edublogs

UK Government Research: Web 2.0 does improve learning

New research from Scotland and the UK Government shows that Web 2.0 and gaming can and do make a difference to educational attainment and student experience.

Since the birth of most "web 2.0" technology in the past six years I've been there gathering and even doing some of the research into whether it offers up any improvements on pedagogy and/or student experience in the classroom. It's not stopped healthy questioning of the validity of data, normally in midflow during a keynote, but there has always been a layer of distrust in stats and research that has not been peer reviewed, to the extent that there has been a great excuse for the lack of change by haughty educators and States that don't want to make the effort.

So I'm delighted that colleague Derek Robertson and University of Dundee researcher David Miller have, through their large-scale study, found that playing 20 minutes of Dr Kawashima's Brain Training every day is much more likely to improve attainment and speed of calculation in mathematics (up to 50% faster than the control group). Their results are to be peer-reviewed, hence the frustrating but necessary wait for the graphs, stats and data.

Furthermore, Becta's research into Web 2.0's impact in the classsroom, for which I presented the opening keynote at the expert seminar earlier this year, has just been completely published, and shows

• Web 2.0 helps to encourage student engagement and increase participation – particularly among quieter pupils, who can use it to work collaboratively online, without the anxiety of having to raise questions in front of peers in class – or by enabling expression through less traditional media such as video.
• Teachers have reported that the use of social networking technology can encourage online discussion amongst students outside school.
• Web 2.0 can be available anytime, anywhere, which encourages some individuals to extend their learning through further investigation into topics that interest them.
• Pupils feel a sense of ownership and engagement when they publish their work online and this can encourage attention to detail and an overall improved quality of work. Some teachers reported using publication of work to encourage peer assessment.

You can read the full research report online, which includes some input from myself and colleague Matt Locke at Channel 4. The recommendations state that all teachers need to be given more significant time to do more complex work with Web 2.0 in their classrooms, directing students learning in these tools. It also, thankfully, helps us see realistically what students do with technology.

Above all comes the caveat that we must not over romanticise what young people are capable of doing with technology without the structure of learning and teachers acting as guides on the side.

Fascinating stuff on which to start building more daring policies. Essential reading for all those who lament the lack of interest in new technologies from "those up top".
Pic from David Muir, his blog is here.

Looking two times the distance back to forecast the future

"Hunt for Bin Laden: Experts Agree: Al Quaeda leader is Dead or Alive". Yossi Vardi's photoshopped CNN reportage was certainly amusing but was, above all, a completely accurate forecast. What forecasters mustn't do is try to eliminate the uncertaintly from our futures.

Paul Saffo, formerly of the Institute of the Future, shares some of his secrets and insights from his main job: forecasting the future.

The Information Revolution is over. This is the Media Revolution
Everything in the knowledge and information world is uncertain. The information revolution is done, gone, in the past. We are now gripped by a media revolution - media is information that goes deep down and makes a difference in our life. It's also a shift within this field, from mass media to a very strange new world of personal media. Indeed, it's what my new job is all about - making the convergence of media count and make amplification have a new, almost reversed sense.

Even the information devices of old are now media devices. 1998 saw the first ring tone sold, and 2005 it had become a $2b business, accounting for 10% of the music business. Cell phones are entertainment media devices that happen to be communication devices. They are not information devices.

As Jane McGonigal, still at the Institute of the Future, has repeated: you need to look back twice as far back to see what's ahead. It might not be repeated, but the future will rhyme with it. If we peer back to the 1950s we see huge experimentation in mass media, in ways the television could be used, developed, enhanced. Today's use of the web is probably not even a bump on the landscape compared to what we will use our discoveries today for tomorrow.

When television emerged in the 1930s, it took some 20 years until it began to take off. Time-sharing (through email) took time from its first developments in the late 70s to become accepted in the 90s. Technology takes time to take hold, but in recent history technology is taking less and less time to make an impact:
This means that email and internet apps are nowhere near the peak of their activity.

