Gamebased Learning 2009

From the group that has organized some very successful Handheld Learning Conferences comes:

Fun, Stimulating & Provocative

And that’s just the first afternoon…

Dear Colleague

This years Game Based Learning Conference has captured the imagination.

Demand for delegate places has been greater than expected leaving less than 100 places available from our initial allocation.

Perhaps this is because the event is unique. It brings together thought leaders, innovators and practitioners from the worlds of education, software and consumer electronics into a continuous dialogue about the impact of video games and social media on the quality of learning and teaching practice across school, higher education, public and business sectors.

With leading industry figures such as British Academy Fellowship Award winning, Nolan Bushnell, Ian Livingstone and Patrice Chazerand going head to head with leading educational innovators including Derek Robertson, Alice Taylor and Graeme Duncan, the stage is set for an inspiring and thought provoking 2 days opened by UK Cabinet Office Minister, Tom Watson.

For confirmed speakers click here

To review the programme click here

To register, receive a free game and save £50 click here

Read acclaimed educational technology writer Merlin John

It’s your conference, get involved!

The programme has been developed to offer something for every delegate as well as providing essential opportunities for discussion, networking and socialising.

Do you want to present something?

Then the unconference / Pecha Kucha session hosted by Dave Green of the London Games Fringe is for you. Everybody is welcome to present their ideas, work or experiences.

Got skills? Looking for skills?

Try the informal “business speed dating” that takes place during the breaks and networking sessions. Should you wish to erect a pop-up display, distribute flyers or connect with delegates in other ways this can be arranged by contacting our sales manager, Isabel Fernandes.

Interested in real world, best practice?

Look no further than the Game Based Learning in Practice session hosted by Derek Robertson, National Adviser for Emerging Technologies and Learning, LTS who will introduce leading initiatives by practitioners including Kim Applin, Steve Bunce and Dawn Hallybone.

How does industry respond to this emerging phenomenon?

If this is the question on your mind then the Industry Forum is the place to be. With participants including ISFE Secretary General, Patrice Chazerand, ELSPA Managing Director, Michael Rawlinson, ISFE Games and Education Liaison, Catherine Geeroms, Slitherine Director, Marco Minoli, Codemasters Chairman, Chris Deering and representatives from Becta, this session promises to be electric.

All this followed by an evening social reception with the keynote conference sessions the next day!

Do not miss this opportunity to be a part of this years Game Based Learning Conference. Register today.

See you there!

The Game Based Learning 2009 Team (meet us)
The Advisory Group (meet us)

Passes are available for members of the press & media

join our group on Linkedin

join our event page on facebook

Becta’s Emerging Technologies for Learning, Volume 3

Becta has just published the third volume in its series Emerging technologies for learning, an annual publication. This series is worth a read, and I’ve gotten a lot of good ideas from it in years past. This year’s line-up includes articles on

• Growing up with Google (Diane Oblinger),
• Information clouds (yours truly)
• Location-based and context aware education (Adam Greenfield)
• Trends in serious games and virtual worlds (Sara de Freitas)
• Search technologies (Emma Tonkin)
• Interactive displays and next generation interfaces (Michael Haller)

Given the impressive line-up of authors I have to say that I’m proud and a little humbled to have been asked to contribute to the 2008 volume of the series. Highly recommended!!

Image credit: “nptechtag”; cambodia4kidsorg’s photostream:
http://flickr.com/photos/cambodia4kidsorg/1343334854/

Social Networkers Reach Out More with Cell Phones…

… which is the title of an interesting article that appeared in USA Today a couple of days ago that discusses the market potential for mobile social networking. The piece basically reaffirmed my belief that mobile and connected are strongly related and that one reinforces and amplifies the other.  A couple of quotes that struck me:

Senior analyst Jill Aldort of the Yankee Group calls “mobile social networking a hot market with lukewarm potential.” (with regards to profitability)

Jyri Engeström, co-founder of mobile blogging site Jaiku, says, “Mobile social networking is more like ‘social peripheral vision.’ You have an idea what people who somehow matter to you are up to.”

Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz says its mobile user base is growing faster than the website. … “Things that are inherently social are inherently mobile.”

