Connected Blog

As part of a series of posts, we examine the latest research on how young people and the wider population in the UK use the internet, and what it means for Local Authorities, schools and teachers.

When it comes to playing games online 68% said that the games they played on the internet were not controlled in any way. Only 7% got advice from parents on what was suitable, with 6% saying parents trust them to play alone. A further 10% (5 & 5) have filters or parental blocks.

But youngsters are not necessarily well informed about staying safe in these online gaming environments: 55% don’t go anywhere to get advice (students are more confident with gaming online than with other net uses, where 44% would not seek advice on better/safer use), with only 16% using the net, 16% using friends. Most use parents (27%) despite the potential that they may not be in the best position to offer advice, the same that could be said of school (19% ask for advice on safe gaming there).
19% are not sure if the need more help, but 16% need more help.

The majority of adults believe that gaming is beneficial (up to 61% for any one aspect). Imagination seen as one of lowest gains [35%], with games of a more explicit ‘edu’ nature being seen as beneficial: 42% thought (education) games could be useful for road safety, drug use, political and global issues, social and moral responsibility, advice on diet and health). 39% thought games offered escapism. 37% saw games offering a technological understanding.

Connected 21 is now online with articles and features on literacy, Gaelic, PE and computer games.

http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/connected/articles/21/index.asp

A child starts planning the storyboard, while another begins cutting some archived film. Two other classmates seek out some images on the net. Each student in this group, like all those students who attend Islay High School, are using their own Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC), which they bring to and from school to provide a continuous portable base for their work.

But this is not just a story about cool gadgetry – this is a school which has changed itself entirely in the past five years.

I was taking in all of this on Friday, the same day the school won Learning and Teaching Scotland’s Ambition Awards at the Scottish Education Awards. I was joined by John Johnston, primary school teacher and blogger from Glasgow’s Sandaig Primary School, whose account shows how visits like these can lead to new practices in schools many miles away. Krysia and Doug Semple also joined us along with John’s Head Teacher; blog posts to follow, I hope…

But what grabbed us all was the scope of change. First, everyone in the school community (that’s students, teachers and parents, too) is part of a grand peer-assessment ring, with the UMPC acting as a show-and-tell hub for the work and discussions that took place at school that day. Using OneNote, students can capture text notes, audio and video from their classes, with teachers as accomplices in the recording of their explanations and discussions. All too often, the thought of having a teacher recorded on the fly by a student would have the teacher confiscating the device doing the recording. Here, it is celebrated, with OneNote allocating each segmentof audio to each relevant paragraph.

Students can be heard sharing secret numerical codes – their machine’s unique IP Address – so that such documents can be shared and edited collaboratively in real time. This is how students brainstormed and created storyboards collaboratively, keeping all their progress for future analysis in their review of their work thus far.

Andy Wallis, the English teacher running this excited film-making adventure, brings the class to a brief pause, to encourage them to video their own discussions for the next few minutes. It’s a real eye-opener for those who have been hogging discussions, providing a spotlight moment for those who’ve been a little quieter until now. As they say, the camera doesn’t lie. Another piece of evidence for for the formative assessment pile.

It’s not just pedagogy that has changed to make learning work here; the timetable has seen the beginnings of change. Wednesday and Friday afternoons are curious times for the uninitiated: students who, when I was at school, even had separate social areas are now collaborating on projects. It’s not uncommon to have a 14 year old S3 student working alongside a 17 or 18 year old sixth former who’s seeking to work through a brand new subject area. Here, the class you are in is decided by your level of attainment, not your age. Twice a week these afternoons offer an opportunity to expand horizons through extended project work.

As John says, it’s the overriding desire to learn which can be felt from every member of the school community that is quite overpowering – you wonder why you’ve not felt it in every school you’ve ever visited. It’s the responsibility that has been transferred to students – when they misuse their UMPCs they are subject to the ‘normal’ rules of engagement you’d find in any school. The technology has changed all the things it should do, and left some elements of school life, rightly, untouched.

This is a school where the introduction of a new piece of technology has helped introduce changes across the rest of the system. Or where the system’s changes led to the necessary introduction of the technology. You see, that’s the other thing. When change is so integrated into everyday life, it’s hard to remember what happened first.

See the rest of the photos from this trip on Flickr.

Update: Doug “DigitalMaverick” Semple has just added his extensive thoughts, too.

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Adam kicks off a roundup of a superb event in Aberdeenshire to get its teachers (and students) motivated through new technologies, including some interesting world-breaking uses of Glow. Tim Rylands, one of the keynote presenters, gives his own take and some of the background of his long-term involvement with the Authority. Martin provides more coverage (and cheesy pics) of what seems to have been a first class event.

