Learn 4 Life

BETT 2010 - a busy time this week

Last year's MirandaMod discussions at BETT

Every year I have spent less and less time walking around the stands at BETT and devoted more and more time to networking and building video and audio archive resources around people and groups met during the show.

For me the exhibition is about communities of practice - renewal of contact with a wide and growing Twitter tribe in education and general catching up what people are doing in all the areas of techEd around the country.

This year is no exception and I’ll be covering more events than ever using video, armed with a new Canon Ixus 120 IS and quick encoding software to broadcast live streaming and upload vox pops updates of interviews with key people on the fly - wrapping it all in YouTube, Blip and Twitter and eduTalk to give a growing measure of innovation happening at the exhibition.

I will be streaming and filming a lot of social activity. Every day I’ll be at the Open Source Schools Barcamp at stand :

http://opensourceschools.org.uk/node/14108

I’ll be taking constant video vox pops of the speakers there and on the afternoons of Wednesday and Thursday from 15.30 onwards I’ll be streaming out the MirandaMod discussions.

http://mirandamod.wikispaces.com/BETT+2010

Not content with that I’ll be bringing 4 video cameras to all the evening events to capture the TedEx, AmpEd and TeachMeet events for archival and professional development use.

WEDNESDAY http://tedxorenda.eventbrite.com/

THURSDAY http://amplified10.eventbrite.com/

FRIDAY http://www.teachmeet.org.uk/

I will be most interested in the AmpEd meeting on Thursday as it is will be one that, together with TedEx, begins to break the TeachMeet mould. All events should be quite amazing and will be covered in depth. This year should see the beginnings of a radical takeoff of ideas and new management systems in the education world with regard to innovative uses of technology;  the BETT show and all the “fringe” events including the new TeachMeet takeover should be an interesting platform for new activity and discussion and debate in these areas.

I’ll blog separately about Amplified Education later but that’s the general plan. So if you see me struggling around with loads of kit I’ll probably be running from one event to the other or desperately trying to upload vid and audio to the various outlets during the show.

It looks like it’s going to be a lot of fun…

So if you fancy catching up at any of these events I’ll be around with camera and recorders - say hello in passing

Here’s a link to a quick Wiki MindMap of the social activity going on at BETT

Out of our tree … are we weird or are we in the vanguard? New ways forward for teacher Continuing Professional Development? Beyond TeachMeet…

LEARNING SPACES

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

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

CPD ANYWHERE - NO MORE BORDERS

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

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

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

TEACHMEET ALTERNATIVES

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

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

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

POINTS ALONG THE WAY

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

Some of the issues raised were:

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

IGNEOUS EXTRUSIONS AND VOLCANIC BURSTS

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

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

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

Transcript of the broadcast:

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

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

Learn4life-TreeMeetThursday3rdSeptember2009645PM842.mp3

HOW WAS THIS POSSIBLE

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

1 MacBook Pro Laptop - suitably waterproofed…

1 Blue Eyeball Webcam with HD sound and vision

1 PAG Video Light + powerpack

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

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

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

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Trapdoor on the book treehouse -  Treehouse Gallery

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

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

Outside the wire - why you should use Twitter - interview with the amazing Drew Buddie

Photo attribution Mr Ush AKA Ian Usher on Flickr CC

Why you should use Twitter

I have just interviewed Drew Buddie (AKA digitalmaverik on Twitter) about his escapades with Twitter over the weekend at the Isle of Wight Conference. He also talks about his involvement at the e-competent tutor meeting today.

Twitter at the Isle of Wight Conference 2008

First off I have to say that I wasn’t at either event but I did talk with Joe Dale at the Isle of Wight Conference on MFL over FlashMeeting. The buzz at the meeting was nothing I had ever experienced before - Joe had obviously put an immense amount of effort into the conference and the delegates where literally ecstactic about the event. I appreciate the hard work that obviously went into that and it was an amazing success. It was a truly collaborative event with people using digital media like Twitter, FlashMeeting, and dynamic web pages to show the world how to run a CPD event for teachers. All that effort and collaboration really showed in the feedback delegates were giving on camera at the end.

