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Doug Belshaw // My main blog is at dougbelshaw.com/blog. I use Posterous for my FAQ, Conference blog and Ideas Garden. :-)
Doug Belshaw // My main blog is at dougbelshaw.com/blog. I use Posterous for my FAQ, Conference blog and Ideas Garden. :-)
Please go here instead: http://dougbelshaw.com/conferences
I'm on Annual Leave today doing a gig for my consultancy business, Synechism Ltd. (http://synechism.com). I've been asked by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) to speak for 10 minutes on the concept of an 'ideal' school and then be part of a panel for Q&A.
Should be interesting! :-)
I write this the morning after experiencing a 'duelling piano bar' for the first time. Wow. We need more (any?) of them in the UK. Fun.
As the DML Conference has gone on, I've felt that there's been more pushback. This is a good thing: what's being presented should always be subject to critique and thoughtful questioning.
I attended three-and-a-half sessions on Day 3 of the DML Conference 2012:
- Building Education Innovation: The Social & Technical Infrastructure
- Does digital and media literacy support civic engagement?
- The Politics and Paradoxes of Inclusion
- Ignite Talks
Diana Rhoten, the conference chair, was joined by Vicky Phillips (Gates Foundation), Ronaldo Lemos (Centre for Technology and Society in Brazil), and Leslie Redd (Valve). This was an interesting combination, especially as Valve is a games publisher that's only very recently decided to get involved in education.
Valve have a couple of websites for educators. the first is http://learnwithportals.com which uses the game Portal 2 to teach STEM subjects. The second is http://thinkwithportals.com which is about custom maps and modding. They're going to be giving away free copies of Portal 2 to educators, and their educational resources are also free.
Vicky Phillips from the Gates Foundation seemed very keen on the Common Core standards and the Shared Learning Collaborative (SLC). Apparently the SLC is "an infrastructure to find high-quality resources aligned to Common Core standards. If I had my cynical hat on I'd say it sounds like a portal to make it easier for businesses to sell educational content to schools. In that sense, there's clear water between the aims of the MacArthur Foundation and the Gates Foundation. But that may just be my perception (and biases).
Ironically, I found out that the US now has the Teaching Channel (https://www.teachingchannel.org). They're just getting started with theirs as the UK has just got rid of TeachersTV.
Ronaldo Lemos talked about 'LAN houses' that have sprung up all over Brazil causing moral panic. In fact, a law was passed so that they weren't allowed within a mile of a school. However, this was overturned through lobbying.
A gold rush is happening in Brazil at the moment, noted Lemos. Companies such as Pearson want to be part of the $700m set aside by the Brazilian government for digital educational resources. Unfortunately, the government has decided that these should be distributed on DVD-ROMs. Not so handy for tablets, then. And there's been no conversation about licensing and appropriation/re-appropriation. It sounds a bit of a mess.
I felt the questioning, both by the conference chair and the audience, was a bit weak in this session. We need a better way to crowdsource questions at conferences.
I was hoping for great things from this session, having recently finished my doctorate in the area of digital and new literacies (http://neverendingthesis.com). Unfortunately, the two short presentations I caught before bailing on the session presented their research findings in a rather stilted, formal way.
It's the DML conference! Where's the audience engagement? I ended up finding a quiet space to catch up on some RSS feeds. I saw some others had done likewise from other, parallel sessions. For #DML2013 (in Chicago) they need more participation, more workshops.
This was a fantastic session. Not only because danah boyd - someone I have huge respect for - was presenting, but due to the engaging way some important research was presented.
The session began with Antero Garcia on 'This Ain't Montessori: Mobile Participation in South Central High School'. Antero is a great guy, having taught over the past few years in a tough school whilst doing his PhD. He's also one of the conference organisers.
Antero got the audience discussing the ways in which we use our mobile phones professionally and civically, then asked how schools can support these practices. It all depends on context, however, and in his school in Los Angeles, that's extremely challenging. There have been times when the school has been on 'lockdown' for seven hours. He and his students aren't given any information, making it a dehumanising process.
We certainly have issues with our education in the UK, but nothing like the way that, to quote Antero, students in the US are routinely "criminalised in the school space". It's shocking, it really is.