Never mistake a clear view as a short distance
The challenge for those trying to predict the future is that, at one stage on the uptake curve you're made to look foolish as no-one joins you in the adoption of the technology. After a while, you give up on that bandwagon and think about what is worth betting your efforts on next. Just as you give up on it everyone else starts to adopt. You therefore look foolish twice over. I've written off many a fashion faux pas on that S curve theory.

SecondLife is one such maligned technology - I've managed to hit the middle part of that S Curve about a dozen times in the past three years, and have kept on it; something's afoot in this space. Paul believes it has a smell of the 20 year S Curve in it. He mentions the Cisco SecondLife meetings that my now-Cisco colleague John has talked about before. Likewise, in the nineties publishers would have scoffed if you said that something like the MacBook Pro Nano would make reading books online or on a computer doable - and enjoyable.

The changing nature of innovation
The next big thing is not the semantic web - it's sensors and robots
1950s TV - Broadcast
1980s Time-sharing - Email
1990s Cient sharing - WWW
2000  P2P - Napster
2010  Sensors - Smartifacts

Sensors will lead to smartifacts, robots that can make life easier, more enjoyable, more connected... Think of the current indicators: Roomba, the first robots to kill a human in the war on terror in Yemen in 2002, Nabaztags, robots that drive cars more safely than us... The indicators are already in place, though I think we're probably missing it for the immediate ideas and opportunity that the web is offering in 2008.

We're moving from TV to the web, from the living room to everywhere, from watching and consuming to participating and creating, from few and large organisations to many and small individuals.

We are moving at a tumbling rate from the Consumer Economy where buying and selling rule, to, markedly in the past two weeks, an economy where there are new actors in a Creator Economy. Google makes the perfect example of the success of the Creator Economy. It costs $0 to subscribe to Google, the usage charges are $0 and every time we use it we make it better. That last part is the cost - our search string contributes to the richness of what, in days past, would have been the Manufacturer. The question is, do we care if the $ cost is zero and the [heart] cost is information?

One forecast is looking a dead cert: the future's looking like one heck of a ride.

Quinn's photo of Paul Saffo.

Paul Saffo speaking at the ebic Thought Leader conference, Berlin, at which I am later speaking on the futures panel.

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

Don't send out a press release to say you landed on the moon

Over the past three years at Learning and Teaching Scotland I've seen significant change in the way things have been done, largely thanks to the humble blog and the voices behind them. By pressing the need for authenticity in what's said, rather than some glossy, postcard format marcoms message ruling us all, we've seen the beginnings of a healthy little blogosphere in LTS Towers, both externally and, in true iceberg fashion, internally, under the glossy surface.

There are undoubtedly non-believers in all this authentic-voice-stuff that still remain (we're a Government body, this project is too big to allow the simple message we've created to leave people's minds, we need to make sure people use the correct acronym [is it CfE, aCfE or ACE?]) but, by and large, especially since this summer's Inspiration Sessions and Mike Coulter's work in-house, there is an ever increasing chance that if you want to find out more about the people behind the policy, the implementation, the ideas or the websites, that they have a blog. You can converse with - no offence intended - the horse's mouth. From professional development experts to web services, the magazine to the gaming guys, the geeks to the boss, it's covered. If you want to see behind the scenes at the Scottish Learning Festival, be our guest, and see the stand designs, the podcast preps and even take a look at how well (and not so well) the Festival is doing. LTS is well on its way to finding and sharing its voice.

And here's the crunch. People I know will object to this blog post, as they have objected to so many others. It makes them uncomfortable. They wonder if I'm talking about them in the para above. Or am I? Good. It's vital that the politic that got me a job with the education agency remains, for a month or two more at least, in people's heads: all anyone wants from a non-governmental body, a government, an organisation, a company is complete and utter authenticity. No compromises. No jargon. No marcoms crap that gets in the way of what really matters: "what are you doing to help me, and how can I help you?"

