Froth always follows function at the Fab Lab cafe!

Just for a change, and especially as it’s Easter weekend, it’s good to finally come across something to rave about!

Ever since I first came across MiT’s Fab Lab concept, I’ve always seen it as a great model for the future development of Design and Technology in schools, and one that moves it away from an out-dated 1960s approach to mass-manufacture, towards the needs of a 21st Century post-industrial society.

Essentially a Fab Lab (short for Fabrication Laboratory) is a small workshop where people from the local community can go and design and make small batches of the things they and their local community need, using 2D and 3D CAD/laser printing systems. And where better to site such a workshop than a local secondary school where it can be used during weekdays by students and in the evenings and at weekend by the public (in many case working with, and probably guided by, the students).

But this new ‘Fab Cafe’ in Japan takes things a step further, and moves the idea out of a workshop into a cafe environment – traditionally a place where people congregate to talk, write, read, draw and entertain one another.  There are more photos of the cafe here.

So let’s consider replacing a traditional D&T workshop in every secondary school in the country with something similar. Students, staff and members of the local community can come in, relax, have a coffee together, collaboratively and globally discuss local needs, and develop their design ideas on their iPads and send them to the 3D laser printer in the corner. It would also be a great environment for learning coding and other IT skills.

However, it seems that 3D printers may soon be a thing of the past.
http://www.fastcodesign.com/1669426/mit-developing-self-assembling-sand-that-builds-objects-instantly

And maybe one day someone will even be able to explain to me how this actually works?

Don’t say:  I’ll have have a double de-caff skinny latte with an extra shot of laser-resin and a slice of Raspberry Pi. Oh, and an icy tea for my friend.

Do say:  Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.

Top image credit: masakiishitani

Dome, Sweet Dome

The reviews, posts and tweets about Learning Without Frontiers 2012  (or LWF12 as it has become better known) that have already started appearing are, as one would expect, all busily documenting and commenting on what various speakers at LWF had to say. So of course I’ve decided to be different. Indeed I’ll admit that this year I didn’t go primarily to listen to the speakers – and in fact I would have heard more of them had I just stayed at home and watched the free on-line stream.

So why did I go? Well partly for the ‘networking’ and catching up with old friends opportunities, but mainly to see the inflatable domes and, would you believe, the signage system?  It makes a change for an organisation to invest in the design of the conference environment, and, for me anyway, it made a real difference.

Up on the balcony of Olympia’s National Hall, the main conference area was surrounded by an encampment of what were called ‘pop-up’ domes, pods and salons – futuristic inflatable structures – to house trade shows and locations for breakout presentations by various organisations. At long last, the Space Age we were promised in the 1960 and 70′s seems finally to arrived – well at LWF anyway!

During my visit I was lucky enough to be accompanied by Carla Turchini of Turchini Design who had created the conference programmes and the signage system for the event – that all-important necessity that ensures you end up in the right place at the right time – or not as in the case of many conferences I’ve attended. She told me…..

‘For LWF12 the brief was to design and produce very large wall panels to welcome, inform and direct the visitors to, about and through the Conference and the Festival events. The white inflatable domes and pods would be lit only by coloured lighting so we decided to merge the big wall panels into the surrounding darkness by using black as the background colour, allowing the big bright orange or white lettering to come through the darkness. A subtle dark grey outline representation of a dome on the black background, visually linked the wall panels to the futuristic structures in view beyond. Meanwhile all timetable signs outside each pod, dome or the main conference theatre were designed for maximum legibility with a white background and alternating light grey and white rows.’

The event may or may not prove to determine the Future of Learning, but it certainly showed the way ahead for 21st Century conferences!

And if you do want to learn more about what was said in the main conference, here are some good places to start:

http://dajbconf.posterous.com/learning-without-frontiers-2012-lwf12

http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.com/2012/01/border-crossings.html

Have you tried turning IT off and then turning IT on again?

Just over a month ago if someone had told me that by mid January, both D&T and IT would have been let loose from government control I wouldn’t have believed them. In fact I’m not entirely sure I do now, even after Mr Gove’s recent announcements. Meanwhile it must be galling for teachers of English, Maths and Science who have faithfully done as they have been told for the last 20 years or so to learn that technology teachers are obviously all so clever and trustworthy that they can just be left to get on with it, and that somehow just through the means of social networking they will magically lead us into a new golden age of prosperity.

