Digital Storytelling :: Blog

2008 Nominations

I just saw the latest Nasa Space Shuttle launch live on http://www.ustream.tv/channel/spacevidcast and followed along in the chatroom and on Twitter.

You can see the High Definition video of the launch here. Actual launch at 8:56 mins into the vid.

Wonderful - quite wonderful. The presenters gave me a list of the acronyms associated with the mission here:

http://www.itc.nl/~bakker/nasa.acr.html

and all the Web 2.0 links to do with space are here:

http://arielwaldman.pbwiki.com/space

Enjoy

- the mission goes on for 15 days.

Twitter links

- http://www.twitter.com/SSEndeavour

- http://www.twitter.com/spaceVidcast

Youtube Vidcast channel - http://uk.youtube.com/user/spacevidcast

Wikipedia page - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceVidcast

Barbara Dieu:

"As Jimbo mentioned at some point, the challenge does not really come from the technology itself, which is continuously being improved to facilitate connections, networking and working together. The real obstacles to an open culture of collaboration are deeply imbued economic/social/educational processes, practices and the need to control,  which hamper these conversations and the possibility of exchange and sharing."

• Wesch on context collapse
• Wesch on learning as life, not just preparation for later life.
• Campbell on Meaningful learning and Cognition prints

I think our habits of candour and intimacy are changing in response to the internet because it functions like a one way mirror.

I think we still imagine a specific kind of audience for our writing, participation, or media online, but the mechanics of technology networks and the persistence of our works in public searchable space mean that the audience can be a changing thing, access over time, shifting context due to linking to the item from different related materials, and scale of response to something we have posted online are all a part of how the audience can shift, and can shift the meaning of what we have contributed.

I feel like this is different because it feels more like a fluid collective presence than the kind of interactions we have offline. Online audience is also more likely to happen between people who have never met
ie the correspondence itself has to carry all the meaning.

i am self conscious about writing openly it feels like a kind of persistent live to air broadcast.
Wesch's video of so many people taking up the meme and all doing a dance at their computers is an example of what I mean. Each dancer was contributing something frank and personal, they were all intimate moments sent to an infinite audience or no audience at all.

For me there is a kind of directness in reading text online which shorts out for me if i read something and then the author is not online or not alive: It changes the mutability or 'in the round' ness of the text i am reading.

Offline cultural participation in our cities is also in a changing state. A graffiti group participated in the Adelaide Fringe Arts Festival. We made throwies at a workshop which were LEDs strapped to magnets
which you could attach to buildings to make a sign or shape. Kids and children-at-heart made them and put them around the city, meanwhile in Perth a graffiti artist was arrested.

There is also something timeless about posting something to the web -something said once can reverberate long after a person has had a change of heart or mind. That can be expensive for future prospects because there is no division between the private person and the employable citizen in open web search.

During the recent NZ election both parties tried to trash each others' reputations by making
something unhelpful rank as the top link which appeared when you googled for their name.

This would take a considerable effort so was not a small trivial mischief - they must have spent a fair bit of money or time on it. In a context like that the kinds of things which are 'close' can be very loud and some kind of impersonal or unfriendly.

There is another aspect of intimacy which is changing and that is the tension between apparently addressing a known f2f audience and presentation where the comments are being twittered or live blogged. The presenter may not be aware of their context in this way either.

Some face-to-face meetings are traditionally private and handled with few participants, employer, employee meetings, challenging meetings where we might be trying to negotiate for an agreed outcome or commitment between people present. These kinds of events may be diluted by the kind of partial inattention which can happen when someone'has their thoughts elsewhere' when is it important to have the audience known. How does that kind of intimacy differ? Is it still important?

Is it unrealistic to assume traditional characteristics of intimacy in any digital context when the pixels and
bytes travel openly and can be simply replicated and sent on?

One of these words is a challenge to the others.

• Opportunities inherent in the Connectivism & Connective Knowledge course
  
• Call to be a responsive audience by Dr Campbell in Cognition Prints.
• Michael Doyle's candour about life, death and our impact on our ecology

These opportunities feel like vital aspects of our ability to learn as a modern, connected, responsive and responsible society. But our systems for learning and our governments are risk averse. They are choosing systemic, universal, centrally scoped solutions for making the internet safe, for making school safe.

