Learn 4 Life

All you need to create your own outside broadcast unit and stream video from almost anywhere

July 8, 2010 on 12:32 pm | In Adult Learning, Continual Professional Development, Digital Divide, Digital Literacy, Digital Media, Educational Change, Innovation, Learning Tools, Web 2.0, advisory, informal learning, mobile, mobile learning, podcasting, teachmeet, video, video streaming | 0 Comments

I made this presentation for TeachMeet Milton Keynes last night #TMMK but didn’t present as I thought the practitioners who turned up more worthy that evening and time was short.

So many people have asked me how I did the broadcast from the Treehouse last year http://www.l4l.co.uk/?p=690 I thought I’d show what kit was needed and how much it cost.

So download the film, go and buy the kit and write the AUPs and agree the policies with your communities and off you go…

BETT 2010 - a busy time this week

January 11, 2010 on 11:36 pm | In BETT 2010, Continual Professional Development, Digital Media, Educational Change, Innovation, Web 2.0, advisory, blogging, distributed networking, teachmeet, vblog, video, video streaming | 0 Comments

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

MirandaMod - Etienne Wenger - Communities of Practice Broadcast

September 22, 2009 on 9:41 pm | In Continual Professional Development, Digital Literacy, Digital Media, Educational Change, Peer to Peer, Personalised Learning, Web 2.0, distributed networking, informal learning, video streaming | 0 Comments

Below is the archive of the live MirandaMod stream of Etienne Wenger discussing Communities of Practice - this is quite a high quality stream - so if you weren’t able to make it on the night watch the replay of proceedings - you can also scrub through the stream - just wait a bit for the stream to catch up -  enjoy…

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

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

July 22, 2009 on 10:33 pm | In Adult Learning, Continual Professional Development, Digital Literacy, Digital Media, Educational Change, Innovation, Mediated Reality, Peer to Peer, Personalised Learning, Second Life, Virtual Worlds, Web 2.0, advisory, conferences, distributed networking, informal learning, mediascapes, metaverse, open source, pedagogy, training, twitter, vblog, video, video streaming | 0 Comments

HOW TO MAKE VIDEO AMPLIFY AND AUTHENTICATE COMMUNITY ACTIVITY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LIVE STREAMING vs ASYNCHRONOUS VIDEO BROADCAST - how they are different

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MAGNIFYING SOCIAL INVOLVEMENT WITH LIVE VIDEO STREAMS BY USING SATELLITE EVENTS

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

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

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

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

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

SUPERCHARGING STREAMED MEDIA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://learn4life.eventbrite.com/