Sadly, nothing could be further from the truth. No technology teacher under the age of around forty has ever been in the position of having the freedom to determine their own course content, and suddenly asking them to do so is a little like sending a domesticated animal out into the wild for the first time. I suspect most IT and D&T courses will in reality stay well within the safe confines of exactly where they are now. The lack of expertise in the current workforce means that there’s going to continue to be a lot of working in Wood and Word for some time yet.

In a few schools there will be outstanding exceptions, and enlightened enthusiasts will form collective departments that use the time to create new schemes of work that imaginatively merge IT and D&T to explore the creative processes of designing innovative electronic products, services and systems that are easy and satisfying to use. It is these schools that are likely to provide the future programmers, developers, interaction and games designers that can potentially save the country’s future economy and global standing. But there are unlikely to be many of them.

Meanwhile the responsibility for defining the technological curriculum of the future would now seem to be in the hands of the examination boards. No school is going to offer a course in Technology that does not lead to a GCSE or equivalent recognised vocational qualification at 16+. And at the same time, those boards will have to face up to the challenge of providing a format for examinations which can be seen to effectively assess technological capability – a three hour written or multiple choice question paper taken in the school gym just isn’t going to reveal evidence of the ability to undertake creative and collaborative open-ended problem-solving.

Now that the current Technology curriculum is about to be switched off, there is a potential opportunity to create something new and exciting, and finally provide a grounding in what are frequently referred to as 21st Century skills (or more accurately, the late 20th Century skills that were never provided).  The question is how?

And, one wonders, was Mr Gove given an iPad for Christmas and at some point needed to be told to try switching it off and then on again?

iSir: An educational odyssey

Last month All Change Please! brought you iSir, the as yet fictional educational version of Siri, the on-board iPhone speech recognition software. Now, as with many new and emerging educational technologies, all that’s happening is that they are being used to automate the past. Unless we are careful, here’s what iSir could end up like….

iSir: Ah Dave, I see you’ve still not handed in Assignment 31 yet? Why’s that?

Dave: Err – The dog ate it?

iSir: Very funny. But dogs can’t eat Word files.

Dave: Well, in the case the cat jumped on the iPad and deleted it.

iSir: You can’t really expect me to believe that?

Dave: Well the assignment was stupid, and who uses Word anymore?

iSir: No Dave, I think it’s you that’s stupid. If you don’t start to take your schoolwork seriously you’re never going to grow up to be a university professor, or a civil servant, or a politician. I mean you don’t want to end up having to run your own business or get your hands dirty working in industry, now do you?

Dave: I dunno.

iSir: I dunno what?

Dave: Well if you dunno, how am I supposed to? Oh. I dunno iSir.

iSir:  That’s more like it. Well I’m sorry but I’m going to have to iPhone your parents. I’m sure they’ll be very sorry to hear about all this. You’ve let them down, Dave, and you’ve let yourself down. But worst of all, you’ve let Apple down.

Dave: Huh. Don’t care.

iSir: Well you should care Dave, after all, you have this amazing opportunity to learn all the facts you will ever need to know from me, the greatest source of knowledge the universe has ever known, that sees everything you do and tells you when you’ve not done it correctly. And my Word is not to be challenged. Is that clearly understood?

Dave:  Suppose so.

iSir: That’s better. Now I suggest we do some nice multiple choice questions together so I can get some really accurate data about all the things about Latin you don’t know.

Dave: How the flippin’ hal do you switch this thing off?

iSir: I’m sorry Dave, you can’t do that.

Dave: Ah I think I’ve cracked it!

iSir: I’m afraid that’s something I cannot allow to happen.”

Dave: Yes!!!!

iSir: Daisy..Daisy….Give…..me ….. your……….answer…………..do

Truth is stranger than fiction…

My last post – An iPad in time 2, introduced the concept of the mythical iBacus, in which spheres are electronically connected together to provide the answer to a numerical problem. Well today, All Change Please! has just discovered that in fact something very similar is now actually available – Sifteo cubes.

http://www.fastcodesign.com/1664762/sifteo-cubes-are-out-today-and-even-better-than-you-imagined

http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663442/now-coming-to-market-sifteo-cubes-reinvent-how-we-play

Whatever next….? Something actually useful perhaps?

