I was a contestant on the the1stQuestion Quiz Show with Pooky Amsterdam - all good fun - that was my 15 mins of internet fame then

Media Centre Learn 4 Life

The very first Learn 4 Life conference in Second Life is taking place on Learn 4 Life Island this Saturday 14th November at 11am - 15.00pm GMT.

AGENDA

The Speakers will be :

11.00am - 11.45am GMT - Josie Fraser - Digital Identity, Digital Literacy

11.45am - 12.00pm GMT - Breakout group discussion

12.00 - 12.15 - Comfort Break / Networking

12.15am - 13.00am GMT - Carol Rainbow - Delivering E-Safety at Local Authority Level

13.00pm - 13.15pm GMT - Breakout group discussions

13.15pm - 13.30pm GMT - Comfort Break / Networking -

13.30pm - 13.45pm GMT - Leon Cych - Digital Literacy -

13.45pm - 14.00pm GMT - Breakout Groups -

14.00pm - 14.30pm GMT - Chris Smith - Personal Learning Networks - International Schools Island

14.30pm - 14.45 GMT - Breakout Group Discussion

15.00pm - Conference ends

You may benefit from looking at a few video tutorials before turning up to the conference:

Here are a couple:

General Conference Space and How it Works

Using Voice in the Conference Centre - how to enable

Using Breakout Groups in the Conference Centre

Protocols about Using video - basically don’t try to play the video player

How to make and pass back feedback notecards at the conference

We hope you have an interesting and productive day…

The wonderful thing about my job is that I have a network of people I can visit who are involved with prototyping the use of new technologies in education. My latest outing was to a Junior School with a difference this week.

Peter Barrett, an old colleague of mine, had told me about the seed of this idea some months back. Knowing Peter I guessed it would be quite ambitious. We have worked on a number of innovation projects in the past and he never fails to surprise me…

As well as the school going through a massive rebuilding programme, they have also introduced a set of iPod touches into one year 4 class, for each child, to see what happens.

All the touches are networked through an Apple Airport Extreme and out onto the internet through the school’s connection. It is not every day you see this sort of thing.

So I offered to pop along and make a video of their progress after a couple of weeks. In the first week that the children have had them, they seemed to be quite at home using the applications and devices - but it’s early days…

Here is a brief video record of reflections and practice of that use…

I’d like to thank all the staff, children and parents for help in making this film.

Carol is an ICT consultant for Oxfordshire and is probably the only person in the UK who is using Second Life to deliver CPD at school Local Authority level in this way.

A lot of corporate firms spend some considerable time building elaborate ‘orientation’ areas to provide solutions for staff training. Carol, however, concentrates on building a community of practice from the start inside Second Life.

Teachers’ log in from their own homes and the training sessions are held later in the evening. She gives people just enough information to be able to get to the training area and communicate effectively.

This video provides a very thorough basic outline in scaffolding how to hold such a session. She will be talking in more depth about the process at the free Learn 4 Life conference in Second Life on the Learn 4 Life Island on Saturday 14th November 11am - 3pm GMT. If you are interested in securing a ticket for this event please register in the form below.

In the video below is a video record of one of her sessions:

And in the following video there is a collaborative exercise in making an E-Safety poster in Second Life.

Please sign up above for the event - there are only 15 tickets left…

Image attribution Chealion on Flickr under this CC licence

This series of posts is intended to be a comprehensive look at the use and development of Virtual Worlds on Open Source technologies in Schools. It is to be the basis for a book I am writing to be released early next year on Lulu about Virtual Worlds, Open Source and Education.

Over the last six months, through a series of interviews with people from around the globe, I have been mapping out some of the major developments in this field. The trouble is that presently, technological advances are happening so fast, some days, in this area, that 12 hours can make all the difference between one exponential breakthrough and another - the field of virtual worlds is moving so fast!

By next year the technology for Virtual Worlds will be in the browser and at that point they will become mainstream - already firms such as 3DI are going down that route and others such as RealXtend are working on making it possible to interconnect several different types of Immersive Environment to enable the eventual building of what is termed, a hypergrid, and even more recently there is talk of a Universal World Web Client WebHud. There are exact parallels, here, to the construction of the early World Wide Web.

So let me take you on a journey with the help of a few of the main players in the United States, Canada and the UK and see and listen to their stories and reflect on why so many people are putting so much effort into building this vision…

This first blog post is the start of many that will be a testament to the perseverance and drive of those individuals involved in constructing these whole new immersive landscapes. I would like to thank everyone involved, (especially Vicki Davis, her students and their parents) for giving me time and access on this project which seems to have grown with every passing day.

WHY THE TIME IS RIPE FOR MAINSTREAMING VIRTUAL WORLDS - AND WHY OPEN SIM AND OTHER OPEN SOURCE IMMERSIVE WORLDS?

Image attribution Torley under this CC licence

My involvement with Open Source and Virtual Worlds goes back quite a few years - during this time I have watched quietly, as the technology has gone from very geeky, obscure wikis, where enthusiasts are compiling and sharing code, to a more mature commercial enterprise with sophisticated clients and browser interfaces being rolled out and developed on a weekly basis.

For the past few months I have been interviewing the main players in the field of Virtual Worlds in Open Sim, Cobalt, Wonderland et al in education around the globe and taking footage and interviews with people in avatar form both inside the worlds themselves and in real life using Gmail video and Skype.

I have taken literally hundreds of hours of video of interviews with people to try and get a grasp on what is happening at the present time. This is the sum of all that work - I hope you feel it is useful and can guide your own choices of using virtual worlds/immersive environments in your school district or class…

Remember, these are interviews with serious educational professionals working in this field; they are the pioneers risking professional and academic reputation and the businesses promoting  innovative, “edge” technologies in a highly commercial world. Why should they do that - what is the appeal?

THE ‘V’ GENERATION

Image attribution hawken.dadako on Flickr under this CC licence

The future is here and it will serve the V Generation - the 5 year olds and upwards who currently use sites like Club Penguin and Disney Fairies and any number of the 200+ Virtual Worlds out there at home who will have much higher and more pronounced expectations of any future education system that they will enter and pass through in the next 10 - 15 years.

Global research firms such as Gartner have a very good understanding of how this use is beginning to work -

“Generation V is the recognition that general behavior, attitudes and interests are starting to blend together in an online environment.”

• Up to 3 percent of individuals will be creators
• Between 3 percent and 10 percent of individuals will be contributors
• Between 10 percent and 20 percent of individuals will be opportunists
• Approximately 80 percent of individuals will be lurkers

(source Gartner June 2008 - my chart)

and, regardless of age, they will be using a variety of different Virtual Worlds or Immersive platforms for work and play.

