Connected Blog

Four months ago I began holding lunchtime sessions based around the world famous TED Talks. These Inspiration Sessions had a simple format with a complex aim: empower anyone in the organisation to change the organisation. Here, I share the format, the resources, the questions and hope that it can be used in your school, your department or your Local Authority, to challenge current ways of thinking and empower everyone to make small, powerful changes.

The sessions themselves lasted no more than 90 minutes: 20 minutes of video, a different one each month, discussion about the clip, how it relates to our work or education in general, and then breaking out into reflection online. The advantage of using the cips as a stimulus is that the age-old reason for not sharing online – “my stuff isn’t good enough” – doesn’t figure here. It’s an opportunity to share something that’s not our own, and opportunity to rethink what we and our colleagues do, pubicly. It also presents a chance to discover a new technology that allows us to share, allowing for a natural extension and progression for the conversation stimulated by the monthly films.

At LTS we found the most popular ways of sharing were delicious social bookmarking, which allows simple things such as the talk itself or literature around the talk to be shared, without the individual feeling that they may contravene our self-publishing guidelines or that they don’t have the skill to write an engaging blog post. By using a Friendfeed room we’ve been able to connect our Research team with others around the organisation over a period of a few months, and an effective information-sharing group has begun to thrive.

Others found that crafting a blog post was the best way forward. Existing high quality examples of LTS blogging were joined by new blogs. Others are taking up much more internal blogging as a way to communicate better across teams.

Above all, the opportunity for a diverse group of colleagues to get together in a ’safe’ environment and self- and peer-assess what we do every day has helped show the way in several of our largest projects, finding room for improvement and gaps where innovation is required in the future. As they say, watch this space…

Here is a six-month outline of the talks we chose to use and some of the activities that we have designed around them. If you have other suggestions, leave them in the comments and they will be added over time. Let us know, too, how you get on should you plan your own Inspiration Sessions.

Month One:
Ken Robinson: Do Schools Kill Creativity?
Links from the first session

• Creativity in the workplace: do we have any? where is it? what’s lost?
• Kids take chances – can we? What are the barriers to taking a chance? Are we prepared to be wrong? What have our biggest ‘wrongs’ been?
• We squander tremendous talents; what are the tremendous talents in LTS? how can we stop this happening?
• We have no idea what is going to happen in the future; how do we teach kids (and guide their teachers) when we don’t know how?
• Hierarchies and their role in decision-making, workflows, coverage, time, attention
• University professors: does LTS live in its head? How can we make sure that what we do is more ‘real’? Is the ‘real’ the same in the minds of teachers, learners, Government? What is ‘real’

Month Two:
Malcolm Gladwell: What we can learn from spaghetti sauce
Links from the second session.

• How do we know that what we are doing is going to be good? Are focus groups, samples etc any good? Is there another way? Another type of person? Role of learners in helping us choose material for the online service.
• What’s the role of the niche?
• Are we LTS or a group of LTSes? How would this work?
• Teaching as mustard – there are only different kinds of mustard. Technology needs the same kind of democratisation.

Month Three:
David Pogue: When it comes to technology, simplicity sells
Links from the third session
Learning aim: Use internal blogs to talk about how we could simplify things, use external blogs to ask users what they would do. Examine Glow, Curriculum Design and documents (e.g. Building the Curriculum 3). Are we a simple as we can be without being simplistic? What would we change in our approach and systems to guarantee simplicity? How can individuals effect this kind of change?

Additional video:
Richard St John: Secrets of Success in 8 Words and 3 Minutes
How can we get these messages across?

Month Four:
Hans Rosling: Debunking Third World Myths With The Best Statistics You’ve Ever Seen
Links from the fourth session
Workshop on making better presentations, in time for Scottish Learning Festival.