He continued to discuss the ways that traditional models of learning are enforced by school policies. This disregards participatory learning and stifles civic engagement. Mobile phones are only available to students at lunch and after school - the very times they don't need them (as they can interact face-to-face). Antero called students' mobile device their 'civic portal'. Nice term.
One more interesting snippet from Antero's presentation is when the bomb squad came into his school. They needed everyone to turn off their phones so they didn't get damaged by the equipment being used. The hour or so when no-one was using mobile devices felt very odd, he commented. It changed the dynamic.
Without wanting to make this post an epistle, I want to quickly mention the research of Jeffrey Lane and Christo Sims. Jeff's been looking at social affordances of technology on the streets of Harlem. He's done some ethnographic research around the 'networked public', the ways courtships happen in both online and offline spaces. It was fascinating.
Christo picked up on Jeff's theme talking about the ways that the 'heteronormative imperative' played out in two groups of boys within a supposedly progressive new school in NYC. By the end of the year, those who were expressing masculinity through video games were seen as fine, whereas those doing so through offline behaviours had been suspended or expelled. Again, a really interesting study.
At the end of the session, danah boyd did a fantastic job wrapping things up. Although I didn't catch everything she said (she speaks so quickly!) she focused on who it is that has power in various contexts. For example, Antero's school doesn't want to be undermined by students, but it being undermined by the state.
Inclusion, argued danah, creates the appearance that we can live in a world without boundaries. But who gets to maintain power? Who sets the agenda in these environments. Inclusivity has many of the same problematic markers as meritocracy - it presumes that we can have everyone on a level playing field, ignoring other methods of exclusion.
One delicious 'vignette' that danah presented was in some work she was involved with when working with Yahoo! There was a forum for women including those in the US, the UAE and Brazil. For whatever reason they had to have a definition of 'pornography'. As you can imagine, each group of women thought their definition was the 'normal' and acceptable. Who's voices get to be respected? And in what context?
Finally, danah pointed out that we don't account for how certain interests become valued interests. What kinds of 'participation' do we want to include in 'participatory culture'?
Mind suitably blown by the previous session, I caught up with a few people and headed to the wine reception and then to the Ignite talks. They were good, and included ones from Mimi Ito and Henry Jenkins. However, I felt that as a group, the earlier ones (of which I was part) slightly edged these.
In the evening, I headed out for dinner with JP and Jamie from the BuzzMath team (http://buzzmath.com), as well as Richard, one of the DML Research competition winners. After a great dinner at the Salt House (http://salthousesf.com) we ended up at a duelling piano bar. It was my first experience of one, and a whole lot of fun.
Today, now that I've finished this mammoth blog post, I'm packing and then planning to head up to Golden Gate park. My flight's not until 16:00 so I've got a bit of time to see the sights. San Francisco's a place I'm going to have to back to with my family.
I've had a great time at the DML Conference 2012. It's been an extremely positive experience and I've met some wonderful people with some great ideas. Roll on #DML2013!
The conferences I've attended in the US have definitely been more positive affairs than in the UK. That's not a good or a bad thing, just an observation. For example, in the UK, after a period of experimentation, it's now unusual to have an unmoderated Twitter wall behind or beside a keynote speaker. This is mainly because of Donald Clark(gate) at the ALT-C conference in 2010.
No such prohibition or precaution is in place or, it would seem, required at the DML Conference 2012. The backchannel is almost entirely positive and any critique is extremely polite. Again, I'm not making a value judgement on this; it's just different (and, actually, quite refreshing). This may be an artefact of a novelty value that hasn't quite worn off yet, but it's still worth mentioning.
On Day 2 of #DML2012 I...
I'll say a little about each of the sessions.
The Hive Learning Network (http://hivelearning.org) is "a community of civic and cultural institutions dedicated to transforming the learning landscape, and creating opportunities for youth to explore their interests in virtual and physical spaces."
New York City has the most established, with Chicago being about a year behind in terms of partnering with libraries, museums, universities and other institutions. They're attempting to demonstrate the Connected Learning model (http://connectedlearning.tv) in action. One way of doing this is to get young people to tell their own story, using a similar 'Hanging Out / Messing Around / Geeking Out' framework seen at YouMedia (http://youmedia.org).
