As we stumbled our way through the various apps and features we talked about a number of issues.

Here are 4 immediate observations as I am strapped for time as usual.

1) It will be interesting to see how this scales and what the implications are for permissions around it (Handle With Care). The problem will be how it conflicts with T&C’s and institutional expectations in schools. Theo will be writing a post about this and Glow on his blog Digital Signposts. The fact is it is a fairly democratic medium and people will be exposed to the full glare of how they are presented (and represented) worldwide. If you have a problem with that representation you will disengage and retreat into other media or private modes. As Theo mentioned you can, in some cases, remix with a CC licence.

2) How will you add granularity to this medium. One thing I’d like to see would be an ability to annotate at timed intervals. I’d also like to see visual annotation in the screen sharing, so you can draw arrows and highlight stuff. As many, many resources begin to emerge the ability to aggregate and conserve quickly will be vital. The future is indeed data and how you control and direct the flow. This is as true for schools as it is for business – where the two conflict might be a worry though…

3) Amplifying scope always interests me with a tool like this. Having it up on a whiteboard for a room full of observers and having that orchestrated by someone facilitating the interaction will introduce new protocols of social interaction at distance. This is something the MirandaMods have been doing for some time now. Having several rooms with several whiteboards would amplify this further. The ability to make this a very local conversation or a global one or a mixture of both (time zones and sleep deprivation being issues here).

4) Document sharing and annotation in real time with video interaction. So you get to see the context of what it is you are working on and the responses from other people.

I could go on but those are just a few to begin with.  This would be a marvellous tool to blend with Teachmeets. I should imagine it will facilitate cluster bombs of interaction throughout the educational community and, as ever, teachers and students will quickly adapt and subvert the medium.

Give it a go – join up for Google Plus and YouTube and you have a CPD tool there for the asking. If you are in a large school, over several sites,  this will save time at staff meetings. It will drive the use of these tools right into the heart of the educational establishment and I can only welcome that wholeheartedly.

Because of my very heavy workload at present I will put up the two main interviews I did last week and I’ll add various others with a reflective blog on where things might be going in this area as soon as I get do the post production and get permissions from teachers, industry, lecturers and students.

So this is just a work in progress at present – please come back again throughout the week to see it come more into focus as I add commentary and reflections from others from various different sectors.

A lot of people have been asking me to release these videos so I’ve put them up here for the present and will augment them with more detail later.

Please feel free to comment at the bottom of the page.

Interview with Debbie Forster at Apps for Good .

Pete Wood interviewed at Centre for Creative Collaboration.

Fish Tree – attribution BonsMots on Flickr

Will Hutton’s piece in the Guardian this Sunday 12th February (Teachers, stop being so defensive. It’s time to embrace the no-excuses culture) seems to make all the same old mistakes.

He looks at the schooling system in this country mainly in terms of Oxbridge entry attainment:

“Yet there is one statistic that haunts me. A report last year found that five schools – St Paul’s boys and girls, Westminster, Eton and Hills Road sixth form college in Cambridge (this last, unlike the others, in the state sector) – sent more students to Oxbridge over a period of three years than 2,000 other secondary schools combined. Around 35,000 children every year get the three As that could make them a candidate for our top universities; too few of them come from those 2,000 schools – the single biggest obstacle to promoting social mobility. Meanwhile, a third of this eligible pool of applicants come from private schools.“

Why is he using one set of metrics from one set of colleges to make a pronouncement on the whole of the English Schools system? Those independent schools function with the expectation that a fair proportion of their intake will end up in Oxbridge colleges – that’s what the parents pay for and that is what they deliver. But guess what? There are many other higher education establishments out there as well? So why play the old game of inferring something from one small proportion of the attainment bell curve in one particular academic area? Is that the purpose of education? It is just perverse and really is set up to maintain the views coming down the line later in the article. It’s an old trick and it doesn’t quite work. Why, then, don’t we bring all the higher education establishments up to the level of the Oxbridge colleges? Or maybe we should look at the level of parental income and status in terms who who gets in to those establishments – why should one particular set of metrics hold more true than another? Depends where and how you look at the phenomenon? I think this ghost is more of an apparition than it first seems? Let’s try a thought experiment shall we and apply the same arguments Will Hutton puts forward but for the X factor telly programme instead…

But this is just a softening up of more to come:

“These are such alarming figures that much more is at work than any inadequacy on the part of our teachers.“

Then why mention it in the second half of the sentence? This is the English way – derision by association. It’s an age old code that doesn’t need Bletchley Park to decipher. We know what is coming – more teacher bashing and at half term at that, just as people are trying to relax.

We get the usual argument – I have heard it so many times now I am beginning to wonder why it is employed at all:

“…To concede everything to broader economic and social forces is a counsel of despair.”

Then comes the usual, there are brilliant schools making the difference in tough areas, we need to start somewhere.

And of course the killer punch derived from all this insight:

“So it was good to hear Sir Michael Wilshaw, the incoming head of Ofsted, announcing in his first major speech last week that he would not tolerate the educational mediocrity that so besets Britain. Too many schools had been labelled as “outstanding” by Ofsted when they were not; he wanted outstanding to mean just that.“

Er – run that by me again? By what parameters? Where is the data around this word? How is the data shared? Who has suddenly reconfigured and upgraded the word and by what metrics, parameters or lexicon? Who aggregates this stuff or is it merely an exercise in revised nomenclature? Come on?

Then we get lots more on the resistance of the unions and collegiality of the staffroom and lastly, a paean to the introduction of performance management where :

“Confronting poor performance is tough. It means establishing a framework so that teachers know what is expected, one that allows for tough conversations when those expectations are not met. It offers the chance of professional development but if that fails, teachers might lose not just pay but their jobs.“

Notice that word “tough” used twice and it makes a nice bookend with Wilmsaw’s ‘”no-excuses” culture’ – both are confrontational phrases and this article is designed to be confrontational to get the sap rising in the teaching population at half term. Rather than suggest concrete, practical, formative measures we get the same old macho posturing around performance management as a stick to beat teachers. It is entirely unproductive and will just set up more high profile failure in the future.

“It also means that those who do well get quicker opportunities for promotion and salary hikes. To deliver such a regime demands incredible fortitude and determination from heads, along with the inspiration to show that it matters. Inevitably, they will be charged with being unfair and of victimising weaker colleagues. It is hard to marry performance with the collegiality of a staff room.“

Has he been in a staffroom recently?

Er – sorry – but I disagree with your analysis. I’d much rather have an expertise network of heads of good schools who act as mentors with leadership based around formative assessment based on local not national metrics – a network that allows for aggregation of good practice and accreditation based on Masters level but based on action research. Where there is a wider and more community based curriculum that questions why and what we learn for our productive collective futures and where people are encouraged and inspired by good reflective practice not wedge-end metrics or reconfigured words trying to shoe horn people into life paths that may not be fit for purpose.

