Ewan McIntosh | Digital Media & Education

AllWrite: creative writing with award winning authors

In about two months I'll be unveiling my latest commission with Channel 4's Innovation for the Public Fund.

Broadcast reports that we are commissioning Dan and Adrian Hon’s Six to Start to develop a creative writing game for the iPhone and iPod Touch, backed by national education agency Learning and Teaching Scotland. The game, currently under development, aims to help users tap deep into their imaginations and develop their creative writing skills by responding to writer challenges through their iPhone. They say we all have a novel in us, and ‘All Write’ will help users find it.

Six to Start is a highly successful developer specialising in digital storytelling with recent notable successes such as the We Tell Stories series for Penguin Books. Learning and Teaching Scotland have over the past three years developed a world-leading reputation for developing gaming for learning. The partnership will lead to both a mainstream game available in the iPhone App Store, and a teens' version for use in schools.

This is how Adrian puts it:

“All Write is the perfect tool for budding short story writers – it encourages people to get their ideas down wherever they are, and share them with the world. We’ve made storytelling into a fun and enthralling experience by posing imaginative writing challenges, and providing some great new pieces of original fiction from Naomi Alderman, a winner of the Orange Prize for New Writers.”

Alderman was also a lead writer on the Hons' previous success, alternate reality game Perplex City.

All Write is the latest in a series of projects developed in Scotland by Channel 4’s Innovation for the Public fund (4iP). Announced as part of the Channel’s Next on 4 strategic blueprint and endorsed by the Government’s Digital Britain Report, 4iP is a major new initiative to encourage innovation on digital platforms.

By helping young people and new audiences to discover the joy of reading and creative writing, All Write illustrates how digital media can serve a meaningful public purpose.

My former colleague Derek Robertson, now National Adviser for Emerging Technologies and Learning at Learning and Teaching Scotland, was quoted:

“New and emerging technologies and their informed application in the teaching and learning setting is an area of particular focus for Learning and Teaching Scotland. We are very keen to explore the potential that handheld mobile learning tools can bring to schools and in that regard we are delighted to be partnering 4IP and Six to Start in the design and creation of a bespoke iPhone/iPod Touch learning app that will encourage and facilitate a community of ‘imaginative writers.’”

All Write will be launched worldwide this August on the iPhone App Store. Pic credit: New iPhone

New Nintendo DS: another option for 1-2-1

Of all the gaming consoles out there the one I always come back to is the Nintendo DS. It's small, its touchscreen means I don't even need to use a stylus, and the battery life is astounding. The new Nintendo DSi which has just been announced in Japan, due for launch in Europe in the Spring of 2009, opens up the potential even more for the use of gaming consoles as part of a one-to-one computing initiative, for the same price as the current model.

At the recent Emerge 1-2-1 Conference in Calgary, I made the point that I didn't feel the future was in laptops, despite the strong belief from other speakers that the laptop was the only "spread bet" option for learning, able to cope with the maximum demands of the classroom and home. I've always felt that mix and match is the best way forward, much in the same way as we tend to use technology in 'real' life: the right tool for the right job.

Cue the new Nintendo, with its built-in camera and web browser. For most web browsing a small screen and awkward navigation is fine, because most people are not blogging 1000 word theses, but they are Googling and then reading. For most photography in the classroom you don't need high-spec cameras. Learning logs need quick snapshots of progress, and the 0.3 megapixels of the DS, while paling in comparison to most camera phones, will suffice for this purpose.

Wiiwii have a really complete rundown of the new Nintendo DSi. The pic is from Wired, and therefore used illegally here, but I'm going to pay for it with a link to the shovelloads of liveblogging goodness of the moment the new model was unveiled.

First thoughts in on Spore

Spore launches today, unleashing one of the most in-depth creative and, even in advance of its launch, socially active games I've seen in a while.

I've not managed to get my hands on a copy yet and, frankly, have some equally important things that need seen to before I get a play, but thankfully some of our Oz educator cousins have been at it already and have blogged their (overwhelmingly positive) thoughts. The game will be/is thankfully available on a more "interstitial" basis on the Nintendo DS and mobile platforms, for those of us whose concentration and energy spans are on the shorter side. Above all, though, is the promise of plenty of web action to pull the collective enthusiasm and understanding of the game of its players.