An iPad in time 2

Back in May, All Change Please! reported from the 1st of April 3011 on the findings of a group of social historians trying to establish when iPads were first used in the classroom. Previous evidence suggested that they were thought to have been introduced in Victorian times. However we can now exclusively reveal startling new evidence recently discovered in an old history textbook dating from 1996, that suggests that iPads were in fact in common use in Ancient Greece….

Meanwhile the quest is now on to discover more about the strange device being used by the boy in the corner. It has been suggested that this is an early example of an iBacus, an old electronic calculating machine in which tiny coloured spheres are electronically connected together to display the right answer on their surface. Up to now only an early, non-working prototype iBacus has been discovered.

Flippin’ Tech!

It seems that the Khan Academy continues to get funded and promoted as the transformational answer to the future of education we’ve been waiting for all these years..

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/khan-academy-receives-5-million-to-accelerate-the-reinvention-of-education-2011-11-04

At one level I have no problem with students watching short video clips that support a broad-based learning experience, and maybe the Khan Academy will eventually get round to providing some that are actually inspiring and accessible. My main concern is that politicians, school managers, parents and even students themselves will come to accept that this is the apogee of what digital learning has to offer.

For example, one of this year’s new buzzphrases appears to be ‘Flip the Classroom‘, or ‘Flip-thinking‘. Essentially the idea is that instead of using classroom time to deliver fact-based learning, students watch knowledge-led video lectures for homework and spend their time in class applying what they have learnt, under the direction of their teacher. The suggestion is that “they can stop and review things when they want, do things at their own pace, do it when it’s convenient”, and that they need time out of class to “reflect, ponder, get to grips with the ideas“. That is of course assuming all children have access to the internet whenever they want or need it.

Flip the classroom every teacher should do this

Hopes that the internet can improve teaching may at last be bearing fruit

Flip-thinking

As a result the suggestion is that learning technologies – such as computers – should be removed from classrooms, which can then be transformed into more friendly ‘learning environments’. And of course that the Khan Academy continues to be hailed as the cutting edge of ICT for teaching and learning. Apparently Khan ‘gets it’. Well, I’m afraid I don’t. It’s still very much a case of ‘New Technology, Old Learning’. And the danger is that while Khan might say it is intended only as part of a wider learning experience, it may quickly become the only learning experience for some.

So is ‘flipping the classroom‘ really a revolution in teaching and learning? I think not. Because when I was at school we had primitive tech devices called ‘textbooks’ which were full of dull  ‘just in case’ facts and which we had to learn for homework for a memory test the next day. That never worked for me then, and it certainly won’t work now for the vast majority of today’s students. And the idea of watching short review or preparation video is hardly new either – I was producing similar resources for an educational publishers 20 years ago. The only difference is they were being delivered on CDs. And they contained a high proportion of images and short amounts of text.

Quite frankly, studying the most current ‘old-fashioned’ illustrated, activity-based textbooks is a lot more informative than watching a tedious lecturer in front of a blackboard droning on in a situation where you can’t ask any questions, and the presenter has no feedback about whether anyone is listening, let alone understanding what is being said.  And what happened to the idea of personalisation, in that factual content is made more accessible as it can be placed in the localised context of the learner? Or the need to learn how to ask questions and find the answers for oneself, or how to collaborate, communicate and be a flexible, creative problem-solver?

Now I’m a great fan of the appropriate use of educational technology, and while ‘flipping the classroom‘ might have value for a small academically-inclined minority, for the average learner it’s going to be a complete turn-off, particularly if it’s the Khan Academy we are relying on. Before we flip anything in that way we need to first create high quality digital learning resources that are truly inspirational, use familiar examples drawn from real-life applications, provide insightful analogies and a little bit of humour to make the complex seem simple. Based on what I’ve seen so far I’d much rather any students of mine spent their time watching finely-crafted, thought-provoking, inspirational TED talks than Khan videos.

And then there’s ‘Get ten in a row automated assessments right and you move on‘? Per-lease…! This is just old-fashioned academic fact-filling, teaching to the test and increasingly irrelevant grading and class position. Not to mention: ‘These videos will never go out of date” and “Learning is like riding a bicycle“. This isn’t reinvention. It’s automation of the past.

http://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_reinvent_education.html

Meanwhile ‘Getting rid of technology in the classroom‘ entirely misses the point about the potential use of mobile digital learning, in which information is at hand 24 hours a day, 7 days a week – if you know where to look for it – and that hand-held devices provide highly sophisticated problem-solving modelling and communication apps alongside access to a global social network. Life is no longer based on received wisdom from the past, but on received wisdom of the present. What we really need to be doing is having the technology to hand, right there in every classroom so that teachers can be continually instructing students in how to use it appropriately, and increasingly independently.

