Learn 4 Life

Gaming Education - How to create a culture of learning through designing real world games in education

July 28, 2010 on 11:37 pm | In Continual Professional Development, Curriculum, Digital Literacy, Digital Media, Educational Change, Foundation, Games based learning, Handheld Learning, Innovation, Learning Content, Learning Tools, Peer to Peer, Personalised Learning, Web 2.0, advisory, distributed networking, informal learning, mediascapes, mobile learning, pedagogy | 0 Comments

Gaming Education

I have been looking at a lot at “Real World Gaming” and Education recently. This is a subject I have returned to again and again in the course of the last few years. Taking the idea of the culture “around” gaming I outlined in previous blogs, I thought I might explore the natural extension of those ideas into the classroom pulling together various sources and reflect on possible ways forward for teaching and learning.

Real World Gaming

In “real world” gaming the content of the game is contributed by the players, making it simply a set of tools enabling players to interact and compete with one another while on the go. Except it’s a bit more complex than that…

Recently a number of real world games linked to the geo-positions of users’ smart phones have become very popular; things like Flook, Gowalla, FourSquare rely on transparency of information about places and services.

Partly based on serendipity and partly on user input of information to gain points and badges - these “game” (verb not noun) “reality” giving users incentives to share and inform. Of course the trick is that all the heavy lifting is done by the game players who are crowdsourced and who, in effect, build the game resources for each other and, ultimately, the company running the game service. People come back to the game because it has a level of authenticity - it’s what they do in real life anyway as they go about their daily business. So it is turned into a game process whereby they receive awards and status.

Now why can’t we do that in education?

(update: One such app that was brought to my attention today is Mission:Explore and there is also GPS Mission )

Jesse Schell - gaming in education - Learning design and so much more

Look at the videos below by Jesse Schell - he talks specifically about education and how we might design a better way of doing things there with the ethos of gaming behind it - he pulls out specific qualities such as :

Beautiful
Customised
Shared
Real

and to that I would add

transparent
ongoing
iterative
rewarding

another presentation you might like to look at is:

http://e3.g4tv.com/videos/44277/dice-2010-design-outside-the-box-presentation/

where he discusses the “psychological tricks” employed by gaming or virtual world companies to get users to engage and to return to the game again and again.

Learning Design

It was Drew Buddie who first pointed out Jesse Schell’s work at TeachMeet Milton Keynes last month:

http://blip.tv/file/3907169

Drew talks at length on the process of using “learning lenses” adapted from the ideas in Schell’s book.

Negotiated Learning - co-creation of your learning journey

I was also interested to come across Neil Hopkin’s video on Negotiated Learning which reminded me very much of the ideas on Co-Creation that were espoused by Steve Rubel coming from the commercial world back in the middle noughties. There are obvious parallels there for me. I tend to look around at the corporate world and see what innovation is taking place there and how that might have some corollary with education. Certainly quite a few blue chip companies now employ the process of co-creation and extend that into the workplace as well.

Certainly the co-creation of learning using school community is a start but now imagine this in your classroom, school, district overlaying that process as another educational “skin” or “patina”.

How can you “game” the classroom?

Base your learning activities and aquisition of knowledge on collaborative working and transparency of learning. Give points for those students who make transparent their ways of working and sharing their knowledge.

Make sure those “learning” especially, the more dependent learners, that may take some time to “get it” always level up.

Design levels of expertise - so students can Pay Forward to each other knowledge and skills modelled and facilitated at first by the teacher, and then given external inducements by way of points badges and levels for collaborative working.

Of course these ideas are not new to anyone who has been through, or seen a “traditional” education involving “houses” and “teams” will recognise certain common elements as will anyone who have been through the scouting movement. But that’s where the comparison ends…

The difference here could be that the elements of teaching students to teach each other to learn through peer instruction and review could itself be gamed.

It’s not something imposed and mediated from on high but built into the very fabric of the way people could run their classes giving rewards for both the teachers and learners involved but levelling them according to - off the top of my head :

knowledge

expertise

competency

design

application

engagement

reflection

peer review

In effect, through a social gaming mechanism you build a ‘culture of learning’ that allows pupils to collaborate or to self-study in certain instances given enough initial scaffolding and modelling by the faciltator.

Not only would you use a process of learning lenses to design activities as outlined by Drew above - seredipitous triggers to get yourself to reflect in your planning but also you get the students to iterate and reflect on their learning by extrinsic rewards built into the system when they have achieved certain goals. Building in opportunities to both capture the process and use the documentation of the process as a resource would be an ideal use for ICT.

In that way you can build up a portfolio of work and a set of exemplar material to use for revision, starters, explication, modelling. The list is endless. How would you do it?

Game On?