And one year on, since that report, commercial entertainment firms such as Sony Playstation…

… XBox 360… :

are beginning to dabble in the realms of carefully scripted interactive augmented reality avatars. This technology has been around for some time in fact I interviewed Dr Adrian Woolard at the BBC a few years ago about an augmented reality  project he was involved in then:

Click on picture for Archived video at archive.org

But only recently has it become as sophisticated and fully mature for commercial release. This is the latest iteration of that technology in the commercial world:

Now my point is that the current generation of children will expect this level of sophistication in the future. It would seem quite feasible as Moore’s Law progresses that projection systems and more photo-realistic landscapes will be dreamed up and sold in commercial outlets to the home market.

We, as educators, need to start to map out these terrains before us and learn to use some of these platforms effectively in truly transformational ways as they will become the mainstream in time.

WHERE CORPORATE AND EDUCATION WORLDS MEET - BERNARD HORAN - SUN MICROSYSTEMS

Already large corporate companies are involved in projects geared towards working in distributed environments and they are evolving technology to provide solutions for their workforce. Working virtually is a reality in many cases. Listen here to Bernard Horan, senior staff engineer for Sun Microsystems Laboratory talking about how Sun Systems are developing project Wonderland for the corporate and educational worlds - here he talks about the reasons behind the development of Wonderland and the MIRTLE education project - they are very practical:

An adaptation of Wonderland is being adapted for use in Boston by the Immersive Education Initiative there to work with young people for distance learning at the Roxbury Institute of Technology, again, in extremely practical ways:

and yet where are the other equivalent R&D activity in the schools system - where are the models - very few in the main? But they are slowly evolving. Certainly in Second Life there have been a number of educational exemplars over the years, mostly tied to work done by academics.

But what I think marks out people working in Virtual Worlds based on Open Sim or Open Source technologies, is that they are usually teachers who are trialling the system for themselves, independently of academic bodies and those contstraints, and often some very rapid prototyping of models of education are going on in there and, again, often with the help of fully blown commercial partners in ad hoc relationships that benefit all parties. The individuals concerned are often capable of working across silos to bring those different talents together and build exciting new engaging environments. This will be something I highlight in this blog as happening again and again. Often academia follows but does not drive the innovation and that is the main difference…

It is my contention that it is not always in the world of academia that the most rapid innovation happens but only when cross silo partnerships begin to coalesce around a highly focused project to create new and more effective adaptations of the technologies involved. Sometimes the realism and practicalities of markets and audience often determine how innovative technologies move forwards and we need to be aware of this pattern of development if we are going to understand how these platforms are used in the rest of this century.

WHAT IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW

Which one is real?

As Martin Bean, Vice Chancellor Designate of the Open University, pointed out at the recent Alt-C conference, there is a massification of Higher Education going on globally, there is a need for innovation and multi-channel ways of educating the present generation using multiple platforms if we are to keep up in terms of world-wide competition. Virtual Worlds/ Immersive Environments will be one of those channels without a doubt in HE, FE, Secondary and Junior school systems within the next few years.

In this blog I outline some of the major developments that are taking place right now, in this and allied fields and what I think are the major elements needed to introduce these technologies into schools. This year marks the point where I will begin to train teachers in mainstream education in the UK on the use and best practice of Virtual Worlds and to that effect this blog is setting down some of the landscape and exemplars of what is possible in those areas, some of the shared vision of the pioneers and many of the possibilities surrounding the whole arena.

I outline some of the most innovative exemplars at present and a tentative roadmap of how these technologies can be used to augment genuine learning in real life education communities across the board. I will be mentioning several parallel educational initiatives and binding them into the overall picture where possible. This blog post is the summation of that activity at this time and it is intended to be a strong pointer to the future. The time, I feel is ripe to show and tell what is happening…

As you read through this blog and watch the video interviews I would urge you to dismiss any previous preconceptions you might have had about Virtual Worlds. This is frontier territory - sit back and enjoy (or otherwise) the ride - if it challenges your expectations of what education is or can be, then good - I welcome any and all comments and counters to that vision in the comments box at the end of this post - I merely lay it out before you as the current landscape of what could be in the best of all possible worlds…

OPEN SIM, OPEN SOURCE, DON’T SPILL YOUR BEER ON THE COMPUTER

Part of my journey started in the noisy Greyhound pub in Knightsbridge in London in the UK earlier this year and a meeting with Giannina Rossini - one of the pivotal figures behind the introduction and dissemination of Sloodle technology in Second Life.

She had something I wanted to see - a virtual world running on a small Asus laptop - indeed from a memory stick attached to an Asus. So we arranged to meet at the Greyhound  where she showed me Open Sim running off that tiny machine - in that noisy environment in a busy London pub, I began to get an inkling of what could be, given the constraints of Open Source software, and the interconnectedness of personalised worlds - little did I know where it was to lead…

Bear in mind this was a very early iteration of the Open Sim software - there was a fair bit of compiling of code and launching of viewers to make the thing work. But it was a start and so I was off on my hunt for others to show me the way.

Giannina is one of the leading lights behind Sloodle, a technology that binds in Second Life and Open Sim to the Moodle VLE. Basically it allows for a registration system of your Virtual World Avatar on Moodle and the interoperability between the two and various objects in the Virtual World and the learning platform. Giannina was responsible for the main build on Sloodle Island in Second Life and there are regular free workshops there every Tuesday.

VICKI DAVIS - TEACHERPRENEUR

‘…it’s been such a powerful year that I don’t want to go back…’

My next port of call was with Vicki A Davis - award winning teacher from Georgia - and her students who talked to me over Skype about the Open Sim world they had built in four weeks on DigitTeen Island on Reaction Grid.

Vicki is the person who first used the phrase ‘V Generation‘ to me. She beams confidence and authority and is one of the new breed of teachers, globally, who is trialling these technologies with her students in highly successful ways.

She has an amazing ‘can do’ authority about her - no equivocation, nay-saying  or dithering, she just gets right on down and does it as she has done with Web 2.0 tools for the last four years. Like all the individuals I have met along the way - she’s a self starter with a whole raft of awards around the internet projects she’s been involved in.

There’s no doubt who is in charge in her classroom but all her projects are highly collaborative and emergent with time built in for reflection on the part of the students. Vicki is one of those new breed of global teachers who just simply changes the system by sheer force of work and dedication.

DYNAMIC CURRICULUM

Suddenly I was confronted with an educational community that was involved with genuine dynamic curricular activity using a Virtual World. Their World, DigiTeen, part of the Learning on the Edge complex on Reaction Grid run by Trevor Meister - (of whom more later), is a perfect exemplar of how to get it right. The wiki is a practical dynamic documented case study in effective use of virtual worlds and stands as good record for anyone wanting to attempt a similar project. This isn’t an academic study but an extremely practical ‘action research’ guideline to development and scaffolding of new standards and opportunities for day to day working teachers.

Watch the interview with students below in Real Life and Avatar form and then the next one with Vicki see how eloquently she comments on these new learning landscapes. I would hold that interview up as a seminal exemplar of someone who knows exactly what they are doing in this field and if I had my way it would be required viewing for anyone who has doubts about the efficacy of using Web 2.0 tools in education and the systems and infrastructure that can be built around them. I would also point people to the award winning wiki on the global Flat Classroom Project for further reference - the Digiteen project is just one small subset of that whole activity.