Month Five:
Barry Schwartz: Paradox of Choice
Learning aim: how to track so much information, maybe based on this. Compare and contrast with the previous sessions on simplicity and the power of the niche. Where is the balance to be struck between catering for all and doing well for all? What’s the role for involving more ‘users’ of a service, students or parents, in taking on more of the workload?

Month Six:
David Eggers: Homework drop-in centres
An example of civic innovation in practice. What role is there for organisations to kick-start this kind of initiative, extend the potential of learning beyond school?

Last December I had the privilege of presenting some notions around the ‘Bebo Boomer’ at the Online Information Conference, the largest information professional conference in the world. I’ve got around to publishing this crammed 20 minutes of ideas, where I wanted to see if business and public service organisations were prepared to harness the basic skills of youngsters entering the workplace to create more innovation and better communications.

My co-presenters on the panel that day, Roo Reynolds and Mary Ellen Bates, sandwiched me in a way that made it look like we had conceived and carefully woven the whole hour together: Roo on the intricacies of virtual worlds in the workplace, then me on how young people entering the workplace could see their skills better harnessed, then Mary Ellen on the importance of play and gaming.

Roo carries the audio from the all three mini-presentations (including his Slideshare) and the discussion that followed, after I curated comments from Twitter, this blog and mobile phone SMSs. After much bullying from Roo (;-) here is the full presentation, slides, audio and laughter, from my intervention that day, or you can just listen to the audio below.

Cross-posted at edu.blogs.com 

Will must have finally ended up with some spare time hunting around YouTube this morning to find this. University researcher Johnny Chung Lee has taken a £34.25 Wiimote, some old ballpoint pens and some infrared buttons you could find in your Physics department to create a system that can turn any surface into a multi-touch interactive surface, much like that shown off my Jeff Han earlier this year.

Give the amount of effort Learning and Teaching Scotland has put into promoting gaming for learning, and the approval from our regulatory body that has been illustrated in the awarding of the George Gray Research prize to a project about Rollercoaster Tycoon for enterprise education, it’s really great to see yet more uses for the technology that go beyond simply playing the games. In this case, it’s just the remote control to the popular Wii gaming console.

And, as Will points out, it’s a great example of the importance of sharing, the importance of openness in the research, teaching and learning processes. Johnny could have done what other academics do: present it at a big conference and get the plaudits years after having worked this out, meaning us mere mortals in the classroom would have had to either work it out the hard way or miss a great opportunity. He didn’t. He presented on YouTube, and then took the process apart so that we can do it ourselves.

If only more teachers and academics shared their nuggets of brilliance in this way. Take a look yourself and be in awe.

Last year I wrote a series of posts about musical arranging, one of which attempted to outline the various possibilities involved. One of them was incorporating accompaniment styles from a culture different to that of the melody.

Had the option of embedding video been around at the time, I’d have encouraged you to listen to what happens -01:45 from the end of this video to illustrate the point. It’s all about imagination.

The Asus EeePC is a tiny, open source and highly affordable wireless laptop computer, no bigger than a paperback, which could open new possibilities for learning in Scottish classrooms.

Andrew Brown, one of Learning and Teaching Scotland new technologies team, has already blogged about the potential of the wee EeePC, and here takes us on a tour of this brilliant new machine. You can also see some of the photos of this machine, compared to some of its larger computer cousins.

Inserting some of these into a classroom won’t be an easy task, with plenty to think about in terms of connectivity as well as culture.

You can view the video on the Connected Live Blip.TV channel, and embed it into your own blog, or view below:

French photographer Yann Arthus Bertrand, who took those breathtaking aerial shots of our planet, has been undertaking a long-term large-scale project interviewing some of the 6 billion souls on this planet about their cultures, hopes and fears.

Fascinating stuff, both from a global citizenship side as well as a French, Modern Foreign Languages reading and viewing point of view, you simply click on the face of the person who you want to hear speak about love, war, peace, fear, politics, desert, tundra…

Cross-posted to Alan Coady’s Musical Blog

I had compiled a short post yesterday describing Music teachers’ frustrations at not being able to access YouTube in school as it hosts countless audio-visual illustrations of musical concepts. As evidence, I embedded such a video, but I’ve since felt obliged to delete the post. Let me explain why.

