Ever wish you could discuss how a blog post might actually be applicable in your own school? Now's the chance, with an opportunity to join a phone chat with me and other educators from around the world this Wednesday.

Earlier this month I published my thoughts to date on what works best for school leaders (or anyone, given a word-change or two) wanting to bring their staff on board for behavioural, procedural or technological change. It's the first of a series of thought pieces with practical next steps for Cisco's GETideas platform.

My GETinsights 'Office Hours' chats

This Wednesday, at 9:00 AM PST/12:00 PM EST/4:00 PM GMT, you can join me and fellow educators for a discussion of the points raised there on the telephone and/or on the computer, by registering for the 45-minute Q&A session beforehand.

My "Office Hours" session is designed to take the wide brushstrokes of the blog post and talk about how it might apply itself in your own setting - the idea is that we can all learn from each other's stories, barriers, and opportunties. It's also a chance to challenge or pick up on points that need expanding from the blog post.

I hope you can join us. If you're West Coast US, it's the beginning of your day, East coasters can join at their lunch break and European teachers can pop in at the end of the school day. Those in the Far East can think of it as their bedtime story ;-) Any questions, just leave a comment here.

Picture Credit: Ewan McIntosh photography workshop, Shanghai 2008 from Brian Lockwood

In a break for our normal service (and any chance of getting real work done this Sunday morning) I bring you Piano Improv on Chatroulette. There's a wee bit of naughty language but, contrary to most of my own Chatroulette experiences, no rude body parts. You will laugh, maybe even be amazed by a guy with some talent and free time on his hands. I'm not going to suggest that music classrooms around the world start using Chatroulette for edyoocashun, but we can giggle a little at the curricular move that might have been...

Update: After a particularly productive morning I've discovered that the talented guy with piano and some time either is Ben from Ben Folds Five, or a good lookalike. The real Ben Folds has since responded to the User Generated inspiration and thus reinvented U2's penchant for the ritual phone call to Presidents and Prime Minsters: he now Chatroulettes with random members of the public during his 2000-seater concerts, creating witty and nsfw songs for them. Brilliant. And that means I've discovered the party piece we'll force Derek Robertson to do at Games-Based Learning in a fortnight.

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The T-Shirt War from Ibrahim Nergiz on Vimeo.

From Tim, the above film is indeed a triumph of preparation. For a 3-minute film, two days, 222 t-shirts and a fire extinguisher are required (along with, arguably, one of the most relentless editing sessions going). As Tim says, the exercise of simply reverse-engineering the clip is superb for understanding filmmaking and animation. However, for an increasingly burgeoning merry band of us (I know Davitt joins us in this camp) it's the joy of mixing analogue skill with digital, the t-shirt art and screen printing with the digital video stop-frame animation and traditional film.

Another example of grown men oohing and aahing on analogue are our chums at BERG. I met Matt Jones, BERG's Director, Design, on Thursday and felt a warm satisfaction as he showed the video, below, about four minutes in. It's an advert this, ten minutes long, for a Polaroid camera. But hidden in here is a lesson in angles and the physics of light even Mr Meyer would have been proud of (except the 1972 hair styling and music is more retro than either of us would ever manage).

But the craft of the actual camera makes me long for one more than any compact digital oblong that I might find on sale these days. I also have the feeling it has a lot more to teach me about stuff than a digital camera ever could. Like "aspheric".

As a Commissioner with 4iP I'll admit to having struggled to convince those digital media producers around me that if only they could produce worthwhile data projects we'd fund them. "Why is data so important?" they'd ask, thinking of it as some kind of geeky pass-time, rather than something storytellers would use.

I'm going through the same process at the moment interviewing storytellers, one of whom will win £10.5k to spend six months uncovering stories the data tells us in the Revealing Stories programme I devised. Learning how to make data useful isn't easy - it's the latest digital storytelling skill with which the digital media world is struggling and for which the education systems of the world hold so much promise.