But location-based networking has Big Brother implications. “It’s really cool, but it’s also possibly the creepiest thing happening,” says Facebook’s Moskovitz. Privacy controls are crucial. Buddy Beacon, for one, lets you switch to a “cloak” mode to stay under the radar.

The article also sports a sidebar with a listing of some of the more popular mobile social sites, including ComVu PocketCaster, Flickr Mobile, Groovr, JuiceCaster, JumBuck and Multiply.

Finally, there are a few interesting thoughts in the string of contents, especially those that are more critical of the whole 24/7 connectivity and feel the need to be disconnected from time to time. My favorite one is by McGarrett:

Why don’t they just wire a social networking chip in our brain? Oh yeah, our brain is already wired for social networking. So why do I need this?

Thought provoking indeed ….

 

Image Credit: “rickshaw-phones”, abaporu’s photostream at
http://flickr.com/photos/abaporu/536073140/

  

Handheld Learning 2007, Day 1, Opening Session, part II

 

The international speakers…..

Tarek Shawki, Section Chief, ICTs in Education, Science, Culture, Information Society Division, Communication & Information Sector, UNESCO.

On ICT Utilization towards Building Global Knowledge Societies

UNESCO as a laboratory of ideas and standard-setter; also a clearing house to disseminate info to member states.

Priorities:

• Access to networks and high quality content
• Dealing with cost of access; capacity building
• Content development
• Freedom of expression
• Media development
• Knowledge preservation

E-knowledge requires a lot of (different) players

Mr. Shawki then continued to talk about organizational structures and partnerships, which I won’t try to describe here, but which is important in that it shows how ICT developments are happening globally.

Final comment: UNESCO is working on a report comparing all of the different mobile devices for individual governments who are confused with regards to what’s out there.

Next up, Francesc Pedro from OECD’s CERI. His presentation is pretty much the same thing he did at NECC, which I blogged here. He did show some interesting MacArthur-Foundation-made videos.

Francesc’s key point I think is that there is a real need for solid, research-based information in the area of ICT for learning, especially on an international  level, and a need to focus on the changes that learners are bringing.

Not a lot of talk about mobile learning in these two presentations, but more big-picture issues to think about …

NECC, Day 5, ‘With Power Comes Responsibility: Online Awareness, Ethics, and Safety’

 Got to this session late, very well attended, so this is an important issue for many (a detailed outline of the presentation and links can be found here. Mark Wagner is talking about inappropriate content, inappropriate sharing, and threats and cyberbullying (MY COMMENTS IN ALL CAPS).   

Another perspective (NICE, I’M GLAD HE MENTIONED THESE, ALTHOUGH HE DIDN’T GO INTO MUCH DETAIL):

• Citizen journalism

• Citizen police work

• Threats, suicides, and risky behavior are often reported.

• Sting operations online

• “MySpace is safer for teens than predators”

Students do have 1st Amendment rights. Parody is protected. We cannot control students, we can educate them.

Lack of understanding:

• Fear of the unknown

• Vilification of technologies by adults who don’t know the technologies

• DOPA did nothing for adults or kids, but put more work on schools and libraries (http://www.saveyourspace.com) (MUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN ABOUT THIS E.G. HERE AND HERE)

• Potential for rebellion and destruction of trust

• Potential

 Legal protections:

• Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA): filtering, monitoring and policies.

• Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA): policies, parental consent, protection of info.

• Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act: stiff penalties for offenders, national registry.

Safety tips for students:

• Don’t share identifying or personal information (privacy for kids is different than it was for us).

• Do not share provocative images (according to Wagner this is getting better because kids knows parents and schools are looking)

• Beware of grooming.

• Consider the consequences and the future.

• Talk with parents, teachers, or other trusted adults.

Tips for educators:

• Move computer into shared spaces

• Watch for alt+tab and alt+F4

• Check history (is it suspiciously blank?)

• Beware of reluctance to be candid

Educate yourself:

• Your kids know more than the news

• Ask your kids if they’ve been harrassed

• Ask if they use more than one social network site
  (from Magid and Collier’s MySpace Unraveled)

• Kids will react strongly to canceled accounts

• Read the MySpace Terms of Use and Safety Tips

• Report violations

• Know the people in your child’s lists

• View their friends’ profiles

• Monitor and filter if necessary 

http://blogsafety.com

http://socialshield.com

http://theparentsedge.com

Bottom line:

• communicate with students, parents, other educators, IT, the police

• confront students who are behaving in irresponsible, inappropriate, or unsafe ways. Do not look the other way.

