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Howard Rheingold @ FOCT Leicester talking about socialmediaclassroom.com

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Outside the Wire - Why BECTA needs to do better - agency lockins and lack of community engagement?

Becta’s new Next Generation Learning site.

Corporate lockdown

Photo attribution Chotda’s photostream on Flickr under this CC licence

It’s good to see this arrive as a baseline info centre for teachers, parents and businesses but am I alone in thinking there’s one thing missing?

Where’s the bit where the community can evolve around the content and localise it? Er - a newsletter signup or maybe a locked in forum down the line? We know that doesn’t work very well by now because content cannot be reconfigured for local community use.

I don’t feel churlish saying this - someone has to point it out and loudly and clearly until there is some engagement and dialogue on the matter and things change.

Unlike the Strategies Site which had the courage to introduce del.icio.us (and who are going to implement Diigo) and ratings,  and who also have lots of video exemplars and content that can be linked to and thereby RSS‘d for use by local communities - the Becta site is, in effect, “closed”.

I’m sorry to bang on about this but if that site were a web 2.0 service introduced by a startup it would be a massive fail in terms of audience reach. It is, in effect, a lockout and proprietary.

Yes, I realise the argument is that there is little takeup of these resources by parents and or teachers (certainly not employers). But unless you embed them in there it is not going to happen is it?

Fine grained pedagogy is smarter and more personalised

Photo attribution to alternativemeans‘ photostream on Flickr under this CC licence

Case in point of how other teachers are using Web 2.0 services to define what I call granularity of pedagogy in localised communities - watch this film:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=vYxw6qrWt14

Now if you were to transpose that process onto the Next Generation site you have active community use around the content or at least the foundation scaffolding of building one in tandem with awareness.

But of course that would be more open, collaborative and never do…or do the developers employed by Becta not get this?

Too complex and time-consuming for the average teacher

Photo attribution mrbisson on Flickr under this CC licence

The other argument that these processes are too complex or time consuming for teachers or parents to use is also redundant. This is exactly the sort of thing that should be going on at the NCSL, TDA etc in terms of “learning” for NQTs and senior management. Why isn’t that awareness there - maybe it is I haven’t seen it?

What a website should be

The bottom line for me these days with websites, is :

- is it open,
- is it transparent
- is it shareable
- is it remixable for local community use

The argument that this isn’t happening or there isn’t enough takeup is no longer good enough in my book and I’m going to say it long and loud. How can you ever expect users to engage with these smarter technologies of you don’t build them in from the start and at least make them a viable option?

Lack of strategic and cultural infrastructure

Photo attribution to Happy to be Saffanna’s pic under this CC licence

The infrastructure to bind these technologies in has indeed not been implemented yet or been built out. Why is this I ask myself?

The point is - if you are going to have a Next Generation learning site predicated on certain instances of technologies but you don’t build in the open interactive aspects of that technology you are not going to have much dialogue.

To have a signup whereby you get issued with regular updates is, in my opinion, out of the stone age.

I really am not trying to be provocative here - it just seems to me that if you do not build an infrastucture to reflect the distributed nature of your reach and audience you are going to stagnate from the start. I get paid to tell my business clients this…

I’m passionate about this and do wonder why there is such a lag on this aspect of interactivity from an agency that purports to be:

“the government agency leading the national drive to ensure the effective and innovative use of technology throughout learning.”

I hope I’m just not another voice crying in the wilderness yet again…

If government agencies are serious about building in strategic infrastructure that reaches out to wider communities this needs to happen.

It’s like building a brand new ocean liner without any gangplanks or access points other than the one at the front.

The individual, the local and the global - distributed communities and personalisation aggregated

Photo attribution to Scott Mcleod’s photo under this CC licence

For me it is all about linking local and global communities around a spine of centralised resources. This series of Outside the Wire posts have been specifically about that kind of infrastructure, thinking, scaffolding and engagement. But where is it in the current system? Well not anywhere as far as I can see - there is no recognition of the fact that digital, community, identity and how it interfaces or connects with institutions is changing and changing fast? Where is this debate - really - I mean it - where exactly is it?

