Today 15 year 8 students from Sir John Hunt School came to join us at Plymouth University for 'Code Skool'; an intense day of digital product development with undergraduates from the school of computing. Working in the purpose built games development lab with students on the BSc computing and games development, they had just 6 hours to create a product to solve a problem in one of three key theme; esafety, password encryption and online bullying.
The day began with students being introduced to the scrum workflow used by our own 'Interactive systems studios', which would form the structure of the day. Teams were formed, and individuals given roles they would focus on, all with the aid of coloured post it's and stickers.
This was followed by presentations from designers from ISS, and undergraduate computing students on some of the technologies they would be using. Despite the importance of understanding terms such as CSS, HTML and Javascript, the core message from these experts was that ideas come first.
Therefore, for the next stage the room full of Macs lay dormant as the students began 'paper prototyping'; a method from the games industry for developing ideas for products. Almost an hour was spent sketching out ideas, but the value of this became clear after the break as students got their hands on the technology and quickly began shaping up their ideas.
Team members split up to create graphical assets for their projects, begin coding interactive elements using 'Stencyl Works', and create the website which would house the project in Dreamweaver. Games design students, ISS staff and lecturers were on hand to coach the teams into realising the technical side of their ideas, but it was clear that it was the students leading the process, and merely calling on these experts when confronted with something beyond their experience.
Having learnt some key concepts in CSS and Javascript from students before lunch, after lunch things moved on to the intense development phase, with students working closely in teams to realise the ideas they had planned. As all had chosen specific roles, team work was paramount and rather than that meaning working together all the time, students were darting between their teammates and their own computers, all contributing key elements to the project. As the products began coming together it was clear that they were the result of real collaboration, with everyone adding their piece to the overall design.
The day culminated in each team giving a one minute pitch of their product, with the students voting for the best product to win the 'Code Skool' cup. All of the teams were commended for different aspects of their projects, with some producing the most complete finished project, some tying their ideas most closely to the theme, and others showing the highest degree of technical skill.
The winners were the yellow team, who produced a website including interactive elements with questions testing their users on their skills for creating secure passwords. They were singled out by the judges for their excellent teamwork and workflows, and won the popular vote to receive the 'Code Skool cup'.
As events like 'Game Jam' and 'Startup Weekend' show, intense project based work is often close to the heart of developing digital products. Whilst these year 8 students learnt a thing or two about coding, they also got a taste of the atmosphere of working in the fast moving world of games development studios like I.S.S., developing a product for a purpose. Having got this taster, hopefully for some of them this will be the start of a journey into the creative side of computing and coding.
Whilst education is moving forward to adopt social technologies for learning so is the workplace, and keynote speaker Jane Hart explored the implications for learning beyong the formal education system and into employment.
Her organisation, C4LPT, put together a list of the top 100 tools for learning in 2001 and found that most of them were not coporate tools, but personal tools used in a professional environment. She has noticed a trend for personal tools, both hardware and software, being used in coporate environments because the enterprise technologies do no support their workflows. This 'consumerisation of IT' is now being mirrored in the 'consumerisation of learning'.
So how do the people using technologies in this way behave? Smart workers recognise they are learning all of the time, they do not want to study 'just in case' but have access to the resources to learn to address problems 'just in time'. To do this they rely on a trusted network of friends and colleagues, both offline and online. This results in a perception that they learn best with and from others.
The connections they have through online networks allow them to keep up to date with their industry and professions from a range of sources; from informal conversations on twitter and in person, and more formally and in depth through curated content and blogs.
Smart workers constantly strive to increase their productivity, not just solving problems but seeking out new learning for things they could improve to work better.
What is clear from this is that such people thrive on autonomy. They like to have access to a range of tools and be enabled to make the choices themselves. She cited Dan Pink's Drive stating the importance of autonomy to creating engagement and driving individual performance. For some time we have been trying to create a 'compliant' workforce, but now organisations are seeking to create an 'engaged' workforce.