We were shown a series of videos and resources which can be found on the Etherpad for the session: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/DMLHiveLearningNetworks
The idea behind Hive Learning and projects such as YouSTEM (http://youstem.northwestern.edu) is for challenges to be like the first levels of a video game. It starts off as just hanging out, but advanced levels lead to achievement badges. The blended, on-demand help system means that young people can get help either online or in person. But only when they ask for it.
There's been lots of interest around the Hive Learning model, so they've been starting 'Hive Popups' - indeed there was a 'Hive London' at the Mozilla Festival I attended last October. They've found that bringing in (say) 15 organisations for a 6-hour session removes the protracted 'yak' before setting up something more permanent. It means that partners 'get it' rather than having a year of conversations.
There was some pushback by those who thought that the money (c.$25,000 to impact around 25 young people) would have been better spent within the existing education system. As I tried to explain, funding innovation is costly, especially when you're trying to create new contexts and ways of learning.
I have to say that I went into this plenary session not expecting much. I expected it to be akin to the sponsors' slots I've seen at other conferences. I was delighted, therefore, when it turned into a really well-informed and enlightening debate.
(just before the session launched Spigot, a news aggregator, which you might want to check out: http://spigot.org)
On the panel were Carina Wong (Gates Foundation), Mitch Kapor (inventor and investor) and Connie Yowell (MacArthur Foundation). I was *so* impressed with Connie Yowell's insights, knowledge and reasoning about the where and the how of where to focus philanthropic money. I could have listened to her all day.
Most of what was said in the session that was of value came from Connie, who started off her piece with thanking everyone for attending the DML Conference stating her wish that DML becomes an 'intellectual home' for like-minded people. She referenced Jim Gee's notion that it's not about e-learning but a-learning. In other words it's about affinity spaces (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affinity_spaces).
The starting point for MacArthur's funding, said Connie, is 'what experiences do we want young people to have?' The biggest problem, she believes, is around fragmentation - hence the Connected Learning initiative (http://connectedlearning.tv) We need to move the conversation beyond teachers and accountability and towards the feedback mechanisms for young people.
Mitch Kapor talked about his Level Playing Field Initiative (http://www.lpfi.org) and upon the enormous amount of talent that we neglect because of where it's situated. We can scale small, successful programmes using technology, but at the moment it's 'seriously under-leveraged'. Sometimes, said Mitch, we need to admit that we don't know how all this will play out and be willing to adapt.
Connie came back at this by talking about the ways schools use subject disciplines that are great for organizing information, but not so much for organizing learning. She gave the example of the Quest2Learn school (http://q2l.org) around games-based learning.
However, Connie went out of her way to problematize the notion of 'scale' and 'replicability'. Cloning doesn' work, she pointed out as context matters deeply. One extremely insightful comment that she made around this really stuck with me: policies and people 'churn' but professional networks are remarkably resilient. Therefore, we need to be scaling (and investing in) the networks.
There was a note of caution sounded by Carina Wong who pointed out that being overly-radical with the education system can jeapordise the educational experiences of those who are already in the system. She gave the example of Netflix which ultimately moved to streaming, on-demand movies, but shifted the paradigm enough simply by allowing DVDs by mail.
Connie Yowell came back at this talking about the ways in which we define the 'edge'. If we define it as being within the education system, at best all we get are hybrid incremental changes. It's really hard to be innovative and allow for failure when you're in a high-stakes environment with other people's children. How right she is!
Ultimately, and I think this is something that most people in the room agreed upon, we will all have been successful in helping reform education if, in five years time, what it means to be a teacher has shifted. If we manage this well, it's a lever for other changes.
It's difficult for me to judge the value of this session as I was so tired by this point I struggled to sustain a conversation during the opening activity of the session. I ended up heading back to my room half-way through the session for a nap.
I do think, however, that there's a festishisation of 'Making'. As I was saying to Audrey Watters and Bud Hunt over beer that evening, reducing 'Making' to doing extremely geeky stuff with electronic devices is problematic for me. We spend time and effort on things that we deem valuable. I've spent time attempting to solder, tinkering with Linux distributions and being on the edges of that culture. It's not for me. Unfortunately, for some (not all), it's almost like a religion.
