Hal MacLean

The concept for the main truck

One of the most delightful projects I’ve been involved in recently has been the redesign and recommissioning of the BBC Blast touring vehicles. In October 2008 Cleveratom were asked to put together a proposal and we were frtunate enough to be asked to undertake the work. This has been a huge undertaking, but ultimately incredibly rewarding. Starting off by reviewing the Blast trucks both from our experiences of them as facilitators in 2006, and by visiting them in Salford we were able to detail the various shortcomings and strengths, and work on how to improve the experience for young people.

Much of what I have been involved in has been the physical layout of the main truck, amending the spaces and changing the orientation and mechanics of what is possible. One of the more subtle changes was a realignment of the internal partitions to provide more versatile spaces. What we had noticed before was that the main workshop room was used as a throughfare and the constant interruptions were a real disadvantage. Additionally, the small circular tables being fixed in four locations really restricted the way the room could be used. By moving the main partition wall across the truck to reduce the workshop space, we removed the ‘corridor’ that was actually dead space. By rotating the space ninety degrees we re-orientated it so that the door in to the room became part of the back of the space instead of being at the front left. However, we also wanted to change the flow of people through that truck and introduced a small ‘porch’ which had access directly into the edit suite from the outside instead of having to go into the main workshop. This immediately calmed the flow of bodies in and out of the main area. We then moved the studio wall to enlarge the third space and this has had a massive impact.

The edit suite originally had the main server cabinet in it which considerably restricted what could be done in the room. By moving that out into the main workshop area, and positioning it as part of a large ‘storage wall’ concept we created a physical and virtual store in one place. This freed up the edit suite and has introduced incredible amounts of room in what was once a fairly claustrophobic facility. There is now a door through from the edit room into the studio, too. Previously, to get from one to the other you would have had to go through the main workshop. Now, that space is protected and can be a much calmer area.

Storage was a major consideration and much of the time in redesigning has been spent on creating storage where there was none before. The storage wall has been developed and will hold every last wire, connector, tripod and camera that is needed on the truck. In the studio space a new set of cupboards have been created and these are superior in every way to the previous ones.

Lastly, the main truck operates in two modes now – with three spaces as described, or with just two. The studio wall can be folded back to add to the main workshop space if necessary.

There are two other vehicles joining the tour this year. The first is a ‘Discovery’ space where visitors can drop in and sample some of the activities they

The Discovery vehicle concept drawing

will be able to undertake in the main  workshops. This vehicle also houses the tour office but must fold up into a major storage unit for hauling the kit to each location. This has been one of the biggest challenges – to provide an exciting and dynamic space for the young people and visitors, but to give as much storage for the tour paraphanalia as possible. I think we reached a suitable solution!

The third vehicle is an outreach van, which will visit schools and communities ahead of the main tour. It is a much smaller unit but has the capability to deliver as many workshops albeit for fewer numbers of people. The idea is for it to stir up the interest ahead of the main visit, and I think this will be a very busy bus indeed!

There are literally hundreds of other changes this year, far too many to list here for you. The flight cases that are now the main welcome desk (a great idea by Tony Kavanagh) and the new tables and chairs provided by MJF, the mood lighting, the rear projection windows… the technical infrastructure we have specified that should provide ample opportunity for creativity and much, much more!

The 'Advance' vehicle - a smaller truck for outreach work

You can get a feel for the space in these images, taken recently just as the last fit was being completed in White City:

http://homepage.mac.com/halgernon/BBC_Blast_2009/index.html

I hope that as the tour progresses many people will be able to enjoy and experience the BBC Blast programme. It’s a winner!

I was recently asked to provide a short piece of text for Education Executive magazine, looking at one or more of the emerging trends evident from the BETT show this year. I didn’t get the best of opportunities to walk around the show as we were extremely busy on our stand, but I did also do a presentation on Stephen Heppell’s ‘Learning Elsewhere’ feature stand in the middle of the main hall. I focussed on the collaborative nature of working online, and believe that this becoming more and more important. Here’s what I wrote for the magazine article:

Collaborative learning is foremost again this year, but not just between pupils. Becta’s lead on engaging parents in dialogue demands closer collaboration between home and school. More than simply sending out reports and giving access to summative data, great schools know this is about a structured, ongoing dialogue, not an event. It should happen throughout the year to be effective, and go well beyond accessing summative data, talking at parents’ evenings, or sending SMS messages about attainment or attendance.

Collaboration is also central to the New Diplomas. Students from different schools learning together in a consortium, physically or virtually, presents some interesting dilemmas. Current ‘approved’ learning platforms are not yet communicating clearly between themselves and alternative solutions are needed that don’t depend on a single school’s management system. Such platforms do exist, and these often offer greater opportunities for collaboration when managed well.