Key to this is the use of a variety of social tools, and the first reaction from many corporations was banning all access to and use of social tools. Now some are allowing a bring your own device strategy, but often only with senior members of the organisation and not the general workforce. Social media marketing has become very mainstream, and some ad hoc use of social tools is developing in day to day work and in training departments.
Some organisations are starting to think bigger than this, and the next buzz word on the table is the concept of a 'socail business', where social is integrated into the organisations; an approach which IBM is promoting. Their vision is not just about tools, but about collaborationa and community both inside and outside of the organisation.
So, what are the implications for workplace learning?
Teams need to be supported to take on this kind of activity. Training providers need to move from creation of courses and e-learning towards activities such as setting up communities. This is scary for those used to 'delivering training', who need to move towards structuring learning and facilitating rather than traditional transmission teaching.
Jane investgated how workers thought they best learned in the workplace. She had 131 responses, but the pattern started at around 20 or 30 respondents, and remained consistent. Most throught company training was somewhat important. Self directed study came out as more important than training, and looking in depth at the study showed people were actually paying for this development.
It was clear from her research that social and collaborative methods came out on top, followed by personal learning strategies and with internal training at the bottom of what people thought was important.
This has clear implications for where organisations need to place their learning and development efforts. Hart thinks the key is to supporting the personal learning strategies. This is where all the innovative, creative and productive activities are happening and this needs to be embraced and built upon. You cannot train people to be social or force them to, you have to support and encourage them by giving them more autonomy and independence.
We need to let people have responsibility and control of what they do in the workplace, including taking control of their learning and professional development. They need to be encouraged to reflect and review, to 'seek, sense and share', and embrace the seredipity this brings. Key to this is contributing and sharing in a network in which each individual feels a valuable part. Digital tools can support the narration and conversation aroung learning which enables this. With responsibility comes the need for organisation, and people need to be supported to develop their set of tools.
Ultimately though, it is about getting things done. Workplace learning is not about learning for its own sake, but learning to make things happen. These are not the normal behaviours of learning and development departments. They are the continuation of education, and schools and universities need to begin to develop these behaviours to develop and build the new skills for the social workplace.
Creativity is often depicted as a long, meandering process, but sometimes introducing constraints can enable the most creative learning.
Graves Wolf began by handing out brown paper bags containing a challenge; how many PELeCONs could delegates make in 5 minutes? This 'Quickfore challenge' was inspired by the US show 'Top Chef', and is something she had adapted for her teaching on Educational Technology at ichegan State University.
At the core of this activity are the competencies of failure and iteration. How often do we specifcy failure as something which should be acquired? As a teacher of teachers Graves finds these professionals find the notion of failure very difficult; it has so many negative connotations in terms of the teaching profession itself. The goal of her course is to learn to love failure and iteration; that is how we become inspired to change.
She mentioned Noah Scalin's 'Skull a Day' project as an example of this iteration that lead to great ideas. It was revealed that delegates were asked to make as many PELeCONs as possible because often that is what is needed to pick a great idea out of a mass of ideas.
Her inspiration for this approach was the television show 'The F Word', in which Gordon Ramsey creates a high pressure situation for chefs to motivate them, but against a backdrop of caring and support. The high pressure situation of 'The Quickfire Challenge' allows people to suspend some social norms, to push each other in a direct way, and to suspend their judgement in the persuit of as many ideas as possible. Similar to the philosphy of brainstorming in design thinking, these structures force students into entering the conditions for great creativity.
One of these challenges was to visualise personal learnign networks using just what the students had around them. This resulted in both technological and non technological interpretations, in which students considered deeply the connections and relationships bewtween people and tools.
Much of Graves Wolf's work is based around constraints; short time constraints, constraining the tools which can be used, but usually not the way the ideas can be presented.
Another such challenge was to superimpose real pictures onto the world. This requires discussions of meaning, but also technical challenges, using camera angles and apertures to create the closest representation of reality.
As people working in e learning we are often asked to predict the future, but what is our role is we do not know what the future will bring?
Facer asked us to consider the Newfoundland fish stocks. Scientists tried to predict what would happen to fish populations, yet the failed to take into account all the factors that were involved and the fish stocks have been dangerously depleted. If we cannot even predict this how can we possibly predict how technological change will affect us?
