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:
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:
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...".
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.”
Originally shared October 11, 2007. Updated August 22nd, 2010.
As a high school French teacher I found the Sims one commercial game that had both the interest of the students and something that directly helped instruct the content I wanted. Since the early 2000s the quality of commercial off-the-shelf games (COTS games) has risen to match the values of feature films.
Most people's perceptions of games and gaming have more to do with the arcade or shoot-em-ups that they experienced when they were teens. How wrong (happily) could they be.
Certain games are incredibly effective at generating more expanded horizons in students imaginations when they are writing and speaking creatively or transactionally. But play itself is not easy to define. In school we have "play time", which must be both different and more fun than any other time in school. If you hear this three times a day over 13 years of schooling what happens to your notion of work and play? It can't be good.
The opposite of play is not work. The opposite of play is depression.
Jane McGonigal is probably the leading expert in what games offer. She suggests that it's arguably not what most educators think. 'Fun' is but one element that many, but not all, games inspire in us. For learning this is great. 'Fun' gets you the same effect as in this video - you grab attention in the short term, you might even change behaviour. For a while:
'Engagement' is something different. Toledano's pictures of engagement show all sorts of emotions and experiences: fun, fear, angst, perplexity:
I delve into the difference between engagement and fun, and how the former makes video games particularly powerful for learning, in another post just on that.
I've opened some training sessions by looking at something from which is relatively easy to draw the educational link: the arithmetic and literacy challenges in the Nintendo DS game Dr Kawashima's Game Training. LTS's Derek Robertson has undertaken some small-scale case study work which revealed, in this example at least, some increase in attainment, but, more importantly, a great motivation on the part of students to undertake mathematics drills using the game. The interviews with teachers and students help us see where the game added a certain value, and in late summer 2008 this research is being scaled up to 500 DS users.
The educational links have to be sought out, though, when the game is not quite so obviously related to curriculum. This is a skill and confidence teachers have to generate by playing games, or at least spectating their children's efforts and discussing the potential with them. Take Nintendogs as an example. In one Aberdeenshire school we have seen how a game about putting virtual dogs through competitions can generate multiple contexts for learning and activities, from running a business to art and design work.
This is what Derek Robertson, heading up the Scottish Centre for Gaming and Learning, refers to as seeking out fresh contexts for learning.
Another popular Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) game, Guitar Hero, has been used in hugely varied ways by clusters of primary schools and their local secondary school in Musselburgh, Scotland. Depute Head Ollie Bray explains the background to the project, the planning that had to take place and some of the activities that prepared primary school students for a day of collaborative Guitar Hero action in the secondary school at the end of the school year to get secondary mentors and their new primary school friends to get to know each other. Activities included designing guitars, learning how to DJ, designing CD cases, writing fictional band member descriptions and life stories, finding out about suitable locations for a world tour using Wikipedia, tourist websites and Google Earth, planning and costing said tour, and, of course, learning how to play a real guitar.
This example, like the others before it, have been inspired by the work of Learning and Teaching Scotland's Consolarium.
We also need to consider the kinds of skills games can help students learn before jumping in. Marc Prensky's breakdown of the stages of learning in a game are useful for starters. Most teachers would see the 'how' in playing as the main activity in a game, but moving into the moral dilemmas and complexity of decision-making in more long-term "no endgame in sight" games like Sim City or Rollercoaster Tycoon, we can see that very quickly students are moving into the areas of when, where and, ultimately, 'whether and if' type decisions.
To see where this might head in the very near future, it's worth bearing with Sim City creator Will Wright as he takes us exploring his forthcoming PC and console game Spore:
Expanding the horizons of our imaginations
The environments within Spore are far more graphically advanced and appealing, far more personalisable than anything that has gone before it. While we wait for Spore to hit the shelves, though, we can still get that buzz and expansion of our imaginations by touring around Myst, Samorost 2 or Haluz. Taking Myst first, a $20 game that has been around for 10 years now, we have ample resource on the web already to see how it could be exploited to bring students' use of language up a bar or two.
