The second podcast is out – short and sweet and a precursor to more regular content. Honest!

This is more a test of the new mics etc I am using to get that “broadcast” sound I’m always obsessing over – this is pretty close. (Best Listened to through headphones or good reference sound speakers).

Click on the image above or on this text for show notes.

Welcome to the Learn 4 Life Podcast

Here is the audio tease for the next season of L4L’s News Podcasts for the Summer Term.

We hope you enjoy the format – more to come next week. This week is only a tease to get you going but we will be going out more in-depth each week on UK Education topics. News and views from the Grass Roots for practising teachers and educators.

Last month I went along to the iPads in the Classroom event at the London Knowledge Lab. It was a dissemination of the summation of “research” about the use of iPads in the Classroom.

Despite the various studies I am still unconvinced about wholesale use of iPads in classrooms. For me the big issue is the “lockin” that happens when using these devices. One thing that did seem to emerge out of the mist in this session, however, was the ease with which data can be garnered whilst using them.

Partway through the morning I came across Stefan Kreitmeyer’s use of iPads in synchronous, face to face, networked devices. I spent some time talking with him about the strategies he employs.

For me, this is the most interesting and considered use of the tools. I am drawn to uses of technology that allow users to connect and teach and learn in ways not before possible.

Have a listen to the interview below and look at his website at mutiberry.net

If you cannot see the Audio link just click here:

http://audioboo.fm/boos/1219928-interview-with-stefan-kreitmayer-at-london-knowledge-lab-25-01-2013.mp3

The transcript of the Interview is also now available on Scribd for free – see window below:

Transcript of Interview With Stefan Kreitmayer at London Knowledge Lab 25-01-2013 by

It is well worth going to the free events at London Knowledge Lab . I also interviewed Richard Noss about the Lab and what it does:

 

Here are my notes on MindMeister about the report-

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If you can’t see the report on your device – try here:

http://www.mindmeister.com/251137795/ipads-in-schools-notes

At the recent MirandaMod at the Games Based Learning Conference I gave a brief “provocative” presentation about the culture behind Games Based Learning and how schools can use that culture of activity to make learning more productive.

My Prezi presentation here if you want to follow along:

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Games Based Learning on Prezi

Here is the audio podcast of the session too >>>> Audio file .

When I was little (between 5 and 10 years old) I grew up in the early-sixties, post second world war era London of bombsites and grey realities.

Like most boys my age at that time, I watched an endless succession of Brits Vs Germans war films at the saturday cinema club, on (the newly acquired) TV and bought things like the Commando Comic – which was every bit as gruesome as anything you’ll find today in Call of Duty :

 

 

 

I used to have endless cap gun fights with my friends in the streets. I used to take the bus to Southend so I could walk down to the pier and play a very early version of an electronic video game involving a real periscope and a U-Boat on screen. I used to spend hours and all my pocket money on that infernal machine torpedoing things from freighters to enemy gunboats. I can’t say it scarred me for life or affected my cognitive development – it was all pretend and excellent fun.

REALITY vs FANTASY

I haven’t forgotten the thrill it gave me as a child but I wasn’t naive enough to think that all I consumed was anything other than fantasy. The realities of the Vietnam war and other adult intrusions into my life were more than evident and I can still remember the bowel freezing moments of sirens on police stations being tested in London leading up to the nuclear confrontation of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

So when I read about the supposed dangers of gaming and the numerous negative references to their application to education I remember my own history in this area with a wry smile. When the ZX Spectrum came out twenty years later I bought one immediately and played a fair few of the games at the time. By that time I was teaching and I started to learn Basic and brought the machine into class so I could program animations for pupils and start to teach them how to code.

Five years ago, when Second Life came out, I was an early adopter – I’m still in there working out smart ways of using the immersive environment to teach and learn effectively. Anyone who knows me, knows I am not really into reminiscence or nostalgia for times gone by – I prefer to live in the present but where relevant, the past can give an insight or long view into events going on today so long as we learn from our mistakes…

BACKLASH AGAINST GAMING AND MORAL PANICS

The sudden backlash against online Gaming and the arising of concerns about possible changes in brain activity in Teens and  “unethical” lack of responsibility makes me wonder. And I had, to be honest, one of those WTF moments (if you don’t know what that means cover your synapses I won’t provide you with a link).

You see they are only pretend – ask any teenager if they consider the war games they play to be real…The whole process bound up in gaming is, strangely, a ludic one – this may be news to some people-  it doesn’t have to have real life repercussions. Just as the imaginary number of people I shot dead when a child never turned me into a rampaging serial killer – it isn’t real. But then nobody was giving me brain scans at the time – it’s probably too late now…

ONLINE GAMING HAS A LONG HISTORY

More than 30 years ago, in 1978,

LEARNING SPACES

Why would I choose to live video stream and film a group of people who got together at the last minute in a tree house in Regents Park to discuss the future of educational CPD? The idea, at first, seems bordering on the eccentric. The venue for this discussion was more something out of Second Life than the real world. The Treehouse Gallery public Art project in Regents Park generously gave us time and space to devote to this meeting about ICT CPD for the 21st Century and Drew Buddie suggested it would be the perfect venue for a meetup…

As my good colleague, Theo Kuechel has often said over the years – the future will be about different learning spaces. And in this particular instance it seems to be true.

CPD ANYWHERE – NO MORE BORDERS

Firstly it demonstrates that it is now quite possible to have CPD anywhere – even in a darkening park under a tree in the middle of London at the end of the Summer in a rainstorm. There are no longer any physical barriers to getting together to share ideas and reflect on how education is going in the rapidly changing technological landscape of the 21st century.

