Learn 4 Life

The UK Education Tribes and why they should join together to effect real change

February 4, 2010 on 9:59 pm | In Adult Learning, Continual Professional Development, Curriculum, Digital Literacy, Digital Media, Innovation, Learning Platforms, Mediated Reality, Peer to Peer, Personalised Learning, Uncategorized, advisory, distributed networking, informal learning, mediascapes, open source, pedagogy | 0 Comments

How do you change the learning landscape?

How do you make things happen that begin to change what people do in education and in society in general?

How does change come about?

Is it all necessarily good?

How can you scope effective exemplars of learning out to a wider audience and help people to become better at doing stuff well (forget the teaching bit for the time being…)?

I’m lucky - I get to play - yes play - in several educational arenas - each one has its own tribe and each tribe is highly effective in what they are trying to do but, at times, activities are virtually invisible to the mainstream teaching force.

Some tribes don’t know about each other - some do. Most of these tribes are connected on Twitter and loosely federated for big events at certain times of the year. Others don’t even exist online but have good traditional infrastructures and local lines of communication - what we need is for them all to meet up and organise.

So who are the tribes in the UK landscape and why should they join up?

First there’s TeachMeet which constantly amazes me - how people step up to the plate and deliver what is a completely distributed but highly organised management exercise resulting in quality CPD for teachers - it  is nothing less than astonishing. No one person is in control and yet it seems to work. However most teachers still don’t know about TeachMeet - it hasn’t mainstreamed - why?

I would say that the hyperlocal links still haven’t been made and at the other end - organisations like DCSF, Teachers’ TV, Ofsted, TDA,  Becta, NSCL, SSAT et al haven’t bigged it up as yet - trying searching for TeachMeet or Barcamp on any of those sites… I do think that may be about to change though as its popularity and efficacy as a learning platform gains currency in the UK Learning Landscape.

It’s a two ends of the telescope thing - you need local educators (and I wouldn’t limit that to teachers) to emerge and - people locally to show their expertise, but you also need top down facilitation and advertising of events from several other traditional and effective channels NOT just social media.

Tom Barrett, I think, had the excellent idea of asking for sponsorship money to leaflet schools local to the TeachMeet event so that people could at least be intrigued by what it might be that was happening down the road - at least they knew “something” was happening locally - it might only be on the fringes of their radar now but if they came across references both locally and nationally then, at least, they might have some inkling - at present they have none. Simple strategies like contacting the local newspaper can be highly effective and it goes without saying that local LA’s could play their part.

Believe it or not most teachers are still not on Twitter and they don’t really care about Social Networking if it’s not of immediate concern. However, tell them there’s a social “do” that they might like to come to, down the road, they might just turn up. What might be even better is if people were given accreditation for organising an event or turning up and presenting at one - Drew Buddie has been suggesting that for years. Even better would be some kind of action research branching out of this…

The other Tribes and groups like

MirandaMod, ETRU, Amplified, TEDx, Open Source Schools are all variants or like minded communities and the same issues often apply. How do we get people out to these events to share and how can we mainstream them or at least scope them out to a wider audience and participants to effect change; to build effective learning communities where people share in the spirit of moving learning on in highly dynamic and engaging ways?

Forward thinking organisations like

VITAL

Naace

Consolarium

Futurelab

Mirandanet

NDRB

Creative Partnerships

Wise Kids

RSA

ALT

and a host of others are all looking for the same El Dorado  - why can’t all these tribes work together to try and effect some change at local level and have a nationwide infrastructure?

It does seem to me that TeachMeet is now an effective means of professional development - every time I hear new people at a TeachMeet event say - ‘That’s the best CPD I have had all year’. I think - then why don’t we build on what works and not on what doesn’t? Why isn’t this process better known - why haven’t we been reaching out beyond the electronic ghetto?

The truth is we have been hard wired to sit around a fire and tell each other stories for millennia  - so let’s revive some of that community spirit  - let’s have the courage and imagination to build such an infrastructure. Let all the Tribes join up and give it a go. What is there to lose?