We are seeing an increasing segregation of reactions to this, from those becoming hyper connected to technology, to those seeking to switch off. We are seeing constant connectivity, the merging of the virtual and the physical and the augmentation of bodies. A massive growth in intelligent prosthetics has come out of the Iraqi and Afganistan wars. Large scale complex systems of devices which were not designed to be interconnected with each other is happening, for example in the finance system. What are the consequences of that? Systems collapse or massive new knowledge resources. Nobody knows why the recent financial crashes happened, the systems have become so interconnected and so complex we actually do not understand the consequences of changing aspects of them even though we built them...
However, it isn't just a case of technological change; our societies and our values are changing too. Facer cited a study on parents asked about their children taking cognitive enhancing drugs. They were generally anti until it was reframed in terms of other children taking such drugs, which caused quite a change in attitudes.
Where Facer is at is not trying to predict it but to work out what are the certain things that we know?
One thing we do know is the demographics of our society is changing by 2035 50% of population of western Europe will be ages over 50 with a further 40% life expectancy. One future is a potential of conflict between generations.
The second big issue is the growth of radical inequalities. There is a decline in faith in the idea of the 'knowledge economy'; we have internation competition in the creative roles whoich we in the west felt we could keep to ourselves. Multinational companies are concentrating creative roles into elite centres recruited internationally, traditional middle class roles such as law are being outsourced. Pharmaceutical companies are reducing research staff and instead in some cases setitng competitions for breakthroughs; great for those that succeed, not for the rest who invest resources in trying to solve the problem...The idea of continuos economic growth and the knowledge economy is seriously problematic.
Issue number three is that of resources and the economy; as we saw in the UK in recent weeks issues with energy supply have significant societal consequences.
"We cannot plan for a business as usual future."
However, Facer says we cannot simply swing to the opposite view of preparing for total collapse. Our second option is future proofing, trying to cover all of the bases with a lack of aspiration for the future.
The option she suggests is 'Future Building'; "looking for the seeds of desireable futures that exist in the present; nurturing these possibilities; recognise complexity and work to 'tip the balance'".
What she argues schools and Universities should be about is creating spaces for seeing possibilities for better futures. These institutions cannot achieve this on their own; they need to look outwards. Educational institutions are the last public service that exists in every community, and it is easy to underestimate their power.
To reimagine the future Facer says we need to re-engage with play and creativity, after all to imagine possible futures takes these aptitudes. Play can bring new ways of thinking, she cited the 'Bristol Zombie attack' as an example of such play as exploring thinking.
Reimaging the future involves suspending reality a little, in order to imagine multiple, competing and contradictory futures. If we are to find the best possible futures this kind of divergent thinking is vital.
To turn these trends toward e-learning, Facer asked us to consider the digital architechtures of our educational institutions. Ruskin described 'the architechture of slavery'; standards and conformity, phrases which she feels often reflect our dialogue around digital systems. Instead, sh aregues, we should be looking towards Gothic architechtures; quirky, capable of subversion of ideas, that does not construct students and staff as slaves but as craftsmen. Initiatives such as Helen Keegan's alternative reality gaming exemplify this kind of 'digital gothic architechture'.
To start to construct liveable futures we need to recognise the power of schools and universities as areas for their reimagining. We need the space to play and to imagine possibilities. We can facilitate this by developing a Gothic architechture of digital systems where creative possibilities come first and not standardisation.
Keegan ran an entire module at her University as an Alternate Reality Game; a game which is based upon real life to use trans media to tell a story which players interact with using real world objects.
These games create an immersive experience which takes place in real time and cannot be re-played. Helen discovered these games through the first season of LOST, where each episode eneded with a web link to information regarding the on screen story which appeared to be real. Thos participating were unsure which elements were real and which were not; a powerful mechanism to drive players into the game.
Keegan wanted to harness this immersive experience in an HE setting, but conceeded the ethical issues of decieving students. She found many of her students taking a consumer driven approach to their education, with little regard for the learning that was taking place and a concentration on what they needed to do to get a first, Often this undermines the love of learning and curiosity required for eally deep learning to happen.