Ofsted have been at it for 20 years and the best they can come up with is more verbal posturing based on decidedly shaky parameters. They don’t share their data in smart ways apart form making the odd pronouncements on certain curricular areas and the weirdly timed press releases to cover their own back in my opinion; they don’t use formative assessment, they don’t provide solutions – it’s as if Dylan Wiliam never existed and they just appear to up the ante without offering solutions other than more of the same. There’s too much teaching fish to climb tress out there and not enough allowing them to design their own ocean.

What we need is an national organisation that mentors and builds highly agile action research then aggregates good practice based on local performance set against local factors – personal bests rather than olympic times.

We’ve had 20 years of Ofsted and high stakes vocabulary changes and here we are, more of the same? This is another top down piece of spin designed to look good which will fall apart at the first opportunity.

Why? Because leadership is about taking people with you to new, exciting, inspirational places. Management is just that, merely managing the place you are in and managing performance even worse. You’ll never see proper formative assessment come in; you’ll never see an aggregation of good ideas and proper action research like they have in Finland; you’ll never see a localised model of assessment against realistic parameters and differing metrics based on different contexts for learning; you’ll never see vision and inspiration in this insipid environment.

No bottom up system has ever been allowed to flourish in this country for obvious reasons. All I’m seeing is more ill-informed agendas based on loosely cobbled together opinion that doesn’t move teacher development on one jot.

Yes it is leadership and teachers who make the difference but if you do not cherish teachers and help them thrive professionally you are going to make all the same mistakes since the introduction of the National Curriculum.

We need an interregnum; time to stand back and take stock of what it is we need to help teaching professionals up their game I doubt we’ll get it with articles like Will Hutton’s.

This year I have been looking at using solutions to help make “professional standard” videos for release on the web and digital TV. As part of a technical roundup this year I thought I might showcase a few pieces of equipment I use and that may prove useful in a school to make professional grade videos but they could be of interest to anyone who wants to start thinking about making digital content for themselves. Bear in mind I am not talking about quick and dirty “process” video techniques as outlined by Tom Barrett’s excellent crowdsourced document here:

https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dhn2vcv5_6tv55j7g9&pli=1

but more polished videos suitable for output by a media department or for representing the school or organisation’s views and ethos or even to launch your own TV channel viewed by mobile phone!

Bear in mind the Digital switchover and convergence comes into force in October 2012 (sometimes earlier) in the UK so making your content as good as possible for digital broadcast might be a consideration if you are hoping to build a school or company media channel reaching a niche market. I don’t have all the answers here but after hours of researching online and looking at and trying out equipment here are a few pointers. I will start with the most expensive and work my way down for most budgets.

TRIPODS

Photo attribution Johndan on Flickr

A good tripod is a must if you are going to make more professional movies.

Yes, a small gorilla tripod or desktop tripod will suffice for less important shots with no sound that you can use to fill-in or cut away from the main film can be useful but having a good small “rig” to attach everything to is vital and it needs to sit on top of a sturdy tripod. I would recommend you spend as much on a good tripod as you do on a cheap HD camera because it will be a workhorse for years to come. If possible buy a separate tripod and then attach a fluid head on top – Manfrotto do excellent ones:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-6wW1XC_Ko

http://bit.ly/sVn35N

Why?

Because as you “grow” your kit and media department you can attach more sophisticated equipment on top of the tripod like a glidetrack for instance (http://www.glidetrack.com/products/hd-range/glidetrack-shooter-hd.html#) which will enable you to do more professional shots – and it takes a lot of knocks and wear and tear. A good tripod lasts a lifetime.

SOUND

Photo attribution to rustysherrif on Flickr

If you are going to make professional quality videos then the one thing you really need to consider carefully  is sound. Often the onboard mike from the camera isn’t enough to do the job efficiently. I look at videos I made years ago and think how badly the sound is recorded. If you can’t get the microphone as near as you can to the person being filmed then invest in a wireless mike or a field recorder. Proximity is the key to sound on film. Make sure your video camera has the option of inputting an external mike.

So even before getting a camera I would always consider investing in a good wireless sound mike. I use Sennheisers and I think they are the best sound apart from broadcast systems which cost thousands. This system in the UK is most compliant for the 2012 switchover:

http://www.creativevideo.co.uk/index.php?t=product/sennheiser_ew-112-p-g3

A MUCH cheaper “wired” alternative is here:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/product-reviews/B002HJ9PTO/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1

You may not even need a video camera with an external mike if you want to post produce the sound. What that means is you take a separate recording off-camera and then synch the better recording replacing that of the camera’s. One brilliant program for doing this is Dual Eyes.

What is essential is that you use HD camera though although a good legacy SD camera is not to be sniffed at. At present John McClear is looking at very cheap handheld cameras for school use:

http://mclear.co.uk/2010/01/10/quest-for-the-perfect-camera-for-the-primary-school-classroom-of-2010/

all I will say is that the ideal should have an external mike socket for plugging in an external mike if needed.

FIELD RECORDERS

Image attribution to gmarcos87 on Flickr

To get good sound I often use a separate Field Recorder and/or mixer – my choice is the Zoom H4N – which is probably more expensive than the camera you’ll be using but then it produces superb results. I combine the wireless or wired mikes above with this cable (at the time of writing)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/MALE-3-5MM-FEMALE-LINE-ADAPTOR/dp/B00131HWBA/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=musical-instruments&ie=UTF8&qid=1325335224&sr=1-1-catcorr

to plug into the Zoom H4N or the cheaper version Zoom H1. I can then get two mikes into the recorder and level them accordingly. The recorder saves to a SD card.

If you want to go up a notch and completely “level” your sound before it gets straight into the camera without a separate recorder or post production then you can, using this:

http://www.creativevideo.co.uk/index.php?t=product/beachtek_dxa-2t

which works with any camera with an external mike socket. But there are good cheaper and more resiliant alternatives – buy a cheap HD camcorder with a mike out for a bit more money and you have the basis for a really good setup you can build over time. As you will see later in this blog, an old legacy tape HD or SD camcorder can be converted with the right kit to take excellent films.

If you are making “movies” then buying a Rode Shotgun Mike, a boom pole and a dead cat wind muffler would be another excellent investment if you need to hide the microphone or use an interview grip like they do on the Beeb. Some of these have cheaper equivalents elsewhere on the web or you could make your own with someone who is handy with DIY.

LIGHTS

Image attribution to dafalcoln on Flickr

The general rule of thumb with lighting is “plenty of it” and with interviews, from three different directions – possibly more.

Nearly always you will need lights to fill-in shadows and other optical deficiencies in your camera’s makeup. Lighting is a whole other blog. This is where you can be inventive and set up gorilla tripods and other stands and put lights on top of them. Here are three lighting sources I use on difficult to get to shoots:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/HDV-Z96-Lighting-Olympus-Panasnic-Camcorders/dp/B004X34APQ (make sure you use it with a Sony battery and not the AA’s otherwise it flickers)

or a Paglight

http://www.paglight.com/index.htm

or a Rotolight

http://www.google.co.uk/products/catalog?q=rotolight&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=shop&cid=590463192423209887&sa=X&ei=_xL_ToSIF8aGhQf_0tSgAQ&ved=0CEcQ8wIwAg

You can use cheaper alternatives and consider the health and safety aspect if using a non-LED paglight as they run hot. LEDs are cool lights so much safer.