That's not to say, however, that we shouldn't be exposing more young people to how things work and how they are put together. Of course we should. We need to recognise, however, that the creativity inherent in Making isn't something exclusive to that craft.
It's difficult for me to sum up the conversation I had over dinner and beers with Bud, Audrey and Steve in the evening. It was so wide-ranging that it was difficult to capture. I did, however, like Steve's analogy of food to educational reform. We know what is good for us, Steve pointed out, but we still allow fast-food places to serve things that are bad for us. And as consumers, we still fill up on this bad stuff.
As Audrey pointed out, however, there's an equity issue there. If you can't *afford* to eat the healthy, low-fat, organic produce, then your choices are constrained. And so the wheel turns...
I'm looking forward to Day 3 of the DML Conference 2012. I'm very much looking forward to danah boyd's session on 'The Politics and Paradoxes of Inclusion'.
I shall make copious notes. :-)
First of all, I have to express my delight at being given the opportunity to attend this conference. I'm not sure whether I'm blown away more by the calibre of the presenters or my fellow delegates. I'm certainly in some select company here.
Day 1 of the third annual DML Conference kicked off with John Seely Brown's keynote. I've long admired JSB's work from afar and so having the chance to see his warm, effective and thoughtful style of presentation was delightful. There's no way I can summarise everything he said, so I'll give you my highlights:
- Scalability is the big issue. Whereas the 20th century saw 'S curves' with moments of stability, there is no stability in sight in the 21st century.
- The half-life of a given skill is constantly shrinking. Interestingly, and (to my mind) with reference to Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi, JSB talked about "participating in knowledge flows as an active sport."
- Technology is the easy part. The hard part is the social and institutional.
- The role of tacit knowledge takes on increasing importance as our world is in constant flux. JSB used Jeff Bezos, Jimmy Wales and other Silicon Valley success stories as examples of why Montessori schools are so good (they all attended them as children).
- iPhones and smartphones are 'curiosity amplifiers'.
- There are 'knowledge ecologies' around media and games such as Harry Potter (see fanfiction.com) and World of Warcraft (see wowwiki.com) In WOW, players create their own custom dashboards to make sense of their gameplay. What if we did this in education?
- The Open Source movement is a participatory learning platform. It provides cognitive apprenticeships "enculturaing to a virtual community of practice."
- We need a 'Blended Epistemology'. We must augment Homo Sapiens (man as knower) with Homo Faber (man as maker). This links closely to JSB's love of Montessori schools.
- Interestingly, JSB talked of our ability to now make not only 'things' but *contexts*. For example, changing the music of a film alters not only its meaning but what you actually 'see'.
- Blogging is as much about creating context as it is about creating content as a blogger is a node amongst other nods.
- Another part of a new 'Blended Epistemology' is Homo Ludens (a highly nuanced concept of play). We need to re-grind our conceptual lenses.
- If you're not comfortable tinkering, you're going to be in a state of constant fear. Tinkering can be a gut 'feeling' for systems.
- We need 'networked imagination', something that emerges from collective action predicated upon networks of practice and communities of interest.
- JSB finished by talking about the one-room schoolhouse being an effective learning environment because teachers were mentors and guides, encouraging older kids to teach younger kids.
Wow. So many ideas and concepts in such a short space of time!
After that session I stayed in the main hall for 'Democritizing Learning Innovation' chaired by Mark Surman, CEO of Mozilla. With him on the panel were Gever Tulley (Tinkering School), Jess Klein (Mozilla/Hive Learning), TechNinja and Super-Awesome Sylvia.
Mark had purposely sought out a child to be part of the panel as, he believes, innovation in the future is "more likely to come from a 15 year-old than a 50 year-old." Sylvia is 10. She has her own YouTube show called the Sylvia Show (http://sylviashow.com) in which she shows people how to be a maker and to experiment/tinker with stuff.
Gever Tulley set up the Tinkering School (http://tinkeringschool.com) a few years ago. It's a place where young people come to learn by doing. He gave a fantastic example of braiding rope out of recycled plastic bags. Children learned how to make a 'super-rope' which then turned into a walkway between trees.
