Learn 4 Life

Outside the Wire - how to co-opt distributed network devices, services and people to make things add up to more than just a sum of the parts in Education

A little bit of history was made today of all days (it is the first day of the Handheld Learning Conference but it’s not that) in that Gordon Brown’s speech was broadcast/ blogged live from a Mobile Phone.

Two Social media bloggers, Documentally and Sizemore got access to Gordon Brown speaking at the Thompson Reuters Newsmaker event about the timely economic measures and this was broadcast in a ripple effect out through the blogging community using such social media tools/ sites as Qik, Seesmic, Twitter, Phreadz and quite a few others.

This reminds me of reading the real time feeds from when pictures were posted from a camphone of the exit from the tube on the 7/7 bombings from moblog - these were immediately syndicated around the world in a matter of hours causing the birth of that way of doing things - I won’t use the words Citizen Journalism because I do not think it is that, it’s far more.

At the same time as I am watching the PM I am monitoring Mark Kramer’s live Qik feed from the Handheld Learning Conference and am able to message around it in real time. He is also twittering the feed out for anyone interested. Last year I set up a cam and broadcast a lot of the seminars to Mogulus but this year it’s on the fly reporting I see…

So what has this got to do with education apart from the seeming democratisation of media outsourced to one guy and his mobile rather than a whole film crew?

Well it shows the power of social media and that is people working together in a network distributed all over the place geographically but focused on the highly dynamic process of bringing together cultural outcomes. I think the knock-on implications for schools are immense - whilst people are at the HandHeld Conference looking at videos of kids with handheld devices in trials with institutions months ago, the people using these personal and public tools are out there doing it beyond the wire but providing real and focused services for other professionals to reflect and engage with here, now.

My point is that these ad hoc networks, when co-opted for mainstream purposes are highly effective. But the network doesn’t have to be place dependent - it may be event driven but the people working together on it can be anywhere and are not reliant on any one sanctioned box to do their bidding. It’s all personalised, they have complete ownership of their devices and connectivity and they sure know how to use it!

The process involves innovative uses of new technology, risktaking, high levels of collaboration and communication and the delivery of outcomes that are world beating.

So just as I am writing this, up pops Terry Freedman on Twitter highlighting his piece about insularity in education institutions at HotChalk. In that piece he references ISTE’s NETS for students.

And of course this describes perfectly what has just gone on this morning amongst the Social Media blogging community. Now how to get this into schools. How to convince people that these processes are incredibly valuable intellectual assets to our ways of being in the 21st Century. How to convince the actual opening out and transparency involved in doing these things and the fact that they liberate how you go about learning and teaching, making it far more personalised and engaging.

Did anyone train up Documentally and Sizemore? Did they go on courses to learn this stuff, did they bleat on about needing support - No - they just went out and did it and showed the rest of us how to.

I think my point is that it isn’t the finished product, or even the tools you are using (although they can help) - it’s the willingness to persevere in the process until you establish new ways of working that break through and democratise the dissemination of information, knowledge, community and all that other inspirational stuff and it is this innovative process that should be going on in schools. And, what is more, teachers should be shown these exemplars as mindset rather than skills training. Because if you teach skills for things that are so fast moving you will just get one big fail - what is needed is the teaching of mindsets the attitude, will and risk taking to do these things.

Bloggers like Documentally and Sizemore are providing the real life templates for these processes and for that we all should be grateful.