Safer Internet Day. What a marvellous cause to educate younglings (and their parents and trusted teachers) about how to be safer online. Yes, of course we should be encouraging ‘good’ behaviours in all walks of life and that now of course includes our digital lives as well. We teach children please and thank you; not…
Category: Education
Being open, private and just less ignorant
I have never really thought of myself as an activist before, for anything. Sure, I have had interests that I have felt quite passionate about, for instance it was about two years ago that I was knee-deep into researching about ‘opening’ the archive into digital environments. Luckily for me, I had a great opportunity to…
Workshop for Films to Make you Feel Good
In the midst of working with researchers and project leads pioneering with innovations in pedagogy, I find myself often forgetting my background in the creative arts. As part of my role as Projects and Community Assistant, I manage students and graduates who work ad-hoc on projects in different capacities; some of these are media production…
SOLEs; are we asking the right questions?
Self Organised Learning Environments (SOLE) is a term coined by TED-talker Sugata Mitra. His very powerful (yet also hugely criticised) talk uncovers how children living in India (and often digitally illiterate) learnt how to use and programme computers that were installed into public places. These children were not supervised throughout the project. SOLEs fall under problem…
Game Changers is coming!
We don’t have to wait much longer before we launch the pilot of Game Changers! I have been working with Sylvester Arnab and Alex Masters to develop the programme. During the Disruptive Media Learning Lab’s first year, there were many requests for game development support; however, tailor making games for individual modules will inevitably take…
Phonar Nation celebrating new collaborations
Its been a lovely school year exploring photography with you and Jonathan and St. Andrews. Lots more possibilities for next school year too.Thank you for sending us goodies to hand out to the students. I will absolutely let you know when they arrive and tweet out portraits of the students holding the goodies. Elysia, GEMS…
#levelawesome PhonarNation
Phonar Nation is really exciting at the moment. We have two schools who have kids younger than the intended age of the class creating some amazing work and now they are connecting. They are also almost 4000 miles away from each other. Bravo to Chicago GEMS Academy and St Andrews Primary! Craig has been making…
Being Active in a Community
Being part of an online community is something that I have been doing actively since I guess 2013. You could say that I’m a real newbie. What I mean by ‘actively being in a community’ is being part of conversations with people I don’t know, but have shared interests with. Until then I had been…
Mediactive: the Next Generation
I have just finished reading Dan Gillmor‘s book Mediactive and you know what, it’s bloomin’ brilliant. I don’t want to over-sensationalise things but it’s kind of the bible of being a consumer and producer of media (of any kind) on the web. "Welcome to the age of information confusion." Picked up @dangillmor's book today- I'd recommend it…
Making More Out of the Curriculum
Often I have conversations with my mum about education. It’s funny that she often has a very contemporary view about how children (in particular) should be taught; however, little does she realise how innovative her teaching really is. She runs a group of young journalists (aged 11 and younger) who report on important narratives in the…