Back at Easter I was pitching the idea of Sporeversity to EA, something which may indeed have evolved into the as-yet-unlaunched Spore wiki on the main website. In any case, if they don't do it (and even if they do) the fans will be creating their own networks to describe their virtual lives as well as their real ones. Indeed, if you've had a play, do give me a quick ping so edu.blogs.com readers and I can see your thoughts on it, too.

Blue Sky Thinking in Canada

We're heading towards the end of a marathon week in Canada, firstly in Alberta and now in Saskatchewan, working with educators, administrators and leaders of learning to think about some new ways we could inspire tomorrow's generations.

All the links from the past week which I've mentioned, examined or peeled back in my workshops can be found under the big Canada grouping in my online bookmarks. Within that, one can just click the small + sign next to any additional category that takes your fancy to narrow down the options. Happy researching and, above all, tell us here how you get on.

Image of Saskatchewan

Remixing Cities, remixing learning: Charles Leadbeater

There's a great deal of 'play' at this year's Scottish Learning Festival, with LTS's Consolarium Challenge stretching over both days, pitching student gamers from across Scotland against each other for the ultimate accolades (and loads of free gaming kit for their school). I'll also be doing a seminar on the crossover between gaming, social media and learning, as well as leading a band of innovative educators at the Discovery Hour on Wednesday and, maybe, Thursday - come and find out how teachers have been making superb uses of Second Life, robots and new media in the classroom.

However, as always, there's at least one keynote I feel might not have the pulling power on the masses who, by the last day of the Festival, are seeking some easy takeaways for their schools and the latest classroom innovations, a keynote that promises to have several profound messages for our school leaders and curriculum designers. In fact, if the audience were not 2000 but more like 200 of Scotland's ICT coordinators, Directors of Education, Head Teachers and policy wonks I'd be quite happy. This is my appeal for you to attend or watch the video stream of Charles Leadbeater's keynote on the future of education.

To leave you in no doubt as to the thought he's given this issue, let me direct you to a paper he published about the evolution of the city. I normally abhor those who ask "What does School 2.0 look like" but, by kings, he's pretty damned close. In Remixing Cities he manages to succinctly outline what 'school' might look like. It's more like Schools, in the best tradition of Malcolm Gladwell's Pepsis and Spaghetti Sauces, because, in the future (well, the sooner the better really) there will no longer be a school that we go to, but rather schools that we go to. And, yes, play features heavily throughout. Here is a lengthy citation from his superb manifesto:

If a city addresse learning from the vantage point of these social web models, what could it offer? The outer circle would be:
An eBay for learning: a city-wide learning exchange to match learners to those with the skills to teach but who are not teachers. For example, if someone needed a tutorial in using garage band software, they could find someone with the skills who may not be a school teacher.

The Learning Game: more learning opportunities modeled on large scale, multi-player games in which players discover challenges and acquire the tools and skills to overcome them together. For example, a city-wide sustainability challenge using maths and science skills.

YouLearn: using the power of user-created video to provide learning opportunities complete with user ratings and comments.

Wiki-learning: a city based resource of facts, figures, information and insight, created by and for the city’s citizens for its curriculum.

Social search for learning: using tools such as tagging, folksonomies and social book marking to allow more structured peer-to-peer learning, so that one generation of learners can follow in the footsteps of others.

These mainly digital tools would be augmented by enhanced opportunities to learn outside schools in businesses, libraries, galleries or in settings relevant to what is being learned—the city as a classroom.

The middle circle would focus on families, learning and social networks. That might include:

Social networking for learning: peer-to-peer networks on MySpace, Facebook and other networks to link people in learning clubs to learn with and from their peers, including adults and parents, online and offline, in coffee shops and homes.

Enhanced parental involvement in schools: development of family learning centers; parents as teaching assistants.

Get Started: Increased investment in early years provision for disadvantaged families and linking them earlier to schools that prepare them for learning.

NetMoms: Using social networks to promote mothers’ clubs to support informal learning and employment.

Personal trainers for learning: Local learning support workers who would work door-to-door, similar to health visitors.

Schools would still be vital, but they would be designed to maximize the value of the wider platform. For instance:

Parents and adults might learn in the same building as children.

Schools could be productive enterprises, centers for small business clusters, in which children run real money-making businesses.

Teaching by discovery and doing to instill social skills alongside cognitive skills would be much more central.

Schools would be open longer, more flexible hours, with schedules that suit the different paces that children learn and the times that parents work.

There would be more, smaller, studio-style schools, akin to cafes or drop-in centers suited for more virtual learning communities and particularly for disaffected teenagers.

