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.

Apple had their now annual iPad event in San Francisco yesterday. Here’s three things that came out that I think are brilliant for education and schools.

1. With the last two iPhone announcements, Apple has left the previous models for sale with a reduced price. This time around with the iPad, they’ve left the iPad 2 for sale at a lower price point of £329. (Pretty good discount, especially if you’re equipping say 1000 pupils with them). At the moment, I think the iPad 2 is just fine for education settings where the saved money is better spent on (e)books, apps and other content. I would still recommend teachers being issued with the latest and greatest model as that does future proof it’s use for an extra year.
2. Apple Configurator is a new piece of software from Apple that allows administrators to update, install apps, do backups and, yes, configure up to 30 iOS devices in one go. This will save a ton of time and releases the individual teacher from having to do any of this.
3. New Apple TV (£99) and a tiny detail in its settings. This would easily be missed if you weren’t looking for this. In our Blue Sky Classrooms project, we’re using Apple TV to enable teachers to be wireless and mobile in the classroom. Up until now any iOS device (that’s capable of doing this) could use AirPlay to stream the screen or photos or video to any Apple TV on the same network. No password required. This is obviously an issue if you have a large network accessed by both teachers and pupils; it’s only a matter of time when someone ‘accidentally’ AirPlays something undesirable. Apple TV now has the ability to password protect AirPlay. Fantastic.

Extra bonus:
If your school is looking at doing something with iBooks Author, there’s an update for that to support the Retina display. You should also check out Tumult Hype. It’s a very very powerful HTML 5 authoring tool that can now also export in iBooks Author widget format.

More on TEDxLondon’s Flickr page.

TEDx London Education Revolution Photos by Kristian Tapaninaho is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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