The concept in this particular case was bitonalism (playing simultaneously in 2 keys) and it could be seen especially easily as the pianist’s right hand was playing in C, entirely on white notes, while the left hand visited only black notes (Db pentatonic). The performance of Alberto Ginastera’s Tres Danzas Argentinas by Alexandra Prodaniuc was so dynamic that no pupil would forget it in a hurry. After a test run of the embedded video, I noticed that associated videos were featured in thumbnails below. One of these was entirely unsuitable for our environment.

Had I simply recommended the original video by providing a link, and viewers had stumbled upon something else while on the Youtube site proper, that would be one thing. However, in this situation the video would have been playing on my school blog page, as it were, and I felt obliged to delete the post.

What I imagine needs to happen, if the educational side of this otherwise fantastic resource is to be useful, is a situation where staff in schools can access YouTube via a password.

Those interested in seeing this commendable performance in their own environment can find it here. There is also a very clear illustration of finger substitution (to ensure sustain) in the right hand at 01:40.

In this video snippet see how some principals and headteachers-to-be are learning the skills on the job. 

You can view this video below or by visiting the Connected Live Blip.TV Channel.

I first came across the idea of a self-tuning guitar on Dr James Frankel’s commendable blog on music technology in education. Initially, I was quite sceptical about the idea of $2,199 on a self-tuning guitar or $900 to have the technology fitted to your own guitar.

My own feeling is that it would be better simply to improve your aural skills. The example I gave in a comment on his blog, is that the ear which would be surrendering tuning rights to technology is the same ear required to judge how far to bend a string or how wide a vibrato ought to be to suit the mood and style of the moment.

However, I feel that this comment didn’t really do service to the system as there is more to it than that. If you’ve never seen and heard a self-tuning guitar, take a look at this clip:

The technology has three main aims:

1. tuning the strings
2. getting strings up to tension before tuning begins – this would be a real time saver (I’m presuming that all six would be wound simultaneously – not possible for humans without unthinkable genetic manipulation)
3. ensuring that the adjustable bridge screws are correctly positioned so that the note at fret 12 is exactly one octave above the open string i.e. twice the frequency – you can imagine how much of a stop-and-start activity this would be if manually done – this might seem a little unclear unless you watch Gibson’s short instructional video. Click on the final choice entitled “instructions” when you get here

Is there even an occasion when handing over tuning decisions to technology is not ideal? I can think of one.

The technical bit
Many classical guitarists make tiny adjustments in tuning depending on the key. For example, if you are playing in E minor, you want the open G string to match exactly other fretted Gs. If you’re playing in E major (and you know for a fact that open G is not going to appear) then some players tune that string very slightly flat. Why? The key of E involves many appearances of G# and one of those most likely to appear is at the first fret of string 3. Pressing at the first fret raises the pitch slightly higher than any other increase of one fret – due to being so near to where the string is pinned to the nut and the resultant G# can end up being slightly too sharp for some ears.

Without getting into a huge dissertation on equal temperament, shall I just throw in for good measure that were you to be playing in Ab, the same G# would be called Ab (an enharmonic change) and might be tuned very slightly differently? Why? G# is most likely to mix with an E and a B to form a chord of E. An Ab is most likely to mix with a C and an Eb to form a chord of Ab.

Such choices are obviously not available to, say, pianists but most choral singers would be familiar (although perhaps not consciously) with the idea of notes being nudged very slightly up or down in the interest of more pure tuning.

So, would you consider buying this in for your guitar students, or is it a technology too far?

Every year the Scottish Learning Festival welcomes visitors from across the world. What is in it for guests from outside Scotland?

You can see the video below or on the Blip.TV Channel.