Learn 4 Life

Pixel to Person - real to virtual and back again

Pixel to Person at the Greyhound Pub in Kensington Square

At BETT last week I also attended the Pixel to Person meetup at the Greyhound pub in Kensington Square. I have written about this wonderful place in a previous blog but the most amazing thing about it are the people in Real Life who attended this session.

Real to Virtual and back again…

To get a flavour of the surreal nature of the evening here is a brief video of the sort of setup that was involved bringing together a real and virtual space…

Sloodle - Interview with Giannina Rossini by Mal Burns

I first met Giannina in Second Life a couple of years ago at the ISTE Island at about 3 a.m in the morning. We’ve been good friends ever since. Here she is talking about Sloodle to Mal Burns live on Mogulus streaming web TV as well. Mal runs 15 web sites to do with Second Life when I last counted.

Giannina is one of the hardest working people I know in Second Life, doing a lot of the background work to get Sloodle publicised - she has also built the Sloodle Island in Second Life, which as anyone who knows about building in there, is no mean feat.

Sloodle enables people to communicate between Second Life and Moodle and so much more. She is a key person in this highly innovative area. She constantly underplays her role but I know how much work she puts in and it is an immense effort to build new learning communities with these technologies. As with everyone else at Pixel to Person that evening she is unique and a very valued member of the community.

Second Life and Building Schools for the Future - Interview with Mark Mullis

Mark Mullis showed me his new BSF build on Teen Grid - exciting stuff. Mark shows his new BSF build built 2 years before the real one. He also talks about the 3D projection systems he is using to make SL come alive mixing virtual and real worlds. Again he is an early adopter/ innovator making things happen years before they become mainstream.

Interview with Slim Warrior AKA SlimGirlFat

This is a brief interview with the lovely Slim Warrior AKA SlimGirlFat. She was the first uk musician to play live in Second Life. Like Giannina, I think she confounds all the usual stereotypes of people in Second Life. A very personable, accomplished musician who has a deep and very detailed technical knowledge of how to broadcast live streaming over the internet. I had a listen to her music later and I’m definitely now a fan

Interview with Mambo by Mal Burns

Virtual Live Band is a real life band of 4 members from 3 different countries and 4 different locations playing at the venues of Secondlife. They use Ninjam Software to synchronize and stream their music into the Virtual World of Second Life.

The interview is in two parts because of the size of the upload.

Virtual Live Band is the first band of this kind and the only band in Secondlife to work in this way.

Mambo Welles (RL Trevor Tweedy): Based in West London,UK,Mambo has been playing bass for 25+ years. During the 80’s he worked with several unsigned bands in and around London. After a break from the music scene for a few years, in 2006 he returned to playing live with the rock covers band, Limeburner.

This interview is 20 minutes long and is absolutely fascinating - Mambo goes into quite some detail about how the Virtual Live band play together. They are the only musicians to do this in Second Life. Yet another amazing innovator.

Interview with Francesco D’Orazio, founder and CEO of Myrl and Victor Keegan technology columnist The Guardian.

Francesco D’Orazio

Myrl is a Social Gateway for Virtual Worlds,  it was released in September 2008.

Francesco has been working over the past 7 years as a strategic communication consultant and qualitative researcher specializing in social media strategy and immersive marketing.

He holds a Ph.D. in New Media Studies and Sociology from the University of Rome. His research has been focussing on immersive communication, mapping the pervasive and ubiquitous spread of immersive strategies and tracking down the history of immersion from religious rituals, planetariums and panoramic painting, up to ambient music, experiential marketing, alternate reality games and virtual worlds.

He is currently Lecturer in new media at the IULM University in Milan and is Senior Fellow at the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology, University of Toronto.

Francesco explains here how Myrl’s Social Gateway offers people a way to keep track of their online activity in the different virtual worlds, sometimes even with multiple accounts in the same virtual universe.

Vic Keegan

Vic writes a weekly technology column in the Guardian, and also contributes to Guardian Unlimited’s Comment Is Free blog. He joined the Guardian in 1963 and since then his positions have included Business Editor, Economics Editor, Chief Leader Writer and Assistant Editor. For 11 years he was a member of the Scott Trust, owner of the Guardian, and edited the Online section of the Guardian for six years.

But here he describes his numerous projects in and out of world. Here he talks about his art gallery in Second Life and his NFP company World Film Collective which has offices in Second Life. World Film Collective runs a series of filmmaking workshops with groups of young people from marginalised and deprived areas of the world.

They aim to give students a voice through which they can present their lives, their passions, their interests and their messages to the global community. They can make films using mobile phones and show them through Second Life - as he said it is a very cheap way of having a centralised global office to enable people to communicate. Yet another fantastic idea - I’d encourage you to go along to the website and sign up.