What is needed is a digital cultural infrastructure that deals with this on a professional and personal level and we are nowhere near that yet. Institutions will begin to change and fragment in terms of teaching and learning with reference to digital culture and locking things down and out where there are smarter ways, is a complete and absolute dead end; a complete waste of time.

So I will say it again - where is the recognition that there needs to be a facilitation of the use of social media technologies to personalise and transform learning? Where is the smart use of open source community building tools? There seems to be no awareness of this…

Counter arguments

I can see the counter arguments arising and these usually are:

- sustainablility

- scalability

- persistance

- identity

- security

- “tech trauma”

And I will address these specifically in future posts with exemplars but not here today.

But I am tired of attending particularly wonderful sessions at BECTA, Futurelab, Handheld Learning et al where people say at the end - “but this has got to change” -  but never saying how - it’s all very aspirational but it gets people and communities nowhere.

Smart focus research that allows for distributed activity globally

I would suggest that a smart focus was put on the practitioners who are using these tools in isolation at the moment and see how they are binding them into their school communities within a globally distributed context.

Is research tackling this - if so where?

Photo attribution Watz under this CC licence

I see the problem as this at the moment, even with quantative and qualitative research in institutions. That individuals who are joining up and aggregating resources - rapidly sharing them with other individuals globally to effect change are the main drivers. It is not going on within institutions in enough numbers, yet, because there is no mechanism to understand this other than through institutional channels and this also needs to open out and change; academia usually turns its lens on institutions that are geographically placed within 20th century structures and do not see the granularity of the individual within a 21st globally aggregated educloud context - they are looking through the wrong end of the telescope.

To be specific - if your focus is on schools, and if one individual within a school is having an amazing effect on the teaching and learning of their pupils, then that research will miss that hidden infrastructure because it still has its lens and methodology turned on the institution and not the global back channel with those distributed individuals in it - again a parochial mindset. If people are researching this please send me links.

The traditional dismissal

The traditional view has been, “Oh they are charismatics or evangelists” - and once they try to scale up such practices within their institutions (unless they are part of a senior management team) then they usually hit a brick wall.

And yes, this has been the case in the past but what people are missing is that one individual is usually part of a much bigger global distributed community attached to a smarter educloud.

Validation, recognition and scalability

Photo attribution to zen under this CC licence

Yet there is no mechanism to validate and extend these individuals’ practice beyond their classroom or school because institutions are not geared up for that yet, and because the very nature of a distributed system requires radical social and cultural change.

It would seem an obvious model to me that the community building and learning outside the institution can be made to do the heavy lifting, but without the will and cultural infrastructure it is going to fail and stagnate into small pools of practice here and there.

What there needs to be here, is vision, experiment, trial and risk and I don’t see that forthcoming from anywhere in government or its agencies for change - and it’s a tragedy of missed opportunity if it continues in this way.

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

I first met Mark Kramer at a Futurelab seminar when I was trialling livecasting from the HandHeld learning conference in London 2007.  He was in the audience and seemed to be asking all the right questions and was a fount of knowledge on Social Media about stuff I had never even heard of up until that point and I considered myself pretty wired into the discussion.  We exchanged a few words and then I encountered him again on Seesmic a few months later. We caught up again recently at the 2008 HandHeld learning conference and it was only then I realised we had met in real life for the first time all those months ago.

Mark researches works at the  ICT&S CENTER FOR ADVANCED STUDIES AND RESEARCH, Salzburg, Austria  as a Research Fellow / Teaching Assistant and a lecturer at UPPER AUSTRIAN UNIVERSITY OF APPLIED SCIENCES [FH OÖ], Steyr, Austria. He’s currently engaged in Information Society / Web Science Research and actively researching and publishing within various interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary academic fields, including: Communication Science, Computer Science, Political Science and Pedagogical Science. He’s responsible for managing the ICT&S Center’s academic reference and media-resource collection. He’s a highly participatory observer and active developer of mobile learning scenarios. In other words he lifecasts his daily experiences and talks with and videos nearly everyone he meets and not just fellow techies but all sorts of people on his travels.