Alongside teachers would be more para-professionals, teaching assistants, business people, environmentalists and artists.

Children would learn from one another with the creation of a new generation of lead learners.

Every child would have a self-directed learning support plan to shape what they learn and from whom, in and outside school.

Download the whole document.
Picture; Sparktography

Music in games

Gianna Cassidy looks as the link between music, our emotions and the games that we play at Glasgow Caledonian's eMotions Lab. She believes that everyone has the basic building blocks of musicality, in the same way that we all have the building blocks of other languages, including, of course, our mother tongue.

But how many people, when asked, would call themselves a musician? It's not as easy as it sounds to disentangle the psychology of who we are, the music we listen to, the songs we sing or hum.

Music is inextricably linked to our responses to moments in life, including of course how we interact with a game as its soundtrack weaves its way through the gameplay. When supermarkets pump French music through the sound system, people buy more French wine. When the music is played faster, people move quicker through the store.

Likewise, games are a filter for our musical experience and vice-versa. Music offers a rare position for researchers to look at how the game in its music influences the player's game, rather than looking, as we do traditionally, at how the player interacts with the game. Add that to the amount of time we spend playing games each week, around 12.5 hours, there's a signficant influence on our self through playing games and their music's effect on us.

Game music is best when it's owned by the player
Many games' music is akin to a film track, where the music informs the emotion the game author wants you to feel at any given moment in the game's story. But where we're playing a game whose music has the potential to be interchangeable, as many racer and shoot-em-ups are nowadays, affording the player a choice in which music they hear, we see something rather more interesting. After all, would games not be better if the expert designers had control over what we are hearing?

In an experiment where music was played over the game Project Gotham Racing, most accurate was where participants chose their own musical soundtrack along with the car noises, followed by just the car noises. Low arousal music led to more inaccuracies (sloppy, relaxed driving) while high-arousal music led to the most errors in driving - twice as many as any other type of music. Music makes the heart beat faster, creates more excitement, and a game without music would be like a film without a soundtrack - about 80% less entertaining. But here there's an implication that if it's not the music of preference of the player it can be an unwelcome distraction.

It's an interesting beginning to some thought on how much control over music either player or game designer needs to have in order to make the game successful.

Interactivity in gaming: are we there yet?

I've managed to get along to the gaming for learning day of the Edinburgh Interactive Festival, a fest not about interactivity in its broadest sense, but about gaming. I'm wondering whether the organisers have built in a bit of slack for what we all know will make the games industry more successful in the long term. The title of the event offers huge potential to expand a rather quiet conference floor, and the word "interactive" offers more scope for gaming than the public exhibition space would have us believe.

Though social interaction through gaming can be seen oozing through education projects of the kind we see coming out of the Consolarium, most of this interaction is engineered by the combination of a superb teacher, guidance from a full-time gaming specialist and the stamp of approval from the national education agency. The interaction is not engineered by the commercial, off-the-shelf game itself, designed instead for entertainment for oneself rather than entertainment with others. The interaction is coming from the framework of teacher, classroom and planning. The one relatively recent and significant exception to the rule would be the Wii.

Where games are used in learning, there is significant social interaction whose scaffold is the teacher - the way the students play the game, the way they talk about the game, the tasks they undertake and then the way they reflect about their learning. The teacher plans and prepares the play of the class.

Education does social interaction
Take Kim Applin's use of Endless Ocean at Meldrum Primary School: a game that provides a rich graphical interest is used much the same as Rylands and co would use Myst for creative thinking and writing. They record species they find on their 'dives', write about what it feels like to dive to the coral reef, design their own fish, make Crazy Talk animations of their creations. It's great. But all the support, ideas for taking the game for learning and the outcomes are done within the context of a curriculum, which Kim refers to repeatedly, and it is a teacher, not the students, choosing the rough direction of travel for interactivity.

Education has done well to use computer games or video games to enhance or create new contexts for learning, but the methods and outputs, though digitised, more varied and of increasingly higher production values, hold much in common with the process and output of the primary school classic Granny's Garden, which I was playing in 1986. Students play game, in a group or individually or both, teacher structures activity around social interaction between students, students create objects and (mostly) linear stories, illustrations, movies, iStories, podcasts. If this is, rather simplistically put, the process we see re-modeled in 2008, where can we take things in 2009 and beyond, to encourage some truly student-led and student-structured interactivity? Moreover, where can we take commercial or online games that are played outside the classroom, with no teacher to scaffold activity?

