Peacemaker: a game for peace

Peacemaker is a computer game based on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It's aim is to "promote dialogue and understanding among Israelis, Palestinians and interested people around the world". The player has to find a route to peace, navigating through events such as suicide bombs, military attacks and diplomatic negotiations. Much of the game is based on real video footage, and has relied on university academics for their knowledge of the region and realism.

Watch the demo video

Open Access eLearning Papers

eLearningEuropa.info, a European portal for ICT in education, has recently launched a new open-access, Creative Commons-licensed journal called eLearning Papers. The second volume (PDF) is now available for free download, while you can browse individual articles and papers on the site. Great to see an open approach being used by a publicly-funded project, and ties in nicely with the recommendations of the participants in the UNESCO-OECD forum on OER I led recently. Another archive of eLearning papers is available via TeLearn (see my previous post).

Safer Internet Day: global blogathon

Safer Internet Day is taking place on 6 February 2007. More than 200 schools and 150 organisations are taking part in the event via a global ‘blogathon’ and competition for creating digital materials on ePrivacy, Netiquette, Innovation and the Power of Images.

Starting as an initiative in 2004, SID has become a major annual event crowning the awareness activities of Insafe, the European safer internet network coordinated by European Schoolnet.

Schools will showcase their creations in the 2007 Blogathon: a blog that opens every year on SID. On 6 February, 4 winners will be announced and receive prizes of ICT equipment for the schools worth a total of 3,000 euros. At the same time, the blog will be opened to participating organisations, who will each post messages on the topic of ‘crossing borders’ from all over the world.

Also on SID a press release will be issued including the first data from my survey of children's behaviour when using ICT tools such as mobile phones and social networking platforms.

Open archive of education technology research

I4D recently wrote about TeLearn, an open archive of technology-enhanced learning research articles. TeLearn is offered by Kaleidoscope, a "European research network shaping the scientific evolution of technology enhanced learning", funded by the European Commission.

One laptop per child is unfeasible for developing countries

I have been following with great interest the development of the MIT $100 laptop project, as it seems to have good potential for developing countries. Benjamin Vergel de Dios, UNESCO Bangkok, made a financial simulation of the costs of equipping every child in the Philippines with a $100 laptop. As you can see in his diagram, it implies increasing ICT budget by a 75%, which is unfeasible for most developing countries. Benjamin is coordinating on an excellent project, called ICT in Education Policy, which aims to "promote appropriate policy models and strategies for the integration of ICT into education in the Asia-Pacific region, with special emphasis on developing policies which utilize ICT to remove barriers to participation in education and enhance the quality of education".

Image: Benjamin Vergel de Dios

Augmented reality and mobile learning

Leonard Low, who publishes the Mobile Learning blog recently posted an interesting concept for mobile learning interfaces. His idea is to have a flexible LCD screen which picks up location-based educational data via a mobile device. The student would then be able to access online resources and contacts according to his/her location, as an overlay of the view of the location itself.


As an aside, I think this is another illustration of the innovative nature of fiction - the overlay-style view he proposes looks rather similar to 'Terminator Vision' in James Cameron's 1984 Terminator movie.

Image by Leonard Low.

Passively Multiplayer Online Games for Schools?

Howard Rheingold just blogged about Justin Hall's presentation at the University of South California's Annenenberg centre.

Howard wrote:
"Justin has fun online, works online, studies and loves and plays online -- and on his phone and his Playstation. Why can't the whole thing be a game -- a social game and a knowledge game? While he goes about his day's surfing, blogging, chatting, tagging, gaming, posting, uploading, downloading, Justin wants to experience the same visible sense of goal-oriented progress he gets in World of Warcraft when he looks at his screens and sees exactly what level his activities have earned him."

He also mocked up a screenshot using Jaiku, which I am using here to illustrate this post.

He also posted a link to a video (Quicktime) in which Justin explains the concept.

This kind of concept would also be great for learning environments, allowing users to understand how much progress they have made in different areas of their work. It's easy to see how it could be added to an LMS system such as Moodle for instance. Only problem is, it's inherently quantitative (i.e. will measure time and/or number of contacts, posts, etc) but would be unable to deal with qualitative aspects.

Social software and learning

Futurelab, a great UK-based research organisation working on many exciting research projects in education technology. It's launched a series of useful publications on current hot topics, called Opening Education . They recently published 'Social Software and Learning (PDF)', an excellent overview of social software, implications of such software for education, plus a plan of action for moving towards community-based learning.