What really interested me was Gever's reflections on the competences we already expect of children *before* they begin the learning journey. At the Tinkering School they don't expect that competency but realise that it's emergent. In this he referenced John Dewey and Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development. His school focuses on projects that create a context where children choose the next step based upon their interests.
Jess Klein joined Mozilla last y ear after working with The Hive. She showed how she'd learned from young people and altered the learning environment to facilitate peer learning. A great example of this is through Hackasaurus (http://hackasaurus.org), now a Mozilla product, and one that has evolved - and continues to evolve.
Jess gave the example of some stinging criticism she got from a teenager called Joe from Brighton who vented his frustration at Hackasaurus. After letting this sink in for a few days, the Hackasaurus team took onboard his suggestions, and now Joe is helping them develop the product!
In the Q&A session afterwards I was most impressed with Gever Tulley who fielded some questions about the Tinkering School extremely well. He talked about the need to turn assessment on its head and give students the ownership of assessing their own - and their peers' work. He mentioned tinkering being "more of a philosophy than a process," about it being "the gap between when you think something's done and it actually working." That really resonated with me.
Mark Surman closed the session by saying how we need to "bang stuff together" in order to build things. We need to bring communities together.
After lunch, I really wanted to attend the session entitled 'Are Badges the Answer? Perspectives on Motivation for Lifelong Learning'. Unfortunately, by the time I got there (ten minutes before the session started) the small room given over for the session was absolutely full and was spilling out into the corridor.
Given that Cathy Davidson, Erin Knight and Matt Thompson (who all have a big role to play in Open Badges) were also stuck in the corridor an impromptu breakout session started. By the end of this there were around 200 people there and it became known as #OccupyBadges on the Twitter stream.
This session was a useful clarificatory session for people who wanted to ask questions about badges, as well as there being some pushback from those still unsure. It seems that some people want to map out how things will pan out to the Nth degree, unfortunately, which just isn't possible!
Overall the #OccupyBadges session was extremely useful, very positive and expertly chaired by Cathy and by Erin.
I'm co-kickstarter of Purpos/ed (http://purposed.org.uk), a Co-operative Community Interest Company attempting to get as many people as possible to debate the question: 'What is the purpose of education?'. I thought that putting myself forward for an Ignite talk at #DML2012 would help get the message out to a wider audience.
I give a fair number of presentations, so if you asked me to speak for an hour on Purpos/ed, I'd be fine. However, the format of the Ignite talk (20 slides, 15 seconds per slide) caused me some concern. If you get just one line wrong, it throws off the rest of your presentation. Thankfully, I didn't fluff it and my talk was well-received.
My fellow Ignite-rs were spectacular, talking about everything from assessment programmes to zombies! Fantastic.
After the Ignite talks and a short break, the projects that had secured funding as part of the DML Badges competition (http://dmlbadges.net) were announced. I was one of the judges for this, so it was great to see so many happy faces.
The Mozilla Science Fair in the lobby seemed to go down well, although I spent most of the time talking to Howard Rheingold and some of the projects from England.
Finally, to round off an extremely busy first day at #DML2012 I was invited for dinner with those involved in DML's new Connected Learning initiative (http://connectedlearning.tv). It was great to meet people like Audrey Watters and Bud Hunt in person after following them for so long, and to get the chance to meet Mimi Ito again.
Roll on Day 2!
I've mentioned elsewhere that over the past two years, after (temporarily?) leaving the classroom I've travelled to more places than in previous years combined. This is seen by my wife as a glamorous activity - and it is, to an extent. I greatly enjoy meeting new people and places, as well as the time I get to reflect and ponder.
But travelling by one's self can be a rather lonely experience. Part of the price you pay for new experience is being constantly in unfamiliar situations. Like a smooth pebble found on a beach, everyday habits and routines help wear the edges off to make life easier. In contrast, travelling can provide you with sharp, vivid situations that stick in the memory for a long time - but this demands constant attention. Consequently, when travelling I'm tired not just from time zone differences, but in the difference in the amount of attention I have to pay to unfamiliar surroundings.