Gaming technology offers many new ways in to getting young people engaged with history, geography, language… Musselburgh Grammar School’s PE department has seen that there could be promise in getting young people fit through their lunchtime Wii sessions. Unfortunately, it’s only for S1 and S2 students. Quite how Mr Bray’s going to get in is beyond me

Tanya Byron’s report for the Prime Minister on children, games and the net is, as yet, nowhere to be seen on the web. However, you can find out a bit more about the report and catch up with this morning’s news reports, interviews, blog and newspaper reactions.

A newly discovered blog from West Lothian led me to a newly discovered project written by the brother of an old(ish) aquaintance, and whose company is also doing some interesting work for Channel 4. If this is a sign of things to come, then we’re certainly advising the right thing on the C4 Education Board.

We Tell Stories is Six Stories based on Six Classics (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) told in Six Different Ways through the net and written by Six Different Authors (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), by the brothers Hon’s company Six To Start. It’s a dream for any English language and literature teacher, with one new story every week for the next six weeks.

The first week has a Google Earth-fresh lit mash-up from top Scot author Charles Cumming. The 21 Steps is based on Buchan’s The 39 Steps and takes the reader on an intriguing mystery through the streets of London and up on the plane to Edinburgh. It’s all a bit too close to home, but wonderfully done. There’s a phone clue in one chapter which I’ve just called, but gutted that the solution to the clues lies in St Pancras Station – where I’ve just dashed from this evening on my way home. Had I been playing instead of working today I’d have been unable to unlock a seventh secret story. I just wonder if the Alice character is inspired by one inspiring gamer I work with occasionally.

Almost as intriguing as the story itself is the backstory to how these six (or seven multimedia Web 2.0-ey ARG-type games have been created, and the challenges both authors and coders came up against. It would make a superb literature project for the 21st Century student seeking out a dissertation subject:

Adrian Hon, chief creative of the online games company Six to Start,
says:

“Authors don’t need to be great artists or programmers right now.
They ‘just’ need to write. To make anything more advanced than a normal
story, though, you need more skills.”

Most authors aren’t also computer
programmers, and most programmers aren’t novelists. As Hon says:

“Web
people come up with cool ideas, such as telling stories by web 2.0
series, wikis or e-mails. Twitter, but it fails because they can’t
write a good story for it.”

This needn’t be an insuperable hurdle. We
may see a new partnership added to the traditional artist-and-writer
combination for illustrated books, or musician-and-writer team for
songs. Writers could work with programmers in this new form of
storytelling.

It also kind of puts claims that Amazon’s Kindle is the innovation in e-books into stark contrast with where the real innovations can take place.

So what are these innovations? Well, the Hons see them falling into only six categories, around which one could start design one’s own interactive literature. To see how this works in the context of the first story, you can read the process involved on the creator’s own blog or get into even greater depth in the Gamasutra interview. Better still, see what others make of it from the project’s airing at BarCamp Brighton (presentation below). One of my first ever non-edublog pals Rachel covers it all beautifully.

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Thanks, Adam, for the initial tip-off and, yes, it’s something we could, in theory, adapt for Modern Languages. Watch this space. In the meantime, I think there are numerous possibilities for the Frenchies and Germanists amongst us to exploit the playing/experiencing of the adaptations of  the 1001 Nights, Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytales (I know he was a Dane, but his work and 1001 Nights formed the basis of my Honours degree dissertation into the Fairytale Since the Time Of Perrault), and Zola’s Thérèse Raquin .

The most exciting development in 21st Century Literacy this year? Probably.

Update: If you’re a teacher short of time and want to try preparing something around this, Rachel and others have worked it out and provided some spoilers. Don’t read, these, of course if you just want to experience the story.

Here is the full, uncut text of the research report by Robert Hart, Director of Research at Intuitive Media, which was featured in issue 20 of Connected Magazine. Drawing on the results of a research project into how online connectivity is changing children’s lives, Robert shares the story of Emily Sanderson.

The human species is evolving rapidly. Our children are growing up in a very different environment to their parents. They have access to huge amounts of information at the click of a mouse. They can connect with people all over the world from their desktops, their laptops, and now increasingly from their mobile phones and mobile internet devices. Things have changed.

Let’s wind the clock back 25 years to 1972, when Carl Sagan was asked to design a plaque to go into deep space with the NASA Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft. It was naively designed to invite ET round for tea, or to eat us for tea! It showed how to find us and what we looked like. Looking at the plaque (pictured left), the humans are standing side by side, but disconnected. If Sagan had known about Emily Sanderson and her online friends, the picture might have been different.

With humans now intimately connected to each other online around the world, we are seeing the emergence of Homo sapiens continuus – the Connected Ape.