How would you do it?

What next for BETT and TeachMeet - beyond the lunatic fringe - why so serious?

January 17, 2010 on 8:06 pm | In BECTA, BETT 2010, Continual Professional Development, Digital Literacy, Digital Media, Mediated Reality, Peer to Peer, Web 2.0, advisory, distributed networking, informal learning, mediascapes, open source, teachmeet, twitter | 0 Comments

This year I overhead a comment to this effect -

“Looking around on the stands and at Open Source, TeachMeet etc. it seems people are being regarded far less as the ‘lunatic fringe’ and becoming more accepted.”

I often think that when you talk about new ideas and concepts applied to education, many people look at you with the same disdain they might display on finding out that you have told them their favourite uncle is a cross-dresser. “Yes dear - we know they do it but we don’t talk about that…”

That a similar attitude seems to persist for TeachMeet seems obvious and, so far, the mainstream organisations have fought shy of the big TM - it’s a well known secret but no-one wants to big it up or go public with it just yet.

But the fringe events - lunatic or otherwise - just may be the salvation of BETT in the coming years…and there has been some movement from the exhibition organisers this year and it’s all good.

The problem with BETT from a vendors’ view

I have worked on a couple of stands at BETT in the past with an excellent educational product but it’s been exceptionally hard to get people’s attention if it’s new or innovative and you are just starting out marketing. If you have ever worked on a commercial stand at BETT it can be a very dispiriting business believe me.

Trying to get people’s attention and being rebuffed or shot a dirty look as they push by in an ever increasing frenzy to get freebies off different stalls whilst running the gauntlet of leafletteers is not a very nice experience or, even, very good for your self-esteem especially if you are going out cold and unsolicited. Unless you can bribe them with a branded gonk or personalised pen - or other inducements and even then it’s a Sisyphean and quite thankless task as they make a grab for the goodies and are gone.

It’s like a ‘walk of shame‘ in reverse for the stall staff - most people really aren’t that interested - they are overloaded with info and bags and just often want somewhere just to sit down and the last thing they want to hear is a sales pitch - often it seems the firms (as Ian Usher pointed out) do more Business 2 Business than sell to the educational establishment.

The whole process is very decontextualised - people need to be hooked in by some particular serendipity; some amazing Son et lumière (like the LEGO stand this year) and then they will come or only because they have organised to see you in advance of the show.

The bigger brasher firms can build wonderful environments - little pods where they can pamper their punters into handing over the spondoolics and who can pay experienced presenters to wow them into semi-narcoleptic comatose acceptance and submission but the average stall holder has a fight on their hands for people’s attention and money.

Of course some teachers are just there for the jolly - they seem pretty clueless about what they need or even if they really need it and they will snub and denigrate and wriggle out of any social interaction with that look they have that sits between pressurised fear of the unknown and mild irritation brought on by the fact someone has had the affrontery to stop them in their ceaseless peregrinations around the show.

There they hurry by, like the lost souls in the second circle of hell of Dante’s Inferno, like dead wraiths cursed to be ceaselessly buffeted aimlessly around in circles lusting after things they could never have…

I Don’t Know What You Want (But I Can’t Give it Any More ).

Enter TeachMeet Takeover

But on the whole the education profession is more than receptive to “what works” and engages pupils - surprise, surprise they like to watch other teachers talking about their teaching and good resources and like to see exemplars of wonderful practice.

Enter Teachmeet Takeover and something different happens. Suddenly your stand is populated by teachers giving superb presentations (teachers are good at that) and they draw a crowd. This creates more of a relaxed and convivial atmosphere in some cases and in many of the events caused people to learn quite a few new things and, perhaps, even buy some commercial products.

The TeachMeet fringe events create a highly focused social concentration for genuine reflection on good teaching and learning practice.