In order to build these new systems you need to be a risk taker. At this point in time Reaction Grid was in early alpha but that didn’t stop Vicki and her students from forging a whole new way of working. Using the lessons learned when they used Google’s (now defunct) Lively they have evolved a very effective way of working in virtual worlds in education.

In the interview below with Vicki - she shares how she implements new technologies in the classroom and how she makes it work, practically. She is literally laying out a whole new curricular model and embedding lessons learned by using such a dynamic curriculum - it is an inspiration to hear the ethos underlying what she does and the vision behind it. Her students are a credit to her - notice how they talk of ‘teaching’ using the phrases ‘When I was teaching’ - a lot of co-collaboration and co-teaching goes on all the time. This is truly a 21st Century classroom. I was absolutely inspired by this interview.

Note how practical her models are and how focused she is on the teaching and learning aspects - she’s not shy to address any problems that might occur in using these new environments. Her opinions are borne from years of experience; not “what if” something happens but “when it does we do this”.

I have to say that is breath of fresh air to my ears as so many people will voice opinions and doubts based on hypothetical circumstance that so often prevents people from trialling technology like this - it’s good to hear from a practitioner out there doing it for “real” and doing it so well. Vicki is being given excellent support by the commercial owners of ReactionGrid to help fast prototype her and her students’ ideas.

RICH WHITE INNOVATOR

Rich White at GreenBush Labs in Kansas is another amazing innovator/developer/educator working in the field of Open Source virtual worlds. He is one of those mutli-talented individuals who understands both the technical and pedagogical aspects of using these platforms. In the interview below we only just touched on the surface of the many, many innovation projects he is involved with. Again, we met on ReactionGrid which is something of a touchstone for innovative educators on Open Sim.

Rich is involved in so many projects that sometimes it is hard to keep up - he seems to innovate on a daily basis and I would mark him out as one of the leaders in this field globally. When he’s not writing about, developing and demonstrating Augmented Reality and Shape Shifting technologies he’s busily devising and trialling cave video, interactive whiteboard environments and projects like the excellent CSI Virtual World and Edusim in the videos below.

Rich’s background is, again, in a variety of fields including commercial and academic - he’s more likely to issue a White Paper on his work rather than an academic thesis and is typical of the crossover of individuals between silos of activities - a recurring theme in this blog. These multi-faceted individuals are a completely new breed and synthesize their expertise in different fields, business, academia, education to evolve whole new ways of working in this area.

Just the sort of skillset we would want our children to have in the 21st Century surely and if not why not? If we are to pull ourselves out of the increasingly anachronistic 20th Century education system we need more teachers like Vicki and Rich in the workforce.

Overwhelming, unrealstic? - I doubt it - I would argue that they are boilerplating new ways of working and laying down the foundation for excellent Continuing Professional Development in this area in education. I will continue to back up that claim in subsequent blogs and videos/ case studies with innovative teachers in the coming months.

DEREK ROBERTSON - SCOTLAND - THE WORLD’S BIGGEST EDUCATIONAL VIRTUAL WORLD - MAINSTREAMING IMMERSIVE ENVIRONMENTS

Back over to the UK again for this Skype interview with Derek Robertson, National Adviser for Emerging Technologies and Learning in Scotland, who has managed to help mainstream Virtual Worlds in the Scottish Education system. As with so much that happens in Virtual Worlds, events have moved on since this video interview a few months back.

Scotland now has the biggest mainstream Open Sim Virtual World platform in the world called CANVAS.

Once again, Derek has a background firmly rooted in teaching and academia and other cross-discipline areas. CANVAS is part of the Scottish GLOW (the world’s biggest educational intranet) connected by Shibboleth. He is already well known for his seminal work on using commercial computer games in mainstream education and, together with Ollie Bray, has devised a number of practical ways of using these with local communites - all their work is underpinned by serious academic research.

CANVAS has to be the biggest mainstreaming of Virtual Worlds globally and is no mean feat. As I stated at the start of this blog - this is happening now - it’s not an idea or academic trial - it is live and working already.

Last year I did an interview with Mark Duffy of Second Places about his involvement with Open Sim. Many of the elements I questioned him about then are now in place.

Click to play

DAVID BURDEN - VIRTUAL WORLD PIONEER - CHATBOTS - VISUALISATION - MULTI-PLATFORM DELIVERY OF TRAINING FOR REAL WORLD COMPETENCIES

In this Skype discussion with David Burden of Daden some months back we discussed, amongst many other things, the rollout of Pivote an open-source authoring system for learning in virtual worlds. This is an Open Source multi-platform authoring system which can be used on anything from a mobile phone to a web browser. It has been put to use in the training of paramedics and all academic research and money underwrote the development. It was then released as an Open Source application and can be freely downloaded.

Again another example of “real world” use of Immersive Environments to train and orient professionals…

AARON WALSH - IMMERSIVE EDUCATION - WORLD STANDARDS FOR EDUCATION - OPEN SOURCE - OPEN STANDARDS - OPEN DEPLOYMENT

My video interview with Aaron Walsh, director of the Immersive Education initiative at their summit in London back in April, again earlier this year highlighted a much wider scope when considering the future rollout of Virtual Worlds globally.

Aaron’s connection with Immersive Environments goes way back to the very beginning of international standards for 3D on the web in the 90’s - what was then the VRML consortium subsequently named the Web 3D consortium.

His main vision is to help collectively forge Open Source, Open Standards, Open Deployment of Immersive Educational Environments so that assets, tech and platforms can all work seamlessly together. This will be future proofing of technologies to some extent and will guarantee that all systems will work interoperably and be extensible and scalable.

The Media Grid Immersive Education Initiative has set up a number of working parties to investigate not only the technical but also the social aspects of use of Immersive Environments including the possible deleterious effects on mental health of addictive behaviour and engagement in-world.

Two of their recent projects are the development of an Immersive iED table and the announcement of the STEM (Science , Technology, Engineering, Math) Rocket World initiative.

Listen to Aaron’s thoughtful answers and reflect on them in the light of all I have revealed about the current state of the technology in this blog posting.

TREVOR MEISTER - CANADIAN API WIZARD - REACTIONGRID

Trevor Meister’s Pachube helmet…

But probably one of the most inspiring individuals I have met on my journey has to be Trevor Meister. When I first encountered him I should imagine he was working virtually 20 hours a day on various educational projects on ReactionGrid.

The first thing he showed me was the use of Scratch for Open Sim. He had adapted Eric Rosenbaum’s code to work entirely in the immersive environment of Open Sim on ReactionGrid. Watch the video below - to see what it can do…

Trevor was also in the early stages of bringing in data into Open Sim and plotting it on Dynamic textures on primitive building blocks. I returned a couple of weeks later and it was obvious he had made enormous strides with development and adaptation of APIs from external spreadsheets to plot data more fluently.