Surely there must be a way to engage in learning and in developing skills to keep ourselves safe which  do not cost us the vitality of our opportunities to learn, share and be heard as participants in this emergent networked culture.

Much of the interesting potential of the internet is found in being able to connect with other people, to follow a meme and find people who share your thinking and questioning, and to be able to respond honestly and as best we are able to the challenges which arise out of these journeys.

These powerful opportunities risk being trumped by the governance of our infrastructure.
There must be a way to move forward with a sense of due care and positive engagement, not just by  learners but also by the systems and communities which enable them.

Overview

I volunteered to attend and give  feedback to the first strand of this event

"Teaching and learning, with particular attention to personalisation"

at the Thistle Hotel in London today. I have replicated the slide handout we were given about the consultation process and then documented some of  the discussions that went on in text, picture  and audio formats using Web 2.0 collaborative tools - please annotate and comment on my observations.

There are 8 strands in all - I am only reporting back for event number 1 emboldened :

1    5 November 2008    10am-4pm    Teaching and learning, with particular attention to personalisation

2    6 November 2008      Assessment for learning and the use of performance data for pupil tracking

3    11 November 2008    Subject knowledge for teaching

4    12 November 2008    Curriculum and curriculum development, literacy, numeracy, 14-19 developments and ICT

5    13 November 2008    How children and young people develop and how they learn, and management of their behaviour

6    18 November 2008    Inclusion – special educational needs, English as an additional language

7    19 November 2008    Leadership and management, especially for subjects or curriculum areas

8    20 November 2008    Working with others in and beyond the classroom – the school workforce and the children’s workforce, and working with parents and carers

Where possible I have rerepresented diagrams in the powerpoint to avoid copyright issues and also to clarify feedback in diagrammatic form. All content is copyright TDA and I fully acknowledge them as the primary source.

Masters in Teaching and Learning : The Aim

Slide from TDA consultation rerepresented for explanation. This is the TDA's main aim on this .

So this was the first slide (rerepresented to avoid copyright issues) that we were presented with. It's a broad brush view of the TDA aim. It's obviously transformative.

The next slide is what was called the "snail diagram":

Key factors ensuring transformation model.

This diagram outlines the process whereby this particular strand can be implemented and consultation was asked for around this as a basis for the model being rolled out.

Enablement

Improved teacher quality

Timetable of consultation prior to rollout

Three phases and in more detail each phase -

Phase 2 in more detail

Phase 3 in more detail:

We were then given a separate sheet clarifying the starting point of the TDA which I have also replicated below - then I will outline further context and the day:

Timescale of rollout - very tight!

I had notes on this saying 2009 all NQTs in North West - Newly apointed NQTs. The outcomes from the consultation will be to develop:

"a national framework for MTL that can be used by providers of MTL to develop the programme and that is tight enough to gain national consistency, but flexible enough to develop a programme to meet local needs. The TDA will work with a range of national  expertsto develop this framework, using the outcomes from consultation as a starting point. Once this framework has been reviewed by social partners and representatives from schools, HEIs and local authorities, it will be used as a basis for those providing MTL, for roll out from September 2009, to develop their MTL programmes."

Our first task was to :

Develop an example of a real-life classroom or department scenario that an MTL participant needs to engage with in order to broaden and embed professional knowledge skills and understanding.

- How would coverage of 'teaching and learning' as a content area thread through this scenario?

- How should the scenario draw upon any of the other content areas? 

I took a mobile phone shot of our outcomes and annotated it on flickr - just click on the picture to take you to the original and roll over the boxes.

I am not going to into any more immense detail - we had a look at Core Professional Standards - M level descriptors  and M Level descriptors and Core Professional Standards and tried to square them. We wondered why we were being asked to do this and we guessed it might tie into money interms of professional development linked to the qualification - and so there was some mapping going on.

Here's our and another table's feedback at our stab at that with quick feedback that I recorded on the Mac.

Click for audio recording here 

Things that came up throughout the day:

Role of Coaches?

Possible dumbing down of standards - constant referral to competencies - worry by HEI over this as opposed to proper academic rigor.

HEI's on our table were concerned about lack of time for reading and writing and higher order reflection informing practice.

When best in the cycle of NQT to do the more intensive stuff. Basically you need to get established to before you can get a focus for a masters.

