Ewan McIntosh | Design Thinking, Education & Learning

Inside Learning Podcast on the Live Web

I spent an enjoyable hour speaking with Matthew and Steve from Inside Learning and this is now available as a podcast. Here are the links to some of what I discussed:

• edu.blogs.com: my blog
• LT Scotland: my employer
• LT Scotland's MFLE: my previous project with LT Scotland
• mgsOnline: my first school where we used blogs at home and abroad
• Extreme Learning: Project-led work from East Lothian in its beginnings and some of the big questions it poses
• Tools:
  • Wikis at wikispaces
  • Blogs with WordPress or edublogs.org
  • Podcasts created and stored on Odeo or, for more editing possibilities, created on Audacity
  • I use Typepad for blogs and podcasting, but I pay for it
  • Making use of mobile phones in Musselburgh
• What is bluetooth?
• Skype: free phone calls over the internet
• Flickr: photosharing and you can use it for art class and more besides
• Technorati: the blog search engine and watchlist generator
• Bloglines: cope with all that information by copying your little orange RSS buttons here into this aggregator
• Delicious: to share my bookmarks with everyone (mine are here)
• Online video-editing
• TeachMeet06: innovative unconference held during SETT.
• An adoption strategy for social software: some management examples
• Digital Literacy on the web: my del.icio.us links
• My CV on my blog: always tell people who you are
• MartinLutherKing.org: an example of a website where researching its origins is vital (this one is owned by a White Supremecist group.
• mgsOnlinePodcast: the first set of podcasts from a school in Europe, and some of the publicity that came with this (in the sidebar).
• Typepad (cost) and Odeo (free): easy podcasting and easy way to get feeds
• David Noble's Booruch podcast on developments at Hillside
• PodcastDirectory.org.uk - educational podcasts
• ScotEduBlogs - find other Scottish edubloggers
• Flickr: photosharing and you can use it for art class and more besides
• GoogleVideo and YouTube - video podcasting might be next!
• Derek Robertson - LT Scotland's professional gamer ;-)
• Nintendo DSs and non-linear writing
• Missionmaker
• Steve Beard: gamer and game-maker with students
• BBC Jam - interactive resources
• SecondLife: real life virtual 3D world
• Media Stage - virtual 3D Film studio
• ScotEduBlogger Meetup: TeachMeet's ancestor also organised on a wiki
• TeachMeet06: innovative unconference held during SETT.
• Sponsors of TeachMeet: Stormhoek (wine); Promethean (corkage and wifi)
• Glow: Scotland's national intranet

Current affairs lesson plans up for collaboration

Andrew Pass's Current Events in Education blog is a great source of ideas on how to use news events as stimulus for learning. He had hoped to get some collaboration from teachers through the comments on his blog but, for whatever reason, this hasn't really happened. But now, believing that the best lesson planning ideas are collaborative efforts between different teachers, he has made this collaboration easier to carry out through his new Current Affairs Wiki. I like it a lot, although I wonder how useful the current affairs are after 48 hours. That said, considering most textbooks are slightly older than that I think there's a future for teachers to update previous events with the most current affairs in that area. This is, in fact, a living textbook.

Skype, blogs and wikis for Professional Development

Technical difficulties again at the Education Village in SETT, but the tech guys were great at getting the show on the road. I talked through how communities of practice can be created through adding your name and blog address to a wiki, like ScotEduBlogs produced on Wikispaces, and how important it is to share your thoughts with those who share your passions. We don't have to put up with those staffroom bores any more!

What I found strange was how some nut thought it would be fun to add a postscript to my talk, uninvited, through the hall mic, to, shall we say, dispute my framing of Skype as a free version of video conferencing? "And now time to let us do some real work", he said, about the next session which used video conferencing. Now, let's face it, how many teachers have video conferencing in their homes? None. How many could have Skype? All of them.

Is there a worry that Skype will usurp Video Conferencing? I just see them as two tools for two situations or jobs. Let's leave our inferiority complexes at the door.

Thanks most go to Promethian and LTS for funding the wireless access codes that allow me to blog from SETT

Wikipedia vs Britannica: Yawn...

Suw's blog post headline says it all. Wikipedia will always be better than Britannica as long as the wiki's free and Britannica isn't. After all, if we've got a digital divide in hardware how much bigger is that divide with online goods, credit card use and children (who don't have money or credit cards to pay for it?). Case closed.

Extreme learning in East Lothian - a possibility? Part 1/2

At the moment many students in our schools are not engaged beyond the end of the school day (some of them barely during the school day) and so in East Lothian today around 35 teachers and librarians from the authority and beyond met to see how extreme learning and integrated project work could help turn education inside out. How can their personal passions as a human being be more than something they do outside school, and become something which permeates their whole learning life, no matter when or where they are learning?

What follows is a mashup of Don Ledingham's intro, my thoughts and the following discussions. It's quite suiting really, considering that the whole movement will be co-owned on a wiki in the coming weeks.

