OllieBray.com

RM Strategic Forums: a vision of future learning

I have been more than impressed at BETT over the last couple of years with the exhibition that RM has put on regarding the future of learning spaces. I was also very impressed with my visit to the RM real centre at the end of last year – I just wish that more schools adopted some of the amazing options that are available to them instead if of still building just classrooms.

Anyway, I am delighted to be supporting RM at one of their 2010 events that will look at the a vision of future of learning. More information about the events are here – the first one was at Bristol last week and by all accounts it seemed to go really well and generated a buzz from the people that attended.

I am supporting the London event on Tuesday as part of the expert panel. If you are going along come and say hello and feel free to ask me difficult questions!

Reflections from Games Based Learning 2010 (#GBL10) – 4 of 10 Matt Mason: The Pirate Dilema

One of the highlights of the 2010 Games Based Learning Conference for me was Matt Mason. Matt is the author of the book “The Pirate Dilemma”.

The Pirate Dilemma is the first book in the history of the world to hit the number one spot on Amazon’s economics/free enterprise bestseller list, and the rap bestseller list, at the same time. It has since been published in ten countries and Matt was recently voted ‘Pirate of the Year’ by BusinessWeek.

Matt explained to the audience there are three rules of a really effective pirate:

1. Look for gaps outside the market;
2. Create a vehicle; and
3. Harness the power of the audience.

(there are also not a bad set of rules as a teacher trying to engage a reluctant class!)

I’m not going to say anything else – watch Matts presentation it’s fabulous!  You can also download a free electronic copy of his book from his website or you can choose to pay for it (its up to you!).

Reflections from Games Based Learning 2010 (#GBL10) – 3 of 10 The Consolarium

As I have already mentioned Learning and Teaching Scotland were supporting this years Games Based Learning Conference in London by providing speakers from our Consolarium project. The Consolarium is the Scottish Centre for games based Learning and Innovation in Education.

Derek Robertson did one of the opening keynotes on the Monday morning where he talked about the journey that he has been on in bring games based learning to Scottish schools. As always Derek's presentation was excellently delivered and made fabulous use of videos of children from around Scotland talking passionately about how they have used games in schools.

View Derek’s keynote here:


Joining Derek and I in London from the Consoalrium were two of our development officers Brain McLaren and Brain Clark (we tend to only let people called Brian work on the Consolarium project as it keeps things simple!).

Both Brain and Brian spoke in the second Learning with Games session that I opened and chaired on the Tuesday morning.

Brian spoke about his life as a Consolarium development officer and despite a few technical difficulties with video embeds he blew the audience away as soon as he showed the Sony EyePet and talked about his nursery – primary transition project.

Brian Clark followed with a great talk on the Consolarium plans for games design in Scottish schools. I’ll follow this up as a separate post next week. But for now have a look at Brians presentation below:

Reflections from Games Based Learning 2010 (#GBL10) – 2 of 10 What can education learn from the medical industry?

The great thing about the Games Based Learning Conference is that it isn’t just about games, learning and school. In fact most of the pioneering work with computer games and learning is going on in other sectors. In particular the military, medical industry and higher education community.

Jonathan Stewart, a Surgeon at the Hollier Medical Simulation Centre gave a really good presenation on how simulations are being used in the medical industry. I took a huge amount from Johnathan’s presenation in terms of what we could learn in schools from medical simualtion.

For example in his talk he mentioned ‘haptics’ technology where trainee surgeons use haptics (pressure sensitive devices that you can feel and are resistant to touch) to practice surgical pricedure before trying them for real. I wonder if there are possibilties for using this type of technology is subjects like woodwork or metal work? Where children practice cutting objects as a simulation first before trying it on the ‘real’ meterals. Surely with such practice the final product would be a lot better?

