Learn 4 Life Podcast

I have been working on the TeachMeet BETT 09 films for the last month and now I can finally begin to release them slowly on a regular basis. They will be coming out from the TeachMeet Talks channel which has been sponsored by Futurelab for the whole year..

This is the first one to come out – Lisa Stevens on having the courage to just try new things with technology and learning. Notice she talks about the community not the tech…

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I love teachers like this, who have the courage to have a go, to try something new, who rise to a challenge – it really is as simple as that and the TeachMeet films will be an example of more and more people who are doing just that. Trying new things, experimenting and often with fantastic results. Show these films to your colleagues – it’s not about how well you do with technology – it’s about connecting with people and fostering learning in a postive way.

TeachMeet definitely marks the genesis of a whole new breed of teacher – one who is willing to take risks; to open out the variety of ways they can engage with learners and most importantly to have the courage to  learn themselves, knowing they may well make mistakes along the way. Lisa talks about validation, audience, learning in a heartfelt passionate way. I’m glad there are people like this teaching our children in this country. I hope these films inspire others to go down similar paths…

How do you get people to think completely differently about education and learning?

Learn 4 Life exists to document change and innovation in education in this country and the world. The site highlights ideas around ICT that challenge and question the current orthodoxies. It’s not simply a blog about the latest Web 2.0 tools or teaching techniques although it does encompass those things – the aim of the whole project is to document and disseminate significant pointers to future change in education. Virtual worlds is one area where this really is the case and I make no apology for highlighting any practice involving these environments.

I personally believe that the current models for learning in schools are not fit for purpose and that a lot of the curricula around the current exam based systems are outmoded and, to be honest, anachronistic. But in order to move an education system on, you need to have people who have the vision, courage and determination to be curious enough to experiment with and investigate alternatives, no matter how fantastic or “wild” they may seem at first. Often these form the genesis of new orthodoxies and more effective and engaging ways of working that stress process over product and that lead to an environment where learning is bounded only by your own imagination and not just a series of irrelevant and end-stopped exams. Education is a lifelong process and anything that appears to nurture and amplify that and make it fun  deserves a very close look.

Virtual Worlds

A lot of what is written and reported about Second Life in the mainstream media really does often miss the point of how virtual worlds can be used to build communities in non-linear, less hierarchical ways far more in keeping with the distributed digital world fast coming up on the inside all around us. Let no-one lose sight of the fact that they are just another medium, albeit highly engaging and immersive, to try and reconfigure how we do things together in the name of learning. The radical thing about virtual worlds is that they enable the participants to evolve whole new ways of working with each other – for me they foster and encourage reflective practice on the part of many of the participants and also help form extremely dynamic community building at both a localised and a global level that is highly personalised. If you watch the interview you will hear Peter outline the successes in this area.

Peter Twining and the Schome Park Project

Peter Twining is at the forefront of research into new educational systems. I was lucky enough to be able to talk with him about the genesis and history of the Schome Park Project and how Second Life on the Main and Teen Grids became an environment for his focus. Peter’s vision is far from parochial or unambitious as you will hear throughout the interview.

One of the most important interviews of recent years

The Schome Park Project may seem a little under the radar in terms of educational change in the UK at present but I consider this one of the most important interviews I have given in recent years and the project to be an amazing foundation for how communities of learning may operate in the future.

Knowledge Age Skills

I really do believe that Schome and the vision behind it may well underpin serious development of virtual learning spaces and gradual evolution of Knowledge Age Skills for a truly 21st educational system.

Lightbulb Moments

Peter talks about the history of the project and his several “lightbulb moments” along the way. He agreed to be interviewed in Avatar form in Second Life Main Grid and I mashed the video of his interview with images from the Schome Park Project...

I recently interviewed Joe, whose new job is Head of New Ventures at the SQA. Joe looked a bit quizzical when I referred to the New Generation User Skills Report at the beginning of the interview but was too polite to correct me. It is, of course, the Next Generation User Skills report and I have blogged about this previously.

The gmail connection held up well and I appreciate someone as busy as Joe making time to give this interview with all the inherent risks and glitches that can happen over a live connection. (note: I did use the wonderful Levelator to re-level the sound because of the discrepancies in volume – try it it works wonderfully.)

Genesis of the NGUSR, Diva Project and Curriculum for Excellence

He talks about his background at the awarding body, his experience of using mutlimedia as a lecturer in a college for 20 years and how that helped him review the landscape for a User Skills Report. As well as the NGUSR he also outlines various initiatives like the Diva Project in Scotland and how he has worked with vendors but also how the NGUSR will feed back into the Curriculum for Excellence. His remit now extends to adults and lifelong learning as well which is what Learn 4 Life coverage is all about!