Take aways:

• We cannot control students, we can educate them.

• “Wouldn’t you rather know?”

• This was a nicely balanced, straight-up presentation, intended to educate, not scare people. It was good to see so many people attended. Wagner also provided a link to a wiki with lots of resources

Tag=n07s707 Blog Posts / Blog RSS / Flickr / Flickr RSS

Why communication is important…

 

Found this story via Darren Kuropatwa’s blog. It’s called “Safety v. Panic“, a powerful, personal experience about what can go wrong with the use of technology for teaching and learning when people don’t communicate. I fully agree with Darren’s comments that

Maybe if everybody tried talking to each other before they started pointing fingers they might learn from each other, understand each other better, figure out a way to meet everyone’s needs better and maybe, just maybe, the kids would have really learned something … and it would have stuck.

This is exactly the stuff I wrote about in my recent Innovate article (free registration required) on building relationships with technology and kids, but on a much broader scale. It’s easy to point fingers, ban, sue, and punish. This type of attitude also takes up a lot of valuable resources (time, money….) that would be better spent on, say … educating?

Read the original post and the comments, read Darren’s comments, and let me know what you think …

Image Credit: “Purpura”, Danella manera’s photostream:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/daquellamanera/143760074/

4-16-2007 continued

 

Just a couple of additional sources that shed additional light on the role of new media sources in the coverage of major news events, and the ways in which news reporting is changing. Paul Bradshaw writes in a short but interesting post in his Online Journalism Blog that

Unlike previous user generated content milestones like 9/11 and the Asian tsunami, this story took place in the heart of the new media generation, and the resulting coverage is more comprehensive, more accessible, and takes in more new media forms, including social networking.

Via this same blog, I came across this post on Poynter Online, which provides an interesting collection of “user-generated content” of the Virginia Tech tragedy, from a journalistic point of view. Lots of interesting stuff; and like Bradshaw says in his post, roles are changing:

1) the need to develop the awareness of, and skills to find, this material; 2) in the face of such comprehensive and accessible first-person reporting, the need to develop new roles, perhaps as gatewatchers, facilitators and filters rather than reporters.

And by the way, this doesn’t hold true just for journalists ….

Image credit: “One Day Blog Silence”, David Leggett’s photostream:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/theleggett/463068884/

The Importance of Open Content

 

This one’s been sitting on my “to write” list for quite some time now, but a visit to the university library yesterday reminded me of it.

The idea of open content online is a simple one.  As Judy Breck has written in 109 Ideas for Virtual Learning, and  in this article:

Open content for learning, which is the substance of the global virtual knowledge ecology, is free, reusable, connectable learning subject content within the open Internet. It is easy to assume open content is applauded because it is altruistic for content creators to let what they produce be used charitably, for free. A much more fundamental advantage is the openness in the sense of being connectible to all other open content. Any content that is closed in the connective sense will atrophy in a withering that will ultimately punish those who sought proprietary profit.

I agree with Judy that access and connectibility are key ingredients. To that I would add (and this is by no means a complete list)

• creativity: learners creating content; prime examples are Wikipedia, Curriki, and any of the myriad of media sharing sites that are out there;
• accuracy: if content is open, created by many, and used for learning, it should be accurate. Wikipedia has been at the center of the accuracy discussion. If you ask me, I’d put more faith in Wikipedia content than the average textbook, because I know online content is up-to-date, multimodal, and checked by many (relatively speaking) for accuracy;
• quality: see “accuracy”. If content is open, created by many, and used for learning, it should be good;
• the power of groups and collaboration: many small ideas lead to big ones; examples of this include Google Image Labeler and Photosynth (Microsoft Live Labs): , as described in this earlier post.

Obviously, open content does bring with it its own issues that will need to be addressed, such as

• access: does ”open” mean “unfiltered”? 
• copyright: Creative Commons is a workable solution for this issue. It’s a matter of content creators being willing to use Creative Commons instead of more traditional forms of copyright. A good example is Gilmor’s We the Media
• authority: or the importance of source. See e.g. this post by David Warlick.