Always try and use a white painted board or a reflector to give more fill-in light if possible on shots (I’m not going to go into the intricacies here) as well.

If you want more expensive lighting kits then go for something like this:

http://www.smick.co.uk/sonline/3-head-continuous-lighting-kit/prod_428.html

LEGACY CAMERAS

Image credits to friskierisky on Flickr

You may have noticed that I haven’t recommended a camera that is because the technology is moving so fast but I would say if you want good quality video then choose a camera capable of producing video to HD 1080P mode with a SD or CF card slot to save files digitally with and external mike in slot. Even without an external mike you could use Dual Eyes software to post-synch footage as mentioned above.

However some good bargains can be had with old SD and HD mini-DV tape video cameras – you can convert an old Firewire SD camera into a tapeless CF card reading camera using a DN-60 drive :

http://www.3dbroadcastsales.com/description.php?model=64

combine that with the BeachTek sound equipment mentioned above and you have a tapeless equivalent. There are always workarounds.

IPHONE 4S

Image attribution to double-h on FLickr

Lastly the emergence of the iPhone 4s in video making cannot be ignored. I have been researching film making on the iPhone for some time and below are the resources you need for a state of the art media department wanting to use smart phones.

Everything I have said above about sound and other parameters applies to the iPhone as well.

Click on the Linkbunch link below to go to the collected resources.

http://linkbun.ch/1lnr

FINAL THOUGHTS

Image attribution to hadesigns on Flickr

I hope you have enjoyed this run through of resources to make more professional films for your institution. The wisest thing anyone says, of course, is that the best camera you have is the one you are using.

Look up all the amazing films on Vimeo.com – see how the professionals do it and learn from them. Use YouTube to see independent product reviews of all the kit I have mentioned and their cheaper equivalents. It will be worth investing the time. And above all, enjoy the process of film making with whatever you have to hand.

I haven’t gone into storyboarding, pedagogy, post production, lighting, sound, colouring, hosting, streaming, copyright and loads of other skills here but I am available for inset around March/ April 2012 just click on CONTACT in the menu above or here – I work all over the UK.

Have a great new year!

PRESENTATIONS

INTERVIEWS

I also did the usual round of attendees; interviewing people about why they were there; how they got there; what it is they wanted to get out of the day.

MirandaMod is working in association with Achievement for All on this project and this is the first of several video sessions I will be helping to capture on film for both organisations.

Chris Yapp’s presentation is split into 4 parts with Q&A at the end.

Update – here is film of the winners of the first London Educational Startup Weekend – The Night Zookeeper! Well done guys – excellent. Apologies for the background noise – some days the sound doesn’t want to play ball, and, as you can hear, there were lots of celebrations going on but I am getting this out as quickly as possible in the spirit of the weekend…

You can also listen to the audio interview I did with Paul’s team here:

Previously I talked with the majority of the participants left on Sunday at the Startup Weekend London Education event. Listen to the various conversations around building the content.

However on entering the chat a few minutes late I could see that there was anything but consensus and sharing between the people on the discussion stream. Basically the Teaching Awards were having a “special” #ukedchat on the Teaching Awards. Many people, like Doug Belshaw, regarded the whole thing as a commodification and hijacking by Pearson of the #ukedchat values and ethos and that they were trying to leverage the channel to their best advantage in this one off.

I quote his words: “the TES and Pearson seem to have conspired to commodify #ukedchat in an underhand, Machiavellian way.”

Strong stuff but I suspect it is only half the case – if that.

I first encountered the Teaching Awards at #TMLondon (the London TeachMeet) and you can hear my interview here:

and as you can hear I asked some very specific questions about the organisation and who bankrolled it, its makeup and nature and I was interested in their plan to build networks around the country to build on expertise and CPD. It is a charity with its main funding coming from the DfE and Pearson.

I was a bit taken aback by the scope of what they hoped to achieve and the parallel network they were intending to build but I think education is a broad church and commercial partnerships can help give scope and definition to a good idea. Like me Doug has worked for commercial educational providers in his time and is well placed to judge on the quality of how commercial companies interact with their target market.

Doug also pointed out that Pearson don’t get Social Media. I think they do but their PR teams, perhaps, at times, don’t. I was quite interested in working with Pearson on helping to build networks but I’m not now. Why? I think they need to understand the very fragile nature of trust relationships in the online educational world and work from there – they will need to do a lot of bridge building to repair the damage done tonight unintentionally or otherwise.

Whereas at the recent Mozilla festival the Pearson API team was probably well embedded in lending their expertise to the Mozilla foundation crew and were associated with the event they weren’t trying to run or choreograph it – having a “special” #ukedchat session on the subject was another matter. Pearson are also involved with the http://londonedu.startupweekend.org/ which my non-profit Social Media for Schools is backing – but that is an event where they are associated with the startup hacking concept but not driving it – there is a difference – it is a new concept and not an established trust network.

I also did not know that the TES is behind the “#ukedchat” hashtag but then it is a person not a commercial conspiracy and she was mortified to see how the whole thing panned out. If anything happened tonight it wasn’t a Machiavellian plot, merely a PR disaster that ended with the brand associated with the Teaching Awards turning slightly toxic in the eyes of a small online teaching community. Not good for the brand and not good for the fragile emergent community.

I am one of the very few truly independent consultants in the UK and I do a lot of pro bono work for non-profits, charities but also paid work for commercial organisations – you can see who I have worked for on my evolving CV above – everything is always transparent and I keep very clear demarcation lines between commercial and free work. I even got “let go” from a project earlier this year for sticking to my guns when it came to producing educational resources for an unnamed organisation I am not at liberty to mention – I wasn’t going to do anything that I considered compromised my ethical values. I have also moderated #ukedchat and I have nothing but admiration for the teaching community that built #ukedchat and continues to maintain it especially @chilledteaching. I do also teach from time to time still.

The @teachingawards pointed out not long into the proceedings that

I think, this is a complete travesty of what happened. Basically the majority of posters were not in favour of the “competition” ethos (real or imagined) behind the awards and it sort of fell apart from there really. I think the focus should have been more around the nature of achievement but it never got off into a positive direction. Eventually the whole discussion was replaced by another halfway through on the Digital Divide.

Anyone coming into the discussion, or fray, for the first time would have drawn entirely the wrong conclusion about the purpose of #ukedchat and what a wonderful resource it is and probably would have left pretty quickly too. There were several comments from first timers who were extremely disappointed by the whole thing and that is not a good state of affairs.

These are hard times for commercial companies; they are all looking for the magic bullet and they are all in transition when it comes to building effective channels to market and products their consumers want. They will try a number of imaginative means to get to a core market – how they do it is the difference. As has already been pointed out by Doug there are the commercial firms who strongly embed themselves in the online educational communities and they do a lot of free work for schools – these people, and I do not have to name them as everyone agrees on who they are, have built people’s trust over months and years by consistency and authenticity of purpose – they have proved themselves by their actions over time. They understand the authenticity of listening and acting on what people want. They will co-opt the best practitioners to build and write new products. Other firms blunder in and expect people to listen – it doesn’t work because too many people are attuned to being exploited. This may result in oversensitivity and misperception in some cases but the damage has already been done.