Games in education

Computer games are becoming more and more popular in the educational world. UNICEF has just released Ayiti - The Cost of Life (via Water Cooler Games), a simplified 'Sims' style game where you assign tasks to family members living in Haiti. Even playing for just a few minutes communicates how difficult it is to balance health, education and finances when you are affected by poverty. Although I enjoy games, and see that they have some classroom uses, I think there's a lot of hype around them at the moment.

Obviously games have a lot of potential:

• creating innovative interfaces for accessing educational content - mashing up Moodle with Second Life (SL) in Sloodle, so that content can be transferred and published on both platforms (more info on SL & education here)


• increasing student motivation - using a new kind of interface can stimulate students' enthusiasm


• improving hand eye coordination and reaction time - these are particularly crucial in fast-paced games.

I don't subscribe to the media hysteria of 'games are evil' (check out this interesting article on the topic from the Wilson Quarterly), I do see a number of issues in using games in education:

• gender - navigation in virtual spaces has some gender issues; often boys find it easier to navigate due to more experience in game environments. Representation of gender roles in games can also be highly stereotypical, presumably because of the skewed gender representation in the technology industry


• hampering creativity - some innovative games such as Sims and SL allow users to transform and create during the game. However, most still rely on users following one of a number of pre-determined paths, thus reducing creative opportunities.


• difficulty and expense of game development - commercial games are now often more expensive to produce than Hollywood movies, and thus to produce an educational game of similar quality to the entertainment sector is prohibitively expensive.

More info about games in education:
Report from the Summit on Educational Games
University of British Columbia's virtual campus on SL
A collection of research papers on games in education on Citeulike
DoomEd - a first-person shooter game for science education.

Global nomads: video conferencing

An article in Edutopia covered the Global Nomads project, which aims to get teenagers to get in touch with their peers across international borders. The school pupils get to meet via video conference, and discuss crucial topics such as HIV/AIDS, global warming and war. But it's not all school work: the students also get a chance to ask questions about family life and hobbies. The website includes a media library of short films from Vietnam, Brazil, Japan and many other countries, and a schedule of forthcoming video conferences.

Lessons from an unusual social network

In the English speaking world, teenagers are all busy chatting to their friends on commercial social networking platforms, like MySpace (owned by News International) and Bebo. These platforms are full of advertising and offer little in terms of child protection or safety. Meanwhile many French speakers are using a rather unique platform, set up by a non-profit organisation, called Parano.be. Although it's based on rather basic technology (php), it has a huge number of users and survives on donations made by the biggest fans of the site. There is no advertising at all. Members join specific sectors based on their interests, which include sector-specific forums, bulletin boards and a number of other features. A virtual 'salary' is provided to users based on how long they stay online; the currency can be used to purchase virtual gifts or services for others, or even transferred directly to others' virtual accounts. The network is essentially organic: to invite a new member, you have to spend a relatively large sum of virtual currency to send the invite.

Here are some of the most intriguing features from an educational point of view:
- child safety is maintained. Under 18s can only join and view certain sectors of the site, which are monitored by older, verified individuals. Occasionally younger members will lie about their age, but the community usually swiftly responds. There is a high level of responsibility and self-policing. It shows that a school-based community could effectively be moderated by older children.
- role play (RP) is pervasive: although the interface is largely text based, RP is part of the life of most sectors on the discussion forums. The moderators organise an RP session on a regular basis, based on the suggestions of the members. These RP sessions are basically long stories generated by the contributions of each user, and can be highly imaginative. In education, such an approach would be great to encourage creativity and written expression.
- rank changes according to behaviour: the moderators assess the level of participation and other issues to understand what rank the members should have. Usually enthusiastic members will rapidly rise in rank, unlocking new features and 'missions' to complete. This is an interesting 'game style' approach which could encourage pupils to use a system.
- virtual currency is usually spent solidifying social links: buying virtual gifts such as champagne, flowers, teddy bears, etc. for others is really important in keeping good relationships with other members. Such a system could be used in a school-oriented scenario to help individuals understand money management and mathematics.
- games are common: individuals will organise games or competitions from their profiles. They could be treasure hunts, to find information hidden on others' profiles, or simple trivia questions. Prizes are usually virtual currency or gifts. This ludic atmosphere could easily be transferred into an educational 'quest'.

Football, global thinking and ICT in the holidays

The Communication Initiative recently published an article which alerted me to Bring on the World, a pack of excellent ICT-based resources for informal education activities for school breaks. Using the World Cup as a basis for exploration, this pack of activities released by Oxfam helps children to think and learn about fair trade, globalisation, Millenium Development Goals and other huminatarian topics. At the same time, the activities are linked to the UK curriculum, as they involve PE, English (reading and writing), Geography, Citizenship and ICT.

