This year I’m working with Dean the Art Wizard and 20 ‘Gifted and Talented’ [a definition here] Year 10 pupils from King Edward VII Science and Sport College. The pupils will spend some time developing projects before going as small groups of Science Ambassadors into feeder schools and running activities with younger children. As part of National Science and Engineering Week in March, they will also host activities at King Edward’s as part of an open evening.
Yesterday Dean and I spent the whole day with the soon-to-be ambassadors: we introduced our practices and I did a presentation around the theme of materials selection in sport. Dr Lewis, the science teacher we are collaborating with wanted the project to use recycled (reused?) materials and to tie in with the Olympics, so we then presented the pupils with a pile of junk materials and the challenge to design a sport to take into the feeder schools as an activity.
We used an iterative process of first generating wild and exciting ideas and then over a few more passes eventually distilling these down into things that kept the kernel of what made the original ideas exciting, but were realistic for taking into primary schools and doing with a few classes of young children over a couple of hours.
We finished off by documenting the process and by starting to write up rule-sets for the new sports.
The Year 10 pupils will me a few more times to refine their projects and then Dean and I will accompany them into about 6 different schools to roll out their activities. I’ve no idea what to expect.
Generation of initial ideas
Introducing the new sport of hockegg
Principles of box jousting explained
Making prototypes
Making prototypes
CD and bubblewrap wheels are attached to a racing cart
I was asked if I would run some workshops as part of Mowmacre Hill Primary School’s Creative Learning Day – a day aimed at trialling a range of creative learning activities and developing the pupils’ role in the planning, reflection and evaluation stages of Creative Partnerships projects.
Working in mixed-age ‘research groups’, each consisting of 30 pupils, the children were exploring the following 5 areas of creativity:
Envisaging what might be
Questioning and challenging
Making connections and seeing relationships
Exploring ideas and keeping options open
Reflecting critically on ideas, actions and outcomes
So, I needed to provide an activity that would work with children aged 5-11 years old and would provide a framework for the areas of creativity. After some discussion with the Creative Agent (representative from Creative Partnerships) we decided to use a version of Emergent Game.
Given that at least 50% of the adults who play Emergent Game pay to keep hold of their avatars, I thought it would be prudent to change the format to one that didn’t involve soft toys!
A selection of mysterious liquids
Inspired by the workshop we did at hanare project in Japan last year, where we ran out of toys and one of the players used a glass of water instead, I decided to theme it around some mysterious liquids…
I was also keen to build on the immersive experience work I did earlier this year at Linden Primary School, and experiment with how key strategies from that might be scaled down into something much smaller. In this case, a workshop lasting about an hour.
Starting off in a room next door to where I had laid out the grids, I first introduced myself as a secret agent. I wasn’t allowed to tell them much about my job, other than that we were on the lookout for fresh talent to join my department in the years to come.
I gave them a description of the sort of people we were looking for:
People who can notice the smallest details.
People who can think the biggest ideas.
People who can tell the best stories.
People who can imagine the wildest dreams.
I then informed them we would be doing a series of missions as a sort of a job interview, and I would be watching to see who had the skills we were interested in.
We also wanted people who were good at team work, so I gave them 1 minute to get into pairs (preferably with someone from a different year). After that, I told them our missions would be based around investigating some mysterious liquids. The scientists in my department had no idea what these liquids were, so we needed the pupils to figure out what the stories might be so the scientists knew where to start with their research.
The mysterious liquids were all in a rucksack and the teams of special-agents-in-training did a lucky dip to get the one they would be investigating. Whilst the bag made its way towards the back of the group and after the initial exclamations of “its just water” had been heard, I reiterated the four skills, asking after each one if they thought “its just water” would be the sort of thing we were looking for. Generally, they thought not!
The Grid
With all the mysterious liquids distributed, we moved next door into the mission laboratory and gathered around the edge of the grid. Here I explained the first mission:
Profile:
What is the name of your liquid?
Where is it from?
What is the best thing it has ever done?
From this standing start, the children only had about 3 minutes to come up with the seeds of a back story for their mysterious liquids.
They did me proud with intergalactic waters of several different sorts; healing octopus blood; water from a river-and-washing-up-liquid accident; jelly from London that would make you powerful and water from Antarctica that looked innocent enough, but only the two agents working with it had the special eyesight to see what it really was…
It poisons you because a part of the moon has fallen into it...
Where some of the older kids were sniggering and wanting to say their mysterious liquids were urine, I called their bluff and demanded more details.
Frog wee/wii collected by a farmer over the course of one day
Next – to some embarrassment from aforementioned sniggering kids – was the reporting-back session, where each team told the rest of the group what they thought their mysterious liquid was. This gave me a chance to make sure everyone was entering into the spirit of things and identify the very few who were unable to see anything more than a bottle of water. It also meant that everyone could see what sort of standard was being set and what they had to match up to.