#ukedchat is a brilliant resource and will continue to be a brilliant resource – a lot of people who have given an immense amount of time have been hurt by accusations flying around and I can understand both sides of the argument. People need to stand back and learn from this evening’s experience. There were several strategies suggested at the end of the evening’s chat – some to have different chats for “special” commercially sponsored chats and others for pure pedagogy.

What has emerged from this evening’s episode is that trust networks are fragile and rare things that need to be nurtured. The way in which we do that for the greater good is the key – and how we interact with others in our communities in genuine open and transparent ways to help build the greater good in society will always be to the fore for me personally.

In this era of corporate financial greed, mass unemployment of young people, the bankruptcy of politicians and their ideologies we need something of true worth.

For the record I have won an award once and been up for several others over the years. The one I won was down to the work of my pupils who came with me to receive it and to get a great day out at the Science Museum. Otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered. What counts is what every teacher knows in their heart – doing the best they can for their pupils and no amount of lauding by others can replace the small victories made every day in the classroom – that is the thing that inspires and keeps people in a very difficult job. Long may it be so.

After showing Mozilla’s Popcorn Interactive Film Popcorn Templates at TeachMeet London on Thursday 10th November I’ve had a steady stream of people nagging me to make a screencast about it.

Many of them are non-coding teachers who like the idea of controlling interactive movies.

So I bowed to pressure and here is a ‘Popcorn Templates 101′.

I pre-prepared a movie to work with – you can use it too if you want to – the URL is

http://blip.tv/file/get/Learn4life-PopcornTemplates101882.ogv

(just right click the link and download).

Put that link into the popcorn template maker here when prompted in the template/screencast.

Anyway here’s the finished movie once it has been through popcorn:

http://www.l4l.co.uk/popcorn/popup.html

To see how to make it, or an equivalent, just have a look at the screencast below.

Next week I’ll put up how to change movies into Ogg Theora format for upload to the web and why that is a good idea.

Now stop with the nagging…

Below are 17+ audio interviews and quite a few videos of the evening.

Please use Mozilla’s Firefox or a modern browser to see/ hear the audio and video. I’m using the latest HTML5 embed codes so Internet Explorer will not work I am afraid and yes, that is deliberate.

AudioBoo Interviews

Videos (ongoing)

Image attribution under CC to Tessa Farrell

NEW LAMPS FOR OLD

This blog is going to cover a lot of innovation developments very quickly and try to tie together informal and ad hoc wanderings I make over the internet and in “real life”; the people I meet and the reflections they make on education. I have referenced a lot of video in this blog post and I would urge people to take the time to look at these exemplars to get a deeper understanding of the ideas I’m trying to convey in this piece.

I often say to people I’m too busy to do traditional academic research but sometimes I start to see patterns happening in society with technology and in the cases below I think there is a glimmer of social activity that may be growing in schools and in society at large some parallel paths that seem to jump out in high relief – and so I will focus on them and try to amplify those elements or patterns of use I see as having some common ground. I document and collate interviews and video and try to make sense of it all over time. I hope you find it of interest. I’ve always found education and learning to be a messy business – not as cut and dried as some commentators might like you to believe…

THE CHANGING NATURE OF VIDEO

Although the initial focus of this blog will be on how the nature of the traditional medium of film/ video is changing and how that change is being exploited by different people to effect transformation in different ways it segues into  how that, in turn, has repercussions for how we learn; how we come together; how we reconfigure our learning in different spaces in education and allied “social” places. I think there is a cultural change going on; one that involves technology, our relationship to it and to each other.

TEACHERS TV REBORN

What triggered this was the fact that the TES has released the whole of the Teachers TV archive to the wider world. Not many people are aware that you may digitally remix the video content where appropriate in that archive.

So long as you give attribution and so long as you don’t try and sell the content and if you don’t devalue the content or bring it into disrepute i.e. sully the brand, you can remix the videos for educational purposes.

It is good to see the TES as well as streaming the content online is also allowing selected videos for download.

But I am going to question the whole model of how we use media in this rather lengthy and detailed blogpost because I suspect those very models of how we consume and interact with media (and more importantly each other) are about to change radically.

IS REMIXING TEACHERS’ TV CONTENT LEGAL?

Remixing of content was perfectly legal under the previous Teachers TV terms of use and also under Crown Copyright – so I’m looking into remixing content. Why? Because I believe the way forward within any culture is to take and remix ideas, artifacts and systems from the past in a highly social context to make new and challenging ways or methods of exploring ourselves and our world, and how we coexist and interact within that world.

I doubt the TES and other providers would lose sleep over my examples below; the truth is that not many people will want to remix content but, perhaps, at some point in the future it will be a viable exercise. In fact I think this would be a perfect opportunity for the TES and others to exploit the whole archive and open it out to make fresher content around it. Read the rest of the blog, the exemplars and the documentation of social activity over the last year – I think it is small thing but significant.

LIMITED SHELF LIFE

It would seem fairly obvious that these films are going to have a very limited value in only one or two years’ time. Educational systems, institutions, personal and public technologies will have changed and these films will almost certainly not stand the test of time. They will soon become historical documents rather than living, breathing resources. They will become the equivalent of vellum but not as durable. They are essentially stuck in the age of “flat media”.

In some ways the DfE, even though they don’t know it yet, has conspired to sell off old stock and has essentially made a good deal out of an electronic ‘pig in a poke’.

TV IS FLAT EARTH MEDIA

The reference to TV points to the fact that these resources were made for one medium but became very useful in another – online. However I would say their value lies more in teachers and students exploring them from a more pro-active “making” aspect of learning rather than time-shifted ice-blocks of expertise (although they do serve that immediate purpose).

The old model of “lean back” learning and CPD is slowly being eroded by more hands on “engagement” in the classroom, TeachMeets, “maker“, “tinkering” and “hackfest” or “hackday” culture which has been prevalent with larger media and online companies for some years now, is beginning to port, if not spill, over into other areas of society.

REMIXING MEDIA AND MAKING IT INTERACTIVE AND SOCIAL

Wouldn’t it be good to remix content? I chose the beginning of this “creativity” film and made the transitions between the speakers slower so I could do more varied things with their individual clips.

I then converted the clip to an Ogg file and uploaded the new clip into the popcorn.js HTML5 “Butter” Template and got the film to “trigger” various other events through the browser like links to Wikipedia and other resources on the web. Make sure you have a modern browser and click on the image below to see the effects.

I rewrote a little of the javascript and the whole process took me about 20 mins because of the templating system.

But look at this blog on the activities of the Bay Area Video Collective and what teenagers who had no coding experience did in two hours:

http://webmademovies.org/web-made-movies-at-bavc

Now the films they produced were a lot better than mine above and I’d recommend you look at the finished products through a modern HTML5 enabled browser:

http://avnerd.tv/factory/teamtiger.html

and then go and have a look at a far more sophisticated film in the HTML5 examples especially the project Michael Wesch orchestrated and crowdsourced here:

http://www.visionsofstudents.org/

Yes, you will be able to click on any of those movies in the timeline which will take you to other movies. These are, in effect, hypervideos.