But if that wasn’t enough he was experimenting with innovative Pachube sensor technology via a home made space helmet.

Trevor has over 20 years as a Maths and Physics teacher in Canada and with that track record he thinks this platfom a viable way to teach students and I entirely agree with him. What is so amazing is that he is now able to use the Immersive platform itself to flesh out his ideas about how it can be used.

I am personally astounded at how quickly he has developed several educational technologies in- world in such a short time. I think his expertise would be a boon for any government or educational institution wanting to use Virtual/ Immersive environments effectively in education.

He is currently seeking academic or governmental sponsorship and I am amazed he hasn’t been offered immediate funding for his work but I am sure it will not be long coming.

REACTION GRID -  CHRIS HART, KYLE & ROBIN GOMBOY

This interview is with Chris, Kyle and Robin of ReactionGrid without whom much of the access to educators and business people I have met on Open Sim would not have been possible.

Out of all the Open Sims I have visited in the last few months theirs has been the most approachable and welcoming towards education and their policy of a PG Island with appropriate protocols has been a model of use for the way access is going with virtual communities in Open Sim.

They have given amazing amounts of time and advice about their particular education and business sim and at no point have they refused to answer my copious questions about the process of getting schools onto Open Sim and their Gridizen policy.

In the interview above they introduce themselves and outline the ReactionGrid ethos. Of all the emerging Sims at the moment I would point educators, in particular to their grid. They are sure to get a very warm welcome and lots of advice about using the technology.

SUPAREAL

In the light of all this research into Open Sim and Immersive environments in education I am launching a new Virtual World consultancy business next week with my business partner, Julia Blagbrough, called SupaReal.

I feel the technology has now got to a point where Virtual Worlds are indeed a viable option for education at all levels - not just Secondary but also Primary schools and eventually a whole global network - a backbone of Open Source servers, will break open entirely the way we do things in education at the moment - a whole series of interconnected 3D learning environments that will almost certainly, in time, lead to a Hypergrid of interconnected learning spaces that will act as an intellectual crucible for innovation, creativity and new practices for 21st Century learning. It will be the 3D web…

It’s an exciting time and one I’m happy to be alive in to see how the road opens out before us as we continue into 21st Century learning. The seeds are there - it is up to us to make them grow and flower into new ways and pedagogies for our children and all our futures.

Sept 2009

LEARNING SPACES

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

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

CPD ANYWHERE - NO MORE BORDERS

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

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

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

TEACHMEET ALTERNATIVES

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

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

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

POINTS ALONG THE WAY

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

Some of the issues raised were:

• CPD is broken - how to fix it?
• The TeachMeet model and how to widen awareness of this
• How Web 2.0 tools are used effectively in education at present
• If only a minority of teachers know about new CPD models how to be more inclusive
• The use of Learner and Student voice in CPD models
• The cost effectiveness in new CPD models
• Working outside of silos

IGNEOUS EXTRUSIONS AND VOLCANIC BURSTS

Along the way there were quite a few gems in the discussion - John Davitt’s comments that evening, using a geological analogy about CPD and the rapid development of ideas by practitioners in this area, were particularly pertinent.

“ … it’s almost like there’s a geological model where professional development in the past was, you got laid down like sedimentary rock – you started in as a beginner and slowly over the years you took on these layers and shales of improvement and obviously now it’s like igneous extrusions, volcanic bursts but that’s not the whole picture… ”

The archive of the live broadcast is here below but the TwitCam video it is not always available at times so a MP3 and transcript of the broadcast are also downloadable below - please do read through the 14 page transcript - it might take less of your time if you are a text based learner:

Transcript of the broadcast:

Tree Meet - Beyond TeachMeet - CPD for ICT In the 21st Cetntury

The MP3 podcast stream extracted from the Broadcast can be found here - best heard in tandem with reading the transcript above as the weather at some points obscured a few words:

Learn4life-TreeMeetThursday3rdSeptember2009645PM842.mp3

HOW WAS THIS POSSIBLE

The kit used to broadcast live under a tree in Regents Park was:

1 MacBook Pro Laptop - suitably waterproofed…

1 Blue Eyeball Webcam with HD sound and vision

1 PAG Video Light + powerpack

1 Gorilla Powerpack to extend the laptop’s life over the broadcast

1 £5.00 a month Dongle with phone SIM to broadcast out through the 3G Network

All in all it stood the test and performed excellently - access to a good wireless broadband connection would have made the video more fluent however. But as you can see - now there is no bar to broadcasting or holding CPD anywhere you wish, on any occasion at any time

.

Trapdoor on the book treehouse -  Treehouse Gallery

Image attribution Thomas Roche on Flickr under this CC licence
This blog has always, and will continue to be, a record of my personal journey through the realms of what is innovative in education in social media and immersive environments; a charting of the individuals and communities I meet there along the way.

This year has been exceptional in the richness, the granularity of experiences and interactions with people I have encountered in those landscapes. That is what I do in the main, document these sojurns, pass them on for others to speculate and consider how new models, better ways of engagement might effect a step change in society. To make a rough hewn map of possible future territories in the area.

ISLANDS

ThinkBalm Island on ReactionGrid

On this journey I have come across whole islands of activity metaphorical, real and virtual where people are working at the very fringes of innovation.

Once such place is ThinkBalm Island on ReactionGrid. Here, I attended my first ThinkBalm Innovation Community Immersive Brainstorming Event. I was highly impressed and honoured to be there. And very fitting for a firm working as pioneers on the frontier of digital immersive platforms, ThinkBalm does things differently.

The session was led by Erica and Sam Driver. ThinkBalm is a grand experiment in collaborative innovation and ideas sharing; they use these events and their industry analyst firm as a conduit for numerous excellent highly focused reports and research around business activity in what they call the Immersive Internet. Basically they do what they scrutinise and are a living laboratory in effective communication and dissemination of ideas and information in that sphere.

I was drawn in to the ThinkBalm landscape simply by exploring the exponentially burgeoning sims on ReactionGrid and decided to do a little digging because I was intrigued by their business model and some of the parallels it has for education.

I saw that I had narrowly missed their last professional networking event in Second Life documented in this YouTube video.

When I saw that, I immediately realised the cross-over parallels and interconnections with Pecha Kucha and the growing TeachMeet phenomenon in UK education circles that I am documenting in videos sponsored by Futurelab.

In fact I was a bit in awe of the pedagogical models and the deep thinking and preparation that must have gone into facilitating that Second Life networking event. It appeared to be far slicker, more focused and superbly staged than many of the academic gatherings I had attended in Second Life in the past.

SILOS

Image attribution to y cstreet.us on Flickr under this CC licence

One of my personal remits for this year is to informally research different social professional silos working in social media, immersive and mobile platforms. Then bring together the best I have seen from those discrete arenas and highlight what seems to work and draw comparisons. But also to find those points of common reference that resonate with my own experience. This has always been the purpose behind my blog but this year I have widened the scope.

