Games based learning

Games based learning as expected, had a highly visible profile at this year's Learning without Frontiers festival, in London. Take David Samuelson for example. As Head of Augmented Reality development for Pearson Education, he must have one of the coolest jobs in the world. He gets to explore all the latest possibilities technology can offer to education, and to ask the "what if?" questions each day.
In his invited presentation at today's Learning Without Frontiers festival, David emphasised what his audience already believed - for children, video games are an ideal, natural medium for learning. Kids love playing games, he said, and they learn from them without effort or inhibition. They are often 'in the flow' and don't have any hang ups about expressing themselves. He is interested in mashups - where augmented reality can be embedded within games. It's a new generation of games that is emerging, but with the advancement of games console design, the new 3DS Nintendo screens, and the natural gesture controls of devices such as XBox 360, the time is right. The universal appeal of games must be a natural extension to learning in formal situations. What excites him most is the story telling that is seen in the latest games, for example Heavy Rain.

Another invited speaker at #lwf is Dawn Hallybone, the ICT co-ordinator and senior teacher at Oakdale Junior School in Essex, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at the LWF teachmeet on Sunday night. She had entered into the spirit of the fancy dress teachmeet and was wearing a luminous pink wig. In a very engaging presentation today (without her wig), she talked about playful learning and highlighted how handheld devices such as the Nintendo DS (used in her school as a brain training tool) and games such as Professor Layton puzzle adventure stories can be used to inspire kids to learn a range of key skills such as literacy, numeracy, problem solving, team working and interpersonal communication.

Dawn uses an innovative combination of tools including the Nintendo Wii, to engage kids in scenarios that take on a 3D immersion effect. They become so engaged in their characters and activities, they forget where they are, she explained. Dawn also eulogised over how Twitter has enabled her and her colleagues worldwide to connect and share their ideas on how they are using these tools in new and exciting ways to enhance learning in formal settings. They have set up a games network, pooled their meagre resources, and have purchased a library of games that can then be shared across all the schools that are members of the collective. Long may it continue.

Games based learning by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Learning without Frontiers

Although I am missing being at Learning Without Frontiers, after having had a tantalising taste of it during the Sunday Service (the free first day of the festival), I am following remotely via the Twitter stream (#lwf and #lwf11) and also watching some of the keynote speeches via the streaming media channel on the LWF main website. It is very high quality, both in audio and visual terms, and there is also a separate live stream for slides. It really is almost like being there in person. Congratulations must go to Graham Brown-Martin and his team for such a well organised and dynamic conference.

I was particularly impressed by the presentation from Sony UK managing director Ray Maguire, who seems to have monitored the pulse of the UK compulsory education sector. He made several important statements about the future of learning technology. Why can't we take the best teachers and the best lessons and broadcast/stream them to all interested schools? he asked. We have the technology. (Yes, and we did it over a decade ago during the Star Schools project I was involved in, in South Dakota). We need to encourage schools to let more kids create content and share it he counselled. And on the subject of institutional VLEs, although he didn't go as far as to claim they were outmoded, he did admit that they had been instigated before the advent of social media, and VLEs were premised on behaviour and practice of a decade ago. In his concluding statement, Maguire called for collaboration between Sony and schools to extend and enhance provision for education, particularly with games and other handheld technologies. Maguire also called for decisions to be made at government level and for an operational budget to be made available for wide implementation. We won't hold our collective breaths on that one, but guess there's no harm in asking, is there?

Learning without frontiers by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.