If you're still left thinking this is rubbish, and that traditional 20th Century corporate communications have a place in this connected world, then go read Seth Godin's superb rundown of NASA's best ever spokesperson, and then think about what watchlists need to be created, press releases junked and bloggers befriended. Happy blogging, folks.

Pic: Neil Armstrong

Summarising UK child internet use on Connected Live

Just before summer I set about digesting about 500 pages worth of research that, for the first time really, told us about the attitudes on the net of young people and their parents. You can read it over the next week at Connected Live.

Given that most of us at this time of year have our minds on other things, I thought it would be worthwhile publishing a week-long series of posts which helps you make sense of what the research is telling us. You can find a new post every day under the Research category or simply add Connected Live's feed address to your aggregator (and read the instructions on how to do this for this blog).

Let us know, too, if this is helpful to you and if you or your school and Local Authority adapt your practices based on it.

When expectations are raised in schools, what happens in Higher Education?

This week thousands of excited messages were displayed all over Facebook and Bebo from Scottish students, examination results in hand, readying themselves for their first year at university, away from home, with the expectation that they will be learning - literally - how to become a Master in their chosen field.

Yet over the past few weeks I've been wondering, after ever-improving learning experiences in schools, whether expectations of the learning experience in Higher Education are inflated. What is it that Higher Education needs to take into account to make learning more enjoyable, more successful and, ultimately, to allow ancient institutions to survive into the 22nd Century?

Just before I went away to France to become a Godfather, I gave the closing keynote of the UK's Higher Education Web Management conference at the University of Aberdeen, covering what I've seen emerge as the main pushers of change in society, their consequences in schools and the world of work, and what the knock-on effect for Higher Education might be. You can view the whole one hour talk, from about five minutes in past the music and introductions, over at the University of Aberdeen's video streaming site. Despite the predictable (but mostly irrelevant) debate about which tool should be used for a backchannel discussion, I hope I managed to stifle the irony of presenting a lecture on participation culture by really using a Twitter river of thought to steer my thoughts, 'live' for the 'studio audience' as well as those joining from afar. Not the conference's choice, perhaps, but the choice of the vast majority of educators I was able to tap into during that hour.

The "Google Gen" and Higher Education
In Aberdeen, I was doing my best to empower technology leaders and web managers in universities, rather than necessarily educators, to start making decisions that would impact on teaching and learning. The following week I was relating the same concerns and opportunities to the "Google Generation" Committee of Inquiry, chaired by Prof Sir David Melville CBE (pdf), revealing how, ultimately, universities in the UK and beyond would lose students who found their "way of learning" in another institution.

I wasn't alone in believing this to be the case. I was presenting evidence alongside Stephen Heppell and Keri Facer, Director Research at Futurelab, and it was a beautifully dovetailed argument we ended putting forward - almost as if we had prepared it that way. Rather, it's probably because universities in the UK and Europe, at least, are headed for meltdown if something doesn't budge soon. We had the visionary, the current status and the research backing that shows the changing desires of learners, and where universities and colleges have to head to match them.

It's rare that thinking, research, the practical ways forward and the opportunity to get the potential strategy across to an influential group come together in quite so timely a fashion. I hope that, at least, it's been an episode that changes things for the better in some small way.

You're invited! LTS Inspiration Session: Exploring technology's simplicity

When it comes to technology simplicity sells. That's the title of David Pogue's TED Talk which provides the basis of discussion at the third Inspiration Session for Learning and Teaching Scotland employees. But this time, with Scotland's teachers on holiday and clearly with nothing else better to do, we're inviting you along.

With apologies for the late invitation, if you fancy a trip to Glasgow or live nearby, you are welcome to join members of the Glow, online services and technology teams, as well as Development Officers and Knowledge Management colleagues from across the organisation:

• Monday, July 28th, 11.45-14.00
• Classroom of the Future at Learning and Teaching Scotland, Glasgow
  Optima building, 58 Robertson Street
• Meet at 11.45am in the 9th floor reception, session from midday until around 2pm.
• If you wish to attend, please leave a comment here or email me.