FISSURES

Image attribution to  jcmeloni on Flickr under this CC licence

I am finding it increasingly hard to work with partners who haven’t got the same mindset of openness, sharing and parity in their dealings whether in education or business. I find, in almost every case, I get the benefit of immense expertise and countless value added experiences in my own professional development from this modular way of working with more elastic partnerships - one benchmark earlier this year was interacting with the growing community of fellows at the RSA (particularly Tessy Britton, David Gauntlett and David Wilcox) who are involved in transformational change in that particular organisation - another is Amplified, another is Tuttle club and yet another is MirandaMod.

My outlook has changed so much, so that if I now engage with gatekeepers or proprietorially hierarchical organisations I just can’t work fluently - it was a common concern when I was teaching too; there’s a dysfunction there that goes against my own ethical values and it just doesn’t sit right. So I tend to avoid these non-flat institutions in the main -  one of the reasons I became an independent educational consultant in the first place and left teaching.

TRIBES

And once you read a book like Tribes by Seth Godwin you never go back. In the video below Loic Lemur who founded Seesmic, interviews Seth Godwin about the concept of Tribes - now there are two people who look like they’re having fun.

Now transpose that thinking onto the education system - any education system, anywhere you can think of, and you might start to get an inkling of why I am searching for some some form of personal and social credence in my business dealings with others. But, dear reader, I digress…

HOMECOMING

Image attribution Atelier Teee on Flickr under this CC Licence

From the very start of my educational consultancy, over seven years ago, I have always trusted my gut instinct in business. I have always worked in the innovation field, often years before others, trialling and testing ‘proof of concept’ ideas, no matter how outlandish, to probe those boundaries.

Learn4Life was established to act, not only as a personal, ad hoc, informal research project but also to be a way of enabling, mapping out and binding in, the emergent social media educational landscape and to disseminate and document best practice through video. I wanted to try and take soundings, find strategies for growth in that area; new ways of doing things that sit more easily with me and that directly address some of the more obvious shortcomings of the present school system as I see it.

On this journey, and it is a lifelong one, I have met fellow travellers and in each and every case it has felt like what I can only describe as ‘coming home’. The usual pointers are a passion and drive for what people do, a dedicated concern for change; the desire to adopt and forge new concepts and ideas. This homecoming is  often marked by the qualities of authenticity, narrative and community.

I got that similar feeling ever since arriving on ReactionGrid with many, many conversations with the individuals working on different projects in there and yes, it felt like coming home.

MASKS

Image attribution to icathing on Flickr under this CC licence

But what really drew my attention, or what Howard Rheingold currently calls Mindful Infotention, to ThinkBalm in particular, was a reference to of one of Erica Driver’s comments in my never ending RSS stream about the convention of using real names when interacting in business immersive environments. Unlike Second Life, ReactionGrid allows you to choose an avatar with your real name. So my curiosity was triggered. Over the course of this last year I have also been looking at issues of identity surrounding working and learning online and particularly the work of Yishay Moor and Shirley Williams with occasional glances over at what Josie Fraser is up to.

So when I joined Erica’s Linkedin group and saw the title of the event ‘How to write an immersive technology business case‘ (this coupled with the fact that I have recently confirmed the imminent launch of a business partnership with someone who has been working in allied fields for years in gaming and broadcast) I just had to go. Trust me dear reader I am getting to the point.

LEGEND

Image attribution to Jeff Lowe on Flickr under this CC licence

On arriving at ThinkBalm island in avatar form I was immediately launched into a highly focused brainstorming event facilitated by Erica and Sam. In the company of about 20 highly energised people with far more expertise in this area than I will ever have, I was given a masterclass in business writing techniques. This all through the medium of Jeff Lowe’s BrainBoard tool which has the facility to save all comments and ideas written on it in the form of notes to a database and email.

Image attribution to Jeff Lowe on Flickr under this CC licence

The hour went quickly and was a marvellous use of the platform and the interactions orchestrated within it. I would say it was an excellent case study in how to use this medium to best advantage. At the end of the session opinions were garnered in Jeff’s Attitudometer (touch the green top if you are in agreement about a question or statement, red if you aren’t and the middle if you have a neutral opinion). It’s an instant  feedback aggregation visualiser - simple and efficient.

COMPASS

Image attribution to exi-stencil-ist’s photostream on Flickr under this CC licence

So what do I draw down from this first experience of the business community in an immersive environmental platform and what can education learn from this?

Well, all of the participants were highly motivated self-starters who weren’t afraid of taking risks - very similar to many of the teachers I have met at various TeachMeets. And like them they are working in highly distributed small pockets of communities outside of main institutions bound together by their passion for learning.

These business models of working, at their best, seem very efficient and unencumbered by the usual barriers to productivity. There is fluency and focus, especially in the business community and it is able to fasttrack, prototype and instantiate ideas quickly and act on them with similar speed. I have also seen several similar instances of effective distributed work models on Tom Barrett’s blog.

In the UK firms such as Headshift are beginning to join up the dots between business and social media and could have a lot to offer education in terms of scoping out radical new ways of working between both areas…

But educators are necessarily wary of business; there has not been a good track record between the two communities in the UK especially - many teachers have felt disempowered and locked in to big corporate IT structures underpinning what they do and for the most part putting blocks on innovative practice. The rise of mobile device ownership in those communities in particular is beginning to change that and especially the use of Twitter for professional development. But a lot of what I have seen in both communities in the last year has led me to believe much cross-fertilisation is possible.

What marks true north, as well, in both communities, is the use of real world ‘face to face’ meetups to build genuine social community and those relationships then help pump prime subsequent distributed virtual gatherings on numerous platforms. The models are very similar - they seem to fit well.

I do think at some point there will be a merging of the two with each being able to give value to the other. Teachers like Viki A Davies and Trevor Meister both of whom are also on ReactionGrid are starting to pave the way. But more of them in my next blog post.

I personally believe that the role of educators will start to evolve and that many will begin to use the creativity and drive that underpins entrepreneurial enterprise in their professional practice and vice versa. The best of both communities will have a lot to teach each other.

But for now the map is very much equivalent to the one at the start of this post - the Mappa Mundi and the social systems and frameworks that surround the building of 21st Century working very much mired in the same conditions that underwrote the Medieval world before the coming of the printing press and Caxton. Who knows what will happen in the next decade but it’s fun trying to see what may pan out…

It can import images from your Flickr or Picasa sets, tags etc. A nice little app. give it a go.

As you can see in this simple video tutorial, I made a model in SketchUp in seconds and then was able to export it into Second Life just as quickly using the plugin.

Now if you are a school using the excellent 3DVinci SketchUp tutorials to make simple or even more complex models you can export them into Second Life and make Machinima of them for example. It would make an excellent design project plus you could make your own advertisements and props.

