Designing Successful Learning Together

Claudia and I are just back from a whistle-stop-tour in Helsinki.We were there to further scope out and develop our plans for Helsinki Learning Festival 2014.

The idea came into fruition after multiple meetings with the Finnish Institute in London to develop international education programmes focusing on sharing best practice in global education. It was at the end of 2012 when we had organised London Festival of Education and the Finnish Institute had organised Open Knowledge Festival we knew that the time was right to set our ambitions on a large education event in Finland.

Finland, a relatively sparsely populated country, constantly has it’s numbers boosted by droves of international ‘education tourists’ who flock to discover the secrets of Finland’s edu-successes. Finland can indeed be extremely proud of their educational system which is based on trust, autonomy and respect of their ‘highly educated’ teachers. Check out this article tweeted by Sir Ken Robinson only yesterday which features an interview with Pasi Sahlberg, director of the Finnish Ministry of Education’s Center for International Mobility and author of the book Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland?

Sahlberg also points out that whilst many people are keen to learn from Finland that it’s paramount that those within Finland are also looking out and learning from and with their global colleagues. (We’ve heard this notion paraphrased again and again via multiple sources.) It was this idea as well as the successes of our respective festivals that meant we and the Finnish Institute were very keen to develop an international learning event that happens within Finland, for Finnish educators but also for teachers from across the world.

We want to design an amazing professional development opportunity for teachers who can be inspired by brilliant keynote speakers, take part in workshops, lead sessions, network with and learn from their peers in a relaxed informal environment. For the festival goers to be entertained, to debate, to challenge and to collaborate.

But! First thing’s first, we had to ensure that a learning festival was of genuine interest to those within Finland. To do this we organised a ‘roundtable’ event and invited key educational experts, teachers, professors, policy makers and cultural and business leaders. This, thanks to the lovely people at British Council Finland, happened at Hub Helsinki yesterday.

We have to say that we were really blown away by the enthusiasm and ideas the esteemed crowd shared with us regarding the festival. It was felt that not only was there a real interest in helping us make this happen but also it was reported there is a genuine need for a festival like this. The group clearly sparked off one another and each brought fresh ideas and unique perspectives to the discussion. There was a buzz and energy in the room that made it obvious that this idea is a goer.

There’s lots more to come but we look forward to collaborating with all of our new partners and working together to make a truly spectacular global learning event.

Kiitos paljon to all who came to the meeting yesterday!

Watch this space…and get in touch if you want to be part of Helsinki Learning Festival 2014

Darina

(Our working dates for the 2 day festival is 11th & 12th April 2014… so we’re very much hoping to see YOU in Helsinki a year today:)

Those lucky William Edwards teachers. They can now plan their lessons on an iPad, organise their weeks and months ahead, print their lesson plans, send them to colleagues to use or ask them for feedback. Put simply; they’ve re-thought how they plan.

In mid-May Steve Munday, the Head Teacher of William Edwards, got in touch saying they wanted a planning tool that suited they way they’d like to work.

What Suklaa did: We took the brief and basically started by clarifying and distilling the app to ‘what it really needs to do’.

We then took the spec of the app and designed an interface, focusing on simplicity.

Once the spec was approved by the school, we contacted a number of developers for quotes. While getting quotes and feedback from the developers we were able to further refine the spec sheet and screen mockups. We ended up going with Alex Kent, an iOS developer whose originally from the UK but now lives in Stockholm. He’s experience as a university senior lecturer was very helpful as he understood a lot of the needs of an educational establishment.

During the development of the app, we kept up with how it was  going; communicating between the school and Alex, helping decide on how certain features were to be implemented in the final product.

Roughly four weeks after the developer was commissioned, the app is now ready. In fact, the school have just today handed out iPads to every single teacher fully loaded with a selection of different apps and their very own WES Planner.

If your school or organisation has a great idea for an app, do get in touch. We can help you make it happen.

I was just on a call catching up with the lovely Amy from NESTA when I remembered that on this EXACT day last year my waters broke almost 6 weeks early. Myself and Claudia were due to be delivering a workshop for learning providers participating in NESTA’s idiscover programme. We were not due to to be delivering babies. Nope this was not in the plan, not yet anyway.

Oskari Thomas Tapaninaho was born almost 4 days (!!) later on Sat 2nd April 2011. What a guy. We love him. Quite simply he’s AMAZING. Now I could wax lyrical about my almost 1 year old boy for hours.. but maybe you’d zone out or even worse unfollow me. And perhaps fair enough. The très cynical John Donnelly told me that he often unfollows people who ‘drone on’ about their love for their offspring. I see too little of you these days John to risk a lack of social media interaction as well. So I won’t. (maybe I also risk unfollowings for using Del Boy style French words unnecessarily?)

Anyway..these last couple of weeks have been very busy. We’re working up our ideas for Flourish our international professional development project we’re running with the Finnish Institute in London. In it’s first phase we are inviting UK and Finnish based teachers to take part. It’s nicely timed as we’re going to a couple of events about Finnish education this week, the first at the Institute of Education and the second at the Finnish Institute.
We have also be invited to attend a reception at the Finnish Ambassador’s residence. I made a Ferrero Rocher joke to my colleague Rachel and she didn’t know what I was taking about. Young people…

Last week we attended ‘Whose Curriculum is it Anyway?’ a regional conference run by Whole Education. It was a very well put together event. A particular highlight for me was Head Teacher, Jo Shuter, from Quintin Kynaston Academy and her talk about raising the game despite adversity. They have achieved some amazing things, including forming a charity within school to house homeless students. Jo referred to her school culture as a family where honesty is key. Crucially they have a joined-up thinking approach to education and work closely with feeder primary schools, colleges and university and they have outreach staff who continue the relationship with QK students once they leave.