This session will feature a team viewing of the, ahem, sideways look of technology and what 'simplicity' actually means. We'll then have a fairly loose discussion around how LTS could do its job better by finding its simplicity bone. Your input here would be most valuable. I do hope you can come along. If you want to see what we've done so far in our inspiration sessions, please flick over to Connected Live.

For the past three months I've been hosting these Inspiration Sessions, providing regular "thinking pitstops" for nearly half the staff in this time, getting to grips with what new technologies' potential might be for their own projects and mining the staff at all levels, from administrator to Director, for their creative ideas. Several new blogs and web services have been launched with the growing confidence of staff, and internally we're beginning to see much better sharing of information using the likes of social bookmarking on del.icio.us, an internal wiki and weblogs.

Lehmann's Philly: the same, but different.

What is learning? For the past few nights I've been enjoying my time with Marcie and her boss, Chris Lehmann, Principle of the Science Leadership Academy, taking a look inside their school's way of thinking.

Learning and teaching is about what the students can do, not what the teacher is able to do. It's about what questions we can ask together, about being inquiry-driven, through questions which are authentic, to which we don't know the answers.

It's about being passionate and whatever we're learning has to matter. Chris' students were cutting sheet metal, part of a project to create a new type of biodiesel which would be more efficient than existing methods. The class applied for two patents this year, and two communities in Guatemala are developing the product to provide fuel for real.

It's got to be meta-cognitive, everyone's got to think about what they did, how they did it, what they could do better the next time. It's got to be technology-infused, technology which is ubiquitous, necessary and invisible. We've got to choose technologies not on the basis of what's new, but what is good for a given task. It's also about being on the same page as the community with whom you wish to interact.

What do certain tools do the best?
Lehmann's approximate and reasonably false taxonomy:

Research: RSS, delicious, Google, Wikipedoa
Collaborate: wiki, google docs, moodle
Create: blogging, drupal
Present: podcasting, uStream, Flickr, iTunesU
Network: Twitter, Skype, Facebook, email.

But tools don't teach
We need strong pedagogical frameworks to see the whole learning experience, onto which we can slot the right tool for the right job. It's categorically the wrong approach to come up with an idea for a "blog project", "a podcasting project", "a social networking project", in the same way as it's wrong to approach pedagogy from a starting point of "what pedagogical proof is there that social networking improves attainment". You start with the pedagogy and use an appropriate tool to fit the pedagogical bill.

In Chris' school, every member of staff and every bone of curriculum is hung on Understanding By Design, with all the teachers using and all the students understanding the same metalanguage of the oeuvre. By doing this, students are able to reverse engineer the work they have done within the pedagogical framework the teachers have used, in the same way as assessment for learning strategies aim to promote. They are able to learn about learning.

Planning
So, planning is undertaken along these five structures:

Desired results: where do you want to go
Learning objectives
Understandings: the big ideas - why are we teaching or learning this?
Essential Questions: The throughline - what do we keep coming back to throughout the inquiry?
Skills and Content: What is the stuff that we have to know to get to those big ideas?

Assessment
If, after a period of learning, you assess by giving out a test, you are not doing project-based learning. Tests and quizzes are but a dipstick, a quick snapshot of where everyone is at. The projects themselves, the projects that are the creation of the students themselves, are the main assessment tool. They are constant, they are ongoing.

What Chris is describing seems to me, albeit in other meta-language, to be what Scotland's Assessment for Learning and Assessment as Learning programmes are beginning to achieve throughout our small corner of the world. The ambition of his school's learning approach reflects the Curriculum for Excellence. I really shouldn't be so surprised that Chris is one of those here at NECC with whom I'm the most comfortable chewing the educational fat.