(Un)interaction in the 'real world'
In the real world, outside school, it's going to be rare that kids get as much out of their games in terms of social interaction and, in turn learning. Even forgetting the learning argument for the moment, the "ticky box" approach to applying games to learning and curriculum, we can see that the games industry has, by and large, left social interaction to the domain of the educator, the enthusiastic parent or precocious child. After all, is 10 seconds of abuse of our competitors before playing Halo really interaction? Is text chat with strangers during our F1 racing really interaction?

Truly engaging, long-term interaction with endless opportunity to build upon requires something more profound, more complex and hard-to-grasp to happen: people need influenced by other people (not by the computer-generated, limited characters), actions need to be completed with other people (not with a game's cues). Social interaction from within the game (and not through the imagination of a teacher and his/her students) is where the games of the future will find themselves. ARGs may not be the elixir (or they might be) but they have more of the kind of true inherent interaction I'm talking about than any other gaming interaction we can see.

The challenge for those working in education is threefold. Truly interactive gaming such as ARGs, from a player's perspective, are hard impossible to predict and can't be preplanned to fit in with curricular goals. They are incredibly challenging to author, arguably more so than recreating a 3D copy of something we've already played, on a game-making application like Missionmaker. Finally, they require the use of social and mobile tools that are misunderstood and maligned in most education circles: social networks, blogs, video podcasting sites and, above all, cell phones.

This is where gaming, and particularly gaming for learning, has to go eventually. I'm heartened when self-confessed glutton-for-punishment Susan Yeoman ends her talk on educational uses of gaming by pressing the importance of pubishing and sharing output from game-playing with as wide an audience as possible on the web. Sharing, listening to feedback, collaborating and republishing ideas is much tougher than picking a game off a shelf which has rich graphics for stimulating creative writing or which trains our brains in mathematics or foreign languages.

Above all, really making games social within and of themselves further asserts the roles of learners, not teachers, as the ones who direct and plan learning, regardless of whether it 'fits' into a curricular plan. If it works, with the complicity of talented teachers and informed parents, then we really are headed towards something of excellence.

An alternative view of filmmaking

I'm borrowing electricity and wifi at the back of a Marco Torres and Alasmedia film-making spectacular, delving into filmmaking of another kind.

I found the Steampunk movie below, from Alice, as beautiful and enchanting as many of the 'real' movies I've seen recently. It would make great creative fodder for some creative writing of the kind I was talking about yesterday, taking your mind away to another universe for 4:30.

BLC08: Thinking Out Of The x(Box) update

On Monday I helped kick off the Pre-Conference workshops at Alan November's Building Learning Communities week in Boston, with a four-hour workshop on using video games, text-based games, alternate reality games and consoles as a stimulus for creative writing, art, design and the sciences. The updated notes from Thinking Out Of The x(Box) are now available.

I was ably assisted from 6000 miles away by a Skyping Tom Barrett, who shared his experiences having just come off a four week Myst writing project. His use of one-to-one laptops and Google Docs to coordinate collaboration was interesting, especially since the group back in Boston shared my initial view that 30 laptops in a classroom would have killed the energy visible in Tim Rylands' class. The jury's out (permanently perhaps), and Tom's Google Doc work shows that great things are possible either way.

The updated notes for the session (minus the ARG stuff - that deserves a post on its own, to come soon) are available now, including some of the amazing Guitar Hero work done by Ollie and colleagues at MGS and the Nintendogs project that covered a term last year in Aberdeenshire. Enjoy and, if you decide to set out on an adventure with games in your classroom, please do tell me about it here.

Tutpup: play, compete, learn

Since last autumn I've been offering ideas on how mathematics and literacy could be improved to a startup, with the simple notions that

a) certain kids (a large number of them) enjoy competing against each other (social media)
b) we all learn best by playing just above our level

It's become Tutpup, and I'm relieved, to say the least, that the combined guts of those working on the project have been right in this instance. Hopefully the nature of the exercises will glean the same kind of results that the Nintendo DS seems to claim in previous trials in Scotland and England.

Think Kawashima without the need for a Nintendo DS, and add on a safe social network. Then, once baked for a few live mental agility games against fellow learners from around the world, add on a parent or teacher feedback report each week. Voilà Tutpup.

I'm really keen to see how Scottish primary and early secondary teachers might take on the Tutpup challenge. You can sign up your class(es) or your own offspring. Kids can sign up themselves, too, with automatic approval sought from parents. Let me know here how you get on. Reports so far are more than impressive!