The resulting ARG, #PSVTAM, was designed to create a deep sense of digital identity in the students, through explroing participatory media production, remix culture and transmedia storytelling. This game was based around a mysterious character communicating with the students.
It began with a 'rabbithole', a series of numbers '91211'. This was the date booked for student's films to be shown on the big screen in the centre of Manchester, but students were not aware of this when they recieved these numbers in an anonymous letter at their home addresses. Students were deliberately disorientated by this. Tweets from students showed they were scared, some citing a stalker as the possible sender. There was a flurry of activity on social media sites speculating what these numbers could mean, slowly revealing Rufi Franzen, a mysterious character who began communicating with the students through YouTube videos of a remix of a speech by Steve Jobs.
The initial reaction was more paranoid that they had expected, and the letters were reported to the student's union, the police, and one student issued threats of violence on twitter. Helen's thoughts turned to possibly being sacked from her job for this, but decided she was doing it for the right reasons and she would stand by it. She sent them an email assuring them there had been no breach of personal data, but not taking responsibility for the letters and undermining the game. The trust relationship she had with them caused this to pivot the game, and the players started to take control of the game with their actions and drive the curriculum.
They decided to answer back, and began creating similar videos to try to confuse their confuser. Collaboration began through google docs and other online tools. At this point Helen and her colleagues began to become paranoid about some of the responses, they had become immersed in the game themselves.
By this point the learners had worked out where they needed to be on the 9th December, but they had no idea why. They drove the narrative towards finding out who Rufi Franzen was, taking control of the direction. Helen and colleagues closely monitored the engagement of students, throwing out hooks to pull in those who had not engaged recently.
The night before the event Rufi got in touch with them and offered the opportunity to ask 5 questions with yes or no answers. These answers were given by a plastic bird flying between two black skulls, one for yes and one for no. At this point students had been delving into Keegan's reading list and looking for clues as to what was happening. They uncovered mentions of 'I love Bees' in Charle's Leadbeter's work, who in a twist of fate happened to be in Manchester and was nabbed by one of Helen's colleagues to produce a further video clue.
The morning of the event Keegan admits she was frightened as to whether it would work; she had become a player in the game and was taking risks along with her learners. Students were instructed to find a QR code at the location, leading them to a mobile number of the controller of the big screen. If they called this number at the right time they would be told to turn around and their videos would be played on the big screen in the centre of town.
The students were stunned and excited to see their videos on the screen, and they were later told it had been an AR game. Keegan was surprised that their were stunned at the revelation it had been a game, and many of them went home and spent considerable time going back through every video and tweet to work out how it had all happened.
How often do learners go back through their learning post assessment for fun?
The aim of the activity was to engage the 'casual' learners who didn't usually engage with their courses. Unfortunately this was not entirely successeful, the learners seemed to split into the enthusiastic, active and casual participatory groups, although those who engaged did so highly.
The big issue with this sort of activity is the ethical issues, ARGs must involve a degree of deception. The big question is can we justify lying to our students and making them feel uncomfortable in the name of education?
To Keegan the answer is 'Yes'. The experience was transformative for many students and encouraged them to ask questions and develop an openess and criticality. It heightened their awareness of the world around them and encouraged them to ask questions; surely a key tenet of education.
Alec Couros has been described as a 'techno communist', open the learning in his institution to anyone that cares to join by using web tools.
With current technology the documentation of learning is incredibly accessible and, Couros argues, incredibly important. Sharing examples of photographs documenting learning moments of his children, and students documenting their learning via YouTube videos, he argued that putting things out there before they are perfect is an important part of learning. These examples were all open and public on the webt, and openness is the key to much of his work.
Alec has been runing MOOCs, massive online courses open to anyone. Some of his graduate students take these courses for credit towards their degrees, but they are joined by hundereds online. Far from getting the learning 'for nothing' these participants actually contribute to the course, with the pedagogy evolving to utilise all the learners as mentors for each other.
