Learn 4 Life

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

Here’s another first from Learn 4 Life. Using Twitcam to Broadcast out Second Life from your desktop. Simple blocky but effective if you use a tripod and don’t move your avatar around too fast.

In this broadcast I even managed to stream in a video into Second Life on a media player. The sound is superb but the video being shown comes across as stills but then my broadband connection can only take so much through my Mac.

Oh an I forgot to add I was also talking to Chris Smith @shamblesguru on Skype as well on voice - go and play. A whole new Inside / Outside broadcast model. Voila!

Scratch in Open Sim

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.

Teachers are Heroes just for one day - Open Source Schools @ BETT 2009 - Why you must use Open Source Software

Open Source Schools

Open Source Schools - BETT Seminar January 19th 2009

Every once in a while you see something that makes you think: ‘Yes this really is going to change education in this country’ and it makes you smile inside because you know what is going to happen further down the line and how revolutionary it will be; it will touch the lives of so many people and transform learning - making it more effective, more engaging, more personal and build a sense of community far beyond the initial event itself.

Pivotal Moments

One such moment was on the saturday at BETT 2009, where a small but significant 45 minute presentation by 4 teachers (Miles Berry, Michelle Walters, Jose’ Picardo and Doug Belshaw) on Open Source Schools will, potentially, change the face of how schools use Software in the UK and beyond and its knock on effect for how people do business in the classroom. A big shout out must also go to Josie Fraser who I know was one of the consultants to BECTA on the project which is going from strength to strength.

Days of Lockdown are ending

For me the days of locked-in licenced computing and the lack of access to pupils to good professional quality software at home are a big issue. So this launch is timely - if you are mulling over the lack of funds in your budget for the year you must see this presentation - it will save you thousands of pounds and enable you to have a way of ensuring pupils can work from home to school and back again fluently with the software and kit without worrying over legal and compatability issues. This will save you money and raise the game in terms of home/ school learning.

Fiming and Mashing the presentations

I couldn’t attend because I was presenting about Second Life (with a live link to Tailand) elsewhere at BETT but Hannah Wise from the BBC kindly agreed to film the session and what a good job of camerawork she did! I’m glad we managed to capture it on video because I think the event needed documenting and the basic concepts spreading as far and wide as possible using that medium.

I’m passionate about the use of video in education to effect change - for me it is the underlying ethos behind this site. See something good, film it or record it to audio and then disseminate it to make things happen. So I Mashed the video with the presentations to create the results below. They will all be available on the Open Source Schools site, please go there for lots more resources as well and please download them and use them in CPD for consciousness raising locally. They are all free to distribute under a CC Education Commons licence. In this time of Credit Crunch and shrinking school budgets Open Source Software will be invaluable but more than that it will underpin and build your learning communities and that is what it’s all about surely? Show this to your head, head of department, LA advisor, parents, local firms, anyone who can make a difference in your local community.

Teachers are Heroes

The teachers in this film are special; early adopters who have given over hours of their time to show their vison for the future - people like this are my heroes - they make the difference and not for just one day but one day, one moment can change things, they have my immense respect. They are passionately engaged with their subject and, most of all, their pupils; they change people’s lives by their devotion and commitment to education. What they do needs to be documented and shared.

Open Source is about People and how they connect

Open Source is not about the software, it is about the people, the inherent freedoms of choice we make in our world and the lives of the young people with whom we engage and isn’t that one of the most wonderful things to pass on to another generation? Making these videos has been a labour of love I hope you find them of use and spread the word far and wide. But enough of this sentimental guff - down to practicalities; watch the videos below, download, show and share them with everyone you know.

The Presentations

Miles Berry, Michelle Walters, Jose’ Picardo and Doug Belshaw - Whole Presentation

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Miles Berry’s Introduction (only) to Open Source

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Michelle Walters explains what Open Office is and how to use it

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Doug Belshaw talks about his use of Netbooks and Linux in the classroom

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Jose’ Picardo talks about how to install and use Audacity the free Open Souce audio recorder

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Miles Berry talking about Moodle

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Michelle Walters on how to get started with Open Source Software

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Miles Berry talks about the Open Source Schools website

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NB: For those of you with a technical bent the links to an iPhone, WMV, OGG Vorbis and loads of other versions of these videos are available at the blip.tv site : http://learn4life.blip.tv/. Just have a look at the controls for embedding in the show player.