Why are we still arguing over Gaming in Education?

March 3, 2010 on 9:14 pm | In Continual Professional Development, Curriculum, Digital Literacy, Digital Media, Educational Change, Games based learning, Handheld Learning, Innovation, Learning Content, Mediated Reality, Peer to Peer, Personalised Learning, distributed networking, informal learning, pedagogy | 0 Comments

When I was little (between 5 and 10 years old) I grew up in the early-sixties, post second world war era London of bombsites and grey realities.

Like most boys my age at that time, I watched an endless succession of Brits Vs Germans war films at the saturday cinema club, on (the newly acquired) TV and bought things like the Commando Comic - which was every bit as gruesome as anything you’ll find today in Call of Duty :

I used to have endless cap gun fights with my friends in the streets. I used to take the bus to Southend so I could walk down to the pier and play a very early version of an electronic video game involving a real periscope and a U-Boat on screen. I used to spend hours and all my pocket money on that infernal machine torpedoing things from freighters to enemy gunboats. I can’t say it scarred me for life or affected my cognitive development - it was all pretend and excellent fun.

REALITY vs FANTASY

I haven’t forgotten the thrill it gave me as a child but I wasn’t naive enough to think that all I consumed was anything other than fantasy. The realities of the Vietnam war and other adult intrusions into my life were more than evident and I can still remember the bowel freezing moments of sirens on police stations being tested in London leading up to the nuclear confrontation of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

So when I read about the supposed dangers of gaming and the numerous negative references to their application to education I remember my own history in this area with a wry smile. When the ZX Spectrum came out twenty years later I bought one immediately and played a fair few of the games at the time. By that time I was teaching and I started to learn Basic and brought the machine into class so I could program animations for pupils and start to teach them how to code.

Five years ago, when Second Life came out, I was an early adopter - I’m still in there working out smart ways of using the immersive environment to teach and learn effectively. Anyone who knows me, knows I am not really into reminiscence or nostalgia for times gone by - I prefer to live in the present but where relevant, the past can give an insight or long view into events going on today so long as we learn from our mistakes…

BACKLASH AGAINST GAMING AND MORAL PANICS

The sudden backlash against online Gaming and the arising of concerns about possible changes in brain activity in Teens and  “unethical” lack of responsibility makes me wonder. And I had, to be honest, one of those WTF moments (if you don’t know what that means cover your synapses I won’t provide you with a link).

You see they are only pretend - ask any teenager if they consider the war games they play to be real…The whole process bound up in gaming is, strangely, a ludic one - this may be news to some people-  it doesn’t have to have real life repercussions. Just as the imaginary number of people I shot dead when a child never turned me into a rampaging serial killer - it isn’t real. But then nobody was giving me brain scans at the time - it’s probably too late now…

ONLINE GAMING HAS A LONG HISTORY

More than 30 years ago, in 1978, before the personal computer got going in homes - people like Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw adapted interactive book text adventures and Dragon and Dungeon board games to make the first MUD at Essex university .

That’s 32 years ago and it has spawned a grand tradition of variants - but no cognitive casualties or people bereft of ethical sensibilities I can see despite its long history. Only recently have we got the long tail of moral panic beginning to emerge on this.

WHY TEENS LIKE TO SUBVERT GAMES?

Now you may consider me a bad father but I let my son play Grand Theft Auto. Shock horror you may think but rewind a little and consider this. He’s almost always playing it in front of me - his maturational age in some senses is way beyond his chronological age - I monitor his gameplay and I’ve never seen him do anything other than subvert the game with his mates online. Today’s teenagers are extremely sophisticated and are aware of the nuances, the genres and the possibilities of such games - they pick up on stuff older people might well miss - here he is talking to me about what he finds intriguing about the “Game”.

Link to interview

What seems to cause the most outrage in using Games for Learning is the “content” - which I agree can be quite dubious in some cases - but most of the kids I have observed in his agegroup (mid teens) seem more intent on working together to subvert or solve problems rather than worry unduly about the ethical repercussions of the roles they are taking within gameplay. Remember it’s make believe. That’s not to say that some games are entirely inappropriate for various agegroups but used with discretion, insight and understanding the elements and social activity “around” gameplay are a powerful motivational force in learning.

CARTOON VIOLENCE AND ETHICAL CONCERNS

One of the very first disturbing things (to me) that  I came across when I first encountered the web was a site called: “Kill Barney“.