I will come back to the Mozilla project at the end of this blog as they are in London in November working with young people.

LINKING MEDIA TO “THINGS”

Many more people are now disaggregating media resources and putting them back together to make new things from old; more pertinent and more engaging media often serving highly social agendas. This is where the culture of learning is at its most rapid and agile and there seem to be elements that point the way to a new form of education and learning which is, of course, one variant of an old way of learning. One through doing and making but also reflecting on and using rigorous expertise. We are on a new threshold of diversity in learning and it is not going to come from schools but from left-field as usual.

The ability to reuse and repurpose media, particularly video, is about to get fairly ubiquitous and seamlessly easy in the near future. Already much younger people (I am talking 0 – 4 year olds here) do not use video in the way we do if they have had any exposure to computers like the iPad. They expect an interaction. They expect the video to have some form of what I would call “social inflection” built in. A narrative that needs to be engaged with “virtual” or real play partners/ objects. Many designers understand this and are gearing up to make the connection between real life “toys” or objects and screens so that interactions can become more purposeful so they can make their products more engaging.

So something like this:

Click on the pic for page…

and these very sublime ideas http://www.volumique.com/en/

can become something a little less sublime like this:

Good luck to Disney, however, this is still, essentially, a “push” model masquerading as “choice” where it is fairly pre-determined. What is more and more common these days is that someone then “hacks” the technology and puts it up on YouTube and you get this:

The mistake many traditional media and educational companies are making is to think we are all passive consumers of video when video is rapidly evolving into a highly interactive medium that we will all be able to “tweak” either by coding or through templates or “hacking”.

At the present, the majority of us are still passive consumers of media but there are new models of use about to emerge that will change that and the older media companies just aren’t aware how they could be co-opting their educational consumers in far more engaging ways that would keep them coming back to their companies. The ability to interact with and manipulate media will become fairly trivial and so the ability to remodel and construct personal variations will be seamless. How do you plan for that?

Take this interview with Color

Warning this is a long interview go to http://youtu.be/r2jLGwbVsDE?t=15m50s to cut to the chase.

That technology is also a very closed or black box one as it purports to give the user more perception of communication and freedom whereas, in my view, it locks them into a joint video monasticism that closes down culture rather than opening it out – it offers a “seeming” freedom through new cool features whilst doing entirely the opposite. That’s my view anyway. I wish color and Facebook lots of success in their ventures but, for me, this could be a route to locking down culture rather than making it thrive. Time will tell…

HACKDAYS

Now compare that to the Hackday culture that has around for over six years now. The vanguard of this kind of rapid protoyping was started at Yahoo and this film of one at Alexandra Palace between developers, engineers, designers and UX people working for the BBC and Yahoo in 2007 will give you a fair idea of the process involved:

Click here for popup of vid

What is more interesting, for me, is media used in ways around co-operative endeavour to change the way we collect together and think, learn and make knowledge and things. It isn’t rocket science these are elements that are well known in the commercial sector and UX design and have been around since the 1940′s but the nature of the changing relationship between user and media is becoming so personalised, so complex that there are new disciplines of use beginning to emerge.

MEANWHILE BACK IN SCHOOLS

But we are still having conversations in schools about the difference between ICT and Computing. This discussion at a recent educational barcamp sums it up really – people are looking for ways forward and questioning how we teach things:

Thanks to Teknoteacher (Alan O’Donohoe) for the filmed conversation and reflections.

And yet there are organisations like Young Rewired State where good multi-agency models of learning are already happening:

But the ways to do this are not in the domain of schools – they are out there in the wild and unless we have institutions whose curriculum can be more agile, then schools will become an irrelevancy in the face of this new climate of “can do”.

POSSIBLE CROSS CURRICULAR MODELS – HACKING MUSIC AND MEDIA

Often these new ways of learning and making come from people who are naturally creative and curious and who want to explore taking apart stuff (and by this I mean ideas too) and then putting them back together in new combinations. This applies to the way we do things socially too – which is augmented by the tech. I predict that it is this social aspect that will eventually find its way into schools and traditional education in some areas.

For example, musicians sampling and using remixed video/audio loops to create new content from old. Below is an example of taking a program like Ableton Live, an Akai APC40 controller a piece of coding software called Max for Live and using them in tandem to create this:

See film in Popup

I could give multiple instances of where code meets art meets innovation meets performance creates new stuff that sells.

In some ways I think we could go back to Robert Pirsig’s book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance or Delueze’s braiding of different disciplines to see the underlying canons that drive the epistemologies in this area but this out of the scope of this blog but may one day make it to a book on philopsophy and education, tech and learning.

The common elements here, I suspect are:

Curiosity

Passion for learning

Expertise

Mentoring

Innovation

Constructing / hacking / making /reflecting

Elasticity of Media

Transparency of teaching and learning

Co-creation, Collaboration towards a social goal

The Internet of Things

THE GROWTH OF VIDEO ENABLED DEVICES

Video cameras are now in a number of devices that can be controlled locally or over the web. The variety of ways this can happen and be networked will undoubtably grow.

But there is also the fact that video is now becoming ubiquitous and soon it will be networked into an increasing array of different devices – my friend Peter Barrett has been experimenting for years with ways of using networked video with commercial devices in schools – imagine hacking these devices to do new things and interacting with browsers and other people?

CONTROLLING VIDEO WITH CODE AND VICE VERSA

Recent “cool” and somewhat frightening elements of how video is beginning to become more “elastic” through use of open source software and “making” or “tinkering” culture called http://www.openframeworks.cc/ can be seen here another example of remixing media to quite a high level using repurposed code:

Scramble Suit from Kyle McDonald on Vimeo.

But that is “nothing” compared to the work going on at Harvard headed up by Kevin Dale

http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~dale/

where the videos there show face video face replacement to be almost indistinguishable from one person to another. We now have the ability to make one person look like another and this raises all sorts of ethical concerns about online identity (as if we didn’t have enough already).

What then happens is a raft of quick prototyping developments that lead to different experimentation in other fields. For example this face controller for music

or this one for “virtual instrumentation”

This is part of ongoing research happening at the University of Southampton into different types of musical interfaces. Here a connect is being used to control music:

or this one for making a servo motor work using arduino.

Some of this prototyping by people experimenting with disparate equipment could lead to concrete and positive outcomes and new innovative products. When people like this get together and have a “Hackday” they concentrate development into a few hours or days. Hackdays, usually but not always, enable people to rapidly explore and prototype ideas together in a social context that spreads the development load and ensures co-construction to a common goal. Skills needed in our workforce. Why not in our schools?

Video can be used in other ways too – as sensing and controlling for code through hardware.

Look at this wonderful scratch video of Stephen Howell using a Kinect as a data capture device to control computer programs:

Scratch and Kinect from Stephen Howell on Vimeo.

LIVE CODING

A lot of musicians/ coders are now doing what is called Live Coding

Show Us Your Screens from louis mccallum on Vimeo.

