Wish I'd done this...

Just found, via a slightly circuitous route: Creative Spaces. A shining and alas very isolated example of an open, exploratory "web 2.0" learning resource. The user - whoever they may be - is invited to engage with museum artefacts through story (see the celebrity videos like Tony Robinson's), other people's comments, and a tag cloud, hopefully driving them to reflect further and comment themselves. It's got a lovely clean design, too. Love it (tinge of envy - I was once working on similar ideas that never came to fruition).

Here we go again?

I was rather surprised to learn that the BBC Trust's service review of children's services and content, published yesterday, also covered "content to support formal learning for primary school children". I was less surprised - but weary - to discover that "As part of this review some commercial education content suppliers raised concerns about the competitive impact of the BBC’s formal learning provision. Under the terms of the BBC’s Charter, the Trust has a duty to have regard to the competitive impact of the BBC’s activities and has written to establish whether these concerns should be treated as a formal complaint."

Oh, not again. The review document emphasizes how CBBC and CBeebies are there to promote education and learning. As I have said ad nauseam before, the BBC must have a role to play in education. This should be curtailed by and complement the (usually) bread-and-butter stuff that commercial publishers can do, but that's because the BBC is the only organisation that can innovate and question the prevailing teach-to-the-test zeitgeist, and so that's where it should spend time, effort and resources. Ewan McIntosh's excellent blog pointed me to something I should probably have seen years ago - Ken Robinson's February 2006 TED talk - in a wider-ranging and thought-provoking post about what we're getting wrong.

Is there any chance that we can move away from threats towards collaboration and dialogue in the wider interests of society?

BBC raw money

I'm delighted to say that the work I've been doing with the BBC and Tinopolis Interactive for the last several months is now live at http://www.bbc.co.uk/raw/money/ - a site designed for adult learners who need to improve the way they deal with money. Nice to get some content out there!

Lord Puttnam at Handheld Learning

Lord Puttnam made a typically passionate and rousing speech at the end of the Handheld Learning conference. It's available online to view here - you'll need to scroll to the very bottom of the page.

Leaving aside his (entirely justifiable) attack on some elements of the press (which I read to mean my bugbear, the Daily Mail), his comments were an interesting view on the credit crunch.

His approach as understood by me:

• the UK should now focus its efforts on building an economy based on green technologies and the creative industries, not on financial services;
• we should think of education as "vocational" in a new sense - that of a child finding his or her vocation;
• there is a real need to re-engage the large number of disaffected learners;
• technology is key to this as it's what the learners expect and understand.

You may agree or disagree (mostly I agree) but I was desperate to ask about public service educational content in this respect. The BBC seems currently to be worryingly quiet on this matter, Channel 4 can't do it on its own, and allegedly some not-for-profits and LAs are now so scared in the aftermath of BBC Jam that they won't develop content for fear of being accused of having state aid in a free market. This is absurd. Will somebody in politics or public service broadcasting stand up and be brave, please? We need to be building stuff of the quality that the independent sector were creating for Jam. But we just can't do it right now with no funding and no evidence of ambition.

BBC Trust review of younger audience provision

"The BBC Trust is consulting publicly on how well the BBC serves younger audiences and on its services aimed specifically at them – BBC Three, Radio 1 and 1Xtra."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/consult/open_consultations/younger_audiences_org.html

Self-explanatory, but people should know about this.

How I learned to love games in the classroom – or, conversion by Derek Robertson

I’ve always been a sceptic about the use of off-the-shelf computer games in the classroom (in other words, pre-existing games not designed for education being used in schools). This is even after working on a Futurelab-sponsored “thought leader” panel about it. My doubts stemmed from a number of things:

• The sloppy thinking that “you can just put the learning in” – I’ve seen one prominent commentator describe how he thinks that French questions should be inserted into an existing action-adventure game at key points in the action, forcing the student to answer them before they can continue. This apparently would make it educational. In fact, it would be positively damaging: the whole point of an action-adventure game is the visceral experience. Stopping that experience ruins the game and demonizes the learning. It may be possible to integrate the French into the plot somehow – but that requires developing the game with that in mind from the beginning, and ensuring that it fits seamlessly into a compelling story and experience. Shoehorning sucks.
• Many of the games ideas that I have seen, implemented or not, have contained an inherent dishonesty. The idea is that the learning gets “hidden” – that kids won’t notice that they are learning about history while they are playing a game. This is a recipe for disaster. Make the learning necessary for the game, but be honest about it. Kids of every age spot the lies very, very quickly.
• The limits of simulations. There has been some interesting and good work in schools with a range of simulations – from SimCity to Theme Park – but several issues emerged. It took the teachers a very long time to work out the way the game worked, and where they did, even more time to embed them into meaningful lessons. More profoundly, though, I have always worried that however interesting the simulation, it never reflects the true, sometimes fickle complexity of reality. Additionally, there is often a rather frustrating relationship between the fidelity of the simulation and its usability.
• Scalability and transferability. Almost all of the work I have seen or read about depended on an a charismatic and motivated teacher delivering great lessons. Arguably, these teachers could have delivered a great lesson with a carrot and a piece of string, never mind a computer game – the success of the teaching depended on an individual, not the resources they were using. I have rarely seen examples of work which could be used without that fantastic teacher.