Another highlight was the Innovation Unit’s Alec Patton’s breakout session ‘How can we make schools more engaging?’. This was a fast-paced workshop where we were challenged to think about a learning experience that worked for us. The outcomes were as diverse as the audience but a lot were to do with real life, out-of-school, failing and emotional attachment. It was great to see theory expressed so actively.

After the conference I went to the British Council where all of their European representatives were together for a week of training in the ‘mothership’. The event was a rather small reception which I felt very lucky to be invited to. I talked to people from all over the world getting great tips for our Flourish programme. It’s brilliant to realise how small the planet really is. Lots of following up to do this week.

Another fab event last week was the opening of the latest Mozilla spaces in London’s St Martin’s Lane. I met with some brilliant education tech people including Digitalme’s Tim Riches, John Knight from Blackboard and his wife Erin Knight who heads up Mozilla’s own learning department read more about Mozilla’s learning vision here. I also very briefly met Doug Belshaw as he was rushing to get his train back up north, the next day via twitter I stumbled across his brilliant tedx talk on digital literacies. (note not digital literacy) Definitely worth a watch!

Now.. you’ll notice this blog post is refers to birthdays plural. It should not go unmentioned that the wonderful Claudia Barwell has had a significant birthday this week. Yes, significant. Let’s just say that according to some her life will only be beginning now. So Claud, what exactly have you achieved since Sunday? HAPPY BIRTHDAY YOU BRILLIANT WOMAN.

I think I’ve finally figured out a problem that’s been really bothering me for a while.

Ken Robinson, in his book, The Element, explains that to find your ‘element’ and to be happy, you need to find your passion and be good at it. You also need to have the opportunity to make it happen and the right attitude, i.e you need to want it to happen. I really like this thinking and it’s something I’ve encountered a lot recently in various forums, especially in discussions around passion and happiness. I am a big believer in people doing jobs that makes them happy. I love my job and my own work in education often entails encouraging teachers and young people to focus on things they are passionate about.

What was bugging me, however, was that a lot of people, particularly young people, would argue that they are in ‘their element’ when playing computer games, watching films or TV or spending time, (a lot of time) on Facebook. Clearly most young people are passionate about this stuff and are very ‘good’ at them. But is this really enough? Should someone stop them and encourage them to do other things as well? Or should we all just relax and they can go on to get a job that sustains their basic needs and allows them to spend their free time doing what they’re passionate about? Even if it is leading a group of comrades to a raid in World of Warcraft, surfing the web or chatting with their friends on Facebook? I wasn’t sure..

A lazy option may be to say to young people “stop wasting your time on video games and do something useful”. But I guess that’s like saying “eat your vegetables” without explaining that they provide a good corner stone to a balanced diet. There has to be something deeper, a bit more of an open dialogue about it.

I think part of the problem with spending excessive time on WoW or FarmVille or Facebook or Friends re-runs or listening to podcasts is that too much of anything will overwhelm your brain. The brain will be constantly on the receiving end of information and doesn’t have any free cycles to spend on thinking. A lack of thinking results in drought of new ideas.

The crux of it, is that video games and films are entertainment. Entertainment is about consumption. Facebook is about communications as well as consumption. What’s missing here is creation.

Communication versus consumption versus creation. Those are the three main ways one can spent time. (Sleeping, by the way, I think, fits nicely within creation unless, of course, you’re a sleep talker.)

We, young and old alike, spend too much time consuming information and as a result, our brains don’t have enough free cycles to create anything new. Why is it important then to create something? Couldn’t we just concentrate on being really good at consuming or communicating to bring us happiness? Well, I believe that you get a more fulfilling sense of achievement when you’ve created something. (Trust me, you’re still consuming entertainment when you’ve ‘created’ a level 85 Paladin.)

But it isn’t about creation being the one important part here, it’s about the balance of all three. Communication and consumption and creation. They form a circle where each part feed to and off each other. See Kirby Fergusons series ‘Everything is a Remix‘. Creativity and creation don’t exist in a vacuum. Consumption and communication is needed as well.

Why is it difficult to stop consuming and start creating? Two reasons stand out for me. Those creating content for consumption, whether it be Blizzard making Diablo III or a Hollywood studio making the Jason Bourne series, are very very good at what they do. The second reason is because of that prevailing human trait: laziness. It’s just so easy to continue with old customs of crashing on the couch and switching your brain off. It is easier to receive than give.

(I wrote about social games and the sense of achievement as a response to a BBC programme on Facebook. It’s related, so have a look at that as well.)

Jane McGonical argues that skills learned in video games can be applied in the real world. It’s a very positive and inspiring talk and I’m not arguing that you can’t transfer these skills but how often does that happen, really? She does say that the benefits of video gaming to the human psyche start to disappear pretty quickly after 21 hours a week. Perhaps that would be a good limit for over all consumption per week? Gamers, like all of us, need to find opportunities and time to apply those learned skills, otherwise I believe they’re being wasted in pure consumption.

It’s time to switch off and switch on. Let’s all give our brains some space to breath. Let’s also open these conversations with young people in schools and help them participate in the design of their own education. Let them become future builders who question and discover their own passions and then make them happen in the real life.