As I write this I'm in London Heathrow airport, having flown down from Newcastle. My wife and children waved me off; I'll see them again next Monday. My destination is San Francisco where I'm doing three things:
1. Attending the DML Conference (#dml2012)
2. Helping judge the DML Badges competition (#dmlbadges)
3. Doing an Ignite talk on Purpos/ed (http://purposed.org.uk)
I'll keep you updated day by day with what I'm up to. :-)
I was involved in a session at this conference.
(the audio is also at archive.org and the slides can be found on Slideshare)
This was my first JISC CETIS Conference. It had all of the elements of a great gathering: a fantastic venue (the National College in Nottingham), a well-designed programme, and informal sessions. Not to mention, of course, very committed delegates.
I was there having been invited to provide some input to a session being run by Phil Barker and Simon Grant (both from JISC CETIS) around the topic of Open Badges. I was delighted to be involved - you can see my slides and listen to the audio above.It was good to catch up with some JISC folk and others in the sector with very much a technical bent. It did make me realise, however, just how different the mindsets of educators and developers are. The former camp want technical solutions to well-defined problems. The latter are mostly concerned with successfully-realised technical solutions - even if there's not a well-defined problem to be solved.An assumption that's prevalent in all sectors is that if you're interested in learning technologies then you must be a techie. Whilst I may be slightly technically-minded, I'm actually not that interested in how to get from A to B. I kind of just want it to work - preferably using open standards.I suppose the upshot of this is that I pitched my input into the Open Badges session for those interested in how they could change education. In hindsight, this was a mistake as I don't think most developers are actually that interested in the problem; they're interested in the technologies. As one person who came along to the session told me during a coffee break, "We're sick to death of hearing that X, Y or Z is going to change the world. Accept that it isn't and move on."Oops.It seems to me that most development and innovation in learning technologies (from the developer side) comes from neat, pragmatic solutions to existing (perceived) problems, or ways of combining data streams to get interesting mashups. And there's nothing wrong with that, of course. That's absolutely what we need. The final keynote, for example, from Prof. Mark Stubbs (Head of Learning and Research Technologies at Manchester Metropolitan University) showed how his institution had gone about a curriculum design process for over 50,000 students. I can't remember pedagogy being mentioned once.I'm not being critical of the conference or the community in my comments above. What it really brought home to me, however, is the need for educators to engage more with things that are technologically possible - and for learning technologists to engage more with pedagogy. We talk about 'mainstreaming innovation' but, in all honesty, just getting techies to talk to teachers (and vice versa) seems to me to be the whole barrier.
I spent today at the Guardian Innovation in Education event at Prospero House, London. It was the first time I've chaired a session or spoken on a keynote panel (you can read about what I spoke about here and there's a pre-conference interview here).
It was a day of two halves, really. The programme promised much in the morning, but it was only Mick Waters, former head of the QCDA that stirred things up and said things that had people nodding heads, sending out tweets and writing things down. The session on leadership I thought was particularly awkward as the panel had little or no experience of being in such a position. Thankfully, the session chair Russell Hobby from the National Association of Head Teachers was able to step in with some pertinent points.
I had a similar feeling of being short-changed in the session entitled Innovation in workforce development: the importance of teacher training and supported professional development to empower teachers to innovate. The panel didn't have enough breadth of experience (or specific examples of good practice) to give us any meat.
Thankfully, the conference organization, the venue and the afternoon session were all great. I chaired a session featuring an eclectic mix of speakers from games designers to academics which seemed to go down well. At least I kept everyone to time! Lord David Puttnam was fantastic in his keynote, teasing out issues in the education system. I asked him the Q&A what he believed to be the purpose(s) of education He replied that he considers it to be all about helping people to optimise their talents and feel 'successful' (which gives them confidence). Puttnam recounted the story of an American journalist he knows who was in London during the August riots. He found our youth to be 'fearful' and wishing to live 'normal lives'. How sad.
Apart from David Puttnam's keynote, the session I enjoyed most was Best practice: Showcasing the benefits and challenges of adopting innovative technologies in education. This featured a couple of people of whom I was already aware (Ollie Bray, Abdul Chohan) and two that I wasn't (Simon Elledge, Martin Palfrey). They shared with us their successes and failures at the 'coalface' implementing learning technologies. I think a lot of people went away with ideas from that session.