But. I’m writing after the Handheld Learning conference this week, where on both days I saw Derek Robertson from Learning and Teaching Scotland’s Consolarium speak about his work across a wide range of Scottish schools. I also saw a teacher from a London LA talking about how she has re-applied one strand of Derek’s work (with the Nintendo DS and the Dr. Kawashima Brain Age game) in her school. All of the numerous examples Derek gave of his projects - from Guitar Hero to Endless Ocean – seemed honest, well thought through, compelling and – and here’s the important bit – scalable.

I even challenged Derek on a big issue for me about projects involving ICT. I always wonder how much the novelty and attention which kids automatically get from being involved in a project with computer games and learning increases their motivation and focus automatically. Derek’s great answer was: why shouldn’t kids get new things all the time? And what’s wrong with giving them attention? Fair cop, particularly if you are working for an organisation which has institutionalised that novelty and attention by providing Derek and his colleagues as an ongoing resource.

It strikes me that the key things about Derek’s work are the following:

• Selection. Derek chooses – very carefully- the games which he works with for their potential for use in the classroom. Strangely, Grand Theft Auto hasn’t featured in his work yet...
• Derek’s notion of a “contextual hub”. Derek doesn’t just push the games (and their associated devices) into the classroom. He spends a lot of time working up how the games can be used, and building extensive activities around them. So, when working with Nintendogs the children got so excited with dogs in general that they wrote about dogs, read about dogs, made pictures of dogs, and even got the local dog warden in to understand how you should treat and look after a real dog.

There’s a challenge here for those of us who develop software for education – to match the way in which off-the-shelf computer games engage their users (mercifully, this isn’t just a question of production values and money, although they obviously play a part). It’s this motivational quality that Derek is so successfully harnessing in his work. Guitar Hero offers a great context for learning, if you have the imagination. Off-the-shelf games are going to provide a fantastic – but by definition patchy – set of resources for teaching. Let’s make sure the dedicated resources that people like me develop learn from the games and from Derek’s work with them.

Beyond Inclusion

Jonathan Hassell at the BBC – who I worked closely with on a project for blind learners – has an interesting idea about accessibility which I think deserves wider hearing. It sits - sometimes uncomfortably, for me at least - alongside an often-peddled notion that “designing something to be accessible will mean that it’s more usable for everybody”. This is true up to a point – yes, we all have our own preferences, learning styles and limitations, and if mine happens to be the need to see something in a larger font and that’s supported by the software, all well and good. But there are limits to this, and people and organisations seem scared to admit it. I suspect this is mostly because it would make them admit the compromises they’ve had to make in designing their offerings – and in a highly sensitive area, this can attract the wrong sort of attention.

Accessibility is vital and should be “designed in” – included, even – from the beginning of a project. But designing accessible products is an art as much as a rigorous process and science. You can’t just tick a bunch of boxes – pragmatic and specific decisions, and often compromises, have to be made about what you can afford and what’s reasonable for a specific project. Sometimes, websites or CD-ROMs have to have less than perfect accessibility to deliver a really great experience for the majority of users, or to fit within the commercial constraints of the initiative. Equally, some projects need to be the reverse – specifically designed for certain disabilities or needs of a minority, and providing a more limited experience for the rest of us. This latter point is what I understand Jonathan to mean by “beyond inclusion”. The best projects, of course, admit all of this up front and have the budget to allow for the creation of separate experiences or versions for particular disabilities where they just can’t be catered for by the “main” version - but such budgets are few and far between.

There was nothing like seeing the face of a six-year old blind learner experiencing a product which was designed precisely for her needs. She could unpack all of the layers of sound we had provided in our resource in ways which, as a sighted person with less attuned hearing, I simply couldn’t. If we’re aiming for excellence in our electronic learning materials, we should acknowledge that sometimes accessibility in its widest sense will be limited - for the minority or the majority.

Jonathan’s holding an event about this at BAFTA on June 30th, if you’re interested.