Picture from Oxfam website.

Open source learning resources repository

Not all schools or other educational institutions need or want to install a learning management system (LMS), but a learning resource repository is extremely useful for keeping track of digital learning resources and better enabling sharing between teachers and learners. European Schoolnet has recently released MINOR, an open source "repository to store, manage, and exchange the multimedia assets produced by teachers", as it says in the news article they recently published. The application and source code can be downloaded from Sourceforge.

eLearning for developing countries: what's needed?

Despite many good intentions for developing countries to 'leapfrog' in technical terms, it is rarely yet the case. In many ways, this is because most technologies are designed and deployed in a developed country context, and thus have a number of limitations when trying to implement in a developing country. Additionally, many developing countries still don't have many specialists in ICT in education, and rely mainly on the precious few of enthusiastic, over-worked, pioneering teachers to drive change in their schools.

My work in SE Asia and Europe has prompted me to identify some issues which might help developing countries to deploy more cutting edge technologies in schools, despite the status quo of low bandwidth, poor infrastructure, low levels of training and support for teachers.

1. LAN-based Learning Management System (LMS) installation

many LMS have excellent features which would help schools in developing countries to make best use of their low levels of connectivity and relatively few ICT-based resources. Using an LMS with some learning content management features on a LAN is a good solution for enabling teachers to effectively share their 'homegrown' as well as externally acquired ICT resources. In addition, using LMS tools would enable students to get a 'feel' of using Internet-style applications without the need for broadband connectivity.

What are the barriers? Cost (especially in the case of commercial LMS), difficulty of installation (particularly in Open Source LMS), need for low cost LMS on appropriate platform (many low cost LMS run on Linux, which many teachers find hard to install).


2. Platforms based on mobile phone technologies

Many developing countries have very low numbers of PCs in schools, and low connectivity. However, many people are using mobile phones, and I have seen that many teachers have their own. In Thailand for instance, many people have mobile phones with quite advanced features. There is clearly potential for using mobile phones for teacher support and networking - e.g. sharing lesson plans, tips and advice. My previous post on mobile learning has other ideas.
What are the barriers? Lack of models for use of such platforms, lack of knowledge among teachers in installing/configuring such platforms.

3. Platforms with a range of content creation and synchronisation options
Due to low connectivity, schools in developing countries can benefit from platforms which can deal with offline content creation, which can synchronise/upload/download new resources and other content in a batch process. Surely RSS/XML technologies can handle this rather easily.
What are the barriers? Barriers are almost non-existent. Are there platforms out there already which have these capabilities?

4. Open content repositories with language agnostic approach Many educators in developing countries say that there is little content available in their languages. However, there are huge amounts of language-free content online in the form of pictures, maps, small sound files and other non-textual forms. But teachers and students cannot find such content due to the lack of index and search tools available in their own languages. It would be great to see more organisations taking a FOSS/OER approach to translating at least search interfaces in minority languages.
What are the barriers? Lack of capacity within developing countries to take the initiative on such issues, lack of awareness in developed countries to make such facilities available.

5. Training in dealing with low ICT infrastructure scenarios Many teachers in developing countries seem to think that they can only really use ICT if they have one or two pupils per computer in the computer lab. There are many strategies for using ICT without having a good level of infrastructure. For instance, I saw in one training session, Chris Smith using just one keyboard and mouse together with a projection screen to engage a whole group. Basically, one person controlled the mouse, and another the keyboard. Both were passed around the room so that everyone used the equipment during the session - the only additional investment needed was a very long (but cheap) cable! Other strategies such as using web applications on a LAN, backing up websites using tracker programes (like HTTracker) so they can be browsed offline when Internet connection is slow or disconnects often. There are many other strategies, but hardly any training or training content for teachers on this topic.
What are the barriers? Most training is planned still with an "ideal" situation in mind rather than a realistic view of the state of schools. Better needs analysis should be done when planning training.

What MySpace can teach education technologists

MySpace, the site that most Western teenagers use every day, but also love to hate. It has so many problems and issues, but nonetheless continues to grow in popularity. Perhaps there are some lessons we can learn for education technology projects.