Secondly I felt that this meeting should be documented in detail as it marks a step change in how people “could” do things in the future. No matter how far away that future may be – the technology to facilitate that meetup is available here – now.

And what better topic to discuss than ICT CPD, the TeachMeet model and new ways of doing things that may re-energise the CPD model in this country.

TEACHMEET ALTERNATIVES

John Connell – in a recent blog, suggested it was time for a TeachMeet alternative. I quote:

“I believe that the time has come, however, to think of an alternative to TeachMeet – not, I hasten to add, as a replacement, but to stand alongside TM as another way of getting people thinking, learning, playing and working together to change education, in circumstances where the particular strengths of TeachMeet are not so appropriate.”

I guess this is one of those alternatives – a QED on how to do that using imagination and drive to focus people’s attention on the issues at hand.

POINTS ALONG THE WAY

I would recommend that people look at the transcript, listen to the podcast or watch the video. This meeting wasn’t just about the novelty of meeting in an unusual place – it was a tightly focused discussion on the future of CPD in ICT and beyond in the UK. Many interesting points were raised during the discussion and I would welcome comments at the end of this blog on our reflections that evening.

Some of the issues raised were:

* CPD is broken – how to fix it?

* The TeachMeet model and how to widen awareness of this

* How Web 2.0 tools are used effectively in education at present

* If only a minority of teachers know about new CPD models how to be more inclusive

* The use of Learner and Student voice in CPD models

* The cost effectiveness in new CPD models

* Working outside of silos

IGNEOUS EXTRUSIONS AND VOLCANIC BURSTS

Along the way there were quite a few gems in the discussion –

Thanks to ReactionGrid and @dstrawberrygirl, Learn4Life now has a place on the Open Sim grid and I am officially a “Gridizen”.

Chris set me up an account in minutes and I was able to have a quick play with Scratch for Open Sim.

Here’s a very quick video of the basic process. I simply downloaded the Scratch for Open Sim application – written in Squeak here (courtesy of a link from Rich White‘s excellent Greenbush Labs Blog – Rich tweaked Scratch for Second Life for Open Sim as a universal app for Windows, Mac and Linux) and then I was able to write code that could control a prim on the Open Grid in seconds.

I simply dragged and dropped the building blocks onto the interface and then copy and pasted the code into TextMate and from there into my prim on Reactiongrid and presto – it worked first time. (NB you don’t need to even copy to a Word Processor on a Windows machine – but do on a Mac)

So much more engaging than Scratch in 2D don’t you think

HOW TO MAKE VIDEO AMPLIFY AND AUTHENTICATE COMMUNITY ACTIVITY

I have been live streaming video for about 6 years now in different guises. From the pre YouTube days when I needed the help of specialist media companies to live stream, and virtually a whole server to push the video out (with a massive bandwidth bill to boot) – to a few years back when I discovered Mogulus (now Livestream), Ustream, FlashMeeting, QIK et al.

It always struck me very forcibly how important it is to get both the mediums – (real time synchronous video with commenting from viewers on Twitter) and asynchronous (after the event more polished and post produced embedded in a series of good resources) to play to their various strengths.

One of my first video jobs was to build a website for the world’s first Virtual Opera in a girls secondary school in Kings Cross and show the daily rehearsals as they were performed as a series of flash movies then stream the finished opera in real time – twice!

Part of the deal – which was sponsored by Nesta/ Futurelab as it was then was to get match funding from Commercial companies to enable provisioning of kit and services for the event. But the Commercial companies, at first, couldn’t see the concept – they didn’t “get it” – remember this was pre YouTube.

So for weeks I shot digital video of rehearsals – then went home in the evening – edited and encoded the video and then renecoded it into flash uploaded them to my server and wrote the HTML for the flash movies and created the finished web pages. The videos then began to tell a story and people started to understand the filmed narrative.

As the site began to grow and the movies began to populate the website we got more and more sponsorship because the companies could see the narrative emerging and the community started to tune in and, in turn, bounce off of that content. But more than that the community was global so the opportunity to show sponsorship on a much wider platform riding on the tails of a very local story became an established model. So when YouTube came along later it wasn’t that unexpected to me.

Parents were able to see their children rehearsing and the countdown to the live stream of the performance. Companies could see their ROI grow day by day with the popularity of the site which was getting a lot of media attention as it grew – everyone’s attention was captured because of the community looking in on itself and responding.

So the asynchronous video helped to magnify interest in the event and the event drove the activity and buzz around the community. It was a virtuous circle but also a hell of a lot of hard work into the early hours of every morning for about three months…

LIVE STREAMING vs ASYNCHRONOUS VIDEO BROADCAST – how they are different

Fast forward seven years past many many jobs and contracts to the Open Source Schools UnConference this week where I was able to broadcast out live from the NCSL using a Mac laptop and a “dongle” – it’s nothing new I’ve been doing it for years.

Over the past two years I have perfected the use of a mini outside broadcast portable filming unit I carry everywhere with me – it easily enables me to film, stream and document the day for others who could not make it there physically. Six years ago this was my dream – today it’s a reality and the technology to produce live streaming is getting smaller and more powerful by the week…

Inside this case I have 2 tape DV cameras, 3 Flip cams, allied mini tripods, broadcast quality external mikes, ethernet cables,

This is a simple test to see if I can run the iPhone codec from Blip. Should work on web and iPhone – here goes. Won’t work on the web if you have a PC and no iMovie player.

Click to play

OK a bit of recursion – so seems to work – I need to include iPhone links every time now with the usual Flash stuff – great resource and useful for teachers who want to access resources beyond the school network. Sorted…