@derekrobertson's...

The Fourth Wall: A cautionary tale...

As a big fan of sci-fi I have always been particularly taken with some stories but particularly those that depict a dystopian vision. Particular ones that struck me form my school days were The Pedestrian by Ray Bradbury and The Fun They Had by Issac Asimov as well as the movie The Day The Earth Stood Still with the classic, "Klaatu, barada nikto!" call to Gort the intergalactic policeman.

My exposure to sci-fi stories was enhanced in the late seventies when I and many many others became seduced by the magical sci-fi stories that featured in the 2000AD comic. Featuring favourites such as Judge Dredd, Flesh and Strontium Dog I would get totally lost in the amazing future worlds that were beautifully depicted in this comic but the one theme that always used to make me think was Tharg's Future Shocks. Tharg was the alien editor of the comic and he would occasionally throw in a story that always had a quirk or that would kick you right in the backside and make you think.

This blogpost is about one such 'Future Shock' called The Fourth Wall. Published in Prog 85 in October 1978 this cautionary tale warns of the inexorable march of advancements in technology, and in particular technologies for entertainment. In the story we see the young boy, Chris, very excited about nis new TV experience. The Fourth Wall is an experimental televisual experience and works only when you close the door. It then immerses the viewer in a very 'lifelike world' with terrible consequences...

The Fourth Wall from Derek Robertson on Vimeo.

I remember a few years ago when the NIntendo Wii first came out that I couldn't help thinking just how prescient Tharg was. Here, 30 years ago was a short story predicting immersive technologies so lifelike and involving that you didn't just consume the visuals, you participated in them.

Now with the PS3 Move and the Kinect system from Microsoft coming out the future of immersive gaming is getting very to close to The Fourth Wall. However, I am very excited about the prospect of what both these technologies will have to offer and how they can enhance game play but I do have some concerns too. For example, imagine a system that measures the player's body movements and efficiency to score, for example, how well you placed the plastic bag over the hoodlums head  in Manhunt and held it just so and just tight enough to dispatch him! Now that would be immersive gaming but with some sensationally dubious outcomes....maybe not as severe as the boy in the Fourth Wall's but one for us to carefully consider...

Dr Kawashima: a good resource used by good teachers

I've had a bit of time to think about the reaction to my appearance on the media last week where I was discussing the extended Dr Kawashima intervention that I am carrying out in four local authorities throughout Scotland after the Easter Break. An intervention funded by Learning and Teaching Scotland through their Consolarium initiative.

Supportive texts received immediately after my appearance included:

"Press the red button to go interactive? I did this and selected the translate from Dundonian option." Stuart Lennie

"Megastar! Stay on and audition for the part of Nancy with Graham Norton!" Con Morris

Thanks guys!

In case you missed it here is a clip posted by Ewan McIntosh (copyright of the BBC) of one of the discussions that I had on BBC Breakfast:

Michele Ledda from the Manifesto Group said on the programme that computer games were "harmless enough and useful". However, he did not think they had a place in the class and that there was a crisis of authority because people like me are suggesting that new technologies such as games do have a valid and important role to play in teaching and learning. He also made light of continued attempts to investigate a variety of ways in which we can help maximise learners full potential. His reference to fish oil, which apparently is good for the brain, and then his bizarre reference to snake oil did not I feel aid his argument. One must remember that if you get snake oil on your DS then it will invalidate the warranty!

Before the chat with Michele Ledda there was another chat with a gentleman called David  Perks who is physics teacher in London.

David seemed to be suggesting that we were saying that school was boring and that this was part of the problem. I can't ever remember saying that in any context whatsoever and I was perplexed as to why he would say this when he really did not appear to know very much at all about the work that we have been doing. I think we both agreed that, as I said, good teachers will use good resources. The only difference is that it appears that I am prepared to explore non-conventional ways of engaging the already engaged but more importantly those learners whose potential is not in any way realised because the existing model does not work for them. Have a look at David Muir's post about this discussion.

I then appeared on Radio 5 Live with Nicky Campbell and Sheila Foggerty. My 'opponent' this time was a lady from the Campaign for Real Education. Have a listen and ©BBC.