Possible conflict between schol Prof Dev and Masters coaches - you may find something extremely useful from study but not being seen to get your game together in terms of requirements in prof dev.

So chinese walls solution perhaps?

I was concerned there seemed to be a lack of communications infrastructure - suggested solutions but HEIs seemed to think there students should remain within their portals but admitted their students used social media extra murally :). I outlined a distributed model - don't really think people understood what I was talking about.

From my viewpoint.

A lot of video and new social media web 2.0 apps could solve the problem of time for reflection and collabortion. A lot of HEIs seemed resistant to this idea, some of them seemed to think I was talking about a completely virtual environment that would replace face to face meetings - I had to explain that they would augment rather than replace. I was surprised not to see any JISC members there.

Unfortunately the tenders have already gone out so this aspect could not be included in any spec - and that, in my estimation is not an ideal situation.

However  if collaboration is a major strand people are going to have to build quick solutions because the timeframe for this and the scope and scalability have implications obviously for schools if all NQTs are to get this opportunity. So my question would be how do you scale this up without dumbing down - I really do think a Web 2.0 Personal Learning Environment would be a solution if implemented otherwise I think people will have missed the boat on this one - that is a personal view but I'm willing to take odds on that there will be problems of scalability and implementation further down the line if this is not to become burdensome...

We did discuss the possibility of social networks to enable tutors or students to come together and find like minded peers with similar situations or problems but I really do not think people quite understood this concept...the senior manager in a school on table did though and has a localised solution in his school.

And that is my feedback on the day - the food was good too...

Tonight was my Eureka moment for media, web 2.0, virtual worlds and education and how things are all joining up together to make new, exciting spaces that we can pollinate with rich interactive content for learners. I don't say teachers and learners because we're all in this collaboratively now and those roles are shifting sands in these times.

I was looking for some way of introducing dynamic content into Second Life using Flickr and Twitter and other video services in some sort of mashup. It was then I came across Chris Smith's blog on Media Players in Second Life.  And because of that I met Sylvio Runo inworld who runs the NHC Media Center test area. After a quick demo I immediately bought the suite of Media Players he has made.

These play YouTube videos that link and autoupdate by HTML, PHP, ASP. It plays MP4, MOV, 3GP, and a lot more file types;  also images such as JPG, BMP, GIF and more. There are also audio options (MP3, WAV, MPA,). It also has a search function that will play the video results of a key word search and load videos into a cache system to play later as well - impressive. I hadn't realised that this would be so powerful a device to make the viewing of media so easy inworld. It's very robust and works very efficiently. But that wasn't the Eureka moment.

Earlier in the day I had purchased a little app called Flickr2SL that plays Flickr streams and groups. This is nothing new Matt Biddulph and Kisa Naumova  did much more dynamic stuff a couple of years back.

Flickr2SL is a very limited little app that pulls in content from the Flickr site and also displays the results for users who have open permissions on their content. But when messing around with both apps' players and their channels I noticed that - well you'll have to look at the video to see what happened next...

And this got me to thinking - that it will soon be quite possible to parse media XML RSS feeds dynamically on the fly into a video player using key words and parameters. So if people around the world decide to video, twitter or twitter pic a field trip or event - the results can be aggregated and will come streaming into Second Life and for a fraction of the cost of traditional outside broadcast media if you use services like the new Mogulus Pro Web site for example. You should also be able to aggregate videos taken on handhelds by suggesting a keyword and away you go - ubiquity of viewpoint and debate at events. Take the concepts as far as you want.

You can have a 2 way, real time, live auditorium. A live remote TV station with several channels pushing in and out of SL. The media and activites will join and augment via Mashups like this. Inworld participants can push out content through Machinima - the scope of possibilities is endless. You will also have dynamic search. You could track someone videoing live in the real world for instance by entering co-ordinates if they had an always on wearable cam; panopticon or gamers' heaven? This is very, very exciting.

I IM'd Sylvio Runo inworld to show him the chance interaction and he was kind enough to pop in and have a look. But he was unimpressed and told me of a few dynamic features coming to his new player in a few weeks' time which I will look forward to.

With the NHC players I like being able to load a URL straight in - I'd like it even better if I could load and search a video feed based around users' aggregated content. I can't wait for that to happen, but for now, look at the vids in this blog to get a flavour of what these players can do.

Oh and yes the Beatles quote was modded - this is Second Life you know!