You can, of course, export any Google Warehouse model into SketchUp and from there on into Second Life or any number of other 3D modelling packages but I would advise anyone doing this to put attribution to the original builder on a sign on or near the model, otherwise you may be breaking Google’s Terms of Service.

I like Sketchlife but I do have one reservation and that is there isn’t an option to make you the creator of the prim - which would be great if you wanted to re-export your model into Open Sim using the Meerkat viewer. But I guess the company distributing SKetchlife will probably have a server object option soon or sell that as a premium service in time…

Also every prim you use in your model will cost you one Linden dollar in Second Life but I think that’s a fair charge considering the exporter is free. Have a look at the video. I deliberately made it as simple as possible so teachers can use that with quite young pupils if they wish.

You will need to know how to install the plugin into SketchUp and the Server Object in Second Life. There are comprehensive instructions on the SketchLife website on how to do this with lots more fascinating technical information as well.

SketchUp can now enable you to make quite complex models and import them into Second Life - it could form the basis for any good interactive immersive design course for Secondary Schools if properly managed. Have fun!

Here’s another first from Learn 4 Life. Using Twitcam to Broadcast out Second Life from your desktop. Simple blocky but effective if you use a tripod and don’t move your avatar around too fast.

In this broadcast I even managed to stream in a video into Second Life on a media player. The sound is superb but the video being shown comes across as stills but then my broadband connection can only take so much through my Mac.

Oh an I forgot to add I was also talking to Chris Smith @shamblesguru on Skype as well on voice - go and play. A whole new Inside / Outside broadcast model. Voila!

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

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

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

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

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

If you are a teacher in a  UK school thinking of a quick start in Virtual Worlds and want to explore Open Sim I’d thoroughly recommend ReactionGrid for their pricing and prompt service. They even have a virtual turn key solution Banbury and the educational apps they can offer and other services are well worth looking at http://outpost.reactiongrid.com/. They can make worlds secure and in my experience are still small enough to offer a very personalised service and what’s more their main developer is UK based - so what’s stopping you - get in touch with @dstrawberrygirl now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LIVE STREAMING vs ASYNCHRONOUS VIDEO BROADCAST - how they are different

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

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

Inside this case I have 2 tape DV cameras, 3 Flip cams, allied mini tripods, broadcast quality external mikes, ethernet cables, dongle, portable mini hard drive, 32GB USB stick, gaffer tape, pag lights, extension leads and many, many other things that are invaluable. These resources have been built up over time as a result of trial and error.

GETTING YOUR AUDIENCE TO FINE TUNE THEIR SIGNAL - the “human” part of broadcasting

Something always goes wrong and video streaming is an inexact art, so with the coming of Twitter it has been much easier to crowdsource “talkback” from your audience. This is something the mainstream media companies are only just beginning to get.

The people who are both viewing the stream and on Twitter, will give you instant feedback on the reception their end - allowing you to tweak the stream dynamically with others helping you all over the world (although you need to make educated guesses about the quality of some users’ client machines sometimes).

I guess the difference between myself and a “professional” outside broadcaster apart from the cost of the kit, is the fact that I know a fair number of people viewing remotely and I have a good professional knowledge of the people and exemplars I am filming. Sometimes it’s not unknown for me to ask a question on behalf of a remote viewer or myself because the mediated role between active broadcaster, participant and viewer being very much changed by such involvement. The broadcast is both local and global in that respect and authenticity underpins what I do. I don’t do generic video streaming of any event - only the ones with which I have a good professional knowledge of the practitioners and their communities. This helps give a more genuine context and more compelling narrative when broadcasting…

At the Open Source Schools UnConference at the NCSL this week - I managed to stream most of the main sessions (except my own as usual) and with the help of Drew Buddie (http://twitter.com/digitalmaverick), Joe Dale (http://twitter.com/joedale), Tony Sheppard (http://twitter.com/grumbledook) and Dai Barnes (http://twitter.com/daibarnes) most of the other sessions were captured on a series of Flipcams for asynchronous viewing later (I will badge and upload these day by day through August).

As I was filming to DV tape + live streaming I was also monitoring the Twitter hashtag for #osschools and various DM’s from various people about the quality of the stream. By quickly interacting with people I could get immediate feedback about broadcast quality and (try to) correct any dips in volume / picture quality. Plus I could feedback to some presenters in real time on the side…

Those asynchronous films will act as a repository, reminder and CPD resource for those people who were at the conference but couldn’t make the parallel sessions as well as an overview for those people who couldn’t make it there in person. They also act as an historical resource and downloadable archive for people interested in all aspects of Open Source software. Local authority advisors, teachers and others can also point to and embed those films in their local websites and blogs and build further localised CPD sessions around them if they wish.

MAGNIFYING SOCIAL INVOLVEMENT WITH LIVE VIDEO STREAMS BY USING SATELLITE EVENTS

Then, this morning, I was at a remote viewing of TEDGLOBAL OXFORD in Spitalfields London.

About 20 people turned up at 8 am and about 8.20 we were all led over to a viewing suite to see the TEDGLOBAL event streamed live. Nice to be part of a group of people who got access to tickets to view remotely.

So the event is held in Oxford and then broadcast out and what I would call “socially magnified” by being sent to a remote suite of viewers - however - there’s no interactivity between the remote viewers and the broadcast. In the breaks people network locally. It’s a good model but not ideal.

If I were to make a diagram of this experience of the event it would look like this :

Now this is a BIG simplification. But basically - apart from the peer to peer Twitter Channel between users there is no human interaction going on between the live audience and the remote one, between the presenter remotely and the socially magnified group of observers apart from introducing the morning and getting on with the stream. This is a very low level of media use - in fact the best social currency going on is the twitter stream around the media and both events.

SUPERCHARGING STREAMED MEDIA

I have recently been filming for the MirandaMod sessions - I  film for post production to produce a quality film like this - which will include people’s discussion, embedded Powerpoint Slides synchronised with talking heads etc (NB flash movie takes some time to load):

Click to play

but I also film dynamically encorporating live streams with discussions face to face and remotely and  with the help of the amazing Theo Kuechel we would also use a FlashMeeting Stream to include participants in the discussion “virtually” for reflective workshop sessions that augmented the face to face ones:

Now FlashMeeting is traditionally a serial video conferencing application where everyone’s stream is visible in miniature and people take turns to broadcast out - a diagram of use might look like this:

It has some nice features built in like voting and polling and a text chat channel. But that “serial” model of video transmission or streaming can also be wasteful if you wish to amplify live streaming socially - all you have to do - and it is what people hit upon in the MirandaMod sessions - is add a DV camera on a tripod to a computer where a group of people are meeting + show the FlashMeeting on a whiteboard in that room as well. You then immediately magnify the social interactions and make them highly dynamic. So you end up with a modified Flashmeeting not unlike this:

SO WHAT HAVE PIGLETS GOT TO DO WITH IT? OUTSIDE BROADCAST MADE TRIVIAL - CONTENT STILL KING BUT SOCIAL INTERACTION EMPEROR

Today, after having returned from the TEDLIVE session in London I turned on Twitter to see a live broadcast of a Sow who had just given birth to her piglets from Saltmarsh Community School Animal Enclosure :

This was an amazing feat and reminded me of Mark Robinson’s BirdBox Cam back in the mists of time. But whereas in those days you had to hook up a video camera to a computer network and stream out from there today services like TwitCam, BlogTv and a host of others allow you to Stream out with a couple of clicks.

