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#LWF11 – David McCandless, Author & Information Designer – Infographics & Data

January 11, 2011 By 1 Comment

David is the author of http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/.

Worked through some fantastic infographics from his site, go look at them now.  Better still see his TED talk:

Some interesting insights from using Google InSights to track search terms.  Great tool for use in the classroom.

Nice talk about needing to compare proportions rather than totals, in the concept of military spending.  Love the Maths of normalising figures for population.

Take data and use it as a lense to clarify your thinking.

Like Stephen Heppel’s learners David is self-taught in his technical skills using the likes of Youtube.

What happens when you make data beautiful?  Visualisation helps make the mind envisage scale and proportion far better.  Can condense a huge amount of info into a small amount of space.

Nice graphic of the difference between the Left & Right in American politics.  Helps you to see where someone else is coming from.

Information design is about solving information problems, something we have lots of now.

Fascinating and enlightening talk – a breath of fresh air after the intense debate from previous session.  And to top it off his book is on sale at Amazon!

Filed Under: ELearning, Maths Tagged With: , , ,
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#LWF11 – Stephen Heppell – What’s on the horizon?

January 11, 2011 By 1 Comment

Stephen started with a nice anecdote about starting his career asked a tough group of students to help him out by getting teaching tips from other teachers in return from him teaching them the content.

Be Very Afraid programme.  Students taught themselves to play an instrument in a month.

Evolution of tech in our lifetimes: Hardware -> software -> databases -> searching -> socialising -> learning next.

Learning will happen where we least expect it.  e.g. subtitling Bollywood movies in other languages in India; superclasses – 3 teachers, 90 kids, 5 terms learning in 3; Sugata Mitra – hole-in-the-wall.

Spent a few minutes tearing apart teacher training, if you don’t have the very best schools in that area then what right do you have to teach teachers?!

Should be ashamed to be at the top of Gove’s English Bacc league table – child cruelty!  We can do better.

People plus technology breaks cartels – education is a cartel that will be broken by people and technology.

Interesting to hear that Stephen is planning a free school, taking advantage of Gove’s policies to push his own way of doing things Academy!

Pupils need to prepared for the uncertainty.  The reason we are in the vanguard is because we’ve lived through the endless surprise of technological innovation in our lifetime.  We haven’t articulated how good this could be.

The World is broken, learning can heal conflict and suffering.  We have the chance to do so.  Make it loud make it heard!  A proper call to arms.

A captivating talk, Stephen showed how easy it can seem to present when you know your subject matter so well, no notes, just a series of images and a belief in your argument.

Filed Under: ELearning, Leadership Tagged With: , , , ,
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#LWF11 – Keri Facer, Prof of Education, MMU

January 11, 2011 By 1 Comment

Keri Facer.

Can’t continue to argue about whether we focus on the individual or whether we use technology to bring learners together.

We need to learn to live with connectivity that we’ve never imagined before.  Evolution of non-human-like intelligence.

Need a curriculum for collaborative and collective intelligence.  Diminishing economy and rapidly changing aging demographic.  Need to understand the relationships between generations.  Beginning to see education become divided by wealth.  Changeing environmental situation.  Responding to refugees, water supply issues etc..

It’s all doom and gloom, but truly passionate!

We need to develop spaces where we can all come together and solve these issues.  Can’t continue the lie that  a 1st class degree will be the ticket to immunisation from these issues.  Education needed that is engaged with it’s communities.

Cooperative education movements, democratic education movements, small schools, sustainable schools and education justice collectives are all helping to bridge these gaps.

How do techs build communities and enable learners to think about their futures?  Need to start shouting about these projects and values so that the next Government might support this movement.

A highly passioned, and not surprisingly well received argument.  Graham chose these two contrasting viewpoints well, certainly enlivened the debate.

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#LWF11 Katharine Birbalsingh, Teacher & Author

January 11, 2011 By 5 Comments

Katharine Birbalsingh, the former Head Teacher famously sacked following her outspoken speech at the Tory Party conference.

Started with the story of challenging behaviour in Secondary Schools.  How have we got to this point, a dark age of education?  How can we move schools on into the 21st Century?  Need to equip children with a bag of goodies to enable them to thrive in the World.

One thought is to stop teaching so much content and to concentrate on skills, group work etc..  Basic knowledge though is necessary to be able to be creative.  Need to move back towards a more traditional form of teaching.  A middle class child already has this as they pick up so much at the dinner table, from the Maths tutor or from Dad reading at bed time.  Not so from less advantaged children who rely entirely on their schools.

