Connected Blog

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

Between June 9-13 you have the opportunity to help young poets from Georgia and Glasgow’s East End with their poetry. In On The Street Where You Live, young poets will write about their neighbourhoods (or should that be neighborhoods?), and you are invited to leave your two stars and a wish comments to help them on their way.

Sometimes it’s the really obvious things that are the hardest to spot… and the first we should change… Following a fascinating chat with a very bright teacher I’ve realised that there’s a strong case for making some changes to the way we approach ‘punishments’.

Every now and again, I have to supervise ‘detention’. I sit in a room with the Usual Suspects and growl at them if they dare to raise their heads from the laminated edition of the school rules they are copying. I have often suspected that the theory behind detention is to create an environment of such stultifying and oppressive dullness that the pupils would rather behave than be assigned after-school detention… except it patently does not work. As I’ve already mentioned, the fact that detention is the resting place for pretty much the same people week after week after week after… means that rampant boredom is not too effective as a deterrent. This is not good…

I’m an English teacher first and foremost, and so part of my passion is directed towards encouraging pupils to read and write. I love books and literature and do try to get this across to my classes with varying degrees of success. In any given class, I can expect to find the full spectrum of ability — everyone from the fluent to the strugglers. Sadly, one thing is reasonably predictable in all this and that is that the strugglers make up most of the ‘detention’ clientele. So… here’s the really obvious problem that was pointed out to me by a pretty smart colleague:

Why are we using writing as a punishment? What message is this sending out? How can we ‘sell’ writing as something worthwhile and fun… while we are using it as a punishment?

Given these questions, it’s not really a surprise to think that there might be a relationship between using writing as a punishment and kids becoming even more reluctant to write… I’m certainly keen to move writing away from being a punishment as soon as possible, but what should I try as an alternative? My sense-of-humour thinks I should get them to draw pictures in an effort to make them hate art, but I’d rather be positive instead.

So, having already been given occasion to think by one teacher, I’d like to know what suggestions you might have. Is it possible to have ‘punishment exercises’ that are not going to further dissuade reluctant learners, and if so, what are they?

Picture Credit: Picture from the new Sony campaign found via Fubiz.net

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!

Is it possible to use a blog to genuinely bring history to life? The answer is a resounding yes as this imaginative blog ably demonstrates.

As many of you may know, as well as being an advocate for all things Web2.0 I’m also a keen student of the Great War. As such, you can probably guess that I was always going to love the WW1: Experiences of an English Soldier blog which is one of the most imaginative uses of the medium that I’ve yet discovered.

William Henry Bonser Lamin was a British soldier during the Great War and the blog consists of the letters he wrote home along with other related documents… the clever bit is that Lamin’s grandson is posting the letters 90 years to the day after they were originally written. This means gaps between posts… sometimes considerable gaps… but this just adds to the reality of the letters. The letters start in February 1917 when Harry is at training camp. There is something extremely human about his mention of being unable to get rid of a cold then immendiately saying “… but I am lucky to keep as well as I do.”

Lamin’s grandson has taken the time to give background on the main players in this story (Posts in October and September 2006), but you will soon begin to know them through reading the letters. One gets a real sense of the agony of waiting for news that those back home must have experienced through having to wait for the next ‘post’ on the blog.

As a teaching tool, the blog has immense potential for English and History, but I think other subjects could tie into the subject matter of the letters. A couple of ideas I had were to get my own class to write letters/replies to Lamin based on what he said, to put themselves in his position and write to their own families, or moving away from the Great War, consider the impact that writing spread over a period of time has compared to the single ‘one-off’ essay that typifies much of the work pupils do. As a means of relating a narrative, it is a wonderful resource. It is also fascinating to see how the way we use language on a day-to-day basis has changed.

As a historic text, I think it would feed easily into the study of the Great War in a History department. I re-discovered on my trip to the Battlefields earlier this year that our pupils may learn the numbers, but it is up to the teachers to put human faces onto those numbers and this blog is a brilliant means of doing so.

If you want to follow Harry’s experiences, you’ll need to do two things. First, you need to start at the beginning of the blog and work your way through to the present day, and then you’ll need to add him to your RSS reader… The first post is HERE if you want to get started.

Finally, one of my favourite museums is the In Flanders Fields museum in Ypres / Ieper. When you enter the museum, you are given a barcoded ticket with the name of someone who participated in the Great War printed on it. As you move through the museum you can scan your ticket to find out what happened to your ‘character’… inevitably, some of the characters do not survive and I have always been surprised at the impact these ‘deaths’ have on the pupils I am showing around the museum.

So it is with Harry Lamin’s blog: there are no indications as to Harry’s eventual fate so you’re just going to have to stay subscribed if you want to find out whether Harry made it to the end of the war safely… I’m hooked!

When we talk about social networking, are we sending out the right signals? At the Thinkuknow training session in Perth this month I was struck by how much we tend to emphasis the dangers whilst barely acknowledging the benefits.

The Thinkuknow training session in Perth last night started by covering some of the same ground as Ollie Bray’s recent Musselburgh Grammar School session. As such, I was already aware of Habbo Hotel, MSN and so forth. I’ll be honest and admit that, during this part of the evening, I started to look around at the range of people in the audience. Numbering about 40, the audience consisted of a wide variety of people: uniformed Police officers, Social Workers, teachers, Child Protection Officers and possibly even some parents! Many of them were encountering the online world inhabited by our children for the first time and I couldn’t help but wonder if the message sent out by the session is really the right one. You see, there is – quite rightly – a strong focus on the dangers of online usage, but there is almost no mention of the very real and tangible benefits of the internet.

As an organisation, CEOP are charged with protecting children from the worst that the internet can offer, and in this respect they do an incredibly difficult and distressing job extremely well. It is not up to them to promote Web2.0 activities, but what struck me on the night is that, because many in the audience are seeing sites like World of Warcraft, Bebo and Second Life for the first time, and because they are being advised that these sites are potentially dangerous to young people, they come away with a very jaundiced view of their potential.

I had a great conversation with some of the other participants during a coffee break and found myself in the position of having to defend the tools that most of my readers take for granted. It’s an interesting position to be in, especially if, like me, you are as passionate about protecting children whilst also wanting to see greater use of the tools.

The second part of the evening involved our CEOP trainer, Malcom (sorry, I never caught his second name!) showing us how the Thinkuknow resources should be used to deliver knowledge to pupils. For me this was the real reason for being there. Thinkuknow have devised a great resource which takes a very no-nonsense approach to online safety and which I look forward to delivering to pupils in my school in the New Year.

As a final point, I was very encouraged to hear Malcolm point out that we need to get away from ‘blocking and filtering’ because it merely serves to drive undesirable behaviour underground… perhaps this an occasion where the schools should be listening to the real experts in child protection, and concentrating on positive education rather than pointless filtering…

Since launching earlier this week the Student 2.0 blog has really pulled in the crowds. Sean is one of the eight highly readable and thought-provoking students having his say on education, and he’s from Perth, Scotland! Until now he had been publishing his thoughts on his own blog, but is now getting an even greater audience on Students 2.0. It’s great to see Scotland representing one of the continents on this experiment in really giving students their own very global voice.

Aware that stories which support one’s existing beliefs leap off the page, while others remain comparatively static, I was nevertheless heartened to see the quote in this story from a blog I discovered today. The blog is an offshoot of a magnificent website put together by Simon Ager.

Cross-posted to Alan Coady’s Musical Blog