We also had a brief conversation about poetry, economics and his proclivity for creating surreal Flickr groups. I put him in touch with John Davitt - I think they’d get on…

And that’s what I love about these events - the fascinating people you meet and the endless possibilities for networking and collaboration. Often it is difficult to fully socially engage when you are filming people - you can be so intent on getting footage and technical stuff right, that it only strikes you later, in post production, what incredibly interesting people and what ground-breaking projects they have been involved in.

Pictures of the Evening

You can see further pictures of the evening on the Flickr set here and read the Twitter feed here.

It was a pity I had to leave early as I was streaming/ filming the MirandaMod Moots at BETT the next day and gearing up for the same at TeachMeet (click the link for a teaser) - both those events I’m still post producing and will be covered in much more detail in subsequent blogs.

I really enjoyed videoing all these incredibly creative people. I’d like to say a big thank you to Kwame Oh again for allowing his pub to host the venue and all the other people I talked with that evening but didn’t get on video. I can’t wait until the next one where I might be able to simply sit and have a drink and non-digital chat for a change.

High Definition Video

As you can see I took a lot of High Definition footage with my new Flip Mino HD camera and one week on I’m still uploading a lot of it to my HD site. Unfortunately a couple of films did not come out including mine.

I have not enabled embedding of videos on other sites unless it belongs to the interviewee because High Definition footage over the web is still an expensive business and my allocation of 1000 views is rapidly decreasing!

It definitely proves that people want to see HD and Learn 4 Life content but it is getting rather expensive to broadcast at the moment. If you are a regular subscriber and would like to sponsor video views please do get in touch we have a number of advertising options in place. Otherwise please subscribe to view the content. We have a LOT of footage in the pipeline.

Learn4Life UK Holodeck in Second Life Project

Learn 4 Life Holodeck

Holodeck rezzed as Stonehenge on Learn 4 Life Island

Learn4Life Island has been in Second Life now for roughly two years and in that time I have put a lot of time and money into the building of the space to see what the possibilities are for education in the future. This year I am intent on building an imaginative community to work there on several ad hoc projects; they may come to nothing or they may evolve into bigger projects that can be co-opted into mainstream education.

In the first of these I am looking for any UK teachers who are very experienced with the Second Life platform. Ideally they will be working in the arts, media and science fields.  If you have basic scripting/coding skills as well that would be a big bonus. The idea is to have a play with and adapt, design, build Holodecks to make ARGlike environments that can be used for imaginative teaching in any areas of the curriculum - in and outside SL - so allied resources for building, cartoon making, filming, machinima and other stuff will be available as well - a lot of these will be web based, free, collaborative and Open Source applications that can be used to construct stuff both socially and virtually :). The process of building in the interactive/ collaborative activities away from the computer will be just as important as any ‘virtual’ build. You may never use Second Life in your teaching but the ideas and activities you evolve here will help with any future collaborative virtual environment you may use.

I personally will not have much time to run the project but I can offer secure resources such as land and holodecks/ media facilities in Second Life for you to have a play with and try to evolve some form of pedagogy around the concept. This will kick off (if it gets enough attention) end of Feb beginning of March 2009. Any LA or other commercial /non-profit or other interested organisations who want to become involved and offer funding/ sponsorship/ expertise would be most welcome too. Scripters and interested academics are invited too to lend any expertise they feel might be valuable. All results and resources will be entirely open and the whole process is as much one of professional development for yourself as well as the intended students further down the line. If you want to take the experience and formalise, research, exploit it, fine, but this project is not about that, it is about having fun and gaining insights to what does or doesn’t work - I’m deeply attached to idea of learning through play and this project is definitely about play and personal as well as professional development

I am beginning training teachers who are totally new to SL at that time as part of UK BSF (Building Schools for the Future Project) so there will be a totally newbie teaching community around to bounce ideas off as well. Look at the film and get in touch. This project will not involve students at this stage - only teachers…The scope is limited to the UK because of timezone differences but if that doesn’t worry you then please email, Twitter or DM me in-world. I’ll take it from there and orgainise some in-world and Flashmeeting dates.

We will probably looking to take some of these ideas into the EduSim platform as well for use by primary teachers and students later. So please do get in touch.

My contact details are available on the film below.

Click To Play

Links to the iPhone/pod version of the film are here for those who want to download and share by bluetooth as well…

http://blip.tv/file/get/Learn4life-Learn4LifeUKHolodeckProject375.m4v

3GP Version here:

http://blip.tv/file/get/Learn4life-Learn4LifeUKHolodeckProject166.3gp

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.