The above video, of Sir Tim Berners-Lee explaining in five minutes a few open-data-justifying stories, I think the reasons for us to rethink how we approach data are clear. Take just one example, where data revealed an American city was racist in its provision of drinking water. In schools, where does this lesson fit? It's not purely mathematics. It's not just language arts. It's not solely geography or history. It's not possible in the isolation of a graphics class.

For Scottish teachers open data represents the ultimate in Curriculum for Excellence opportunities. For educators the world over it represents cross-curricular projects with realworld application. For the digital media industries it represents another, emerging form of storytelling as important, and potentially as change-making, as film.

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There is a continuing frustration amongst many that for the past decade we've talked so much about the potential of digital media for learning, but that it hasn't translated into enough action. I wonder whether this is to do with the way we're expressing our vision(s) of the way it could be.

I've been working recently with teachers and creative agents from the Creative Partnerships programme in England and with startups from Eastern Europe and the UK in The Difference Engine incubator. Between the worlds of schooling and startups we've been concentrating on the same thing: how do you find out what it is you are actually doing so you can communicate your goal most effectively?

Most people's answer to this is a long, winding mission statement of intent, full of abstract concepts that are impossible - or difficult - to translate into meaningful actions. My first post with Cisco's GETinsight blog is very much on this theme: if you want to bring people along with you on a big change, whether it requires digital media or not, everyone needs to understand what the vision means for them.

Firstly, Benjamin Zander's take as orchestra director and conductor is incredibly helpful (from his brilliant work, The Art Of Possibility):

A Vision might
   ...articulate a possibility
   ...fulfill a desire fundamental to humankind
   ...never leave someone asking "but what about me?"
   ...be a picture for all time
   ...use no numbers, dates, measurements, places, audiences, products
   ...not reference morality or ethics - there should be no right or wrong
   ...be freestanding - pointing neither to a rosier future or a past in need of improvement

When I got thinking about my old school's motto - "Striving for Excellence, Caring For All" - I saw the part I had always liked ("Caring for All") but found that it let itself down on the first part. "Caring for all" I get, and can be translated through every action every teacher and student takes (and you can certainly tell when it's not been carried through into action). But "Striving for Excellence" wrangles against Zander's framework:

• "Excellence" is a state that is not possible for every student in every way (we are excellent at some things, less so at (most) others). It's also an abstract: what does excellence actually look or feel like?
• Being "excellent" is not as fundamental a human desire as "caring for all" of those around us. Most of us don't value "excellence" above caring and comfort.
• It is not the ambition of every student to be "excellent" in everything they (have to) do at school. Many want to "get through", say, Mathematics to excel in Art and Design, or vice versa.
• If we are striving for excellence what do we do when we get there? "Excellence" is not a picture for all time; in theory, if our vision is actionable, we will get there at some point. If we can't get there at some point, then our vision is not actionable and our vision is, therefore, less powerful to make things happen.
• While not pointing to a statistical advantage, the implication of "striving for excellence" is that what we are doing now is not excellent enough, that we are pointing to a past in need of improvement or, more optimistically, that the future is rosier.

The same way of looking at things, and checking ourselves against it when we express ourselves on what we desire, applies in business. Steve Jobs outlines Apple's vision quite succinctly, and in a way that completely fits with Zander's vision:

“Apple’s goal isn’t to make money. Our goal is to design and develop and bring to market good products…We trust as a consequence of that, people will like them, and as another consequence we’ll make some money. But we’re really clear about what our goals are.”

They want to bring 'good' products to market - not excellent ones - and this goal is achievable. Nobody in the company can argue with this or their role in it.

If you're up for the challenge, share your school or company visions/missions in the comments below and have a go at reworking it along Zander's framework: does a new, more en-actionable vision emerge?

I've started bringing some of these thoughts together under the umbrella of national policy-making. Your thoughts would be incredibly valuable: is national policy destined to be uninspiring, visionless? What can we do to avoid that fate?