Many reformers went to Grammar school and mistakenly think that most children are going through a similar education system.  Creating a system where children do not get access to the ‘bag of goodies’ that they themselves received.

We know that exams are being dumbed down. We are letting down many many pupils.

Many believe that an injection of tech is needed.  But this is reformers again misunderstanding what is needed.  Eton has only 2 interactive whiteboards.

Katharine continued talking along these lines, pointing out that Eton etc are very different to main stream schools, but without really going anywhere with her argument.

Argued that lack of technology not an issue as children are already skilled to the hilt from their own use.

“The education that is best for the best is the education that is best for all”.  Need to be educationally Conservative.  Argued that main stream schools reject what is successful in the likes of Eton.

There is no hiding from negative feedback in this room, the Twitter feed on the hashtag #LWF11 throughout this talk was cutting in it’s criticism.

Filed Under: ELearning, Everything Else, Top Posts Tagged With: , , , , ,
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#LWF11 David Braben – Frontier Developments & Legendary Games Designer

January 11, 2011 By Leave a Comment

David is one of our greatest games designers, I was excited to hear him talk as I’ve been playing his games since the 80s!

What motivates kids today?  Fame, money, instant gratification.  Not hard work and days of graft.  So are today’s kids doomed?

Games are a great weapon for education, as Dawn greatly pre-empted.  Games motivate kids in small easy steps with a real sense of progression and feedback, linking back nicely to Derek’s first talk of the day.

Ironically kids will do the hard slog ‘grinding’ in games, and di get the ‘secret learning’ that Dawn spoke of.

There is great learning even in ‘violent’ games, e.g. creation of content within Halo.

Crucially games are accessible. On consoles rather than PCs.  There are not huge learning steps needed to produce something with the game creation tools.  The motive and learning is there already as kids have played the games.

Most of the more raw tools are not easily accessed by teachers and pupils, e.g. XBox

David learnt on Acorns etc when programming was more accessible and ‘cool’.

How hard can it be to create something?  Not that hard.

David and a group from Cambridge have come up with Raspberry Pi, a device and open source framework to help take things to the next stage and look at Programming.  HDMI, ARM CPU, Linux, Wireless but made in small indestructible capsule.  Could you give one to every pupil?  Looking to trial this year.

Always had a problem with ICT, as every kid he talks to says ICT is dull!  Focussed on MS tools.  Such a far cry from the self-driven learning that happens and the skills needed for the industry.  Turned interested kids off and confirmed to those with little interest and experience that it wasn’t for them.  Showed UCAS data showing Computer Science applicants crashing with the first ICT students going through school.

Wants to give kids with no home PC’s access to the Web and to programming and all that it includes.

David showed a real passion for re-engaging our young pupils with computing rather than ICT and a good understanding of the issues that the discrete subject of ICT faces.  I think Dawn & co’s work shows that we need to move away from ICT as a discrete subject sooner rather than later.  And in it’s place push Computing as a more viable and interesting option.  Interesting take on the access to traditional PCs in the home.  I really need to accurately survey our pupils and find just what technology they do have available in the home.

Filed Under: EdTech, ELearning Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
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#LWF11 Dawn Hallybone – Games Based Learning in Primary

January 11, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Disclaimer: I would consider Dawn a friend, thanks to many interactions via Twitter & Teachmeets etc even though we’ve only met a handful of times..  I won’t go into great detail about the work she has done as her blog has details of it all. LWF Bio.

Dawn discussed using Nintendo DS & Wii with the pupils are so engaged in their learning that Dawn doesn’t really need to be greatly involved for large parts of the lessons.  Writing and learning underpins the gaming experience.

Sharing via Twitter and Teachmeet have been great inspirations for Dawn.  Redbridge game network has allowed them to share their knowledge and their resources.

They have developed great cross-currciular learning projects, with games based learning as a small inspirational part of it.  Kids enjoy their ‘secret learning’

Dawn’s school and the Redbridge network have began to look at evidence.  There are clear signs that Maths & English are improving, very clear signs that engagement, attendance and punctuality are improved considerably.

Again this is an example of fantastic innovation in Primary classrooms, this innovation needs to spread into the Secondary classroom.  How can we do this?  Costs are higher and timetables don’t make things easy.  I think we need strong leaders who can remove these traditional constraints.  And again, as Dawn said it;s about sharing the good practice that has gone one already.  Borrowing the great work that has happened via the Consolarium in Scotland that Derek Robertson spoke about earlier.  One school in the research group is Secondary.

Inspirational as ever – well done Dawn!

Filed Under: Classroom, EdTech, ELearning, Featured Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,
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