Download ConsolariumonBBC5live.mp3

I thought that 'Real Education' was the business that I am in until I heard what this lady was proposing and I then realised that I probably wouldn't be allowed in. It seems we need to go back to 'old-fashioned ways' of teaching and not to confuse matters with nonsense such as games. Her idea was to run Saturday classes where flash cards could be used to help children learn. Dearie dearie me, as I said at the time 'The past is like a foreign country, people do things differently there." (Opening line from the Go-Between by L.P Hartley...a fantastic book with Julie Christie in the film!!!) We can't afford to live in the past and we must look to the present and the future to ensure that pupil's experiences are relevant, effective, challenging and above all worth coming to school for.

However, the comment that I feel disappointed me the most came in the BBC Scotland investigation that Ken MacDonald did. I thought it was generally an excellent piece; well-balanced, well-researched and thoughtful except I feel for the comment made by Professor James Logie, a neuroscientist from Edinburgh University.  He stated that what concerns him is that we see this as a 'panacea to cure all ills'. Again, I ask...where and when have I or any of my colleagues who are looking at the role of new technologies in teaching and learning ever made such a statement. It is all about appropriateness of the resource and how teachers use them effectively. At the end of every presentation that I make about my work I say that we are not suggesting that this is a panacea for everything but that it is yet another way that teachers may package the curriculum, if they feel that it is appropriate for the learners in their class. Again, I state that good teachers use good resources!!!

Overall the feedback has been excellent in terms of the interest in the project but also in terms of the enquiries from many other schools about what we are doing and how we plan to do it. It seems that other people want to try a similar thing...

I don't wish to appear as if I can't take criticism, that certainly is not the case as debate is what helps people grow. I just despair at an attitude that is still out there that we should continue with how we currently do things and that if anyone comes along with an idea that maybe comes from a leftfield, that has shown some interesting results and has resonated with teachers and pupils then the kneejerk reaction from many people is to knock it.

I'm really looking forward to carrying out my extended Kawashima intervention and to see what the results show. Who knows? If they do indicate real impact then we really will have something to debate but if it doesn't then it shouldn't stop us from exploring new ideas...should it?

Let's see what happens.

A virtual stay at Habbo Hotel

The wealth of resources out there in the digital world is incredible. There is always something that you din't know about or that has been in use for a few years now and In have just discovered another one today. Habbo Hotel is a virtual community that has been out there since 2000 it seems. I read about this in a BBC article today.

"Habbo Hotel has particular appeal to teenagers and was one of the first virtual communities when it began in 2000 in Finland. It pre-dates other virtual worlds such as Second Life and social networking sites such as MySpace and Bebo.

In the Habbo Hotel users create avatars (or Habbos), buy furniture to furnish their own rooms in the hotel and talk to others in the community via instant message.

Habbo Hotel UK now attracts 750,000 unique users each month, aged 11-18. There are localised Habbo communities in 29 countries. The company behind Habbo said that as of December 2006 more than 66 million Habbos have been created around the world."

BBC 28 Feb 2007

What has caught my eye with this is the fact that the NSPCC has opened up a room at the Habbo Hotel and that there are plans for the drug awareness charity, Frank, to open a room as well. Thius is a great example of how imporgtant organisations such as these can reach out tio their client group via technologies that their client groups' use. Great idea. I look forward to finding out more about this.

Makes me think about virtual worlds in the education sense and how wonderful it would be for example to a Glow World for example in the Scottish context that would offer digital learners a virtual world where they could engage with learning and orther learners within this games based/derived interface. Well worth the investigation...

Does too high a skill threshold mean too high expectations?

The things we do as teachers eh? I remember spending hours upon hours in 1997 locked away in my classroom and study room at home learning how to use Adobe PageMill teaching myself how to create webpages so that I could then teach my P.5/6 class how to do the very same (poetry example). I also remember taking the school Archimedes home one weekend so that I could practise and in doing so enhance my ability to use Fireworkz spreadsheet and database. My commitment to this was such that I didn’t go with my friends to see my team Dundee United play Hearts in Edinburgh. What made it worse was that we one for the first time in years at Tynecastle that day, 2-1!

