Learn 4 Life

TeachMeet Second Life 2010

This will be the first TeachMeet in Second Life, so, in theory a Global Teachmeet - see the Wiki for instructions.

On Friday May 7th at 8pm GMT there is the first Teachmeet in Second Life. This is open to all educators working in Second Life and allied Immersive Worlds from ALL sectors.

If you do not know what a “TeachMeet” is then go along to the wiki and watch the video at :

http://teachmeet.pbworks.com/TeachMeet-Second-Life

A teachmeet is where teachers gather to share good practice - they make 7 or 2 minute presentations.

I am quite happy to facilitate the evening and anyone with Machinima, slides, interactive objects or simply wishing to present please get in touch with me off list.

Eyebeams Electricteeth AKA Leon Cych

http://teachmeet.pbworks.com/TeachMeet-Second-Life

Giving ICT CPD for E-Safety in Second Life

In this interview I talk with Carol Rainbow about how she has managed to evolve ICT CPD for E-Safety inside Second Life.

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…

Mapping what Education and Business can learn from each other on the Immersive Internet, Virtual Worlds and Social Media

MAPS

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…

Desktop Broadcasting of Second Life with TwitCam - “Inside Broadcasting”

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!

Piglets, Pixels and People…Video/audio event magnification…Outside Broadcast comes of age…how to use it effectively - some ideas…

HOW TO MAKE VIDEO AMPLIFY AND AUTHENTICATE COMMUNITY ACTIVITY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LIVE STREAMING vs ASYNCHRONOUS VIDEO BROADCAST - how they are different

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

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

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