1) Users can tolerate bugs: Myspace is bug-ridden. This morning I had to log in 10 times to subscribe to a friend's blog. But people still go there every day..
2) All that matters is the people: Most users only stay on MySpace because their friends and useful contacts are there.
3) Safety is not assured: although still affecting a relatively small number, safety concerns are high (as anyone can register, and say they are any age). So adults can send unsuitable content to children.
4) Privacy worries: teens are posting unsuitable content, without thinking about the consequences. There's clearly need for more media literacy education here.
5) Usability isn't such a big deal: the MySpace interface is very inefficient and requires far too much clicking to do some simple tasks. But they still go back...
6) Corporate ownership doesn't worry them: teens are uploading creative work to the MySpace platform without any concerns about ownership.

US researcher Danah Boyd has written a great deal about MySpace and similar social networks. Also my previous post on digital teenagers has some discussion of similar issues, and a link to an audio file which includes teens talking about MySpace.

Digital teenagers

A recent post on David Warlick's 2 Cents Worth blog pointed me in the direction of a recorded interview with a bunch of American teenagers about their Internet habits, which took place at the 2005 web 2.0 conference. I found it particularly interesting, as I realised that my own Internet habits were pretty similar to the teenagers. Here are some of the main points that struck me:
- teenagers spend a great deal of time on MySpace or similar social networks. I visit MySpace once daily, although don't spend as long on there as they do - but I'm using alternative spaces for similar activities.
- they are really into IM, via whatever interface is used by most of their friends. I only recently managed to get off IM (mainly to save myself time, as I often got into distracting conversations in the middle of the day), although in a previous job I used IM extensively to chat with web developers
- they don't want to pay for things, and use P2P networks on a regular basis. Me too!

My conclusion is that we need to look more into the following areas in education:
- Internet safety for teens: how to protect them through education and media literacy
- IM for education: there are obvious applications in language teaching (linking up pairs of students across borders to chat in second languages) but how else could it be used?
- P2P educational resources: in education, we often say that we want teachers to share resources, but still put up barriers to students doing this. Shouldn't we allow students to share/learn from each other in this way too?

Postcode plants database

The UK's Natural History Museum offers this excellent resource for the UK. You simply fill in the first part of a UK postcode in the search box, and the database returns a list of native flora from that area. The species are listed under both common and scientific names, and clicking on the species gives a few additional details such as the family, form, provenance and in many cases, some photographs. The database could inspire many different educational activities, such as comparing and contrasting species found in two or more areas of the country, providing a "jumping off" point for outdoor investigations, where children could map the frequency and location of particular species in the local area. The possibilities are really only limited by the imagination. Unfortunately the database is copyright to the Natural History Museum - it would be great to see this as a Creative Commons licensed resource. It's a nice initiative that could be widened to a global scale.

Update (19/10/2006): this morning I read Stephen Downes' post, re-emphasising the value of P2P infrastructures compared to client-server approaches. It made me re-think the value of this kind of postcode database. It would be even better if there were open contribution databases, with feeds which could be federated into one... Then, students could be contributors and constructors of the resource, rather than just users.

Google and Oracle make further moves in education

Both companies have recently announced new initiatives for education. Google have partnered with a number of educational organisations (mostly US based) to provide examples and advice for teachers around a number of their tools. They now have a specific website for educators bringing together the tools and content.


Meanwhile the Oracle Academy has a new curriculum for secondary school students in advanced ICT, and new training materials for teachers. There is an overview (PDF) posted on the site. It seems like a more formal approach to complement the existing informal learning project I previously blogged about, Thinkquest.

Photo by Marvin.

Thinkquest Thailand

Oracle's Thinkquest competition for students is taking place again this year. So far, only one Thai team has taken part in the past. This year, three teams will join in the competition, and thanks to Dr. Rangsun at the Thai Bureau of ICT, I have the chance to support them. Dr. Rangsun organised a great one-day workshop, where the teams of students and teacher-coaches presented their ideas so far, and received constructive criticism from Oracle experts, Dr. Rangsun and myself. Now, the teams are supporting each other via a discussion list. I look forward to seeing the results!

Making connections through images: Memory Project

No Man's Blog recently introduced me to the Memory Project, a really wonderful small-scale project linking high school students in Western countries with disadvantaged kids in developing countries. The high school students are studying art, and are asked to make a portrait of their distant counterpart. As it says on the site/
"Given that children who have been abandoned, neglected, abused, or orphaned usually have few personal keepsakes, the purpose of the portraits is to provide them with a special memory of their youth and to help honor their heritage and identity".

It would be great to see this project enlarged, so that there is a long term means of contact between the two groups. Adding an ICT-based element for maintaining contact would then also act as an informal training mechanism for the children in the developing country.