Home is where you hang your @

Yes, I know it's a bit of a lame title, but it kind of expresses exactly how I feel at the moment. I arrived home late last night from Handheld Learning 2008 in London, and got online very quickly to find out what I had missed by leaving early to catch the bus home. I always look forward to coming home again after one of my away trips, and this year I have done more than my fair share. But inevitably, my thoughts soon turn toward what is happening 'out there' again, and my window on the world is my laptop.

I will repeat here what I said to HHL 2008 chair Graham Brown-Martin yesterday at the conference. Handheld Learning is quite simply one of the best organised, professionally presented and innovative conferences I have attended in .... oh..... two years or so. It had something for everyone, whether a high level academic or a day-to-day classroom practitioner, and indeed there was a wide spectrum of around 1000 professionals and practitioners present at the event. It was a pleasure to meet up with so many friends, but also to meet and make some new friends, and rub shoulders with some of the great thinkers of our time in the field of e-learning.

Here are my personal highlights from the event: A three way conversation on social media with dana boyd and Marc Prensky, and having the entire conversation fed live to Mark Kramer's website. Meeting Steven Berlin Johnson and talking about online multi-user games and emerging cultures. Seeing a huge range of new technologies such as one touch voting systems and Wii handsets, and trying them out live for real. Seeing the new Google G1 phone in action. Listening to inspiring speeches from the seeringly incisive Ewan McIntosh and Stephen Heppell. Informal discussions, laughs and plenty of fun with James Clay, Andy Black, Kath Trinder, John Traxler, Steven Warburton, Mark Kramer, Dan Sutch and so many others too numerous to mention. Meeting Johnny Ball, John Trinder, Stuart Smith, Jill Attewell, Lillian Soon, Adele Botha and of course relaxing with a few glasses of wine as we listended to the samba, blues and jazz sounds of the excellent awards ceremony band. Two superb evening meals at Alba Italian restaurant and a comfortable accomodation at the City Road Travel Lodge (yes, it was actually surprisingly good). And the comic debacle that was Tuesday night down at Coffee Republic.

Plenty of footprints have been left on the web from this event for you to look at, read and comment on in the Twemes conference site. And of course, there is the excellent video of the event byJames Clay entitled 'Are you on Twitter?' For me, the best memories are already being transformed into learning materials for my students. I have quoted at least a dozen times today from the presentations, conversations and encounters I had earlier this week. And even though I know I will be off again soon for the next event, I'm glad to be home again for a while, because home is where you hang your @.....

Complexity rules OK

He believes that technology is actually making us smarter, and has written 5 books about the future of technology in learning. Steven Berlin Johnson speaking at Handheld Learning 2008 says that Sim City has been a fertile and engaging learning environment for young people. The audience of course, agrees. Yet the progress toward increased engagement he says, is becoming more homogenised as adults begin to use the entertainment and technology tools their children are already familiar with. Are these trends dumbing down society? - he asks. No - there is actually a trend he says, toward more complexity, particularly within the content of new games and resources, because the interplay between environments and other elements of games encourages people to think more deeply, manipulate artefacts and objects, and generally learn better. He cites the game Civilisation as a particular game which engages people in complexity.

In this excellent exposition on the educational gaming culture, Johnson has exposed some of the key elements of how such games engage and entertain yet also create deeper learning experiences. Games intuitively engage. There are extra levels of exploration within the nested structure that makes up educational gaming, he says.

The popular TV series Lost is also a target for discussion - Johnson has discussed ontological, biological, historical, matahematical and geographical elements of the stories, cast and environment for this series. The complexities of the questions that emerge from this series, he says, equally match up to the complexity of engagement we have brought ourselves to as a society that appreciates and uses compex games. It is no longer passive TV but participative at many levels. The future of educational gaming looks bright...