But more than that he’s a good friend who has a boundless curiosity for social media and people. So when I wanted to test out the new Googlemail Video feature he was happy to respond - first we talked on a first generation Asus EeePc and then on a Macbook Pro for comparison purposes. But we got talking around the issues of kit and went on to wider social issues to do with how people connect and what his research involves.

In the two videos below the conversation meanders between several topics but the focus, as always is the use of Social Media, cloud computing and what its social ramifications are for educators and their community. As he says “So long as we keep the conversation going..” and that, for me is the most important point of all.

This blog is mirrored at the Socialmediaclassroom - I would recommend everyone to join up on there to continue the discussion

Outside the wire - why the Google video plugin will be transformative for education

I got wind of the new Google Video plugin for gmail late last night on Twitter and with a bit of sniffing found and installed it immediately.

I was waiting for others to download and plugin but already I have had two distance conversations between colleagues that might very well have taken me weeks to establish and formalise. Already I have had virtual meetings that have led onto agendas that I could not have explained as easily by email or would have passed me by if scanning text.  What it does is focus attention if used smartly. It’s different from asynchronous video and it seemed better to me than Skype and certainly scores over that by use of an embedded text box which I don’t have to hunt around for.

The quality of the video is superb and the sound very clear. In a 40 minute discussion with John Cuthell testing out the system we only had one break and that was soon re-established.

Where this scores for people like me is the synchronous, real-time nature of contact. It’s immediate, human and easy. Google have introduced something at one time so simple and ubiquitous that I can see its takeup will be popular in the teaching community.

When they make the plugin automatic it will be massive - I can guarantee that already.

Questions over network threading,  bandwidth load and client machines in institutions is another matter but that is what a wireless modem dongle is for…

I’m already trying to figure out to get Camtwist to show my desktop on it shouldn’t be a problem in the settings at the back end of Gmail. If it works you’ve got a desktop sharer as well - use other programs if you are using a PC - I haven’t tried it yet but here are the two settings in Gmail settings and Camtwist if they do - let me know.

Only problem I can see so far is that the dropdown on the Settings for Gmail video doesn’t recognise other cameras… so one to look out for or try to hack.

You can download it here - do it now and if you haven’t got a gmail account I would get one now.

Outside the wire - ethical use of tech and community involvement - what drives us to learn?

How to do it and do it right

Serendipity is a wonderful thing - I am curious - sometimes too curious for my own good but today I had a few things happen that gave me an insight into the future of education and I’d like to share them with you. The first is an interview I did with an old friend, Alfie Dennan of Moblog.

He runs through how Moblog is used in Education in the film and we did talk further later about how effective Moblog is in schools. He even talked about the genesis of the business where he got together with his co-founder to solve a problem of getting data to a phone wirelessly but what intrigued me even more was his use of Moblog and other new API technologies to bind together community involvement to tell stories to change the way people do things. A culture shift in other words towards using social media and digital tech to effect change and build learning and awareness and all done within an ethical framework. Sound familiar - yes some core curriculum for the new digital literacies there I think and Alfie is a fine example of how to do it. I thoroughly endorse Moblog - I’ve been using it to put photos on the web for almost five years now from my phone.

Ethical use of Social Media

But now we come to the interesting part. We then talked about his campaign that used Moblog and its community and outside observers and interested parties to spread the word about XDRTB - an insidious disease but a mouthful to remember. He talks about the creative process that went into the campaign and I recommend you read about the genesis of the whole thing here. What is fascinating about this interview from an educational viewpoint is it is a case study in innovation. How ideas coalesce in someone’s mind to bind together a learning community for the common good. Watch the film and see how the idea evolved - it is a rare case study of how someone uses personal insight and creativity to work up a really engaging idea that binds together people in a common cause. It says more about the uses of Moblog than any dry demonstration of functionality could do - ever. And it’s inspirational.