Doing a bit of ad hoc informal research I was interviewing pupils at my school back in 1994 - a few of them liked to spend some time at home (those few with internet connections) playing online games and I was interested in finding out what was popular. Amongst the 10 and 11 year olds at the time regardless of gender - KIll Barney was among the top three. The site consisted of an early Flash or Javascript animation whereby you could stab, shoot and otherwise mutilate (in cartoon form) Barney the Dinosaur.  At first I was shocked but my pupils regarded it as something to be dismissed as completely devoid of the ethical baggage I had invested in it. They reassured me it was only a cartoon character and that what they were doing wasn’t related to real life in any way. It was a disapprobation of the saccharine like nature of the character - they saw it for what it was - poking fun (although in an extreme way) at the preprocessed cartoon character they had grown out of. I hadn’t observed any perceptible change in their playground or other behaviours to give me concern at the time. Sometimes a game is just a game no matter how you dress it up.

Now compare this to the use of “drones” controlled by non-military staff through consoles 2,000 - 5,000 miles away from the “target” kill. These are being controlled in the home-counties by non-combatants who can drive home to their families at night without the slightest concern. Without wishing to get overly political on this point I know this causes extreme ethical discomfort in me- this is “real killing” where serious games and the death of individuals at the other end are part of a continuum - not just some scary “story”. “That” is the difference between real life and made up I would think and worth reflecting on in this context. This is happening right now in our country and I would consider that far more noteworthy than moral panics about “horror tales” corrupting our youth. Sometimes you have to “get real”.

PROCESS vs CONTENT

Which brings me to the present and the efforts of nay-sayers to belittle the positive effects of gaming. I have observed gaming for over 20 years both in my family (my sister is an avid gamer and has been for two decades) and in my professional life. It seems to me what people always go for is the content and never the process behind what is involved in gaming. With the advent of social media around gaming - online activity and reflection there seems to be an added element of communites of practice that could be harnessed for educational purposes.

In the nineties I was involved with the trialling of “Toon Talk” - part of a research project by the Institute of Education investigating the designing and playing of games. This was fascinating because it used a video game to teach the elements of programming and maths and is still an excellent resource - it can be downloaded free here for Windows. What was missing then was a process to quickly share, through social media, the results of game play and exemplars with a wider audience.

SOCIAL ACTIVITY AROUND GAMING

What has radically changed gaming, at present, is the social activity “around” these games and particularly the synchronous online elements of communication now built into the more powerful boxes. People are able to share activity and insight in a way they were never able to do before. Most “gamers” are a subset of people who know how to coalesce around content and build ad hoc communities of practice to enable rapid learning or modelling of skillsets - it’s all pretty “meta” activity around the actual game and perhaps our focus should be on the processes behind that activity. We could learn things from this activity.

So what are the elements of this social activity - well here are a few I’ve observed:

• Ad hoc communities of practice
• Use of Forums to debate technique
• Transparent Sharing of Skillsets
• Willingness to create learning exemplars using new media especially online video
• Subversion and repurposing of content underpinned by humour
• Highly dynamic learning is going on
  

Gamers seem to come together and coalesce around games and the skillsets involved in playing online games - they appear to have quite a good fluency with ICT skills in general and always seem quite willing to show off their prowess or provide online tutorials or “walkthroughs” of game elements whether this is a “cheat” a “glitch” or a other techniques in the games.

If gamers want to “cheat” or learn to navigate through a game (which can be a highly complex set of skills) - what do they do?

Well they discuss what they do on forums - they make transparent what and how they do things - they make walkthroughs for games for other gamers - they tap into a community of practice. They work together to evolve a little ecosystem of learning by making films, screenshots and putting them up on sites like YouTube and these help others learn those skillsets. These often involve “in-jokes” around gaming culture.

Now if a similar culture were developed in teaching where pupils are encouraged to share and build pathways of learning for others wouldn’t that be a good thing? As a teacher I had many abilities in my class - some kids needed a context for learning for it to make sense for them others could abstract knowledge almost seamlessly - if I had access to tools like Screenr and other film making resources I could have made them little interactive primers to repeat again and again if they were finding it hard. When teaching in Second Life I encourage adult learners to make a record of their sessions using these tools so they can share them with others.

HOW SOME EDUCATORS ARE EXPLOITING GAMES FOR LEARNING USING “REAL LIFE” SOCIAL COMMUNITY CONTEXTS

So far in this blog I have underpinned the fact that most games are make believe, pretend - not real - er that’s why they are “games”.

However if you are going to introduce Gaming into an institutional context without killing the enjoyment of them stone dead and exploiting the best elements of gaming for educational purposes - how do you do it? What evidence is out there that it works and how do you evolve a pedagogical model that both rings true in terms of epistemology but also allows the ludic and enjoyable elements of gaming to come to the fore?

Fortunately there are some great practitioners up and down the country doing some great work that is beginning to bear fruit in terms of research.

EXEMPLARS OF GAMING IN EDUCATION - “SOME PRACTITIONERS”

I could mention a host of people but, for now, I will mention a handful of pioneers - there are many many more educators following in their footsteps.