Drew gave a session on Twitter and not only that his feedback forms were put online as well! He talks of how students showed teachers a few things as well. Excellent - this is just how to run a conference. I asked Joe if any SLT were there and it seems not. Let’s hope they get enthusiastic staff beating down their doors to demand this is the way they should do things in the future. Perhaps the upcoming NCSL Teachmeet in Nottingham May 2009 will turn a few heads but somehow I suspect word will have got around by then.

He also outlines what happened at the e-competent HE tutor workshop and how Ning was used to augment the day. You can pick up the Tweets of both meetings by clicking these links iowconference08 and ect08.

We need CPD like this now everywhere and for everyone

Both these events were excellent exemplars of how to do CPD. Highly dynamic, collaborative and engaging. But I won’t write any more just listen to Drew talking - his passion for what he does shines out. This is the start of a revolution in Digital Learning and I can see this threading through the teaching community just as the use of USB sticks did when they first came out. But don’t take my word for it - just listen to the podcast.

Drew’s Interview.

Outside the Wire - Virtual Worlds London - doing things differently

Click to play

Virtual Worlds London

I was at the Virtual Worlds Conference in London. Unlike at the time of the last post, I was at this conference physically, in real life, not attending the talks, but interviewing the exibitors about the Virtual Worlds and services they were providing.

I was there to do two things - the first was to report on the state-of-play about the use of Virtual Worlds in education and the second to network and try out a proof-of-concept experiment binding several technologies together that could be used in schools and colleges.

Photo attribution to epredator CC some rights reserved licence

Towards a Digital Culture

The conference was filled with lots of business people, developers, owners of startups, tecchies, people pitching for funding and Virtual World gurus from all over the world. Some had paid a lot of money to be there and to pitch their ideas. It opened my eyes to how big the market actually is and at least one teacher, Dai Barnes, gave me feedback on Seesmic about my video coverage, to say how it made him rethink the use of virtual worlds, which was wonderful.

Backchannels again

Guess what - there was a conference backchannel on Twitter, #vwlondon, where all the smart people hung out. What is more, people were using it to network with others face to face in the breaks in mini unconferences, just as I had seen teachers doing the week before.

Some exhibitors were clueless but the smart ones were on the fastrack. But were they in competiton with each other? Of course they were but they were also collaborating - letting their products and passion shine out.

As this conference progressed I monitored and joined or left groups and followed and unfollowed people on Twitter. Twitter doesn’t have to be for life - if you make a connection with someone over time it usually does result in a real life meetup at some point in the future.

These were exactly the same ways of going about business that the teachers and academics were doing at the Handheld Learning Conference a week earlier. It bound some people together faster and more efficiently than anyone working a room to network could have, no matter how good their face to face skills. What is more, it segmented groups according to interest.

Sure some people already knew each other but others were co-opted and introduced because of this process and it was intriguing to watch in action.

The two groups were entirely different, i.e. teachers and tecchie business people but they were doing the same things - looks like a cultural phenomenon to me.

Conference 2.0 ?

As I am writing this blog I get a Twitter notification that, David Burden, a great interviewee, is having a rant at how the way conferences are “done” and suggests a new way, Conference 2.0 - every conference organiser should take note.

Click to play

David’s interview is quite interesting because he has considered virtual worlds very carefully. Because he works in the University sector and business, he sees a wide variety of uses by his clients and he obviously knows his stuff. He talks about different exemplars here and if you are in education at whatever level this may well make you think again about their use.

These are the kinds of people who are dynamically changing the landscape of how we do things. Going into the Virtual World business is a big risk. It takes vision and hard work - but it’s an increasingly competitive field.

It was very interesting to see how the closer I got to the heads of those businesses, and the further away from their PR people, the more information I got. In fact the flatter the business was, the more info I could get, and the better the video interview became. It helped to be able to contextualise the interview with discussions before and after as well to get a greater insight.

Seesmic

Here are some video highlights from the conference - if you click on the first pic at the beginning of the blog you’ll see my intro. I set the equipment up in 5 minutes and broadcast it straight from the spot out through a 3G wireless modem to Seesmic

The 15 or so videos needed no post production, they went straight up to a web page in seconds being encoded on the fly. In fact I think I recruited a fair number of business people onto the Seesmic mindset that day. It was proof of concept for me and saved me loads of time in post production. Go and see Seesmic - you might be surprised at the number of people in your Twitter stream on there - here and in the States.