Encouraging effective collaboration between schools, and between home and school, perhaps requires an interesting shift in our use of existing tools, or alternatively the adoption of new ones. Most importantly, we must actively reduce the barriers around our virtual spaces, in a safe and secure way, if large-scale collaboration is to underpin learning moving forward.

As you can see, the importance of engaging parents goes well beyond simply reporting data to them at frequent intervals, and should certainly embrace the idea of participation in the process, and not simply attending an event. This is hard for lots of schools, but if it wasn’t it probably wouldn’t be worth striving for. The benefits of enabling this level of participation are likely to be clearer understanding of the aims of the school, less surprises at parents’ evenings and almost certainly a higher standard of attainment from the students.

And then there are the New Diplomas, which demand cross school collaboration for many of the lines of learning. Further, they demand close collaboration with local businesses too; working online to extend the opportunity for learning carries many challenges. How will schools introduce students from other partner schools into an online space that they already run – all Becta approved spaces (VLEs, MLEs, etc) are linked to the school management and information system (MIS: a database of student information) to populate the member data. Adding a temporary student to this is hard enough, but adding them regularly, frequently and removing them afterwards is harder still. Worse – how do you add an external adult from the local car dealership (for example) who is working with the school on a specific strand?

At Cleveratom we have been considering this for a while and conclude that it probably isn’t the right approach to link everything to the school MIS, and in the case of diplomas and engaging parents then it isn’t practical either. We have two products that might be of real interest to schools:

Spoke – a self evaluation and review framework tool. This allows you to set up ‘scenarios’ with sets of questions that students can use to evaluate themselves against. Parents can also be invited in to a scenario and staff of course are part of it to. The system allows individual reflection and review of performance, allows peer review, mentoring, group review and even acts as a standard questionnaire tool, too. It is remarkably adaptable and will easily enable a school to engage in ongoing and continuous dialogue with parents regarding their children’s learning, but introduces a strong element of self-evaluation for the students themselves.

Thought Park – a learning platform designed to be simple, engaging and powerful, it is often referred to as a ‘facebook’ for schools. However, it is a closed environment with a known membership that leverages social networking tools to support and extend learning. We have deployed it in a number of different schools around the country, including primary, secondary and FE colleges and it seems to fit the needs at many different levels. We are developing Thought Park for the New Diplomas to include all of the features needed to deliver the programmes. It is most certainly not a Becta approved VLE, and we really don’t want it to be, for the reasons above. It is making a difference to the schools piloting the roll out of the New Diploma in Essex and we think it could be of real interest to you if you are at all involved in implementing New Diplomas in your school, or across a consortium of schools, and are looking at online collaboration as part of that.

It would be wrong to assume that these tools are another way of building walls around information that should be shared. Both systems are able to have the membership extended to whoever you choose, and schools can manage that themselves. As I said in the article, the future of collaborative learning must include the lowering of walls around our virtual spaces, the idea of sharing information and passing on learning to others. We cannot expect to put learning under any specific bubble and not allow bubles to join together. Such is the way VLEs tend to work, sadly – each is its own bubble, and whilst lots of schools in the same VLE can often work toegether, real life in school settings isn’t like that, with lots of different schools using different products that still, sadly, do not ‘talk’ to each other.

Cleveratom at BETT 09

Cleveratom will once again be attending the BETT show, partnering with City College Norwich in the new technologes zone, on stands U120 and U130.

This year we will be showcasing some tools we have developed:

• Thought Park - a superb new learning platform built entirely to support social constructivist learning. It is being used in Primary schools and secondary schools, supporting the roll out of the new Diplomas. It is also the engine underneath the excellent ‘RUGroom.net’ software that City College students will be using at the show.
• Spoke – an innovative tool for engaging people in dialogue online. At it’s most simple it is a questionnaire tool but it is able to be much more than that. You can create any scenario that you want to find information out about and invite anyone to participate. It is currently being used in Primary schools and secondary schools to support Personalised Learning, and in secondary schools to engage pupils in self and peer assessment. It is also being used as a target setting and self assessment tool. One size fits all? Not anymore!

Ask us also about ‘Mobistick’ which is a lovely web based system for collecting SMS messages from anyone. Simply provide the number and invite people to text and you can collect feedback no matter where you are or what you are doing. It also allows you to run simple polls too. We use it when presenting at conferences to allow the audience to ask a question or make a comment. It is also used by schools to engag parents in dialogue, and by conference centres to provide as a service for their clients.

We’ll be delighted to talk about any of these, and much more besides, but you can find out more by going to the cleveratom website. I am pleased to say I will be working with Stephen Heppell once again, giving presentations on his stand in the main hall, and I hope that this show will be the busiest yet. It is likely to be the last at Olympia, too… or so the rumours go. It is all moving to Docklands if we are to believe the whispers!