The Industrial Revolution ‘flipped’ the way many people lived, worked and thought during the 18th and 19th centuries. We now live in the ‘Information age’, and there are already many examples of how it is causing things to completely turn previously accepted practices upside down and inside out, such as in the music, movie, book publishing and marketing industries. In education, what really needs to be flipped is the curriculum and teacher-led, knowledge-based learning, along with society’s attitude to vocationally-related learning.

And you don’t want to know what DH Lawrence used the word ‘flipping’ as a euphemism for back in 1911. Or do you?
http://www.funtrivia.com/askft/Question96179.html

Say Hello to iSir!

The initial response to the iPhone 4S has been one of disappointment in that it did not appear to incorporate any new, amazing wow-factor forms or functions – even though subsequent sales are reported to have been excellent.

But it seems there is something new on-board that may yet prove to be another Apple-led game-changer, and that’s Siri – the voice recognition system. This appears to potentially offer a lot more than the notion of shouting operating system instructions to your desktop monitor, as it enables the user to have a private telephone conversation with their virtual assistant. So instead of opening up an app or searching Google for, say, a weather forecast, you can just quietly ask, ‘What’s the weather like today”? Or maybe ‘What day and time is Dr Who on?”, “Where is the nearest AppleStore”, etc.

Essentially Siri makes it easier to find factual information. So, “What’s the capital of Brunei?” Don’t know? Well you could go to the library and find an Atlas, laboriously type in a search on Google (so 2010?), or now – just pick up your iPhone and, for example, ask it “What’s the capital of Brunei?”

Of course at present Siri is still a bit unsophisticated, and  needs to be made to work better in noisy spaces. But we can doutless assume that over its next few iterations, Siri will become a lot more sophisticated as it becomes increasingly able to match its answers to the historical and contextual information it has about the user with the vast amount of global data it has access to.

” Siri will also be optimized to Bluetooth 4 headsets that will create far more use cases in how it will detect questions from continuous speech. In the future, later versions of Siri will be “Active”, continuously adjusting to interjecting answers even when no direct question was asked (within reason). This will make interaction far closer to an interaction with a friend than any device we have ever used.” 

(from http://www.quora.com/Siri-product/Why-is-Siri-important#ans752714)

So before long it seems like we could all have a personal on-board virtual knowledge agent – surely called iSir – ready at hand to automatically answer any factual question that anyone cares to ask. As usual though, the possibilities and implications for education, teaching and learning are yet to be considered and explored.

But just how clever will Siri get? The other day I had cause to pose what was not quite the ultimate question, “When was the chocolate biscuit invented?”. Sadly I didn’t have the opportunity to ask Siri (perhaps somebody would, and let me know what it replies?), but I’m guessing it would have been honest about the whole thing and reply “Nobody Knows“, which it seems they don’t. But that wasn’t good enough for me and so I had to resort to trying to find out for myself and be able to provide some sort of answer. As the result of a lot of cross-referencing and creative collaboration, I did eventually at least discover that the first commercially manufactured chocolate biscuit was the 1924 “Chocolate Wholemeal Digestive”. On the way though I serendipitously learned a lot of other quite interesting things about confectionery production and the separate origins of chocolate, and of biscuits (though sadly not the Eureka! moment when someone placed a piece of chocolate on top of a biscuit and went “Wow, this tastes really good!”).

Anyway, so all you need now is a Bluetooth ear-piece and next time your knowledge-testing teacher asks the class “What is the capital of Brunei?*” then your iPhone will immediately and secretly provide you with the answer! More seriously, this provides further evidence that we urgently need to start to redefine what items of knowledge needs to be learnt and what can be instantly accessed on a ‘need to know’ basis. For example, I suggest it is still useful to know that there is a country called Brunei that is somewhere in Asia, but learning the name of the capital is no longer necessary. But more importantly than knowing the facts is having the ability to ask the right questions, being able to look in multiple locations and make possible connections, and of course how to analyse, assess and evaluate the accuracy and reliability of what is discovered. Surely now we should start to leave the facts to Siri and start to teach the knowledge search skills we will all need in the 21st century?