Unlike previous years I was on the on the Open Source Cafe Stand where a lot of people were genuinely interested in the software and they were pro-actively electing to come and talk and learn from others - there’s a budding community of people truly interested in Open Source software for schools. The Open Source Cafe was run like a bar camp but there were some great fun moments when the Jo Claessens and Andy Wilson arrived from the BBC to liberate London’s monsters to publicise the excellent BBC Open Lab resources

So I was well positioned to ask some friends about what they thought was best about BETT2010 - it was nearly unanimous that it was the TeachMeet Takeover and fringe events that were most engaging. Have a listen to the few short vox pops below :

Lisa Stevenson explained what the TeachMeet Takeover phenomenon was:

I’m going to all the TeachMeet Takeovers because I find that really exciting talking about how you can use things for free and teachers talking about all the things they DO with all the stuff that we’ve got around us…what’s happened is the stands around us have volunteered to let a teacher take over their stand for half an hour and just present about things they use in the classroom using free stuff - it’s got nothing to do with the stand that they are on …I was on Rising Stars this morning and had nothing to do with what they do; they just gave me the time, the computer, the screen and the microphone and I just took over and talked about what I do in my classroom; because BETT’s really kind of like a Trade Show selling things and we want to sell what we do in our classroom and to show, it doesn’t matter if you haven’t got a big budget - there are lots of things you can do for nothing.

Dawn Hallybone also pointed to the TeachMeet Takeover as the main thing she had experienced at BETT. But with reference to most of the “content” at BETT she said :

Have I seen a lot that inspires me yet - no sorry.

BETT took off for me this year for a number of reasons.

The comms tech is getting more ubiquitous and invisible.

Despite the O2 network going down (presumably because of the concentration of iPhone users) people were communicating more than ever on Twitter and their numbers seemed to be growing - the ad hoc comms infrastructure within the building during the show between stallholders, teachers, advisers and almost much anyone else seemed to be starting to come together.

Stand Owners are becoming more receptive to TeachMeet

The blend of communication and “genuine” human interaction at show level was a new element. There seemed to be less of a disjunction between people and more of a positive engagement. The savvier commercial providers got the mix just right - people like Chris Ratcliffe of Scholastic definitely “get it” and were disseminating video blogs of their own about events around their stand including the TeachMeet Talks. Well done Chris!

Thousands of little social interactions were happening all over the place and you could see the human face of the use of tech - people meeting people they knew on twitter but never met in the flesh before - people renewing professional friendships - educationalists are highly gregarious so it worked and I would maintain that it was more authentic than other possible scenarios because all the participants are so engaged with learning. The changes at BETT could almost have been a metaphor for the change I predict coming in education….

The Theme of Fun

Throughout the show and all the fringe festivals there was a definite theme of “fun”. There was a game of Tig going on between Twitter users  - did you miss that? Yes, Tig, Tag whatever you want to call it - people were showing up on stands and tigging people. They could be commercial vendors or teachers or advisors - it didn’t matter - it was fun and it brought people together and broke down barriers to human communication - it was facilitated by apps like Twitter though that made it easier to say where people were and to broadcast out that you were coming to get them. In the Amplified session on Thursday we discussed the role of “play” in work. Here’s a couple of snippets from that conversation. Here Kevin Mulryne, of the National College for leadership and schools and children’s services, discusses the “fun” things that went on in his work at BETT.

At TeachMeet on the Friday it was fun - it always is - one of the highlights was Ian Yorston who told us about his role as ‘The Unreasonable Man’.

The quote in that video clip could be the ethos behind TeachMeet Takeover in some ways…no wonder he got such a rapturous response.

Again - highly entertaining and fun but also very informative…

I predict that as the tech gets more invisible, seamless and ubiquitous so the opportunities for serious fun will increase. As a species we are extremely ludic, playful to the extreme or we should be and learning should be fun - otherwise why do it? The elements of “play” will always conquer the dour naysayers in the long run - people take their play extremely seriously. Take this whole discussion on gaming on the Wednesday at the Amplified Education event….