Click here for popup of vid

As one person puts it:

“Perhaps what will happen in Live Coding is that it will become more tangible – that using little musical interfaces … you’ll be able to “Live Code” your haptic interface.“

At the TopLap wiki you can even see examples of Live Coding without computers.

But up until now I think the HackDay has been a Geek enclave and the domain and preserve of highly academically able participants with the right channels of connection and communication in their social groups to be able to participate. People would find out by word of mouth or blogs or twitter where to go and what to do.

How about democratising the process a little more and bringing down the models and expanding and interleaving  them with mainstream education?

TOY HACKING

So how could we layer or interleave those social elements around media and the browser and smart things? Because, for me, that is the fastest changing aspect of how people interact with each other at present – or younger people at any rate. How can we blend real life with screens and objects and meld them with ideas and change in the ways in which we learn? What are the new models out there?

There have been some pioneers like Jessica Wolpert and Tracy Tsang of Seaweed Studios whom I filmed a few years ago that showed how they used Toy Hacking with younger children.

or Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino formerly from Tinker.it

HACKING SOCIAL SPACES

I think we are going to have to renegotiate our relationships with learners – one of the most interesting presentations I have seen recently was Oliver Quinlan’s at the beginning of the year at the BETT 2010 TeachMeet about how we need to reflect on our interactions with learners:

Neil Hopkins’ blog on children as co-constructors of learning (third of three) is another film I always point to that makes similar points:

Now this chimes for me with other interviews I have done about how people meet up in traditional spaces and how those spaces are beginning to change or are being changed by users using tech. This interview with Chris Meade and Anke Holst is one early example of how people are reconfiguring the traditional institutional spaces we have inhabited in the past and remaking them for the 21st Century tinkering with the social aspects as well as the kit.

HACKING PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND PLANNING

People are beginning to remould how they approach planning and working together – in a series of workshops in Oxford under the aegis of Vital a number of teachers and advisers got together to flesh out a planning process called a Fishbowl. This had been ported over from andragogy and was being adapted for classroom planning. A number of people in the fishbowl started the process and others gradually chipped in and replaced others in a co-construction of learning. They were, essentially, “Hacking” planning. This collaborative, open and engaged planning session (this is one of hours of exemplars I have in the archive) is a whole new way of doing it. As the session progresses people add their expertise and reflect and model what they might do. This is NOT a model I see going on in a lot of schools due to time and curricular restraints.

How can we hack both the social and physical spaces and the technologies involved to create new and engaging ways of learning?

In this film of a Social Innovation Camp which is a Venture supported by the Young Foundation who work with the Social Schools Trust we can see a similar process at work:

This, in turn, reminds me of the NESTA’s work with Hyper Island :

Which is for older students but involves, mentoring, expertise, real life clients, deadlines, self-learning. At Hyper Island there are no teachers, no tests, no homework or textbooks; instead students will immerse themselves in 20 weeks of project-based activity, responding to real briefs set by industry partners, followed by a 12 week internship.

NESTA has also put a lot of research into mentoring and co-creation activities in schools.

New, more collaborative ways of working that are pupil led are beginning to emerge in the UK as well. The idea of Digital Leaders is becoming more prevalent.

And there is the wonderful work done with NESTA and STEM.

The expertise and the social interactions for learning involved in all these variants do show a strong similarity.

Ollie Bray’s Guitar Hero Transition Project at Mussleborough Grammar School in Scotland is another outstanding example of social interaction and learning around technology.

SOCIAL SYSTEMS AROUND MEDIA – MEDIA AS A SOCIAL LEARNING HUB

Now this ability to pull code together and the social interactions around it, with people of differing abilities and tastes, are some of the things I think are on the level of “highly interesting” on my radar when it comes to how learning could progress if we were more in control of the tools we need to disaggregate and reform media through and for learning. How we learn through the contexts of collaboration, co-operation, co-construction and multi-agency partnerships is something I am extremely interested in.

Mozilla’s work with youth groups in the Oakland / Bay Area of the US to do with film, interactivity and HTML5 is chronicled here by Ben Moskovitz and is very interesting. Mozilla is working with groups like The Factory, Zero Divide Foundation and Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC). Now they are in London for the Mozilla Festival. This is taking the ideas protoyped in the bay area and New York and grafting them onto London.

I talked with Michelle Thorne, the Global Events Strategist at the pre-festival Meetup in a London pub about some of the thinking behind Mozilla’s strategy in this area:

As you can see the ideas are very similar to those I have been outlining and giving exemplars for in this blog. The Knight-Mozilla Drumbeat Mojo project co-opts organisations like the BBC and the Guardian, amongst others, to put real paid intern posts into their organisations and use some of the techniques outlined in the blog to transform the way journalists work.

Why don’t we do the same for schools and teachers?

I would put forward the notion that we need to reconfigure how we do things in our planning, our curricula, our outreach and our delivery and it involves multi-partnership and more community involvement – it involves vision of how we do things not what. It will involve fostering an entrepreneurial mindset, a more agile teaching force – not training because those skills will be deprecated and the “trainees” will be dependent on what they train rather then the reflection about what they do and how they can adapt it creatively in education. The whole system needs shaking up.

ADDENDUM – CODING FOR KIDS

Last night I went to the Codingforkids meetup at the Guardian and there were quite a number of people there from a variety of backgrounds. I interviewed about 5 people on the reasons why people felt they had to meet to discuss the idea of coding for younger students in this way. Here were some of the responses:

I guess I’ll still leave the final word to Seymour Papert:

Still to be continued …

As a recent RSA Fellow I take a keen interest in the education lectures from afar. On thursday I attended my first daytime one on School Wars with Melissa Benn, co-founder of the Local Schools Network who was talking about her book and the merits of the comprehensive system with Lucy Heller. Lucy, managing director of ARK Schools, was representing the Academies.

I remember Lucy Heller from the infamous Channel 4 Education conference in 2010 where she shared the podium with Stephen Heppell and Rachel Wolf among others. I seem to remember she had very forthright views on the use (or not as was the case) of ICT in schools. Perhaps that is why information about her on the internet is rather meagre whereas Melissa Benn has a blog, a twitter feed and even a wikipedia entry. I am still trying to get footage of that day out of Channel 4 for some of the comments made at the time.

The speakers were eloquent and polite but both, to be honest, seemed rather out of touch as did a lot of the audience. Speakers, even the audience, kept referring to taxi drivers’ views as if they meant anything at all. This was quite amusing and reminded me of Myles na gCopaleen’s satirical construct of The Plain People of Ireland. I wondered if anyone would quote what a teacher had said at any point?

Becky Francis, head of education, RSA, sat between them doing a good job of chairing. However, I was unconvinced. She did mention that the RSA had academies and I do know those academies have a cultural remit completely different from some chains I could mention.

Melissa was very gracious about Lucy’s Ark Academies and it was all very polite and Lucy even mentioned she could have been Melissa’s publisher at Verso at one point.

