Learn 4 Life

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.