Hacking education

We had a great day on Sunday at the Learning without Frontiers festival at the Brewery in the East End of London. The day started well with an 'in the round' session with super geek and TV Gadget Show host Jason Bradbury who in his inimitable, mad cap style did live demonstrations of several fun robots including a flying drone he controlled from his iPhone. This was much to the delight of the many kids who had assembled (I count myself among them of course). There was also a break dance-off between himself, a teenage boy and a robot. The robot won. Must see is this video of Jason with his punk robot, which goes on the rampage and trashes his kitchen - hilarious stuff.

After a quick break for lunch it was time for Leigh Graves Wolf (@gravesle on Twitter) from Michigan State University and I to do our stuff in a hack conference presentation downstairs in the Queen Vault at the Brewery venue. The vaulted ceilings and subdued blue lighting of this subterranean venue provided a calm, business like environment for our Edupunk session. We used Txttools services to get delegates to text in their responses to a number of questions we posed during the first part of the hour long session. These included 'will we see a decline or a rise in the number of edubusinesses' and 'is the institutional VLE compatible with the PLE.' We discussed the idea of bricollage, do-it-yourself education using new tools or repurposing of old ones. The 70 plus audience was great, participating and contributing throughout. The final part of the session was a quickfire activity where small groups were asked to produce some kind of artefact to illustrate the principles and ethos of Edupunk. All of the fabulous contributions can be found on the Twitter stream hashtag #punklwf.

The day was rounded off with an excellent Teachmeet with standing room only. The teaching Twitterati were all assembled, many in fancy dress and at least a couple wearing their underpants on the outside of their trousers. Teachers are a strange bunch, and they know a) how to enjoy themselves and b) how to embarrass their kids. What a great day - meeting several Tweeps face to face for the first time, including Dawn Hallybone (@dawnhallybone), Tony Parkin (@tonyparkin), Tony Sheppard (@grumbledook) and Doug Woods (@deerwood) was another highlight. There were some great, practical demonstrations of how to spice up your teaching sessions with a variety of technologies and web tools. All too soon, I had to leave the Brewery and make my way underground across the city to catch my train home. I have to teach today, you see. But then, teaching and learning is what it's really all about, isn't it?

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Hacking education by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.