Maintaining rigour and engagement
Tim Rylands is by far the Myst Master, using the dreamy and occasionally spooky landscapes in Myst III in particular to get students loving creative writing - and improving attainment as a result. LTS has also carried out a Myst case study to show how replicable this way of teaching can be. Viewing Tim at work you'll notice that although the method appears spanking new, the pedagogical background is as firm as it's ever been. I love the use of realia to help students find out what sand really feels like, for example. You'll also notice writing being modeled around extensive use of adjective and adverb, effective punctuation using the punctuation pyramid to differentiate and escalate grammar use:
He sits with the children in the class, with one computer, a wireless keyboard and mouse meaning he's not bolted to the front stage. He praises students by repeating, affirming their work. Students write, write, write, all the time engaged with the task in hand. The result is the kind of writing from young children that is well beyond their (apparent) years. And even with our youngest learners, these ones just seven years old, we can use paired writing to achieve equally magical results. The trick is not the technology, but the support it provides to a great teacher intent on getting kids exploring the wonderful world of words.
Visuwords.com was a wonderful tool introduced to me here in New Zealand just minutes before the workshop in Auckland, which will provide more independent learners with a means of seeing the connections between the basic vocabulary they already have and the new words they don't know exist yet.
We can analyse students' writing afterwards, seeing which words they are overusing or if they could make their text more powerful (by taking a deluge of continuous presents into the active (e.g. the clock chimes, instead of "the clock is chiming") by copying and pasting their text into Wordle.com.
The kind of tasks you can do with these games, though, is not limited purely to 'creative' writing in the fantasy-land way:
And the writing needn't be done individually: group and collaborative writing is possible, too, either using the technology of Google Docs and wikis for some virtual collaboration, or using large A3 paper, rectangle drawn to create a large margin in which up to four students write a little before spinning the paper to add to their friends' texts.
Other ideas to help structure writing might be found in books that have spawned from Raymond Quéneau's original "Exercices de style". The notable visual literacy offspring from this masterpiece would be Matt Madsen's 99 ways to tell a story, some of whose pages you can preview on the web. You might also think of taking the writing into a new format, copying some of the ideas in Penguin's We Tell Stories series by incorporating place into writing using Google Maps, for example.
'Free' writing
Buying Myst or a bunch of Nintendo DSes (for which Myst was launched in November 2007) might still be too much of an investment for a teacher just wanting to dip their toes in the water. In terms of Dr Kawashima-like games, plump for Tutpup, a free online mathematics and literacy gaming platform that keeps children's identities safe and provides email reports for parents or teachers. In terms of Myst-like creative work, there are some flash-based free games on the web which provide equally mysterious imagination food.
Samorost is available in two versions. Samorost 1 is great fun, although the opening scene with a hooka-smoking hippy may push some teachers away. Samorost 2 is a great game for all ages when it comes to dreamy landscapes on which to base some creative writing. When I blogged about it last session Kim picked up on it and almost instantaneously jumped into creating some amazing teaching and learning opportunities in her classroom. Thankfully, she's blogged about the process and her thoughts on using the game as a stimulus for creative writing. I don't want to copy and paste her thoughts, so take a look for yourself at this great teacher's work, in particular:
I think I know the answer to the last question, and it's the answer with so much of this technology. It's not that the technology is particular cool, funky, well-made or educationally sound. It's that the teacher's style of teaching and learning has almost undoubtedly changed. We've been seeing it since, too, with Ant's students with additional support needs.
Here, in this last example, we witness Kim going from the unknown into the deeper unknown. Living on the edge, not sure how it will pan out, being on the same level of anticipation and discovery as the kids in this new emerging world, means that her practice is also constantly emerging. And that, as I have said [too] often, is a central key to us doing better.
Are you using games or game-making to expand the imaginations of yourself or your students? Are you talking about it on your blog or wiki, or even sharing your students' work? I'd love to know about it.
Pic: Nintendo DS
***Live webchat today/tonight - check your timezone for details***
Many moons ago I wrote a post that struck a chord with of this blog's august community: Do schools really value pupils' views? This Tuesday, I'm giving over 40 minutes of my GETinsight live webchat to get in depth on that issue. I'd love you to join me.
There's a blog post up on the GETinsight site already, showing some amazing examples of where student voice has not just been heard, but listened to, too, in the UK and in New Zealand. Student voice for deciding how schools operate is just one aspect. I'm most keen to hear stories and debate out how and whether students should have a 100% say on their learning journeys: the what, how and when of their learning:
[Learner voice] is quickly becoming edu-jargon, with its actual meaning for day-to-day learning becoming less clear to those teaching young people and, vitally, to young people themselves. Learner voice has all too often been reduced to making choices on what the lunch menu will be.
What do you think? Please join me for a live audio chat on your timezone this Tuesday/Wednesday. Details here.
Pic from GreenPeanut