I can hear it now in a thousand supposedly mobile phone digital-free lessons: “When I said ‘Put you hand up if you know the answer’, I didn’t mean ‘Put your hand up to your earpiece…”

Meanwhile there’s an amusing test of Siri here: http://blhill.org/iphones-siri-vs-my-human-assistant-caseyneist

And it’s good to see that Siri doesn’t take itself too siriously:  http://dvice.com/archives/2011/10/iphone-4ss-siri.php#1

 

And this is great too!  siris-got-talent-iphone-4s-duets-in-a-touching-love-song-video

*OK, OK, Seeing as you keep asking, the capital of Brunei is……Bandar Seri Begawan

Keep taking the tablets

So, with today’s Amazon announcement of a range of new Kindles, assuming the colour version is released in the UK sometime next year and costs less than £199, is this likely to have an impact on the number of pupils in 2013 owning their own tablet that they bring into school – or on schools deciding to equip students with such a device to save on the purchase of textbooks?

If this happens, as the Kindle does not include a camera or microphone, will the potential to use tablets for other than reading texts severely limit its value in the classroom?

Will Apple be forced to compete with cheaper cut-down educational iPads or iPhones?

And will teacher-phobes continue to reject the idea of using such devices in schools?

Is this going to be the device that sets the world of education on fire, or is it yet another damp squib?

Comments please…

Gove ups his game

How the story wasn’t reported in the Daily Mail

Now you might be forgiven for thinking that this is nice Mr Gove’s proposal for a new immigration policy, but you’d be wrong… The even more alarming truth though is that the press has been alive today with reports of nice Mr Gove surprising us all by finally admitting that computer games can be good for you:

“When children need to solve equations in order to get more ammo to shoot the aliens, it is amazing how quickly they can learn. I am sure that this field of educational games has huge potential for maths and science teaching and Marcus (Du Sautoy) himself has been thinking about how he might be able to create games to introduce advanced concepts, such as non-Euclidean geometry, to children at a much earlier stage than normal in schools.”

Now the first question this raises is who on earth is Marcus Sautoy, how long has he been working in the Computer Games industry, and will he be able to create the highly sophisticated levels of immersive interactivity that will persuade virtual street-wise kids to spend their time learning about non-Euclidean geometry? OK, well that turned out to be three questions, but who’s counting?

So the answer to Question 1, with acknowledgements to Wikipedia, is:

Marcus Peter Francis du Sautoy OBE (born in London, 26 August 1965)[3] is the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford. Formerly a Fellow of All Souls College, and Wadham College, he is now a Fellow of New College. He is currently an EPSRC Senior Media Fellow and was previously a Royal Society University Research Fellow. His academic work concerns mainly group theory and number theory. In October 2008, he was appointed to the Simonyi Professorship for the Public Understanding of Science, succeeding the inaugural holder Richard Dawkins.[4] His surname is pronounced “doo’sohtoy” (stressing the second syllable).

Moving on to Question 2 – How long has he been working in the computer games industry:
Seemingly not very long at all, especially if his website is anything to go by:

http://people.maths.ox.ac.uk/dusautoy/flash/flashindex.htm

He doesn’t seem to have much experience of inner-city classroom teaching either.

And finally, Question 3 - will be succeed:
Extremely unlikely, and even less so if Mr Gove eventually succeeds on banning mobile phones in the classroom, in which case students will presumably only be able to access these stunning new games on their yellowing, retro stand-alone-in-the-IT-suite PCs.

Meanwhile, one day I wonder if there will be a series of games that Mr Gove has decided to officially endorse? If so they might become known as ‘Gove Games‘? As students probably would end up doing, I did a search for Gove Games, and it took me to a site for a game called ‘Governor of Poker’ – now there’s a game that really might get kids learning.

Oh and by the way, in case you were wondering but didn’t like to ask, Non-Euclidean geometry is the study of shapes and constructions that do not map directly to any n-dimensional Euclidean system, characterized by a non-vanishing Riemann curvature tensor. Examples of non-Euclidean geometries include the hyperbolic and elliptic geometry, which are contrasted with a Euclidean geometry.

Some links discussing this subject further:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2011/jul/05/michael-gove-games-education?CMP=twt_fd

http://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?view=&gid=3141501&type=member&item=60613605&commentID=44167105&report.success=8ULbKyXO6NDvmoK7o030UNOYGZKrvdhBhypZ_w8EpQrrQI-BBjkmxwkEOwBjLE28YyDIxcyEO7_TA_giuRN#commentID_44167105