What we saw at BETT this year was the beginning of a new way of doing old stuff - genuinely engaging educationalists breaking down the barriers to human interaction by using traditional well tried skills. I’d call it “Remixing Education” and it’s beginning to come into focus as people begin to understand that the underpinning technology no longer matters - it’s reaching such a mature level that the organisation and vision can be easily enabled now to cater to people’s individual needs around knowledge and skills and that those are in constant flux anyway as everyone moves forward into the 21st Century and new competencies.

MirandaMod Debates

I always enjoy filming the MirandaMod debates because they are held at BETT and are open to anyone to come and join in. It’s always touch and go if anyone will turn up but as we broadcast out onto Twitter when it is beginning they always do. And contributors always prove fascinating and are the spearhead for a lot of very innovative research. Many people Twitter in from abroad or ask questions around the video stream.

It’s about the people not the tech

It is a constant mantra - all these peripheral social activities at BETT have added up to a marvellous week. Whether you are a stall holder, a teacher allowed out for the day, senior leadership or a pupil it can be good fun.

So why isn’t it mainstreaming?

So I totally agree with Gareth Davies about the fact that the bigger government non-profit agency stands should encourage TeachMeet Takeover.

And the one big question I would ask is:

Why does Teachers’ TV never film or show anything to do with TeachMeet? If they did so - it would become more mainstream and then some proper infrastructure/ funding for dissemination could happen?

Failing that I suggest the TeachMeet crew ask for some funding from all the stands that supported BETT2010 this year to do a drill down mailout to individual teachers as suggested by Tom Barrett in previous campaigns. Getting a personalised letter would be good - even better would be mailshots sent out by all the regional LA TeachMeets and the stands punters who have data about who they have giving an event and informing people of what a TeachMeet is and where they can find one.

It’s heartening to see several messages from people on Twitter saying they are going to hold local events new to their area. What would be even better would be schools hosting an event in a place that is not necessarily the school and build a social evening out of it. There’s enough social scaffolding and event templates for this now.

When the time came - each region could point to BETT and The Education Show and build on this year’s success. And remember it’s not just teachers but everyone involved in educating their children. Why not get a few parents along next time as well …?

Breaking down the silos

Informal learning will be one of the massive growth industries in the coming years - I’ll leave the last word to Dughall Hine founder of School of Everything on his attitude to learning and tech that he espoused at Tedx Orenda on Wednesday Night (if you weren’t there video up soon…)

I’m not one of these people who get really excited by technology - I get excited when technology allows people to do real stuff - it’s fun…

Derek Robertson’s Canvas Virtual World Presentation at the Scottish Learning Festival 2009

September 23, 2009 on 2:30 pm | In Digital Media, Educational Change, Innovation, MUVE, Mediated Reality, Peer to Peer, Personalised Learning, SLF, Scottish Learning Festival, Second Life, Virtual Worlds, advisory, art, distributed networking, mediascapes, metaverse, open source, pedagogy | 0 Comments

This is the Twitcam archive film of Derek Robertson’s Canvas Virtual World presentation at Scottish Learning Festival 2009.

Educators in Virtual Worlds on Open Sim - the pioneers…

September 10, 2009 on 2:18 pm | In Adult Learning, BSF, Continual Professional Development, Curriculum, Digital Literacy, Digital Media, Educational Change, Innovation, Learning Content, Learning Tools, MUVE, Mediated Reality, Moodle, Peer to Peer, Personalised Learning, Scottish Learning Festival, Second Life, Uncategorized, Virtual Worlds, Web 2.0, advisory, distributed networking, informal learning, mediascapes, open source, pedagogy, sloodle, video, video streaming | 0 Comments

WHY VIRTUAL WORLDS - WHY NOW?

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

Scratch in Open Sim

July 28, 2009 on 8:04 pm | In BSF, CLC, Continual Professional Development, Curriculum, Digital Literacy, Educational Change, IT support, Innovation, Learning Content, Learning Platforms, Learning Tools, Mediated Reality, Personalised Learning, Second Life, Virtual Worlds, Web 2.0, advisory, control, control_technology, hosting, mediascapes, metaverse, open source, pedagogy, sloodle, twitter, video | 0 Comments

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.