In the mean time, see you at Olympia – click this link and it will take you to our online Christmas card and a couple of images of the new stand so you know what you are looking for when you get there!

Ever tried going a whole month without? I wasn’t consioulsy trying to, but I looked at the date and was suitably taken aback that it is nearly a whole month since the last time. That’s not quite a record, but it really doesn’t feel so good.

Of course, I am talking about blog posting.

Cleveratom has been a really busy place to be around of late, with many things going on that are simply taking huge amounts of time. This is all good, but it does mean there isn’t enough time left to do things like write blog posts.

So what’s been taking the time away?

First up, BBC Blast are recomissioning their wonderful touring entourage, and extending it somewhat too. The amazingly innovative truck and marquee are to be joined by a further space on each location (where it is possible to fit it in) and have an advanced vehicle visiting locations in advance. It will all make sense when you see it, even if it doesn’t right now, but suffice to say the project continues to go from strength to strength and should be an astonishingly brilliant tour in 2009 – 2011.

Next, the NHS are developing a professional networking solution that should complement and extend the learning management systems, and provide greater opportunities for dialogue between all of the various parts that make up the health care provision we all enjoy. Creating a robust solution that meets everybody’s needs is quite a challenge, but with many years experience to call on, and colleagues from our old university too, we feel confident of getting it into shape by the deadline of 5th December.

The BETT show is fast approaching and as ever Cleveratom will be there, this time partnering with City Cllege Norwich to develop an excellent stand space and provide a rich insight into what happens in the college ‘RUGroom’ space which we helped develop. This development has been exceptiionally successful in providing a rich and creative experience for all of the RUGroom students. We are considerably proud of the fact that our involvement in Norwich has been over such a long time, and that one of the outcomes has been a ‘Beacon Award’ for CCN. Can we now say that we have helped develop an award winning space? I’d like to think so! In the mean time we have to prepare the space for BETT, design the stand, arrange for the hire of the necessary kit, organise merchandising and leaflets and generally get it all into a viable project. We will be on stand U130 (and U120) in the New Technology zone where we will be showing products such as ‘Spoke’, ‘Thought Park’ and ‘Mobi Stick’… all wonderful creations! There is more information about these tools on the Cleveratom Website.

All in all these things take time to get right, and with three major pieces of work like this it is no surprise to find a distinct lack of blogging going on. As soon as there is enough of a space I’ll report about each of these projects in turn.

On Monday Matthew and I worked with City College Norwich RUGRoom students at the ‘Be Very Afraid‘ event at Bafta in Picadilly, London. This annual extravaganza of digital talent showcases to a wide spectrum of visitors some of the many excellent things happening in schools and colleges around the UK. This year was no different with a superb range of digital technologies being used in a variety of creative ways.

City College Norwich have been working with Geo Mapping – using a GPS enabled device (called a ‘Trackstick‘) to log locations every few seconds and enable the user to download the data which can then be added to Google Earth. The result is a path that shows as a line across the map, and which, with careful planning, can be made into all kinds of shapes!

The students from City College Norwich had to plan their routes using maps of the area around Picadilly, and make sure that they created an interesting shape. They then stepped out on the town to walk the walk, returning to download their data. Once they had it in Google Earth they didn’t stop there! They took screen grabs and manipulated the images using ‘3D Maker‘, a small app that makes a number of 3D files, some of which require a pair of 3D glasses to see – you remember the kind, one red lens, one cyan lens…?

The result was a lot of walks in the shape of cup cakes, boats, shoes, geometric designs and all kinds of interesting images. However, of far greater importance was the ability of the students to undertake a considerably complex task (which they did with ease) but also to communicate it to the many visitors who were intrigued as to what was going on. The highly demanding environment of a show such as this really tests the nerve of people who are normally reluctant to talk to people, and I am delighted to say that each of the young people at the event from Norwich were excellent ambassadors for the college.

A quick word about ’3D Maker’ – it is a superbly simple application and needs no real tuition to use. You simply take your image, scale it to fit on the screen when at 100%, then select the items in the image that are to become foreground in the 3D output. You trace around them and adjust a single slider and the app does the rest! You can set foreground, middle ground and background items pretty easily, adjusting the extent of the ’3D’ effect. Wearing a pair of 3D glasses really brings the images to life. If you are even remotely interested in tis kind of artistic imagery, go and buy a copy of 3D maker!

A quick word also about Tracksticks – wonderful little devices that just work as you expect. Turn them on, let them acquire a satellite signal, and go for a walk! When you get back to your computer you’ll need the Trackstick Manager application to download the data to, and then export in the appropriate format. Google ‘.kmz’ files are a snap, and loading them in to Google Earth is a double click away. One slight reservation about the Tracksticks and that is with the software which is PC only right now. A nice and friendly mac version would be the icing on the cake, and really help make the trackstick experience very good indeed.