Learn 4 Life

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

August 29, 2009 on 7:16 pm | In Adult Learning, Continual Professional Development, Digital Literacy, Digital Media, Educational Change, Futurelab, Innovation, Learning Platforms, Learning Tools, Mediated Reality, Peer to Peer, Personalised Learning, Second Life, Virtual Worlds, Web 2.0, advisory, distributed networking, informal learning, mediascapes, metaverse, pedagogy, training | 0 Comments

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

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…

Testing the iPhone Codec for Blip.tv

April 30, 2009 on 1:47 pm | In Digital Media, Futurelab, Handheld Learning, Innovation, LA, Learning Content, Personalised Learning, Web 2.0, advisory, mobile, mobile learning, video, video streaming | 0 Comments

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

Click to play

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

TeachMeet Inspiration

February 24, 2009 on 5:11 am | In Continual Professional Development, Curriculum, Digital Literacy, Digital Media, Educational Change, Futurelab, Innovation, KS2, Learning Tools, Peer to Peer, Personalised Learning, Primary, Web 2.0, distributed networking, informal learning, pedagogy, podcasting, twitter, video | 0 Comments

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

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

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…

Outside the Wire - Why BECTA needs to do better - agency lockins and lack of community engagement?

November 14, 2008 on 11:15 pm | In BECTA, Continual Professional Development, Digital Divide, Digital Literacy, Digital Media, Educational Change, Futurelab, Handheld Learning, Innovation, Peer to Peer, Personalised Learning, TDA, Web 2.0, advisory, distributed networking, informal learning, open source, pedagogy, training | 0 Comments

Becta’s new Next Generation Learning site.

Corporate lockdown

Photo attribution Chotda’s photostream on Flickr under this CC licence

It’s good to see this arrive as a baseline info centre for teachers, parents and businesses but am I alone in thinking there’s one thing missing?

Where’s the bit where the community can evolve around the content and localise it? Er - a newsletter signup or maybe a locked in forum down the line? We know that doesn’t work very well by now because content cannot be reconfigured for local community use.

I don’t feel churlish saying this - someone has to point it out and loudly and clearly until there is some engagement and dialogue on the matter and things change.

Unlike the Strategies Site which had the courage to introduce del.icio.us (and who are going to implement Diigo) and ratings,  and who also have lots of video exemplars and content that can be linked to and thereby RSS‘d for use by local communities - the Becta site is, in effect, “closed”.

I’m sorry to bang on about this but if that site were a web 2.0 service introduced by a startup it would be a massive fail in terms of audience reach. It is, in effect, a lockout and proprietary.

Yes, I realise the argument is that there is little takeup of these resources by parents and or teachers (certainly not employers). But unless you embed them in there it is not going to happen is it?

Fine grained pedagogy is smarter and more personalised

Photo attribution to alternativemeans‘ photostream on Flickr under this CC licence

Case in point of how other teachers are using Web 2.0 services to define what I call granularity of pedagogy in localised communities - watch this film:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=vYxw6qrWt14

Now if you were to transpose that process onto the Next Generation site you have active community use around the content or at least the foundation scaffolding of building one in tandem with awareness.

But of course that would be more open, collaborative and never do…or do the developers employed by Becta not get this?

Too complex and time-consuming for the average teacher

Photo attribution mrbisson on Flickr under this CC licence

The other argument that these processes are too complex or time consuming for teachers or parents to use is also redundant. This is exactly the sort of thing that should be going on at the NCSL, TDA etc in terms of “learning” for NQTs and senior management. Why isn’t that awareness there - maybe it is I haven’t seen it?

What a website should be

The bottom line for me these days with websites, is :

- is it open,
- is it transparent
- is it shareable
- is it remixable for local community use

The argument that this isn’t happening or there isn’t enough takeup is no longer good enough in my book and I’m going to say it long and loud. How can you ever expect users to engage with these smarter technologies of you don’t build them in from the start and at least make them a viable option?

Lack of strategic and cultural infrastructure

Photo attribution to Happy to be Saffanna’s pic under this CC licence

The infrastructure to bind these technologies in has indeed not been implemented yet or been built out. Why is this I ask myself?

The point is - if you are going to have a Next Generation learning site predicated on certain instances of technologies but you don’t build in the open interactive aspects of that technology you are not going to have much dialogue.

To have a signup whereby you get issued with regular updates is, in my opinion, out of the stone age.