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I've been fascinated by a new breed of truly interactive television that has been in the making for at least a year, and started to appear at the turn of 2010. From the UK, Dr Aleks Krotoski's Virtual Revolution has provided us not only with a fascinating snapshot of where the net is in 2010, and where it's come from, but she and her team have offered up their entire filming back catalogue for us to remix, bodge together, cut up and blend into new forms and formats.

Meanwhile, Stateside Henry Jenkins tells us about Digital Nation, a PBS programme which filmed him and other luminaries as "an extra" to the main television programme.

Digital Garnish vs Digital Beef
There's a difference, though, between the PBS "Digital Garnish" and the BBC "Digital Beef". Aleks points out that core to this difference is recognising that her product (a TV series) had at least two audiences:

From the start of the process in early 2009, The Virtual Revolution’s production team envisaged two audiences: the first would be an online community who would help to develop the themes we would explore, clarify hard-to-grasp technological concepts, tell us when we were heading in the right or wrong directions, and really put their stamp on the finished programmes. In the tradition of the new breed of wikinovels, wikiarticles and wikifilms, this would be an open and collaborative project within a larger old media landscape that hoped to engage an increasingly disjointed and distracted audience in a new media way. In return, they’d have access to our rushes that they could use to spin their own documentaries about the web.

As someone who has spent my professional life flirting with old and new media, the openness and collaboration was one of the biggest draws when I was approached by the series producer last March. From my point of view, it would be a gross oversight to create something on this subject without the input of the online peanut gallery.

The second audience would be the BBC2 viewing public. They needed grabby content “on rails”, as game developers describe it, evoking images of a journey viewed through a window. This was the paydirt audience: watching the show that would get the reviews and the ratings. The complex concepts that we worked through with the online community would be presented in an easier-to-consume, more streamlined way. And, despite my interactive bias, it turned out that this was where the art of storytelling really emerged.

Normally, in the world of digital product marketing, focus is where it's at: find what you want to do first, execute it better than anyone else and then move on to take over other land. Amazon did books for sale at a cheaper price first, then personalised book recommendation followed by book recommendation for gifts to others and wishlists. Big Brother does, well, Big Brother.

What Aleks and her team produced is an emerging realisation that it's never as clear cut online as it might be in the world of "product marketing", where you're shifting a finished good to a client or customer. The process is where the innovation is most likely to happen, the final product (for the masses) is where the mainstream element comes in. However, the mainstream element that Aleks and her team produced was different, different because it was most definitely informed by the audience's reactions on the blog and, beautifully, by their own mashups of the filmed content the BBC gave away.

The task of creating a trailer for the programme led to many creative attempts being YouTubed: one of the cleverest is this device-switching-convergence-laden piece of art:

The video at the top of this post is amongst the most amusing, exploring the whitespace and cutaways that always end up on the virtual cutting room floor..

With Aleks it happened by accident, creating two separate projects: it wasn't an process without some turbulence:

"I was uploading a photo I had taken on the shoot to my Flickr site, or dispatching another update to my Twitter followers, when the director of photography asked: “Why?”

"For him and the rest of the crew, I was doing a lot of extra work that was distracting from the real reason we were there: to create a piece of non-interactive storytelling that would broadcast to a mainstream audience in a primetime slot."

In the future, this co-production approach should happen by design. The interactive early adopters will realise the beauty in linear storytelling, and those in the storytelling business will realise the power of editing with your audience:

Now imagine that for a breed of digital product with the potential to be mainstream but with the admission that there is a second, vital audience: the enthusiastic amateur that wants to rehash, remix, recut the original and make something not necessarily better, but certainly different. Take this further: the product your first audience produces is not merely a "nice to have", but core to how you cut your final product. The user-generated editing and user-generated content is but part of your wider editorial, production and developer team, all making a better product together.

Whether you're in the business of making television, designing digital products or designing curricula for the creatives of tomorrow, this co-production approach by design, not accident, should underpin the work we plan, because the results are not just more of a learning experience for the creators of content, but for the audience, too. Learning together, pushing and pulling on the content through digital platforms, ultimately makes for a better end-product that is reviewed, rated and assessed.

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