But I just think they are hopelessly out of touch with the cultural change going on in society in general and in education specifically. There was an obsession in both camps about GCSE’s as if these were the only passports to success and that was the agreed nostrum for everything and how many pupils did or didn’t get to Oxbridge from families who have free school meals.

Ofsted was mentioned quite a lot as some kind of salvation for failing schools on both sides. I always marvel at how Ofsted have achieved this high reputation. They are in no way a formative assessment body and any aggregation of data they do have, they seem to keep to themselves for strategically timed press releases that self serve the organisation. What is needed is a truly professional and independent inspection and mentoring body that can sell services to schools to show them good models based on all the data they have but rarely release. For years I have suggested it might be useful to have an inspection system that makes transparent what schools do well and then to link to specific instances and aggregate lessons through simple searchable data techniques then bring in some good mentors for heavens sake not just grade professionals like some 1950′s infant’s test. There just hasn’t been any will to up this professionalism and why? Because rather than engage in pedagogy Ofsted is more concerned with number crunching a small subset of easily definable metrics that give the government purchase on some semblance of accountable attainment but which bear no relation to learning in the wider world. And I am afraid the wider world is beginning to breach the school walls and as pedagogy turns more into heutagogy aided by technology in some cases there is a rapid cultural change beginning to happen. Arguing over the carapace of old and outmoded systems doesn’t cut it I’m afraid. But I won’t go into that argument here. It just seemed the obsessions with qualifications were to the fore on both sides without any reflection on what it is to actually “learn”.

One of Melissa’s arguments was that the climate of Free Schools and Academies would bring an unstable atmosphere into the local areas and there was lots of anecdote but no really hard evidence on both sides. I was amazed that the lack of transparency about differing funding arrangements wasn’t mentioned once and that Academies and Free Schools and especially the NSN have a cloak of invisibility when it comes to these inequalities. Money was mentioned but in terms of benefactors. It all seemed very patriarchal on both sides. That school is something to be done to you rather than something you do!

Our education system, when it comes to exams, is beginning to run its course. More and more pupils are sensing a lack of authenticity. People like Melissa and Lucy should listen to this interview I did with Pete Bell at TedXLondon. He sets the exams for a major examinations board!

http://audioboo.fm/boos/474452-interview-with-pete-bell-part-2-at-tedxlondon

My other concern was the issue of chains of Academies. This seriously worries me. I have been in public meetings where representatives of the DfE have freely admitted they are very concerned about this aspect of scaling up one particular model and corporate governance beginning to take hold. There are alternatives to both systems and I could quote reams of exemplars but I’ll point to Neil Hopkin as one particular head responsible for more than one school. Both protagonists would do well to read his blog.

I am afraid I am deeply cynical about LAs as a teacher who kept coming into conflict with them over innovative and ground breaking projects being pulled down by petty bureaucratic paperwrok at local and governmental level. I once had to get a letter of permission from the government to set off a plastic water rocket in Regents’ Park for an after school science club – I still have it framed on my wall. But I am no fan of Free Schools either because when it comes down to it the government would like us to believe we can teach any way we like but still sets a whole new bunch of parameters that can be easily quantified and measured by Ofsted. Let’s face it – there is no true freedom in the curriculum and all this propaganda involving “rigorous” and soft subjects is totally ridiculous it is a false dichotomy. The arts have brought in as much income for this country over the last few years as the financial sector and with less ethical concerns.

I am afraid part of the session at the end consisted of barracking by Westminster councillors; this was unfortunate for them really and didn’t give a very good impression. Even when I worked for Westminster it had, possibly, one of the less favourable reputations in the country for school management; ever zealous about cutting back on services and funding but not much support or scaffolding for teachers and their professional development – always too top down – thank goodness the TeachMeet movement is putting paid to that attitude all over the country.

It was a stimulating afternoon but judge for yourself and listen to the whole session here. You don’t have to be a fellow and they are all free so I’d urge people to go along if they have the time.

I noticed Francis Beckett writing in his blog that he is considering giving up his subscription (Why I have got to cancel my RSA subscription) – I’d urge him to get into those RSA Academies and have a look around – he might be surprised at what he sees. There is localism instead of corporate governance for a start. I am pretty upbeat about lots of innovative and forward thinking about how to run schools and I think that there are several elements that are obvious to anyone who has been in the game for some time:

• great leadership
• collaboration
• community involvement and parental engagement
• mentoring and learning for both staff and pupils
• excellent channels of communication
• local and involved governance
• increasingly good use of ICT

Why polarise the issues – the real war will be fought when more innovative models start to roll out. For me it seems it is about interleaving the school within the community. It is not about structures two away from the communities we serve. My recent interview with Dan Roberts of Saltash community school might give an insight into the way things are going. To be quite honest the new educators aren’t interested in old battles – they just want to get on with new ways of learning that are more democratic and more effective.

Francis Beckett also wrote on his blog:
“There was no educational debate at all..” And I will agree with that but the difference is I am trying to change it and I’ve become a Fellow to help that process along.

There is an educational revolution going on out there and you won’t get the news sitting in the back of a taxi.

There are numerous organisations coalescing around these ideas:

MirandaNet
Teachmeet
WholeEducation
Purpose/ed
TedX
UkedChat
Learning Without Frontiers
Naace
Computing at School

I could go on but I would challenge the RSA to stop acting as a conduit for debates around old media and bring in some new blood, the bloggers, the teachers, headteachers and parents who are evolving new and highly agile systems of education. Bring them in – stir things up a bit and create a bit of change to see things anew.

And the Gas Mask?

Well it was a threat that never became a reality. And also at the end of the debate a somewhat elderly gentleman sitting next to me, turned to me and sighed, and said:

“They didn’t say anything – just a lot of hot air…”

Image attribution spaceninja on Flickr

I like getting people out of their comfort zones I guess learning how to install this will take me out of mine!

Oliver Qinlan interviewed at TedXLondon about the “Education Revolution” by eyebeams

Click on the “cloud” to take you to the SoundCloud site to embed comments or follow the link here> http://soundcloud.com/eyebe/oliver_quinlan_interview

I have launched the Social Media for Schools site as part of the first stage of a not-for-profit service to schools for senior managers. Although it is not-for-profit it is a paid-for service.

I fully intend it to be a highly efficient social network for senior managers showing them how to manage networks for their school communities. Almost everyone I have talked with thinks this is a good idea.

Social Media for schools is not about selling a specialised social network to your school – I’ll leave that to other commercial firms and good luck to them. What SMS is about is building sustainable networks and infrastructure and, above all, community to extend expertise in managing how people learn.

I think that is a far more important role in the long run.

To begin with we are releasing a number of videos (sorry they are not downloadable and are fully copyright) of practitioners already using social networking management techniques in their schools. I’ll be organising CPD sessions for headteachers and others from BETT onwards.

In the meantime look at Dan Roberts talking about how he uses Social Networking at Saltash community school.

If you want to sign up for Social Media for Schools just click on SMS logo on the video.

Not just badges at TedXLondon

I have just finished uploading quite a few audio vox pops from people in the audience at the TedXLondon event today. I worked out that if there were a 1000 people there, I have interviewed just under 0.02% of them.