What’s the point of this you may ask? Well, I was just thinking about the nature of some teachers in terms of the commitment that they bring in terms of developing their own skill set with new technologies. There will also be a very keen and committed minority of teachers who will, out of their own interest in many ways, take the time to engage with new ideas, news approaches and new technologies. These folks will no doubt always take care of themselves and will continue to push the barriers of what they do in their particular classroom or local authority contexts. The ones who are reading this blog post are probably identifying themselves as members of this group.

In relation to games and learning I have been thinking about this very issue, particularly in relation to games design contexts. When I was a teacher and a lecturer at Dundee University I used the branching stories books by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone as the context through which we could create a dynamic, multimedia laden branching adventure story. This task had a low technical skills threshold and every pupil and student managed to create a finished artefact that could be shared, played and enjoyed by others. The beauty of this approach was that it developed technical skills but the real focus was on the imaginative writing. I often hear PowerPoint being talked about in disparaging terms but I feel that it has the facility to support imaginative and dynamic learning contexts…if you used appropriately and I’d like to say that I like it. (That’s better I’ve said it, this is may become a forum for PowerPointers Anonymous) The important point here is that there was low threshold level in terms of technical skill development that allowed the real focus on the writing to occur.

At this moment I am looking at more complex game design contexts such as MissionMaker, Thinking Worlds, Gamemaker and Neverwinter Nights and I am asking questions like:

• How low are the technical skill thresholds here?
• What training is required to support teachers in their ability to learn how to use software like this?
• How can we identify teachers who will run with and be committed to spending time outwith allocated training time to develop the necessary skill set to support teaching and learning with games design software?
• Where do class teachers include time to develop pupil skills in the use of games design software?
• What do we do when the expert trainer goes home….?

I recently held a training day for one of these games design applications and even after that day I still needed to spend quite a bit of time going over the rules so that I could make  a series of basic things happen within my game. I am maybe one of the perceived ‘nerdy’ guys that would be prepared to invest the time necessary to make this work for me but what about the wider teaching body? How do we impact on them in terms of taking low to medium through to high threshold new technology applications? Shouldn't we first focus on low threshold ideas/approaches that will enable a wider group of teachers to engage with particualr contexts such as the idea of creating a games based multimedia artefact?

I hope that this does not sound like defeatist post because I am really up for trying out these new games design applications within a variety of educational contexts in Scotland but I think that this is a question we must address. Yes we must be aspirational and aim for excellence but our dreams must also be attainable by the many and not just the few…

Mind you, we can't not support a small community of nerdy guys (I mean this cross gender and affectionately) who will really run with applications such as this and make it work in their classrooms.

Crazy talking Hot Milky Drink

When I was SETT I met the chaps from Techknowledgey. They were showcasing their Crazy Talk and iClone applications. I was very interested in their products particularly in view of the scope that they have for learners to create avatars for their websites, skype use and mobile phones etc and am pleased to say that I received it today...

Have a look at the one that I quickly put together this evening:

Imagine replacing my ugly coupon with that of Pablo Picasso, Winston Churchhill, Charles Rennie McIntosh, Charles Dickens, Martin Luther King or anyone that learners were investigating. They could then write a biography about that person that would enable the learner to demostrtae what they found out about the person, the context they were in and why they behaved the way they did, what drove them etc.

Really interesting opportunities here that I look forward to exploring. Will post a better example soon...

Wear your guitar!

I am currently hooked on Guitar Hero. Just learned to activate Star Power and am making great progress on the Medium level. I aim to play my 70s/80s repertoire at the Toxic festival tonight and then spend my hard earned rock cash in the Guitar Hero shop. I'm saving up for the Grim Reaper guitarist...he has long fingers and looks as though he can reach difficult chords.:-)

If this proves too hard for you then why not buy a guitar that you can wear? Some textile students in Australia have devised a t-shirt that allows you to play air guitar. If you make a strumming movement with the left hand then you are activating the strings of your air guitar and moving the left hand up and down the virtual fret board changes the chords.

See it in action

Alas, frantic finger movements do not yet facilitate solos in the style of Hendrix, Page or my favourite Frehley!