GLOW and dynamic curriculum

He also talks about GLOW and his vision of communities of practice, directories of subject specialists and a more dynamic curriculum development; the system being changed by the deliverers – one of the things I hinted at in asking Norbert Pacheler at the end of the film in my previous blog. One of the joys of my job is seeing how research, practice and trends all seem to be leading to change in various areas and the research coming out does seem to be backing up Joe’s vision. Interviewing people in the learning landscape at many levels does help give an insight into the learning maps that might evolve.

Google and vocational spaces

He is also looking at using Google in the vocational space in Scotland and e-portfolios – his work with the vendors in the Diva Project has proved a good grounding in this. He also shared his idea of how Scotland might use content in all sorts of different way with various stakeholders. Exciting stuff and Scotland has the added advantage of Glow that can hold and disseminate this, something that can’t be done in England as there is no pan-VLE like it. That is going to be a big challenge in the future.

Work based learning

I really wished I had talked to him more about work based learning but no doubt he will be blogging about that at his excellent Experimental Blog. I really would like to thank him once again for just giving me a taster of his vision for learning in the future.

Education and learning need people like Joe and as an addendum I spotted him lurking at the bottom of the EdTechRoundup FlashMeeting this Sunday and I know how busy he is!

Learn 4 Life Holodeck

Learn4Life Island has been in Second Life now for roughly two years and in that time I have put a lot of time and money into the building of the space to see what the possibilities are for education in the future. This year I am intent on building an imaginative community to work there on several ad hoc projects; they may come to nothing or they may evolve into bigger projects that can be co-opted into mainstream education.

In the first of these I am looking for any UK teachers who are very experienced with the Second Life platform. Ideally they will be working in the arts, media and science fields.  If you have basic scripting/coding skills as well that would be a big bonus. The idea is to have a play with and adapt, design, build Holodecks to make ARGlike environments that can be used for imaginative teaching in any areas of the curriculum – in and outside SL – so allied resources for building, cartoon making, filming, machinima and other stuff will be available as well – a lot of these will be web based, free, collaborative and Open Source applications that can be used to construct stuff both socially and virtually :). The process of building in the interactive/ collaborative activities away from the computer will be just as important as any ‘virtual’ build. You may never use Second Life in your teaching but the ideas and activities you evolve here will help with any future collaborative virtual environment you may use.

I personally will not have much time to run the project but I can offer secure resources such as land and holodecks/ media facilities in Second Life for you to have a play with and try to evolve some form of pedagogy around the concept. This will kick off (if it gets enough attention) end of Feb beginning of March 2009. Any LA or other commercial /non-profit or other interested organisations who want to become involved and offer funding/ sponsorship/ expertise would be most welcome too. Scripters and interested academics are invited too to lend any expertise they feel might be valuable. All results and resources will be entirely open and the whole process is as much one of professional development for yourself as well as the intended students further down the line. If you want to take the experience and formalise, research, exploit it, fine, but this project is not about that, it is about having fun and gaining insights to what does or doesn’t work – I’m deeply attached to idea of learning through play and this project is definitely about play and personal as well as professional development

I am beginning training teachers who are totally new to SL at that time as part of UK BSF (Building Schools for the Future Project) so there will be a totally newbie teaching community around to bounce ideas off as well. Look at the film and get in touch. This project will not involve students at this stage – only teachers…The scope is limited to the UK because of timezone differences but if that doesn’t worry you then please email, Twitter or DM me in-world. I’ll take it from there and orgainise some in-world and Flashmeeting dates.

We will probably looking to take some of these ideas into the EduSim platform as well for use by primary teachers and students later. So please do get in touch.

My contact details are available on the film below.

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Open Source Schools

Every once in a while you see something that makes you think: ‘Yes this really is going to change education in this country’ and it makes you smile inside because you know what is going to happen further down the line and how revolutionary it will be; it will touch the lives of so many people and transform learning – making it more effective, more engaging, more personal and build a sense of community far beyond the initial event itself.

Pivotal Moments

One such moment was on the saturday at BETT 2009, where a small but significant 45 minute presentation by 4 teachers (Miles Berry, Michelle Walters, Jose’ Picardo and Doug Belshaw) on Open Source Schools will, potentially, change the face of how schools use Software in the UK and beyond and its knock on effect for how people do business in the classroom. A big shout out must also go to Josie Fraser who I know was one of the consultants to BECTA on the project which is going from strength to strength.

Days of Lockdown are ending

For me the days of locked-in licenced computing and the lack of access to pupils to good professional quality software at home are a big issue. So this launch is timely – if you are mulling over the lack of funds in your budget for the year you must see this presentation – it will save you thousands of pounds and enable you to have a way of ensuring pupils can work from home to school and back again fluently with the software and kit without worrying over legal and compatability issues. This will save you money and raise the game in terms of home/ school learning.