The key questions he says are raised by his work are who controls knowledge, and how is knowledge controlled? These questions are raised by the digital tools we are using, but he argued it is not really about the tools, but about the networks and connections between people they enable.
The main barriers to this are power, control and fear- again factors which are about people and their attitudes, not about the actual tools. Open source tools and content offer great freedoms, but they also create some responsibilities which large corporations play on to maintain their monopolies over technology and learning. Keeping up to date, avoiding viruses and threats, these establishments seek to do the hard work of this for users to keep them locked in to their solutions.
In many ways this is disempowering, and Couros argued that investing time in developing 'network literacies' and skills for navigating the open networks that are developing is important, and should not be skipped over. Developing these 'literacies' allows people to take advantage of resources such as CouchSurfing and Trip Advisor which crowd source existing knowledge and experience.
This crowdsourcing can also lead to more creative endevours, exemplified impressively by 'I'm New' by Kutiman, which crowd sources musical parts from people who have never met into a new composition.
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We are currently navigating a fascinating landscape in terms of this openess and sharing; on the one hand amazing collaborative works like the one above can be created, on the other the idea of authority and correctness are becoming more murky. Sharing examples of conspiracy theories around the moon landings and 9/11, Couros showed that some of these theories are filled with expert interpretations which people outside of those fields can find beyond their experience. So presented with such facts outside of our oen expertise, how do we decide what to believe?
Such examples show that the people with power in our current society are the people who know how to communicate their ideas. The best examples of those who have the power to spread their ideas are the creators of memes. In memes we see people playing with the communication of ideas, and whilst many appear to be based purely in humour, they do become political, such as the myriad of remixes of the photograph of a police officer casually pepper spraying a group of occupy protestors.
One of the questions this raises is 'What does it mean when you Like something?'. Couros encouraged us to consider what it means when we re share something across our networks; do we agree with it, think it is a good prompt for thinking, or wholeheartedly endorse it? This is a question everyone needs to think about, not just those of us studying the phenomenon of networks.
Such questions segue into questions around digital identity, often this sharing can have unintended effects. Such an example of that was the racist rant of a UCLA student on YouTube, which she tried to remove, but was reposted until she lost control of it completely to the point the University responded to it. Despite the obvious offense caused by this, Couros shared a creative reinterpretation subverting the original intention of the video.
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However, even this is complex, in some ways he argued this video could be construed as a cyberbullying attack...
Creating this kind of work is an entirely new skill, one which Stephen Downes has argued is vital not only to create, but also to comprehend these new mediums of communication. We create to develop our understanding.
Increasingly we are also using this media to survey each other. The nightmare of Big Brother was ubiquitous surveillance by the state, but the reality is that we are doing it to each other, and there are numerous examples of networks resharing such things to the point people are landed in significant trouble for their actions.
So where does forgiveness come in to our networks?
"Everything you do now ends up in your permanent record. The best plan is to overload Google with a long tail of good stuff and to always act as if you're on Candid Camera, because you are."
So where is all this going? Couros argues what we are moving towards is social learning.
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This young person posts a request for help, explaining exactly what he knows already and showing it. The video is expertly tagged to reach the right audience, and recieved rich feedback as a result.
Increasingly people are documenting their learning in similar ways, from asking for help to creating videos of their development of skill such as dancing. This is a culture of documentation, but not simpyl for posterity but for feedback, evaluation and improvement. Many niche areas of learning such as the bushcraft above would previously have been kept by small groups; you would have to know someone who knew how to do this to recieve the knowledge. Now crowd sourced sites such as YouTube enable people to access the segments of learning as they want.
In many senses YouTube is the long tail of learning.
What this leads to is a landscape of learning that is open, and Couros argued that embracing open scholarship is the key to educational institutions existence in this landscape. There are moves towards this with open access journals, but currently those early in their career as scholars have to 'play the game for a bit'.
His final thought; we should consider making learning visible. Opening classrooms to share the learning of children, giving them an audience, a purpose and feedback is something he argues should be happening in institutions, not just in free time as in most of the examples above.