TOM BARRETT‘S ENDLESS OCEAN

First up, inevitably, is Tom Barrett, look at his blog postings about the use of games as a medium of delivering the curriculum:

http://edte.ch/blog/tag/endless-ocean/

DAWN HALLYBONE

Look also at Dawn Hallybone’s project using Nintendo DS consoles in Class:

Notice the amount of planning to make the games as intuitively and genuinely pertinent to curricular activity and skills and the planning of social activity “around” games to create “real life” community activity in both exemplars. Notice too the outcomes both academic and social.

OLLIE BRAY AND CONTEXTUAL HUBS

Ollie Bray’s use of Guitar Hero as a Bridging project on a wider scope should also be pointed out here - he goes into the “Contextual Hub” idea rapidly emerging in his excellent blog posts here:

http://olliebray.typepad.com/olliebraycom/guitar_hero/

DEREK ROBERTSON

No pantheon of gamer educators could pass by without Derek Robertson and his work with Ollie at the Consolarium - his latest podcast on the use of Samba de Amigo and the allied learning “around” the game and the resulting social infrastructure and bonding between schools is just the latest case study in a long list of very successful gaming projects that bring authenticity of learning and fun into the classroom.

TIM RYLANDS

Lastly anyone who has seen Tim Rylands working with Myst and the activities he binds pupils into “around” and “interweaved with” the program is also a case study in how to blend the playful and engaging into the curriculum and achieve palpable outcomes.

What do all these people have in common?

They are:

• early adopters
• risk takers
• self-starters
• highly reflective about their practice
• highly innovative
• blog in detail about what they do
• use social media in a tightly focused way for professional development
• build extremely focused communities of practice with their peers
• have the vision and confidence to muster and orchestrate gaming resources to bind into the curriculum
• evolve both hyperlocal and wider scale educational social communities and events

I could go on and list more and more qualities but then I’m not a researcher, merely a videographer and documenter of the activity.

ITS ALL ABOUT THE PEOPLE STUPID

What comes across most forcibly for me is that all these individuals are at the hub of social activity that has engaged and transformed learning in their local area and that they have managed to amplify this practice globally to a wider set of educational professionals.

This is the beginnings of much of future education in the 21st century - these individuals and many others are beginning to transform how we plan and execute the curriculum; making learning more relevant and fun for future generations. I for one, welcome that change.

They may only be using “make believe” but they are deadly serious in their intent to transform and improve teaching and learning. Through the TeachMeet movement and multi channel social media they are beginning to effect change in this area and anyone who wants to know more would be well advised to subscribe to their blogs and follow them on Twitter.

COMING EVENTS ON GAMING AND EDUCATION

MIRANDAMOD GAMES AND LEARNING

On March 9th 2010 - I will be filming and live-streaming the MirandaMod session on Games Based Learning - sign up for the debate and the Wiki here:

http://mirandamod.wikispaces.com/Games+%26+Learning

There will also be a Flash Meeting as well - it all kicks off at 16:00 hours. We hope you can join us.

TEACHMEET GAMES

There is also a TeachMeet GameOn on at the Games Based Learning Conference on March 29th

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?

Amplified Education

January 25, 2010 on 12:43 am | In Adult Learning, BETT 2010, Digital Literacy, Digital Media, Educational Change, Innovation, Mediated Reality, Peer to Peer, Personalised Learning, Second Life, Virtual Worlds, Web 2.0, distributed networking, informal learning, mediascapes, metaverse, pedagogy, teachmeet, video | 0 Comments

At BETT2010 this year - one of the fringe events that was very low key but very popular (these videos separately have been viewed almost 500 times), was the Amplied Education discussion evening.

I am grateful to the 20 or so people who turned up for the round table discussions - there were at least 3 Becta ICT in Practice Award winners there that evening which might give you an idea of the quality of debate, interest and focus around the subject.

Here are the three sessions captured on film:

1) Games in Education led by Tim Rylands

2) Fun at Work PART 1 led by John Heffernan

Fun at Work PART 2

3) Digital Identity PART 1 led by David White where he kicked off with his Visitors and Residents idea,

Digital Identity PART 2

We only touched on 3 subjects from over 20 on the wallwisher site put up for the purpose :

For me the evening was fascinating and I hope to organise and film (with Drew Buddie)  further sessions looking at theory, practice, ideas across sectors not just education in the coming months. My thanks go to all the people who turned up and the participants willing to film, document and take part in these sessions. It has taken me half a week to process and upload the video (anyone got some friendly CUDN access in London (The London Metropolitan Network)they want to donate to this cause in the future? After all we are capturing a lot of useful data?)

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…