What is fascinating about it is the way Alfie worked out how to mashup Google Maps aggregated map pin feature, Moblog and an entire community of very technically savvy people to tell a story through the medium of a low level ARG. It’s also for an ethical cause and I think it is one of many digital narratives that are going to be emerging soon. As you watch the film remember it was the back end community that made this story possible. Some people used highly creative ways to find the objects hidden in London and the ways they gave out and found the clues using GPS phones, photos, Second Life and even a fake number station is quite incredible. Here are a group of people who are highly technically literate contributing and collaborating in something more than just a game. At the end of the interview he also talked about the process of unboxing but more about that later.

Ramifications for Education

Now anyone who reads this blog will know I have been saying for some time that teachers should be embracing these social tech tools to bring together communities and where I find excellent exemplars I always highlight them. So just as I was finishing this blog - I noticed a post by Tom Barrett - Woices and Google Earth for Digital Fiction.

Mashups with maps and other apps

I had been aware Tom was up to something by his posts on Twitter so I popped over to have a shufti.

Basically a lot of the same elements as those used by Alfie above are there. Tom took as his inspiration Ewan McIntosh’s talk at the Scottish Learning Festival about Charles Cummings’ The 21 Steps. Which is essentially a Google Earth mashup with a very pretty skin and scripting from Penguin books.

His idea for mapping parts of James and the Giant Peach onto the landscape in the form of digital narratives is excellent. I first blogged about the uses of this process back in 2006 and it’s good to see some predictions coming true. And, of course things are getting easier and easier in the interim.

I would recommend people read Henry Jenkins’ Transmedia Storytelling 101 and stuff about non-linear narratives for a bit of background on this process.

This is where it gets techie - look away now

Now the third piece of the puzzle came with joining Howard Rheingold’s new initiative - Socialmedia Classroom - well worth doing! If you like tinkering with Open Source stuff on the web this is also an excellent site to visit.

In the developers forum Sam Rose posted a video on the Future of Drupal (and many other open source web applications) from the Drupalcon Boston 2008 conference.

Don’t worry if you know nothing about RDF files and triples  - it basically shows how information is becoming more contextutalised and how we can put it together and pull out information in a much smarter way. It’s part of the semantic web - Curriculum Online was meant to be based on a RDF standard but it never went down that route but then APIs weren’t in that much abundance then. But ignore all that tech talk and just look at the film.

Open Source the future

All of this has definite ramifications for education and Digital Literacy in this country. More and more people are finding it easier to install and run VLEs with help from Consultants and 3rd Party Services to put together the resources they want that reflect the community rather than a commercial product or solution that is generic.

It may not be the case now but I predict this will become more and more common in schools. Especially once they realise that they can be locked into unresponsive and non-extensible services that cost an arm and a leg in yearly licences.

No I can’t see a whole teaching force having these advanced skills but what I can see is the ability to clip online Web 2.0 apps together as easily as Lego in the future. It’s there in applications like Ning already. With the iPhone and now the G1 Android phone - these things are getting more and more ubiquitous in the teaching world and applications like Twitter are providing the glue for easier, speedier communications between distributed teaching and learning communities.

It is all about community based linkups not the tech remember but the ease with which the tech is helping the distributed links to glue together is driving community change as is obvious by the two examples above.

The Becta initiative on Open Source Schools is a small start. But what people have to understand is  that educational software, in the main, will wither on the vine in time unless it can do a job so simply and pertinently - otherwise the social aspects of teaching will just bind in, co-opt and collaborate with mashups outside of the system creating distributed networks of learning that more truly reflect the communities that use them.

Unboxing

Alfie Dennan talked briefly about “unboxing” and I’d like to include a link to a video of Ian Usher demonstrating in his usual inimitable way the whole process on Seesmic below.

And yes, he did give me permission - enjoy your week.