He ended with a moving video from the headcam of a young girl taking on a daunting ski slope. Her success was met with applause by the audience. Her fear was apparent; she shared one of her most vulnerable moments with the world. The sharing of vulnerability is something we often think of as undesireable, but Couros argued this is where some of our best moments of learning are. Documenting those moments and sharing them leads to social learning of the best kind.
In his diverse role Simon has worked in over 1000 schools at every level, and this has left him with a lasting impression "something better change".
Simon began by reflecting on the question asked to many potential trainee teachers 'who was the teacher sho inspired you?'. For him, none did. He started teaching in Thatcher's Britain working with learners from backgrounds of second and third generation unemployment. Despite the hope of the past 25 years we are right back in that situation; something which fills him with anger.
Looking back across his career Simon breated the fact that teachers are always looking for the next piece of technology that is going to transform teaching. To him that implies that all teaching before that technology was rubbish.
Bringing a mock class onstage, Simon demonstrated an excercise using travel brochures to collaboratively find a holiday, and develop criticality of the brochures in the process. He compared this with trip advisor, where crowd sourced reviews introduce a different kind of criticality- sorting out the reviews concerning the facilities, and thos concering the spiritual harmony of a place... So now they can create blogs about the holiday, and produce their own brochures, but that doesn't make the previous ways of teaching any less valuable.
"Teaching is a bit like weighing a Giraffe- you have to make the best of the tools you have got."
Using the example of juggling, Simon showed the way we usually teach such things in schools- a long piece of text. The way it needs to be taught is by doing, that is good teaching, but it can be extended by allowing learners to film such difficult things on their phones to access as they need.
Simon blasted the current approaches to technology as inconsistent. His dog gets confused when someone lets it go on the sofa, it knows it isn't usually allowed. For many learners they experience vast differences in approaches to, and allowing of, technology use by their teachers.
We have as much to do with teaching adults and teachers how to behave online as we do with young people, as this example shows.
This is the challenge faced by our society, yet Simon says we have education ministers who know nothing about learning pushing our curriculum back to a place we do not want it to be. He sees it as akin to someone thinking they are qualified to be a brain surgeon simply because they have spent some time in a hospital... ie any of us.
Simon played Gove's statement on BBC news on new measures to sack teachers with classes who are not making progress. He said ministers should come to conferences such as this and speak to teachers who are trying to do the best for young people; such measures do nothing but make them as angry and disillusioned as he is.
The areas the should be concentrating on reforming, he says, is the assessment system. He shared examples of exam questions and text book problems used in school completely lacking in relevance, and a million miles from the subtlety of the good teaching that is happening.
"Being creative and relevant is the key to effective teaching."
Simon characterised technophobic teachers not as scared, but as the one who have stopped trying to improve their craft. How to we nurture these teachers? He suggests the digital divide extends to teachers; the language being used by both sides is a barrier.
"So long as we talk about digital literacies we are alienating our colleagues."
"Digital literacy is just a part of literacy"
What Simon says we really need are creative, empathetic teachers, and we don't engage the majority of the profession with the language the 'Ed tech' or 'e learning' crowd are using.
However, he sung the praises of online professional communities such as twitter, the blogosphere and #edchat; not because they inform people about the latest technology movements, but because they get people excited and creative about their work.
Simon finished on discussing the current strikes over pensions and working hours, describing the fact we will get no sympathy by being so introspecitve. What he says we should be marching for is the conditions for our learners, and the freedom to be creative and persue the excitement that is needed for great teaching.
He ended by involving the audience in a standing chant: "Something better change".
"I retired from headship and didn't have a list of things to do."
Through the world of blogging Julia has found a post retirement career as a champion of creative writing for children. Through commenting on children's blogs she saw the power of audience, and set up 100wc.net.
100 word challenge is about free, creative writing in 100 words. Prompts are posted every week, from pictures to sentence starters, and children from across the world take these and make them their own. Choosing universally accessible prompts has been a challenge given the range of experiences of the global audience, and Julia has been exploring her own creativity in coming up with them.
So what makes this different to teachers setting titles?