Futurelab '06: Exemplars-Dot

As part of the Learning Spaces conference there was an opportunity to see exemplars of new applications, ideas, designs of schools etc. This proved to be very interesting and motivating. One exhibit that really caught my eye was a concept design called Dot by two art students from the Royal College of Art. The stwo students: Clara Gaggero and Sabine Fekete have come up with the concept of having a floor made of pressure sensitive lights. This is very much in the vein of reimagining of playgrounds.

They have temporarily disabled their website but here is an image of their concept idea.

The plan is that children could play pong on this or even pac-man. They would actually be in the game as their movements would trigger the programmed set of lights. They also have ideas such as creating an interface that would allow children to create coloured ripples when they jump up and land on the floor...

This idea reacently won the Futurelab Innovate to Educate award and the two students are currently working on making this idea a reality.

Futurelab '06: David Puttnam opens event..

The Futurelab Learning Spaces conference was opened by Lord David Puttnam. He is passionately involved with education and his work includes being the new chancellor of the Open University as well as representing Unicef. In his opening talk he aimed to focus on the Building Schools for the Future programme in England.

To begin with he sensitively framed the discussion within a global context that he has seen through his work with Unicef. Millions of children, he pointed out, will not have the benefit/luxury of ‘new learning spaces’ and ‘new technologies’ due to the catastrophic learning conditions they may find themselves in. fact that sometimes in classes of 50 and above they may be lucky to have access to a blackboard! A timely reminder, if ever it was needed, of how fortunate we are in the west…

Lord Puttnam did not enjoy his time at school when he was a lad it seems. He argued that one of the main reasons for this was the actual physical experience of learning in buildings that he likened to Victorian workhouses.

If every Secondary school in Englandis to be rebuilt or refurbished over the next 10 to 15 years (with a budget of £45 billion and 4.5 billion of that on IT) he wants the designers of these buildings and the educators who will inform and establish appropriate pedagogies to consider:

• How will our educational vision help to shape and refine the design of new school buildings?
• How will the nature of the relationship between digital natives and digital immigrants impact on how learners get access to information.
• Learners intimately connected to technology nowadays.
• How can we redefine the learning relationship between teachers and pupils?The development of online communities through games and web2.0 applications and how these can be facilitated within and outwith formal learning spaces.
• How can we connect the wlorld of education within schools with world of learning outside school?
• Should these learning spaces not have more impact on local communities: open at nights and at weekends for example?

In the question session at the end he was asked if the governments mantra of education, education, education still stood. He replied that he was just as convinced now, if not even more convinced of the governments focus on the importance of getting education sysytem and infrastructure that would help keep the UK at the forefront of a successful knowledge economy.

Hand to Eye: Games and Inclusion

How games, and one in particular called Quest, can help engage learners from the Priority 1 (NEET) group was the focus of one of the breakout sessions at Hand to Eye.  Learners who fall under the Priority 1 label in England includes children/learners who are:

•    permanently excluded from school
•    ill for long periods of time
•    refugees

or learners who may be characterised as:

“… those who face a range of vulnerabilities which can rapidly develop into exclusion from social institutions.

I must say that although there was a sound and impressive rationale offered from one of the researchers on the team in relation to the inclusion agenda and an enthusiastic report from the teacher who had been trialling the software with a group of target learners. However, the software itself was not that impressive. It seemed rather slow, ponderous, old school in terms of design and a little patronising in terms of its game play.

Without being too critical I really wonder if the designers had any real knowledge of the focus client group that this product is targeted at. Children that I worked with who may be described as vulnerable would not have taken seriously many of the characters (particularly the high pitched shop keeper or the Grandma who looked as though she came from the 1970s classic TV programme Bod) or the infantile plot that was on offer. It also seemed unsubtle for a player who had issues with self-esteem to choose the game module entitled ‘self-esteem’.

I am happy to be corrected about this game and its possible merits in its target group but it seems to me that children who may fall in the ‘vulnerable” category for whatever reason may find much more in terms of intrinsic self-esteem being developed by engaging with some of the other more challenging and rewarding titles on offer such as GameMaker, Mission Maker or Caspian Learning that require some degree of cognitive challenge and reward when they finally finish constructing a game that they have designed rather than simply playing a well-intentioned but poorly designed one.

Game City Conference

Going to the Game City Conference in Nottingham this week. There is a nice summary of the events from the Edge site. I look forward to blogging about this.