Fiming and Mashing the presentations

I couldn’t attend because I was presenting about Second Life (with a live link to Tailand) elsewhere at BETT but Hannah Wise from the BBC kindly agreed to film the session and what a good job of camerawork she did! I’m glad we managed to capture it on video because I think the event needed documenting and the basic concepts spreading as far and wide as possible using that medium.

I’m passionate about the use of video in education to effect change – for me it is the underlying ethos behind this site. See something good, film it or record it to audio and then disseminate it to make things happen. So I Mashed the video with the presentations to create the results below. They will all be available on the Open Source Schools site, please go there for lots more resources as well and please download them and use them in CPD for consciousness raising locally. They are all free to distribute under a CC Education Commons licence. In this time of Credit Crunch and shrinking school budgets Open Source Software will be invaluable but more than that it will underpin and build your learning communities and that is what it’s all about surely? Show this to your head, head of department, LA advisor, parents, local firms, anyone who can make a difference in your local community.

Teachers are Heroes

The teachers in this film are special; early adopters who have given over hours of their time to show their vison for the future – people like this are my heroes – they make the difference and not for just one day but one day, one moment can change things, they have my immense respect. They are passionately engaged with their subject and, most of all, their pupils; they change people’s lives by their devotion and commitment to education. What they do needs to be documented and shared.

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I talked to Howard Rheingold briefly about Social Media Classroomat the Institute of Creative Technologies – Future of Creative Technologies conference earlier this morning.

Formats available: Quicktime (.mov), MPEG-4 Video (.m4v), Flash Video (.flv)

I first met Mark Kramer at a Futurelab seminar when I was trialling livecasting from the HandHeld learning conference in London 2007.  He was in the audience and seemed to be asking all the right questions and was a fount of knowledge on Social Media about stuff I had never even heard of up until that point and I considered myself pretty wired into the discussion.  We exchanged a few words and then I encountered him again on Seesmic a few months later. We caught up again recently at the 2008 HandHeld learning conference and it was only then I realised we had met in real life for the first time all those months ago.

Mark researches works at the  ICT&S CENTER FOR ADVANCED STUDIES AND RESEARCH, Salzburg, Austria  as a Research Fellow / Teaching Assistant and a lecturer at UPPER AUSTRIAN UNIVERSITY OF APPLIED SCIENCES [FH OÖ], Steyr, Austria. He’s currently engaged in Information Society / Web Science Research and actively researching and publishing within various interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary academic fields, including: Communication Science, Computer Science, Political Science and Pedagogical Science. He’s responsible for managing the ICT&S Center’s academic reference and media-resource collection. He’s a highly participatory observer and active developer of mobile learning scenarios. In other words he lifecasts his daily experiences and talks with and videos nearly everyone he meets and not just fellow techies but all sorts of people on his travels.

But more than that he’s a good friend who has a boundless curiosity for social media and people. So when I wanted to test out the new Googlemail Video feature he was happy to respond – first we talked on a first generation Asus EeePc and then on a Macbook Pro for comparison purposes. But we got talking around the issues of kit and went on to wider social issues to do with how people connect and what his research involves.

In the two videos below the conversation meanders between several topics but the focus, as always is the use of Social Media, cloud computing and what its social ramifications are for educators and their community. As he says “So long as we keep the conversation going..” and that, for me is the most important point of all.

This blog is mirrored at the Socialmediaclassroom – I would recommend everyone to join up on there to continue the discussion

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How to do it and do it right

Serendipity is a wonderful thing – I am curious – sometimes too curious for my own good but today I had a few things happen that gave me an insight into the future of education and I’d like to share them with you. The first is an interview I did with an old friend, Alfie Dennan of Moblog.

He runs through how Moblog is used in Education in the film and we did talk further later about how effective Moblog is in schools. He even talked about the genesis of the business where he got together with his co-founder to solve a problem of getting data to a phone wirelessly but what intrigued me even more was his use of Moblog and other new API technologies to bind together community involvement to tell stories to change the way people do things. A culture shift in other words towards using social media and digital tech to effect change and build learning and awareness and all done within an ethical framework. Sound familiar – yes some core curriculum for the new digital literacies there I think and Alfie is a fine example of how to do it. I thoroughly endorse Moblog – I’ve been using it to put photos on the web for almost five years now from my phone.

Ethical use of Social Media

But now we come to the interesting part. We then talked about his campaign that used Moblog and its community and outside observers and interested parties to spread the word about XDRTB – an insidious disease but a mouthful to remember. He talks about the creative process that went into the campaign and I recommend you read about the genesis of the whole thing here. What is fascinating about this interview from an educational viewpoint is it is a case study in innovation. How ideas coalesce in someone’s mind to bind together a learning community for the common good. Watch the film and see how the idea evolved – it is a rare case study of how someone uses personal insight and creativity to work up a really engaging idea that binds together people in a common cause. It says more about the uses of Moblog than any dry demonstration of functionality could do – ever. And it’s inspirational.