Anyway you can watch Jonathan’s keynote here:

Reflections from Games Based Learning 2010 (#GBL10) – 1 of 10 Little Big Planet

Siobhan Reddy, Executive Producer and Kareem Ettouney, Art Director of Media Molecule did one of the opening keynotes to the Games Based  Learning 2010 Conference. Media Molecule are the brains behind Little Big Planet. Little Big Planet is a game available for the PS3 (and more recently for the PSP) and it really is fantastic. In fact I bought my PS3 just so I could start playing Little Big Planet.

I have embedded a YouTube clip below of Little Big Planet if you haven’t seen it:

I thought Sionbhan and Kareems presentation was superb! They take a few minutes to get warmed up and used to speaking to a large audience but when they get going their passion, risk taking, playful, enterprising attitudes and personalities really start to shine through.

There presentation kicked off by talking about things that were important to them as they were growing up and learning to be creative. This included lego (building blocks), Tony Hart (animation) and the Commodore 64 (Computing).  These were all principles that would eventually make it into Little Big Planet.

They also spoke about the ‘jamming’ culture – a phrase influenced by musicians getting together and just coming up with and experimenting to make music. They linked this to confidence and also to how collaboration, trying and effort can often produce the best product.

They also talked about and gave examples of how you can create your own levels with Little Big Planet – again providing audience and purpose for other peoples work. Apparently over 2 million user generated levels have been creating using Little Big Planet – which just goes to show how popular these ‘creation’ tools are.

Finally they ended with a quote, that I instantly turned into a presentation slide for the following morning,

 “Only by watering ideas do you find out if it’s a weed or a flower”

Which I took to mean – some ideas are always going to be better than others BUT we need to always keep trying!

A Blip TV Video of Sionbhan and Kareems presentation is below (really worth a watch):

Reflections from Games Based Learning 2010 (#GBL10) – Introduction

On the 29th and 30th March I was down in London at the second international Games Based Learning Conference organized by Graham Brown-Martin and his team at Learning Without Frontiers. Learning Without Frontiers also organizes the popular Handheld Learning Conference in October each year.

The conference is now in its second year and Learning and Teaching Scotland were one of the associates involved in providing speakers for the conference.  The quality of the speakers at the event was very good and the input from the Consolarium team seemed to be very well received. Once again this reinforced for me that Scotland really is leading the way with the games based and playful learning agenda.

One of the nice things about both Games Based Learning and Handheld Learning is that all of the sessions are videoed and available up on line after the conference is over. This years videos are now available over on Blip TV and iTunes.

I’ve going to write about what I took away from the conference over the next few posts.

The Future of Publishing (watch all the way to the end...)

I liked this short YouTube clip from DK - make sure you watch it all the way to the end. It would be good to use in an assembly and reminds me of the original idea that I posted about a number of years ago...

Learning with Games – Games Based Learning Conference 2010 (#GBL10)

Just under a week ago I was down in London at the 2010 Games Based Learning Conference. I chaired the ‘Learning with Games’ session on the Tuesday morning and also did the opening keynote.

The session was recorded so you can see what I had to say below:

I also promised that I would share the sides from my session so here they are…

Leaning Through Games - Games based Learning Conference 2010 (#GBL10)

View more presentations from Ollie Bray.

Time to catch up!

March has been the busiest month for me since being seconded to Learning and Teaching Scotland just over a year ago – I really can’t believe that I have not had much time to write my thoughts up here for almost four weeks.

March really was a frenzy of conferences, presentations and learning. I’m going to work hard over the next week to make sure that I get back up to date with blog posts and conference reports that I have been meaning to share since the 2010 Education Show.

I’ve been all over Scotland supporting the development of the Curriculum for Excellence, I’ve been to Berlin for a week as a judge at the Microsoft European Innovative Teachers Forum, I presented and chaired at the Games Based Learning Conference in London, I’ve been working on a number of Games Based Learning Projects and even started geocashing…

More on all this soon in what I promise will be a week of completely 'random' blog posts as I catch up!