Digital Literacy - On the Agenda at Last

Can you imagine teaching Digital Literacy using a chalkboard like this

Photo attribution aidan.expedition’s remasterfed Einstein photo on Flickr under this CC Licence

Anyone who reads this blog on a regular basis knows that I constantly monitor any references to Digital Literacy in the blogosphere and further afield. One of the recent tools I have been using to gather attention or smart focus on those two little words has been Tweet Beep, this alerts me via email to any mention of that phrase - I like to see who is micro-blogging, Tweeting, talking about this topic and any references to research that might be current. It winnows out the wheat from the chaff that comes out of the constant stream of information that is the Twitterverse and delivers the results right to my door in the form of choice tweets in an email.

One such one was this:

Joe Wilson's Twitter on NGUS

I follow Joe Wilson on a regular basis on Twitter and we have had some banter back and forth but I also follow nearly 600 hundred other people as well and sometimes I miss the nuggets that come out of this particular river of info. Tweet Beep helps me pan for gold and in this case it certainly filtered out a very rich seam indeed.

The Next Generation User Skills Report was commissioned by Joe - it is a pretty substantial piece of research just published and I consider it to be one of the most important documents to come out about Digital Literacy in the UK. It is a “must read” for anyone interested in our future.

Quite simply, what it does is examine the idea that there is a productivity gap in the Scottish workplace that Higher Order ICT skills could help close. Ostensibly this is a document produced for the Scottish Qualifications Authority but it is extremely pertinent to the UK as a whole and examines developments in US, Europe and the rest of the UK. It looks at defining a basic set of skills (Next Generation User Skills) and identifying the gaps that exist in provision in the run up to 2013. It doesn’t set out to attempt to solve how to do this but is a very thorough analysis of the lay of the land at the moment.

I particularly liked the fact that, together with a project in Yorkshire and Humber, they were able to break down and map those gaps in provision against existing qualifications, awards and pedagogy in the UK and see how that might project against possible needs of employers and other stakeholders- at last - some informed vision but it isn’t prescriptive in any way.

I also love the fact, unlike a lot of BECTA publications which have a lot of slick photos and very little thought about deep content, this publication has a lot of very simple diagrams, charts and visual representations of data that are right to the point - that’s a big plus.

There’s a lot of variety in there with a lot of thought going into visual representation especially with clear colour coding and shading but it’s not overly slick -  and design doesn’t overwhelm content.

You are also presented with open questions in the form of prompts for writing at the end of the report to enable you to reflect on the content in the light of the research - this worked for me - it made me actually think about/ make notes on what I had read. I have rarely seen so much thought put into the way information is presented.

So we are encouraged to think about Employability & workplace skills, pedagogy, qualifications, identity, informal learning, digital citizenship and a host of other variables – and reflect on what are needs in terms of filling the shortfalls by 2013, through the focus of IT & digital literacy skills. The way ICT is mapped onto the curriculum is very well covered and the suggestion is that ICT is no longer a discreet skillset to be taught, once ubiquity of conditions for learning with ICT becomes the norm, seems an obvious outcome.

I’m not going to go into any more depth because I haven’t the time here to precis the whole thing. Instead - download it from here and do that yourself now - it’s a 57 page PDF document but I repeat it is one of the best pieces of analysis of the Digital Literacy Landscape I have read in recent years.

It’s timely and it sparks a debate about where we go from here. At last someone has done the groundwork to prepare authoritative reflection on systemic and cultural change in this area.

If you are a policy maker in the UK and you do not read it - you will be seriously uninformed.

David Kay, Bob McGonigle, Walter Patterson  and Barbara Tabbiner have done an excellent job here.

Download and read it now!

Alex Savage and Joe Dale

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