What is fascinating about it is the way Alfie worked out how to mashup Google Maps aggregated map pin feature, Moblog and an entire community of very technically savvy people to tell a story through the medium of a low level ARG. It’s also for an ethical cause and I think it is one of many digital narratives that are going to be emerging soon. As you watch the film remember it was the back end community that made this story possible. Some people used highly creative ways to find the objects hidden in London and the ways they gave out and found the clues using GPS phones, photos, Second Life and even a fake number station is quite incredible. Here are a group of people who are highly technically literate contributing and collaborating in something more than just a game. At the end of the interview he also talked about the process o...

Photo attribution Mr Ush AKA Ian Usher on Flickr CC

Why you should use Twitter

I have just interviewed Drew Buddie (AKA digitalmaverik on Twitter) about his escapades with Twitter over the weekend at the Isle of Wight Conference. He also talks about his involvement at the e-competent tutor meeting today.

Twitter at the Isle of Wight Conference 2008

First off I have to say that I wasn’t at either event but I did talk with Joe Dale at the Isle of Wight Conference on MFL over FlashMeeting. The buzz at the meeting was nothing I had ever experienced before – Joe had obviously put an immense amount of effort into the conference and the delegates where literally ecstactic about the event. I appreciate the hard work that obviously went into that and it was an amazing success. It was a truly collaborative event with people using digital media like Twitter, FlashMeeting, and dynamic web pages to show the world how to run a CPD event for teachers. All that effort and collaboration really showed in the feedback delegates were giving on camera at the end.

Drew gave a session on Twitter and not only that his feedback forms were put online as well! He talks of how students showed teachers a few things as well. Excellent – this is just how to run a conference. I asked Joe if any SLT were there and it seems not. Let’s hope they get enthusiastic staff beating down their doors to demand this is the way they should do things in the future. Perhaps the upcoming NCSL Teachmeet in Nottingham May 2009 will turn a few heads but somehow I suspect word will have got around by then.

He also outlines what happened at the e-competent HE tutor workshop and how Ning was used to augment the day. You can pick up the Tweets of both meetings by clicking these links iowconference08 and ect08.

We need CPD like this now everywhere and for everyone

Both these events were excellent exemplars of how to do CPD. Highly dynamic, collaborative and engaging. But I won’t write any more just listen to Drew talking – his passion for what he does shines out. This is the start of a revolution in Digital Learning and I can see this threading through the teaching community just as the use of USB sticks did when they first came out. But don’t take my word for it – just listen to the podcast.

Digital Culture is with us now

Which one is real? – Click to play

The informal use of Social Media outside schools can be a very strong driver for change in learning. I want to give concrete examples of how our culture is changing in this area. All involve the spread of what Josie Fraser called in her recent SocialTech blog – Digital Literacy.

Mirror Worlds as effective informal learning spaces

In the previous post, I covered the Virtual Worlds Conference in London last week and the emergence of ‘ad hoc’, informal ways people met up to do business.

On the night before that particular conference happened, I was invited down to the Greyhound Pub in Kensington to attend a pre-meet, virtual-to-real or real-to-virtual, event. Depending on how you look at it; it can get confusing at times, but stick with me, this is highly relevant to teaching and learning.

The Greyhound Pub – – Click to Play

Virtual to real and back again

The very first thing I encountered was a massive screen in the back of the pub, showing me the virtual Greyhound Bar and all the Avatars there. And in the virtual bar there was a screen showing a live video feed of the customers at the real bar. The Greyhound in real and virtual space is owned by Kwame Oh, (Julius Sowu).

Where a real life place is copied in virtual space this is often called a Mirror World. Buildings and features are replicated to mirror the real world.

Entertainment and leisure as powerful informal learning?

Kwame Oh – Click to Play

Kwame Oh is an ebullient character committed to mashing up Second and Real Life for entertainment, tourism, leisure and business purposes. He’s a social media entrepreneur who understands that virtual worlds need a community context (at least to begin with), but he’s also an innovator and project manager who has a deep insight into the digital landscape. What is more he’s got a sense of fun and a spirit of innovation and creativity. Surely just the qualities needed to generate new business in this new, digital world?

Whilst some academics may reflect on how best to get teachers to navigate  the steep learning curve of Second Life, and there have been good initiatives recently to do this,  Kwame seems to manage it in other adults with an ease that’s enviable. His secret? – other people.

Informal facilitation in a fun space

The pub is a perfect place for some communities to meet and have real life facilit...