Ok you lot at the back -

Play attention

Attending some conferences is like sitting through a well regimented series of platters brought out by catering staff to a finely tuned rhythm of time. Attending others is like being at a massive buffet in which what one person consumes is nothing like another’s choice.

Hand Head Learning was the buffet variety. With a vengeance.

This blog serves as a way of trying to connect together a whole series of disconnected thoughts and responses to a range of eclectic experiences that were sometimes quite iconoclastic.

Early on in the first day Martin Owen took some of us on a journey to the near future where computers were pervasive and ubiquitous, where they were embedded into the walls, painted onto things, all around. It was a world where we were learning through playing with stuff.  This ubiquity and this playfulness were underlying themes of the conference – intentionally or otherwise.

Mobile devices in school were frequent objects of attention by Zenna Atkins She talked with enthusiasm of a school where students are told they must have their mobiles turned on at all times and why that might be the better way to work. She talked of schools where denial of ICT was a disciplinary device – and asked why? She reminded us that UK PLC employs about 19% of us, we need people who are creative and caring, security, skills, trades. She talked about us no longer needing exam results but rather passports to credibility! She hailied game technology as way forward, learning anywhere using gaming glasses -  “why sit in a Victorian classroom”. Her view was that we now had the technology to have immediate benchmarking of where you are in your learning and how that compares to everyone else in the whole world. As far as she is concerned the political parties are all talking about institutional change, not change in teaching and learning. She told of kids checking learning objectives on line in lessons and comparing with what teacher is offering.  She asked what happens when we get tripadvisor dot com for schools? Schools need to learn and use other ways of communicating with parents  – blogs, twitter, facebook.

Malcolm McLaren was, how can I best express this, ‘interesting’. He overran significantly, but his key analysis is summed up in my mind by the following observations -  we live in a karaoke world, no longer a world of authenticity ( he did at one point make a very interesting but not very repeatable analogy for this concept.  He came into a world that was a culture of necessity, we now inhabit a culture of desire. For a more detailed treatment of this keynote see Educational Technology – ICT in Education

Yvonne Roberts talked of the need to  develop SEED. The need to have ‘free range children’.  She asserted the best computer to learner ratio was 1:2  so that there was a lot of interaction and learning through that. She asked the key question, how prepared are young people to learn (by us) ?

James Paul Gee see below Read the manual

What of the breakouts? Well superb ACU were there explaining their 1:1 Iphone Itouch project, Andrew Rhodes was giving significant development for primary students in his area – aided by some of those students. Ollie Bray on the social web was, as always, great to listen to. The CLCs as an innovative force were celebrated by Steve Moss as they took us on a tour of mobile devices and a growth in one school’s English results from 20 – 29% to 48% in three years, the use of virtual world building to check on BSF designs for schools, and the collection or personal real data on mobile devices.

There was too much, I have done a disservice to many by omitting them.

However, yet again Twitter allowed us to run a back channel and eavesdrop on other sessions as the tweets kept flowing and we trended, to the point where some interesting offers of a different kind of social networking began to appear. To get a flavour, go to #hhl09.

Other blogs worth a visit:

Its all about the  coffee James Clay

Terry Freedman on Zenna Atkins

Conference without a Laptop Steve Wheeler

Simon Finch on Normanby School etc

Ollie’s Social Media Preso

And for another occasion perhaps a major accolade to John Davitt for Twitschool!

Read the manual!

I am notorious for not reading manuals, for not looking at directions, for not following recipes. I now feel happier about this failing on my part.

James Gee pointed out that we all run ‘video games in our heads’. This made perfect sense to me. An avid reader  – product of a grandmother who taught me to read pre-school, I have always had film running in my head when in any form of narrative reading. Indeed often when i see a film of something I have already constructed in my film head I am disappointed as it does not seem right to me.

Thinking through the most memorable lessons I encountered in my past they were strong narratives, delivered to enable me to play the video in my  head. this was how I learned. The delivery media was often merely the modulation of the teacher’s voice, coupled with my own construct of the scene. It was enough for me, indeed there was no choice, it was the only media we had back then.

James Gee drew the picture that in schools we often give people the manual, but nothing more. He asked how many people would succeed in ICT if they were given a computer manual but no computer? The best learning comes with an initial encounter with the computer (or whatever) and then the use of the manual to discern having ‘got’ the overall idea. This reaches its most obvious illustration in gaming  such as World of Warcraft, or game cards. The initial experience then forces the gamer to delve into the manual or rules to make sense of the experience at a deeper level. The level of language use in playing games like Civilisation is ‘metathinking with a vengeance’

James Gee describes  this as ‘situated meaning’ : giving manual AFTER they have played the game. The ability we have now is to utilise the ‘gaming’ to situate the meaning in the learners so that the ‘reading of the manual’ then ‘takes’. We are not doing enough of this.

He then went on to describe how in most of these games there is then the ‘modding’ where the activity becomes one of changing and modifying the game. He made reference to the purple potty to show this.

A key question he asked was as modding requires/is the modelling of things, can kids ‘mod’ their currculum? if they cannot, why not?

He ended with a call for passionate affinity – that this passion was what made true and deep learning – that what was being learned was not the real value, but the manner of engagement was the true measure. These passions lead to Affinity Groups. You need passion to put in tens of thousands of hours for mastery. We ought to give pupils passion!

Interestingly the presentation from Bristol CLCs  on their PDAs & notebooks project attributed a lot of success of the work to the ability of the learners to contextualise  of the material they are reading.

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