Working with the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) and Becta, Intuitive Media conducted extensive research into how children behave and learn in protected online social learning networks. The research included observation and analysis of the online behaviour of more than 120,000 children, direct online consultation with some 12,000 children who took part in a series of research surveys and the detailed profiling of eight representative children. Here, we distil what we learned through the profile of a single 10-year-old girl.

Who is Emily Connected?

Emily Sanderson is a real child (although her name has been changed to protect her identity). She is 10 years old, lives in the Midlands and is a representative of more than 120,000 children in the SuperClubsPLUS & GoldStarCafe social learning networks. This profile describes Emily alongside other children in her online community.

• Statements about Emily are given in relation to the statistical analysis of whole community. For example: “Emily owns a Nintendo DS (24%)” indicates that statement is true for 24% of the community.
• How and when is Emily connected?
  Like 61% of the SuperClubsPLUS and GoldStarCafe communities, Emily has a home PC. She also owns a Nintendo DS (24%) and a Sony PSP (16%). She has a mobile phone (like 76%) which she uses her mobile to access SuperClubsPLUS (as do 46% of her peers).
• Like more than half of the children surveyed, Emily gets just 30 minutes a week on the school computers. Emily would like more frequent access for longer periods of time. Most of her online communications activity is at home. She checks her SuperClubsPLUS emails before she leaves for school and logs in again as soon as she gets home. She’s active in the evenings from 4-8 pm and very active at the weekends. She spends over 300 hours a year in the SuperClubsPLUS community.

What does Emily get up to online?

In her online community Emily is exceptionally productive and communicative. She joined SuperClubsPLUS in June 2006 and makes three visits a day. Emily is a dedicated personal website developer. To populate her four home pages in SuperClubsPLUS, she has sourced, prepared and published 32 images and 15 icons. She’s edited her home pages 4,180 times, with 279 updates per month or nine per day. She also contributes her content to her school’s site in SuperClubsPLUS.

Emily has created her own online club – a Web Ring called ‘Birmingham City are the best!’ Emily’s home pages and webrings are dedicated to her favourite football teams.

At home, Emily likes to create her own images, photos and animations (e.g. icons) and send interesting site links to friends. In SuperClubsPLUS she says she likes to make and share content. Emily likes sharing her ideas and content with others, but wants to retain her creative individuality.

How communicative is Emily?

Emily is very sociable and communicative one-to-one. In 15 months she sent 8,419 emails to 580 different members. She sends 140 emails a week and receives 146. She’s also a prolific communicator in groups. She made 5,721 contributions to 13 different SuperClubsPLUS forums (mostly from her Nintendo DS) She is a prolific contributor to community ‘hot-seat’ forums, making 72 posts in 12 weeks.

Emily’s pages are very popular with other children. She’s had an exceptional 6,268 visits to her main home page and her digital guest-book has been signed by 544 visitors. Her circle of young friends has expanded enormously, spanning the UK. She receives emails from 503 different community members. One hundred children list her as a close buddy (they can only choose 10 buddies each, so this is an indication of high regard).

Emily also has a productive online relationship with her teacher (133 emails sent, 84 received). She talks more with the community mediators (259 emails sent 212 received).

How does Emily’s learning vary between home and school?

At school Emily wishes she had more choice in what she learns. She wants to “choose my own work” and “do my own projects.” Unlike 95% of her online community, Emily says she prefers to do easier work and at a slower pace than other kids in class.

Like 83% of SuperClubsPLUS members, Emily would like to work with her teacher from home, making use of email and forums to show her teacher her work and ask for help and ideas. Emily thinks she learns better at school (like 77%), but says she also learns well in the evenings and weekends (17%), with her parents (53%) and siblings (22%).

In contrast to her limited access to ICT at school, she spends over 300 hours a year communicating, collaborating, creating and learning in SuperClubsPLUS.

What can we learn from Emily?

Emily works at a slow pace at school, but she turns into Hurricane Emily online! Her mobile connected lifestyle has changed her educational and social experience. The combination of a mobile phone or games console plus a safe online learning community leads to a new social learning dimension.

Things have changed. Emily takes her learning home. She communicates and collaborates with a vast peer group across the UK. She has become a productive, effective and engaging publisher and communicator, sociable and popular with a very wide circle of online friends – adults and children.

Emily Sanderson has become Emily Connected, a member of the species H. sapiens continuus – the connected ape!

It’s fun to see that the blogging system Learning and Teaching Scotland worked with East Lothian Council to build is now being used to document the LTS Consolarium’s PSP trial taking place in Campie Primary School. It shows once again how having the tools available, having the encouragement in place, and students and teachers who are confident and practiced using them, can lead to seamless use of new technologies to further the development of all our teaching and learning.