I used a Mac laptop, a DV camera and tripod and a wireless sim modem. It was outside broadcasting in a box. This system could easily be used by teachers and pupils (subject to proper safeguards and AUPs) outside of the school. There’s no tecchie holdups - it’s instant and therefore perfect for all sorts of media and other activities.

I noticed quickly that being a good interviewee is an art. Nearly every one I talked with had good communication skills and, as usual, the pre and post interview talk was far more interesting. Next time I’ll try to take a mobile phone for those informal discussions, because that seems to be a protocol that is evolving as less intimidating.

In nearly every case, these business people are talking the same language as the teachers and academics I observed the previous week. The mindset is the same and they agree there should be wholesale change in the way we are doing things in schools.

Entrepreneurial Spirit and willingness to try new things

Click to play
Pierre-Olivier Carles of Stonfield InWorld noticed I was monitoring the Twitter feeds between filming quite intensively and we got talking.

After telling me about his e-learning business and other ventures, he gave me a tip for teaching a lesson using a mobile phone which he had seen. Listen carefully to what he says at the end about the fact that there will be jobs we can’t train for in the future.

Having the Vision

Click to play

Mal Burns produces a phenomenal amount of media about Second Life. He has a Digital TV channel and numerous blogs about the whole phenomenon. I don’t know where he gets the time to do all this but he does! Just listen to him speak on the subject for a few minutes and you’ll begin to get some idea of the rich kind of new virtual spaces people are beginning to inhabit. They are immersive and engaging and wonderful places to reconfigure the learning landscape.

Mirror Worlds

Click to play

John Mahon owns Virtual Dublin. This is a Mirror World in Second Life. Mirror Worlds are close representations of real world places in virtual space.

John, despite having a very impressive website showcasing his virtual worlds, is not a tecchie. As he told me - he flies aeroplanes for a living! But listen to him talk about the process of how people interact in his mirror world and you might begin to understand why his particular patch of Second Life is so popular. Not only does he mirror the buildings but also the cultural events. It could give a few pointers to educationalists about community and engagement in learning.

Open Sim

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Mark Duffy of Second Places is working with Open Sim. If you don’t know what Open Sim is then take a look at the video - he explains it much better than I do. Basically it is a virtual world based on Open Source versions of the code that built Second Life.

The Future

Click to Play

Probably the most fascinating conversation I had all day was with Matt Furman. He spoke eloquently about the mechanics and contexts of getting certain types of e-learning. He branched out into other areas of discussion about the future and types of Avatar which were fascinating.

We talked afterwards too about haptic 3D interfaces and translatation software linked to facial expression. It seems that things are going to get more and more realistic in Virtual Spaces…

And after that, again, through Twitter I discovered by a comment from Rich White, that he thought Matt could almost be describing a free OSS application he had developed called Edusim. Within minutes of uploading this video to Seesmic it was on the web being linked to and that led me to Matt again and Edusim. Edusim is an implementation of the Open Source Cobalt/Croquet OS.

It’s entirely free and allows you to build a very limited, small virtual world on your server and communicate and interact with users on other machines. This looks like an excellent starting place for Primary Schools if you are technically minded. It can even be used with a whiteboard and the initial results look impressive. I downloaded it and built a few objects - it looks like it could be quite interesting if it develops further. There is an Edusim Ning Group as well.

Open Source software will feature highly in the future - be sure of it. Becta has just launched a new initiative on OSS called Open Source Schools - it looks as if the site is powered by Drupal which is an excellent choice very fit for purpose in this case.

Some of the consultants and teachers working on the focus group; Josie Fraser, Ian Usher, Doug Belshaw and Miles Berry have an amazing amount of expertise and respect from the teaching community and so this should be an exciting and contextually interesting launch. Let’s hope people engage and seed it with exemplars and good ideas.

I hope this blog post has given you a bit more insight into Virtual Worlds; if you have time please do look at the videos on Seesmic.

In the next post I will be looking at communities Outside the Wire who are using virtual spaces and informal, collaborative learning in even more non-traditional ways.

The next blog post will be about the different uses of Virtual Spaces within Virtual Worlds - formal and Informal for learning and leisure.

To end this blog here is an interview with Clare Rees, European Marketing Director of Second Life talking about their policy for education.

Click to Play

If you have an Avatar and a Second Life account please drop into our Island and see out learning spaces. Click here for the SLURL and teleport, or read about it here.