The final session was the keynote panel discussion of which I was part. This ended up, after much shuffling over the last few weeks, comprising Ian Fordham (Education Foundation), Douglas Archibald (Whole Education) and me. I very much appreciated Douglas' suggestion to the conference organizers that people had 15 minutes to talk to one another on their tables, with a truncated Q&A session at the end of the day.
Overall, then, a success for the Guardian in attracting big names (Google was a 'knowledge partner, they got David Puttnam to keynote) and in some fantastic conference organisation. A little more thought about who they get for which sessions next time might be prudent. Thankfully, the feedback form champagne draw took place before the keynote panel session ended, meaning people (probably) didn't have a chance to rate me...
I spent last weekend at the Mozilla Festival at Ravensbourne College in Greenwich, London. The main reason I decided to give up a weekend with my family to attend yet another conference was because it wasn't just another conference. Although I felt slightly out of my depth on the technical front (I'm no programmer) I'm excited about Mozilla moving into the education space.
Of course, being Mozilla, they're not perpetuating the same old paradigm and are, in the words of CEO Mark Surman, 'going big' on learning. If you haven't seen their Open Badges architecture (and the associated DML Competition) you haven't been paying attention. Education is driven, for better or for worse by assessment, so providing alternatives for the latter allows us to more easily change the former. I'm certainly fully signed-up for evangelising and exploring badges, as you've probably noticed if you've read my main blog recently!
But back to the Festival. It's difficult to sum up how an event makes you feel: it's of course possible to list and describe, as I shall below, the sessions and what happened, but portraying the well of positivity is difficult. "More hack, less yack" was the order of the day, with a distinctly Californian can-do attitude taking over that particular corner of the Greenwich Peninsula for three days. It's also tough to explain how, in what I'm increasingly realising is Mozilla's modus operandi, the whole event was extremely well-organised yet allowed for flexibility and spontaneity. Saturday and Sunday ostensibly started at 9am, yet didn't start until around 9.45am on Sunday. But still, everything was fine and no-one panicked. Awesome.
Another example of the can-do yet laid-back approach of organisers and delegates was exemplified in the first session I attended on Saturday. It was on paper-based prototyping, which I'd seen briefly on Friday at The Hive session for teenagers. For whatever reason, the person who was supposed to be leading the session didn't appear. At other conferences where something similar has happened one of two things has happened: either delegates wait around for someone to come along, or they simply leave. There must have been around twenty-five people in the session and I didn't see one of them leave. Given we had a stack of paper, I suggested we start with a paper aeroplane competition. And we just made things up from there.
I went to a couple of sessions relating to badges, one on Saturday and one on Sunday. I knew most of the stuff discussed at the first session, stepping in to help Carla Casilli (@cc_open) and Brian Brennan (@brianloveswords) explain the concept to those encountering it for the first time. The second was more enlightening in the sense that it was more of a case study of how one organization, the Digital Youth Network (DYN), have thought through how to introduce a badge ecosystem in their work with teenagers. There's a couple of PDFs they put up on the screen that I'll be chasing them to make available online.
On Saturday afternoon I attended a session entitled: 'Open, Participatory and Fun: Working the Mozilla Way'. Gervase Markham (@gerv) facilitated this session in a way in alignment with these principles, getting us to think through in groups what makes for successful projects. As it turned out, our group focused on a non-web idea of an 'internet-free zone' in rural France. Gerv steered us towards the following things that he suggested every project needs (and which I'll be talking with Andy Stewart for soon to check that we're on top of for Purpos/ed):
We were reminded that every project has a 'presumed level of knowledge' and that it is our job to enable meaningful participation. Amen to that.
Two more sessions. First, I went to 'HTML5 and Other New Technologies Explained for Humans' which was an exteremely well-attended presentation by Christian Heilmann (@codepo8). He not only presented using HTML5 but explained it in a way I could understand and potentially use. The 'grab bag' for the session is available here. Unfortunately, the same couldn't be said for the extremely enthusiastic but ultimately-unsuccessful session on the Storify API I attended afterwards - which is a shame as I really like (and use) Storify.
I still haven't mentioned the amazon barista-created coffee, the Firefox walk-around mascots, the amazingness of the venue or the people I bumped into. Oh well, this semi-braindump will have to suffice for the time being...
