five-minute YouTube video to the Community Counts site, answering the question "what does best practice in computing teaching mean to you?", and should give a recent example of an innovative project within a computing or information systems classroom in Scotland. For more information, email Lisa Keyse. You have until June 4th.
I'm normally not a fan of anything that proclaims to predict the future, let alone a future that's 10 years away. In digital media terms, that's a lifetime or three. However, a new weekly video podcast series - 20 on 2020 - is providing some fascinating insights from an incredibly varied bunch of people working at the sharp end of change and technology.
Eriksson are curating these videos and insights as part of their own research and development, seeking ideas from people they have admired, though don't necessarily agree with. The result is a high quality set of insights from some genuine thought leaders revealing where they think the changes and opportunities are coming in the run up to 2020.
There are currently eight of the twenty up which you can find on the site and on the YouTube channel, and they include
edinburghmsc: via @jar: Openness vs academic freedom: making teaching public - http://bit.ly/bgA0fa
edinburghmsc: via @sbayne: The emergence of the posthuman subject conference: Surrey 2-3 July 2010. http://bit.ly/bixkaX