What then becomes important is the way that instant streaming can be organised to work for education by magnifying human interaction at distance and therefore amplifying the educational value of such experiences between schools and individuals.

So here are a couple of possible pointers to help that magnification happen.

1) If you have an exciting event coming up and you’d like a global audience use Doodle and Eventbrite to get people to agree on an optimum time when you could stream and then gather data on pre audience figures and demographics to help you contextualise the broadcast and create excitement for the event…Use programming tricks from traditional broadcast media…

2) Try to have remote audiences put up the stream on a whiteboard for a larger audience (locally) to see and have a teacher mediate with the broadcaster using Twitter taking questions from their pupils about the broadcast dynamically.

3) If you want to increase this capital, this magnification of rich but global social interaction through media - why not write a web page where two or more Twitcam streams are embedded in a HTML table or just bring up two browser windows and use that as an adhoc video conferencing mechanism between schools. Again putting up the streams on a whiteboard and having teachers or pupils mediate with questions and answers to magnify the social interactions and to model communications.

Now that Outside Broadcast is so easy and trivial to do people will have to consider battery life for cameras (or phones), connectivity and other issues - schools can build boxes of resources similar to the one I have outlined above - now there’s no bar to going anywhere to broadcast…obviously services like this will be available for mobile phones and so as equipment costs  become cheaper the ongoing miniaturisation of kit will ensure that the broadcasts will become ubiquitous.

But as always the most important considerations are the “human” issues surrounding ubiquity of video streaming and this will mean the emergence of a number of protocols and literacies as well as a host of other other issues arising from the “always on” video revolution.

Imagine total ubiquity of media streaming - YouTube live - what is worth watching, what not? What is appropriate and what not? How can you optimise human interaction blended with remote events? What is to remain private and what open? All these are digital literacy issues and will need to be addressed if they are not to be subject to ignorance and further moral panics as they evolve.

With the advent of Google Wave and Live Streaming the internet is going to be always on, totally dynamic and panoptic - what will we do then in terms of social interaction? These are important issues if we are not to just condemn and lock away these wonderful resources.

So to precis some of the issues I have outlined here in this blog here are some things to consider about the live and asynchronous video in the educational sphere:

Live streaming - what for - events? What are authentic narratives that can drive learning forward that bring value to community activity. How do you stage manage these scenarios and serendipities and how do you optimise, magnify and authenticate the human interactions- what are the risk factors and how can you minimise them. How do you write an ethical canon of use?

Transmissive streaming - how to make a simple transmission more compelling, appropriate and meaningful to teachers and learners. What mediation skills are needed - how can teachers or facilitators aggregate web 2.0 resources to create a buzz around learning - how can they archive, optimise and amplify social interaction using these skills.

On my way back from the TedGlobal transmission I came across a demonstration involving local community groups about usery and the national debt. After talking with a couple of the protesters I took out my iPhone and took an
AudioBoo recording of the core protest message. It was pure serendipity and I felt it worthwhile broadcasting this out to Twitter because I felt it was of interest :

It was simply a matter of holding the iPhone up and two clicks. The event held my attention because it involved a community of adults and children who felt strongly about a certain issue and I felt it worthwhile broadcasting. However this can be very decontectualised and one sided so…

The protesters have a web site http://www.londoncitizens.org.uk/ for context. If I were still teaching I would be tempted to use this as a case study in Citizenship - ask my pupils what the provenance for the ideas of the group was - yes - they are a charity what are their aims - do you agree with them? Were they exploiting young children or raising awareness and other similar issues? In effect it would be a wonderful resource to build a case study on. Of course I would need to clear that with my senior management and set in place a number of checks and balances to socially “skin” reflection about the protest and stimulate debate. But without those mediation skills it’s merely another transmission in a plethora of audio out there on the net. I might not even be able to access it from within the school network for starters. So the need for managing institutional interfacing with web 2.0 tools under an enlightened Web 2.0 policy would be vital. I could go on but I won’t labour the point.

These new highly dynamic video and audio media narratives need careful managing but many teachers and institutions are ill equipped to deal with, manage, elicit and mediate the grammar, syntax and protocols of such emergent theatres of activity and all the peripheral web 2.0 augmentations. It’s vital people start to think about this now rather than just have kneejerk reactions that will lock down a golden seam of learning opportunities and a host of new digital epistemologies that carefully managed can make learning far more meaningful and compelling.

MOVING FROM THE VIRTUAL TO THE REAL AND BACK AGAIN - VIRTUAL CPD IN ACTION

As part of this theory I am going to host a Virtual Conference about Digital Literacy in Second Life on Learn 4 Life Island to put these ideas into practice. The speakers I have for the conference so far are Carol Rainbow talking about E-Safety and Josie Fraser on Digital Literacy. I will be talking about the issues involved in this blog.

Ideal attendees will be Local Authorities, Senior Managers, Practitioners. In the first instance people who know how to navigate Second Life and operate an Avatar efficiently. They will also be prepared to buddy up with people who have never been in Second Life to model interactions on a screen or whiteboard to others in their physical space. They will be expected to mediate the experience for others locally and virtually.

It is intended to be a shot across the bows of how to run effective CPD virtually and intended to amplify that experience for others in an authentic and effective way. Tickets are now available from Eventbrite here:

http://learn4life.eventbrite.com/

I then put the result through a screen visualiser and took a quick screen capture. I’m sure this process could be combined with a projector on stage with dance to make an interesting performance. Looking at the maths, design and collaborative working activities around these elements would be kind of interesting to start from in a lesson…

Click to play

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

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…

Click To Play

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…

Being drawn in

Joining the RSA as a Fellow has been on the fringes of my attention for some time now. A couple of years ago I was invited to a meeting to tenatively formulate ways forward to do things differently there by Steve Moore. Since that time I have been observing the process of OpenRSA from a distance - infrequently dipping into the emerging activity coming from that direction. So when I saw, what seemed a pivotal workshop, pushed out through Eventbrite on FaceBook (I think…), I decided to turn up and see what had had happened in the intervening time. I’m not a Fellow but I’m interested in becoming one - perhaps - so getting the back story, the current state of affairs and the debate around the concept of OpenRSA was very, very appealing. The fact that I wasn’t a Fellow and could turn up and have the opportunity to engage was a big plus. Certainly the Social Media mechanisms drew me in gradually like a small comet into a parabola of interest around the OpenRSA’s growing gravitational field - so whatever they had done to get my attention had finally worked - I was there and am now blogging about it in depth.