My perception of Ted has always been one of a world class brand designed to get the chattering classes bound into ideas and innovation. It’s slick, it’s quick, it’s innovative – big heart – big brand.

I’ve also been involved in a few TedX events in the past and my experience with organisers behind the scenes has been “interesting” with regards to protection of that brand to say the least.

The London TedX event looked pretty much a bigger, better version of previous smaller scale education events in previous years and I was curious how the whole thing had evolved. This one certainly seemed to have a number of differences.

First there was a free live stream for anyone who couldn’t get there which is a major plus for an event like this. It was streamed out extremely professionally. This is a big, big plus in my book. Gone are the days of trooping off surreptitiously to some really cool Old St startup to look at the whole thing via an “exclusive” video conference – this ensured it was an open, transparent, global event.

I will confess that I did not pay for my ticket – someone kindly paid for me to go – which is just as well because I could never have afforded the £65.00 price tag. That, in itself, was a kind of financial shibboleth for starters. I had approached organisers to get a pass to do the vox pops but they didn’t even reply to my email – (to be fair it was a couple of days before the event).

What I did want to do was document and highlight the debate around the “Education Revolution” – I had actually streamed Ken Robinson’s earlier talk for Learning Without Frontiers in the UK, back in March. I have the odd distinction of having spent the last three decades working in schools and also in and around Soho post production houses for a super indie film/ web company; so I kind of see things from multiple viewpoints…

I use film, audio and slideshows to document what teachers are doing in schools but I am also a practitioner – in my last role, working in a school earlier this year as part of a creative partnerships project, the pupils (the year 6 school council) grilled me for the job. Luckily I got it!

So TedXLondon seemed a perfect opportunity to start to join up the dots.

When I arrived the very first person I met on the street was Fred Garnett who is involved with the Mosialong project in Manchester. I had met Fred first at a Southbank Event and subsequently bumped into him at a couple of seminars he was giving at the notorious “Really Free School” earlier this year.

Fred Garnett interview on AudioBoo 1

For me the “Education Revolution” is about Cultural Change not purely cool uses of Educational Technology. It is about how communities are evolving in the light of global upheaval – well that’s my analysis at least.

I sensed, by some of the tweets coming in about the event, that more than a few people in education were a little “resistant” to the idea of this big media beanfeast in London and that their perception was one of things not quite happy with things being “on message” – there was an undertow of cynicism in the air. So I decided to explore this and play devil’s advocate and sound out a few people with some well intended provocation – I have to say people were wonderful and very reflective, no-one rose to my provocations but all acknowledged that something needed to be done.

I came across Nicole Charles on her own in the RoundHouse cafe and she seemed tired and distracted (a stint in Edinburgh and far too much work probably being the cause) but she gave me some amazingly thoughtful responses to some pretty searching questions about the nature of TedX, privilege and the whole perception of the media industry getting involved in the process of an “Education Revolution”.

It does seem to me that too many people are locked into their own industry silos and do not talk to people in other fields – one of the things we were urged to do at TedxLondon was to go out and talk with other, new people. I didn’t know Nicole or what she did but I loved her thoughtful responses which kind of blew out of the water attitudes like that put forwards by David Price in his blog after the event.

I think it can be too easy to snipe with a “Teacher knows best” attitude rather than take a serendipitious “how can I learn” approach – especially teachers.

I thought Nicole’s responses were wonderfully open, disarming and full of the insight. What more could you ask of someone who has worked in both worlds – an amphibian as I call them. What this country needs is more people like Nicole – people who have a deep understanding of the cultural changes and the really hard work that needs to be put in to be involved in this area. They have my immense respect.

As I wandered around in the breaks I came across more and more people I have never met before on any other circuits so, for me, the day was fascinating. I love the challenge of finding and talking with other people in different fields with different specialties and seeking out those areas where there’s a match.

The next person I managed to stop and talk with briefly, was Clare Collins. She had some pretty good insights into the nature of TedX and its purpose to inspire but she also had some realistic views on the downside. I was intrigued by her comments on technology, though, and wish she’d expanded on them.

Next I managed to talk to some of the people exhibiting during the breaks and came across a teacher working for Teach First on her second day of teaching!

I won’t list all the people I met yesterday because it is past 5 am and this blog is getting far too long.

At the end of the event I had a great discussion with Marcus Davey, Chief Executive and Artistic Director of the Roundhouse Trust, about all the excellent work the Roundhouse does with young people. He certainly wasn’t going to take any of my provocations lying down and gave me a long list of the outreach and training that the Roundhouse does in the local area.

At the very end of the evening I had a fascinating conversation with Oliver Quinlan and Pete Bell about the nature of what TedX should be about and what it actually was and this invitably spilled over into a wider discussion on education.

So what did impressions did I take away from the day?

Well I felt things had changed – that TedXLondon was the beginning of something that may have some bearing on being able to harness the immense expertise gathered together in that hall.

For me education and learning needs to be connected back to the communities that surround schools. I really do believe that pupils can re-engage with learning with other people in a way that has never been able to happen before through intergenerational learning, local “plugin parnerships” with multi-agency input. But to do this people are going to have to be prepared to come out of their professional “bunkers” and get involved with others in new and imagine ways to reconfigure how they work together and do things.

I suspect that there is a cultural change going on that schools are entirely unequipped to deal with and that there is a distinct lack of vision and direction. What is obvious is that people are beginning to realise they have to co-create and collaborate in the future, to have dialogues and start to connect.

If TedXLondon holds true to its pledge that they will connect up all the organisations there that night online and towards a common purpose we may yet see the beginnings of more than just a series of inspirational talks.

I still do worry that all this talk is fairly paternalistic and that there is a fear that throwing off the reigns allowing people to follow their passions is just too unpragmatic. Too liberal arts wishy washy.

Well I think that is exactly what we should be doing. Don’t believe the false dichotomies of “hard” and “soft” subjects or the “one size fits all” exam and assessment system. I think we should be pulling people together to build new learning communities around the social hub of schools. To experiment, to fail, to get it right and to explore and find our passions. I also think we could achieve this with mentors from the local community and that we could have home grown cottage industries arising out of community activity that is purposeful and authentic and business and entrepreneurial activity that is not abstracted and self-serving but involves social enterprise as a motor for engagement and happiness.

At TedXLondon there were over a thousand curious and committed people, passionately interested in the idea of changing education, society and how we interact with each other. That, surely, is a small but significant start.

The best and most hopeful speakers at TedXLondon, were, inevitably, the youngest. They are our future – why else are we here?

So let’s get to it then…

You can download it from here:

http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/l4l/id349167931?mt=8

or click on the image above.

It was quite a challenge to get a signal through those ancient walls and despite mountaineering sound engineers passing me down a wonderful audio feed I thought the network wasn’t going to manage it. But like all good projects I enjoy a challenge and I was able to buy a Mi-Fi box from 3 and happily broadcast out once all the cables were connected.

You can hear the result below – the whole project was extremely touching and one of the more interesting ones I have been involved with in recent years.

John Lennon’s Imagine played on Exeter Cathedral’s Bells by imagine2011