What triggered my memory to write this post was a somewhat forced trip to the university library yesterday. I was working on a paper and a tight deadline when I was looking for some specific information on the history of cell phones and cell phone use. I figured, no problem, hopped on the Internet, searched wikipedia, ran some queries through Google and Google Scholar, but lo and behold, I couldn’t find the info, or if I thought I had, it was inaccessible because it was through a subscription service.

Finally, I turned to our library to look for a book or two on the topic. Usually, this isn’t a problem, as our library has a nice service where you can order the books and library staff will pull the book for you and order it. All I have to do is go pick it up (in past years, they would even deliver to your office). Anyway, because that usually takes a day or two I had no choice but to go get the book myself. According to the database the book was readily available on the shelf.

To make a long story short, I finally found the book on one of the sorting shelves (and out of order) after 30 minutes of searching. The trip to the library took me about an hour, time I could have spent writing if the information I needed had been readily and openly available online.

Of course, in a formal educational environment an occurence like this tends to have larger consequences, as teachers and students don’t have the kind of time that I do to go peruse the library for an extended period of time. Immediate access to digital information online and in the classroom is key to maintain the flow of learning.

Another interesting observation here is my dissatisfaction with the whole affair. A few years ago going out and getting the book wouldn’t have been that big of a deal. However, with the pervasiveness of the Internet and online resources, I think immediacy of access is something that we’ve come to expect; I know I have …

Image credit: “Open”, tribalicious photostream:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tribalicious/185151669/

Another Good Reason Why Technology and Media Literacy Should Be a Part of Every Education

From CNN: “Today’s leaders juggle e-mails, blogs and integrity“:

(CNN) — Think about this scenario: A leader misspeaks, the comments are posted on a blog three minutes later, and within an hour media organizations have picked up the comments, reporting them on television and online.

Meanwhile, this leader’s BlackBerry buzzes every 30 seconds with bosses, colleagues and family members all wondering the same thing: Did you really say that?

It happens.

Today’s leaders are facing challenges their predecessors never knew — an up-to-the-second era where technology connects us all, where multimillion dollar business deals can be sealed from most any corner of the world and where the BlackBerry and Treo can track you down at any second. It’s an information smorgasbord where the demands are ever growing and the pace is frantic.

Today’s kids will be tomorrow’s leaders. They are supposed to take care of us once we’ve retired. We all know that. According to the article, these future leaders will need to

• have vision and integrity
• be able to adapt and be flexible
• be able to multitask
• have the skills to manage people
• have charisma and passion
• be media savvy

Note that many of these skills are nothing new and were important before technology became a pervasive tool. The big difference today is that because of a plethora of digital communication channels and 24-hour news media, leaders are always within reach (I blogged about that here), and always under scrutiny (there are plenty of examples of this on YouTube such as this one and this one and other sites).

As a result, it’s important today to not only be media savvy, but to have better mastery of other skills mentioned above as well if you want to be a good leader and citizen. Kids can deal with the digital tools, it’s up to us to help them master the other skills…

Image credit: mkreyness’ photostream:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/martinkreyness/344385278/

Ban It and They Will Explore …

Scanning through the Dec./Jan. issue of ISTE‘s  Learning and Leading with Technology I ran across the Point/Counterpoint piece that asks, “Do Social Networking Applications Have a Place in the Classroom?” In the counterpoint, Chuck Favata concludes that we should

teach students to be safe – keep them out of the social networking sites.

Does anybody else see the irony in this statement? Especially considering that ISTE’s technology standards for students state that

2. Social, ethical, and human issues

• Students understand the ethical, cultural, and societal issues related to technology.
• Students practice responsible use of technology systems, information, and software.
• Students develop positive attitudes toward technology uses that support lifelong learning, collaboration, personal pursuits, and productivity. [emphasis added]

Needless to add, the technology standards for teachers include:

VI. SOCIAL, ETHICAL, LEGAL, AND HUMAN ISSUES.
Teachers understand the social,ethical,legal,and human issues surrounding the use of technology in PK-12 schools and apply those principles in practice. [emphasis added] Teachers:

A. model and teach legal and ethical practice related to technology use.

D. promote safe and healthy use of technology resources.

Why not just say “Teach students to be safe”? Had to comment on this one …

Image Credit: recursion_see_recursion’s photostream:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hawksanddoves/313353944/