I really am not trying to be provocative here - it just seems to me that if you do not build an infrastucture to reflect the distributed nature of your reach and audience you are going to stagnate from the start. I get paid to tell my business clients this…

I’m passionate about this and do wonder why there is such a lag on this aspect of interactivity from an agency that purports to be:

“the government agency leading the national drive to ensure the effective and innovative use of technology throughout learning.”

I hope I’m just not another voice crying in the wilderness yet again…

If government agencies are serious about building in strategic infrastructure that reaches out to wider communities this needs to happen.

It’s like building a brand new ocean liner without any gangplanks or access points other than the one at the front.

The individual, the local and the global - distributed communities and personalisation aggregated

Photo attribution to Scott Mcleod’s photo under this CC licence

For me it is all about linking local and global communities around a spine of centralised resources. This series of Outside the Wire posts have been specifically about that kind of infrastructure, thinking, scaffolding and engagement. But where is it in the current system? Well not anywhere as far as I can see - there is no recognition of the fact that digital, community, identity and how it interfaces or connects with institutions is changing and changing fast? Where is this debate - really - I mean it - where exactly is it?

What is needed is a digital cultural infrastructure that deals with this on a professional and personal level and we are nowhere near that yet. Institutions will begin to change and fragment in terms of teaching and learning with reference to digital culture and locking things down and out where there are smarter ways, is a complete and absolute dead end; a complete waste of time.

So I will say it again - where is the recognition that there needs to be a facilitation of the use of social media technologies to personalise and transform learning? Where is the smart use of open source community building tools? There seems to be no awareness of this…

Counter arguments

I can see the counter arguments arising and these usually are:

- sustainablility

- scalability

- persistance

- identity

- security

- “tech trauma”

And I will address these specifically in future posts with exemplars but not here today.

But I am tired of attending particularly wonderful sessions at BECTA, Futurelab, Handheld Learning et al where people say at the end - “but this has got to change” -  but never saying how - it’s all very aspirational but it gets people and communities nowhere.

Smart focus research that allows for distributed activity globally

I would suggest that a smart focus was put on the practitioners who are using these tools in isolation at the moment and see how they are binding them into their school communities within a globally distributed context.

Is research tackling this - if so where?

Photo attribution Watz under this CC licence

I see the problem as this at the moment, even with quantative and qualitative research in institutions. That individuals who are joining up and aggregating resources - rapidly sharing them with other individuals globally to effect change are the main drivers. It is not going on within institutions in enough numbers, yet, because there is no mechanism to understand this other than through institutional channels and this also needs to open out and change; academia usually turns its lens on institutions that are geographically placed within 20th century structures and do not see the granularity of the individual within a 21st globally aggregated educloud context - they are looking through the wrong end of the telescope.

To be specific - if your focus is on schools, and if one individual within a school is having an amazing effect on the teaching and learning of their pupils, then that research will miss that hidden infrastructure because it still has its lens and methodology turned on the institution and not the global back channel with those distributed individuals in it - again a parochial mindset. If people are researching this please send me links.

The traditional dismissal

The traditional view has been, “Oh they are charismatics or evangelists” - and once they try to scale up such practices within their institutions (unless they are part of a senior management team) then they usually hit a brick wall.

And yes, this has been the case in the past but what people are missing is that one individual is usually part of a much bigger global distributed community attached to a smarter educloud.

Validation, recognition and scalability

Photo attribution to zen under this CC licence

Yet there is no mechanism to validate and extend these individuals’ practice beyond their classroom or school because institutions are not geared up for that yet, and because the very nature of a distributed system requires radical social and cultural change.

It would seem an obvious model to me that the community building and learning outside the institution can be made to do the heavy lifting, but without the will and cultural infrastructure it is going to fail and stagnate into small pools of practice here and there.

What there needs to be here, is vision, experiment, trial and risk and I don’t see that forthcoming from anywhere in government or its agencies for change - and it’s a tragedy of missed opportunity if it continues in this way.

Interview with Mark Kramer (@MAMK) over Google video using Eeepc and MacBook pro

November 13, 2008 on 1:26 am | In Continual Professional Development, Digital Literacy, Digital Media, Educational Change, Futurelab, HE, Handheld Learning, Mediated Reality, Peer to Peer, Personalised Learning, Web 2.0, advisory, blogging, conferences, distributed networking, informal learning, mediascapes, mobile, mobile learning, open source, pedagogy, vblog, video, video streaming | 0 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

Click to Play 

Click to Play