Schools are not preparing their youngster for life beyond school. The relevance of school is becoming further from the reality of youngsters’ lives. The way they interact with technology and life is very different from the way they interact with technology and passions outside school (Now I’m going to do Maths, now I’m going to French…) This latter point is  true in students who reach Advanced Higher level and suddenly have to ‘think’, instead of regurgitate learned facts.

Project work is collaborative, it involves parents (how do we explore the partnership between parent and child without saying “his dad dunnit”?). Maybe the issue is more how we define success. Is success a ‘A’? Or is success something deeper than that?

Most of all: kids like project work. Don tells a story of when he was Head at Dunbar Grammar. When he encouraged kids to do a project over the summer holidays, promising he would leave a comment on it in the new term, he expected three or four projects in return. Fifty. Fifty projects got turned in on all sorts of personal passions, including the novels of Sharpe and the architecture of Orkney. Students had decided timescales, focus, length, media… All they needed was the chance and encouragement to do it.

Some project ideas and the curricular areas students might choose to follow:
•    Wallace and Grommit – how do they do it?
IT, animation, storyline, art, modelling.
•    Heather the Weather
Physics, Geo, Media, Maths
•    Why is my gran’s hospital food so bad?
•    Disaffected learners in East Lothian are currently designing skateboard park design – I wonder if they might consider using Google Sketchup or SecondLife to achieve this.

But are these areas too narrowing and will they lead to kids shoehorning subjects in?
How can kids work collaboratively and keep their individuality?

Thankfully Don sees the importance of personalisation in students’ own webspace,  whether that be a blog or something else. He also sees other issues - more on these big questions to follow tomorrow. I'll also be adding more links to make sense of this for non-Scots readers. But time for dinner out with Mrs Edublogger.

Google Sketchup, Earth and SecondLife design and enterprise mashup

I like these ideas for designing and selling products within Google Sketchup/Google Earth and/or SecondLife. At least in SecondLife students can sell as many of the product as they are able, instead of cluttering up the family home with their efforts.

This example here is pinched from the Futurelab article, but does illustrate things nicely. Someone has designed a bed which can indeed be found in the latest Ikea catalogue. In other examples, people have sold their products on SecondLife.

Copyright on the design? I wonder whether Ikea should just open a big blue and yellow shop asap.

The Future of Learning in a Networked World

Barbara 'Bee' Dieu Skyped me about the conference in New Zealand she's attending with many other edublogging luminaries this September 18th. Learning in a Networked World is actually a ten-day long conference spanning several venues across the islands, and the wiki points to a great variety of speakers, many of whom you will recognise from your RSS readers.

Bee is keen to involve as many learners as possible via her fav tool, Skype. I'll certainly be trying to get some of my kids involved in a Skypecast to NZ (time differences will mean this is definitely an out-of-school experience).

If you're keen to take part, too, then leave a comment here. Bee will pick it up and probably publish timings later on.

Coming of Age - the Audio Book

Coming of Age, an Introduction to the New World Wide Web, has been downloaded several thousand times since my coathors and I penned the first drafts of our chapters. As well as a second updated edition being in the pipeline you can now listen to the book on the Coming of Age podcast. You can subscribe to the podcast and receive a new chapter every two weeks or so by getting iTunes and copying this link to the "advanced => subscribe to a podcast" menu.

It'll be great hearing some of my online friends for the first time and gives another way for time-pressed educators to get their heads around social software. You can, of course, still download the book and print it out. Thanks to Shawn Wheeler for organising this.

Exc-el moving forward 5: Arm bands

People need help with new technologies and they need it in a way that involves the least technology possible. Mobile phones are probably the most ubiquitous technology in schools at the moment, especially amongst staff. Why does Exc-el not provide a set of cheap mobile phones to those SSDN mentors who could help out any time of day? If the mentor is teaching the auto-forward transfers the call to the next mobile phone and so on in a chain until someone answers. The number to call for help (the first mobile phone number) can be provided alongside any other leaflets or training materials.

An online forum for support might also be a good idea to deflect some of the more common queries. Just like Riya, we could provide a wiki support forum instead of the traditional type to allow everyone to become a mentor or expert as they acquire the skills. This is more sustainable than paying for time or personnel to act as supporters.

Training should take the form of both online support (screencasts, wiki and/or forum) but also real-life, human “holding hands” support. This involves team-teaching at first but gradually easing off the trainer’s influence in the use of the technology. Training sessions of a more formal variety could be short and placed at times convenient to teachers e.g. during free periods have a drop in, lunchtimes, end of school days, Friday afternoons.

Update: clearly students don't need too many armbands when they want to plan the use and take advantage of social software.

Names, names, names...

It's almost like having a baby sitting there with no name. Please, if you have a minute, help us all decide what the next meetup of teachers who like technology should be called. You don't even have to be coming, though it would be nice if you could make it. But which name best appeals to techies and newbies together?