This competition gives children a purpose and an audience for their writing. Hopefully the 100 word challenge provides a reason for writing other than "because Miss said so". Being "only 100 words" is a powerful structure- it's approachable for children less confident with writing, and it constrains confident, verbose writers to develop their style in a focused way. It also isn't too much to read and comment on, and helps keep the process rolling with specific, meaningful comments on children's work. Many teachers are using this for homework, and others are using the comments for assessment, finding that the commenters often point out nuances which are key to assessing the level of the children's writing.
100 wc is run by a team of 54 volunteers, who go out to children's blogs and add constructive comments. They can currently guarantee one comment to every entrant, but Julia wants to grow it to guarantee four comments per writer. She desperately needs more commenters to make this happen, and invites people to contribute an hour across a week by getting in touch with her at 100wc.net.
Julia invited teachers to enable their learners to join the challenge, and create their own 'live stories'.
The children David teaches in Bolton live on average 8 years less than children a couple of miles up the road. Increasing results can change children's opportunities and their life chances.
After a year's worth of blogging children on average made 2 years progress in a single year. However, this wasn't a fluke as they have sustained this with a new year group and set a precendet for Year 6 children at Heathfield School for huge progress in their final year at the school.
This impact has been well documented in the news, but they have continued to develop the blogging at Heathfield. When acting head, David realised he spent a lot of his time dealing with children being 'sent to' him, mostly for negative reasons. He tried to combat this by setting up the 'Well done blog', to blog about children's positive achievements.
He used a range of apps to capture the variety of achievments, from adding pictures of work using classdroid, to asking children to describe their achievements in audio through audioboo.
Soon children came to him asking for their own blog, and the initial answer was 'no'. However, one day he came across a group in the playground who were writing on paper in the playground for a child to upload on his own wordpress blog at home. This changed his thinking; if they were going to do it anyway then they might as well do it in the open and be supported.
He asked them to write a post justifying why they should have their own blogs, and his pupil Fern wrote 'Why have an audience if you are not going to use them?". This resulted in a blog where she wrote a story a chapter at a time, asking her audience what should happen next to determine the path of the narrative. Over the following weeks she produced chapter after chapter, yet David admits that his 'narrow mindedness' nearly stopped that happening.
"The key to a blog is audience"
Whilst in a school in Blackpool David realised this, when he saw a blogging project loosing pace without an audience to support it. He enlisted his pupils to support the school, and cam up with the idea of 'Quadblogging'; a structure to bring together classes of learners to create an audience.
Having seen blogging evolve, David decided to try the next stage; open, free blogging of the leap year to encourage young people to get involved with blogging. In a single day the participation was incredible...
All 12,000 posts were human moderated, and David shared some touching examples of blog posts where young people shared not just their learning, but their thoughts and feelings. Stories of February 29ths of the past surfaced; a lady who lost her mother on a leap year day and regretted not telling her she loved her.
A touching cry for hep was also shared, from someone with a girlfriend who was experiencing real difficulties, complete with 8 comments of heartfelt support.
So shy is blogging important? David finished with some views of his pupils...
"A comment from a teacher isn't the same as a comment from the world."
"I have seen... there is so much more out there than I thought there would be."
Why do most people use technology? As a part of their real life. Showing a range of Facebook updates from pre-natal scans to announcements of divorce, Josie argued that there is no longer a line between real and virtual life. You don't need to be on Facebook to be a great teacher, but you do need to understand where your learners are coming from to provide them with the experiences they need.
Social networki users are getting younger; 38% of British 9-12 year olds are on Facebook. In an age where children are not watching the same TV shows as they used to, these sites provide a shared social environment and allows them to communicate and socialise outside of school when it is not seen to be safe for them to 'play out' as previous generations have.
However, it is important to bear in mind that whilst we have a lot of young people and children online, there is a sizeable minority who are dependent on school for any kind of access to the internet, let alone access to guidance on appropriate use of this technology.
Josie related a conversation she had with a young person in school which drives home the point that teachers need to take a position as engaging with this technology whether they like it themselves or not.
"If you were being bullied online would you tell a teacher?"
"No; my teacher wouldn't understand what I was talking about."