20 Ideas For Local Authorities To Engage With Web 2.0

A week ago I spent a whole day leading a session on behalf of Socitm, the Society of Information Technology Management, where we were exploring the impact new media could have in Local Authorities and other public bodies. Most of those present were from the world of corporate IT and, as someone presenting a variety of tools they were likely to be blocking on their home patch, I was a tad nervous about taking them on this particular learning journey.

I needn't have been. Having explained in broad terms the main drivers of change thanks to this technology, I was able to explore some more specific examples of public sector engagement with the social web, from eduBuzz in the domain of education, to several health-related initiatives of the NHS. We saw how technology is taking politics towards the realm of direct democracy, and explored the potential for some of the mobile, ambient and participative media that citizens are increasingly using in their day-to-day (social) lives.

We worked through the afternoon seeking practical, do-able actions that these IT managers could take forward, without the need for engagement of the senior management teams or specialist outsourced expertise. They relished the task, and came up with some superb ideas they could implement in days, rather than months or years. Some of them have even put them into action already: take a peek at Stratford's homepage, complete with Twitter updates. Here are the rest, coming to a local council near you:
What are the biggest challenges in your organisation?

1. Competitions for art work on Flickr
2. Mental health blog
   1. Teachmeet-style therapy group
   2. Video diary of experiences
3. Flickr/Google Earth mashups
   1. Things to do in the area, events, locations for recycling etc...
   2. Online estate agency for social housing
   3. Statistics in a glance mashup
   4. Graffiti tracking, crowdsourcing for finding the source of the 'tag'
   5. Mashups to reveal extent of disruption during strikes, accidents
4. Crowdsourcing FAQs on a wiki
5. Homeworkers can have real-time advice between 'virtual desks' (RSS feed to mobile)
6. Twitter for mass-collaboration during crises and a blog to quickly publish information and provide an instant feedback loop
7. Longitudinal e-consultation on complex issues
8. Using Flickr to provide stock photography to local press and council workers (like this)
9. Providing digital cameras to council gardeners to share the process and final result with enthusiasts and ciizens.
10. Twitter private groups for quick intranet publishing
11. Watchlist introduction for the PO, PR, Comms team
12. Culture change through a "from-the-top" blog by the CEO
13. Suggestion box for cost-effectiveness

The Royal Air Force finding recruits on home territory

My granddad Findlay, pictured, was an officer in the Royal Air Force but one who never flew. It's only because of the stories I've heard second hand of him being stuck in the desert for five and a half years that I was even aware there were jobs akin to being Bond that one could apply for in the Air Force, Army and Navy. I even went as far as going through the rigorous application process so that I, too, could spend the prime of my life hiding in a tent, listening to enemies miles away.

Today's youngsters don't need secondhand stories of relatives that lived in a black and white world to see what exactly is going on in war zones around the world, thanks in part to the work the Royal Air Force has been doing in their homeland, the world of social media.

The Force's YouTube channel has relatively low numbers for each video, but a huge selection from which to choose. They explain, for real, what actually happens when the Air Force's ground soldiers have to go in and clear mines - there's no hi-tech, just brass necks.

The Force has kitted out several servicemen with cameras and storytelling skills, including this young Geordie gunner. They're about to kit out further personnel in Basra, giving an insider's story of what's going on through a new site, to be launched later today, RAF Frontline.

These might be part of a cynical bid to recruit youngsters to the world's most dangerous of jobs, or it might be a genuine effort to show them what they're getting themselves into. The videos are lightly edited, to omit anything that could be a security breach. Otherwise, though, the in-house web team is keen to show not just front line action but downtime, too, to show, I imagine, that life in the forces is not all about skiing, pristine beaches and drinks with the lads.

But where I really admire their approach, is in how an initial foray into YouTube has helped develop the use of video much more throughout the more traditional parts of the site, in their "what it takes to be a gunner" video slideshow, from civvy to gunner. It works well as a story.

Not enough, mum will be glad to know, to make me want to reapply, but a jolly good example all the same of the fringe becoming the mainstream offering.