@derekrobertson's...

Work placement girl in games skills shock!

The fact that I am a 38 year old digital immigrant (although I would argue that I am reasonably fluent in the techno-speak) was brought home to me with a bang this afternoon. I have had the pleasure of having a work experience girl (Lesley-Anne) from a local school in the Consolarium with me today. I have given her quite a few demanding tasks to do such as researching the Xbox 360 for me. She did this very well so as a reward I asked her to have a go at Zelda: Twilight Princess so that she could let me know what she thought of it. She was really excited by this because she has yet to play this version of Zelda. Here it is:

I had to leave her for an hour or two and on my return she had reached areas of the game that I did not know existed! What a plodder I must be. But, I started to regain some gaming diginity when she got stuck in a dark tunnel and couldn't get out...(ha ha, I sumgly sniggered) but NO...what did she do? Did she moan and give up? No, She escaped the tunnel, got back on her horse and rode to the shop to buy a lantern. More problems, no lantern there! So what was her next option? Straight to Google and a search for a game walkthrough. Within minutes she had found the information she needed, found the lantern and ploughed through that part of the game...breathtaking. Her speed, adaptibility and almost symbiotic interaction with the game and strategies to help overcome barriers was something to see. I think I need to consider employing some of these experts to help drive things here!

So does every child matter?

When I was a student in my first year at Northern College we were asked by our tutor, Frances McKenzie, to bring in a poem, a picture or a piece of text and to discuss what irt meant to us. I chose to read the passage from Dickens' 'A Christmas Carol' where the Ghost of Christmas Present finishes his time with Scrooge by showing him two pauper children who he referred to as 'Ignorance and Want.'

This scene always resonated with me, particularly as a young child when my dad read this novella to me and my brother in the winter of 1976/76! I couldn't believe that there might be children who didn't have a happy home, shelter, good food and someone to read to them....

I think that was a seminal moment in the development of my value base, particularly in relation to my views on community and the importance of equal opportunities to a good and engaging education.

The reason for this preamble is that I just witnessed a powerful and passionate presentation by Valerie Thompson from the elearning Foundation. She spoke about the digital divide and in some ways made me take a step back and take another look at access to the social software that it is argued. One of the figures that she quoted was that 2.5m children still do not have access to the internet at home. I was rather embarrassingly blind to this figure.

In view of this fact and what it means in terms of inequality of access to effective learning resources, communities and practices, Valerie went on to ask:

So does every child matter?

I think that is a question that we all need to ask ourselves as a fundamental aspect of how we build learning communities. The figure she quotes suggests that our developing web 2.0 social learning community is unfortunately excluding a great number of people who may be shrouded by the cloak of the Ghost of Christmas Present.