Similar patterns

It is interesting to observe so many similar patterns beginning to emerge in different contexts in various spheres around Social Networking this year. From my focus,  Education, E-Learning and EdTech, there is the growing TeachMeet phenomenon; smaller cadres of smart educators like the teachers at the  EdtechRoundup weekly Flash Meetings on a Sunday night;  larger and more aggregated events like Amplified (facilitated and recognised by NESTA) and, indeed, direct action like the recent writetoreply site rezzed up in a couple of days by people responding to a need within the community to easily feed back and comment on Digital Britain and other forthcoming interim government reports.

All this activity does seem to be pointing the same way like iron filings around invisible social magnetic fields and there are opportunities to effect systemic change from the ground up in a distributed way -  in part. But each group seems to share some of the same frustrations, cul de sacs and challenges that involve such emergent change.

Challenges

How to reach out to wider communities beyond the tech savvy individuals that inhabit these various worlds without alienating and excluding others used to more traditional forms of communication? How to gain the attention of and to co-opt top down initiatives to co-create new ways of working but have those emerging models break through into the mainstream and effect change so that the innovative and creative becomes more the norm? How to wrest power and resources from older centralised systems to empower more localised activity that is sustainable, configurable, extensible and can be given wider scope? All key questions in the overlapping Ven Diagram of groups I inhabit.

Events

I think people do lose sight of the fact that it really is about people - the solutions to smarter ways of connecting together both online and in the physical world - it does start from the local community - where these Social Networking tools do score is that they both help, drive and augment community involvement but initially at the point of need within the physical world to cement and reinforce engagement - use and takeup is most definitely event driven.

Digital Refuseniks

And I don’t have a problem with technological refuseniks - theirs is a healthy skepticism or obliviousness -  force of numbers and direct need will make many migrate over time when models of social use have been scaffolded enough by family and friends and significant opportunities or serendipity act as fortuitous drivers to effect change through face to face traditional meetups or ‘meatspace‘ as a few of my more wired colleages might say…  I do think Open Source software, Open Standards, Data and ubiquity of portable mobile devices may well underpin this.

Opening up opportunities

In the workshop people mentioned development of strategy and databases- yes - but underlying that, I believe, are those Open Collaborative opportunities - and they have to be exactly that, open, to have greatest effect. No more silos despite whatever economic conditions we find ourselves in at present. In my opinion the reason why Twitter has scored so highly recently is entirely because it drills down to the individual via iPhones et al and skips over institutional ghettos connecting peer to peer - it’s a technology that’s ubiquitous, accessible,  wired into you, highly personalised - highly configurable - highly extensible. For me its power lies in the ability to access communities of interest that I would never had access to before and on a global scale. Want an example? I sat with an academic recently and asked him to give me the most obscure term he could think of in his field. I did a Google search - nothing. I did a Twitter search and pulled up about 10 conversations around the subject; all people he could have the possibility of contacting or researching with further links out to communities from there.

Network weaving

And as someone also pointed out at the RCA Workshop, the ability to be able to weave these different forms of communication to optimise use and provide concrete solutions is probably an emerging profession. There is an opportunity there for the business of making things happen. People who are smart filters, enablers and can offer commutativity of ideas between both the online and physical will be in high demand. How that can be scoped beyond the individual is a challenge but that’s where top down facilitation comes in perhaps. But not everyone will have the grammar and syntax to use adopt and run with these new systems - good! that makes for opportunities for me and others to provide solutions…and to expand our networks and level of expertise and insight.

The RSA Workshop

Well from that long lead in I guess I should blog about my experiences of the day. The workshop was run by David Gauntlett (whose site I have just seen and I’m amazed I have never come across before!) and was excellent. I made a very quick mind map of the points people started to raise during the background that both Lauras (Billings and Bunt)  and Malcolm Forbes gave about the whole process up to that time (If you fancy adding to it or putting me right just mail me and I’ll give you access for collaboration). It’s merely my own personal note taking and reflection on the processes of the day. It doesn’t say how much fun it was though. As a teacher and someone who has spent quite a bit of time teaching early years children this was a lovely exercise in reflective thinking through the modelling of concepts in diverse media. This sort of thing always reminds me of John Davitt’s Learning Event Generator - it’s also an excellent excuse for breaking down barriers to social interaction through play or Serious Games.

As we modelled our ideas we fed back and reflected on and aggregated what we’d done. I will include all five videos of the event with pictures of the constructions below. Because they are all High Definition Vids it might take a few days to upload but you might like to return to get a flavour of the day as I upload them.

All in all I felt it was a very productive afternoon - am I going to become a Fellow?

Well quite possibly - this feels familiar territory to me - far more of a structure that I can work within. If you don’t know the work of the RSA then it may prompt you to investigate further - certainly for me in education - it makes more sense than any of the more traditional organisations I would want to be involved with.

I’ll publish the results of the plenaries as I upload to Vimeo - for the time being there will be placeholders with Flickr pics for each group. If you were there - you might like to click on the pictures which will take you to Flickr where you can annotate parts - or then again you might not…

Group 1’s Models

Plenary / Reflection / Elicitation / Explanation

First of several videos from the Plenary from the RSA Workshop 19th February 2009

Group 2’s Model

Group 3’s Models

Group 4’s Models

Image Attribution dawn_perry on Flickr CC 2.0 non-commercial license

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.

Image Attribution Tadson on Flickr CC 2.0 non-commercial license

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

Image Attribution Jan Beckendorf on Flickr CC 2.0 non-commercial license

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

Image Attribution Bettina Tizzy on Flickr CC 2.0 non-commercial license

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

Image Attribution Thomas Hawk on Flickr CC 2.0 non-commercial license

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 Wiki, Forum and Blog. He kindly gave permission for images to be used.

Transcript and Video

Image Attribution Pixel Drip on Flickr CC 2.0 non-commercial license

A timecoded transcript of the interview can be downloaded from here or read it in the embed below. If you are interested in the use of virtual worlds for teaching and learning I would encourage you to download both the transcript, video , MP3 and, if possible, distribute them to anyone else you know who may be interested. Peter is at the forefront of this field and his research will be emerging gradually in journal and book form but before that just go to the Schome Park pages to see a number of case studies that will be released over this and next year.

Interview With Peter Twining Feb 09

Joe Wilson, Head of New Ventures at the SQA - NB - video interview at the bottom of the blog

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! How many other policy makers would take the time out to gather intelligence about grass roots teacher innovators like this. He has my immense respect.

Click To Play

Please do check out the links in this blog and reflect how we would go forward in England in the light of what is so much innovative practice in Scotland. As Joe said - they do also have their own unique challenges but it was a fascinating 20 minutes. As part of my broadcasting plan/ personal professional development for 2009 I hope to do more of these mini insights into the world of policy makers in the future - watch this space…