Next I unleashed the remaining missions: one asking them to write a postcard from their mysterious liquid to one of the other mysterious liquids; one asking them to design a creature that might live in the liquid, giving me information about what it looks like, how it moves and how it breathes; one asking about what it might have been used to wash clean; and one explaining where the liquid might (and might not) like to hang out in school.
The creature-designing mission was by far the most popular mission, but again the pupils did amazingly well, with most of them completing all four missions in something like 15 minutes.
We concluded with a second reporting back session lasting about 10 minutes in which each team was asked to share their best mission.
Here is a slideshow of some of the mission cards that were produced during the three workshops:
It was great for me to be able to run the game (although I never actually called it that in front of the pupils) 3 times back-to-back, because it meant I was able to try different formats and tweak things that weren’t quite working as well as I wanted.
In addition to this, the pupils were also involved in evaluating and reflecting on each workshop immediately after it finished. I wasn’t part of these sessions, but you get the gist of them from the evaluation sheets each child completed:
Did you...
At the end of the day there was a final session where the pupils were again asked for their thoughts on the different activities they had taken part in, this time feeding back verbally in response to questions such as: did you think the activity was better suited to any particular year groups; what did you enjoy about the activity; and what aspect of learning did they think it was relevant to.
I followed my last group into their final session and so was able to get a feel for how positively it had been received. I missed whether they thought it was suited towards a particular age group, which was a shame because I want to know how the youngest children got on with it.
There was potentially a large focus on writing during the game, and I wanted to check whether the working in pairs (and often with a teacher supporting them), coupled with the verbal reporting-back sessions, meant that they were still able to express their ideas in a way that wasn’t too daunting (more important to me than actually generating written documentation).
A really interesting thing that came out during this evaluation was how much the pupils were linking it to their maths and science lessons. It’s possible it could also have been influenced by us working in the science room, but they were mostly making an incredibly strong connection to the containers of liquid and their work on capacity etc!
Another piece of feedback I received, this time from a member of staff at lunch time, was the value of the reporting-back sessions in going towards developing some much-needed speaking and listening skills. This was really useful, because up until then I had been a little bit concerned about the pacing and whether this bit slowed things down too much.
Anyway, many lessons learned, and I’m confident that the Emergent Game framework can be successfully and interestingly adapted to use in different education contexts. Next challenges might be to explore how it might be harnessed to a specific set of learning objectives. It would also be good to get the pupils roaming around the school a bit and interacting with their surroundings. I’d also like to see what happens if we re-introduce the emergent aspect and ask the pupils to start generating their own missions…
I just wanted to say that the fizzPOP hackerspace is increasingly becoming the communal, collaborative production space for unpredictable creative things that I was hoping for when I left art school.
Actually, come to think about it, in many ways it’s quite like what I hoped art school would be.
Since doing an exchange visit there in 2005, my contact with Joshibi University of Art and Design and its students has included: helping to host their exchange students coming to Birmingham; effectively working there as a technician for a month; countless days just sort of hanging out there; keeping in contact with several pupils and alumni, including visiting their homes and having them stay with me in the UK; and hearing from alumni friends their tales of working as artists post-graduation and their encounters with graduates from other universities. As a result, I have a pretty well-formed idea of some of the things I would like to do to shake things up a bit, beyond my low-level “So, have you ever considered showing your work, outside of a gallery context” vibrations.
In 2006, 2007 and 2008 I also coordinated and delivered the social programme as part of the annual Joshibi Summer School. This involved sorting out all the pastoral and evening/weekend social stuff for the 30-or-so students who would spend a month based at Bournville Centre for the Visual Arts (BCVA).
We’ve had many conversations about how the Summer School programme could be improved. The main problems from my point of view are that the students arrive as a group; take over a block in a halls of residence as a group; are the only group studying at Bournville over the summer; have an interpreter with them the whole time; and have negligible contact with anyone outside of the staff and the other Summer School students. They may get to experience something of a different way of approaching art education, but there’s a lot missing in terms of cultural exchange and development of language skills.
I decided I didn’t want to work on the social programme this year, but was later invited to provide a day’s teaching for the Summer School. Based on last year’s werewolf success, and my recent work with BARG, there was no doubt that a game would be involved.
My contribution was to form a starting point for a larger project where the students would go on to develop work that contrasts London and Tokyo. I ran two workshops in the morning where we compared the places in Japan they recommended I visited to the places that actually had meaning to them in their day-to-day lives. This got us from guidebook staples such as the Emperor’s Palace and Kiyomizu-dera to stories of favourite ice-cream shops, overheard sounds of children playing in campsites and stars as seen above car parks.
We also looked at the landmarks that we give significance to in our journeys through landscapes that we are very familiar with. Taking our journeys to university as an example, we drew maps and uncovered more stories. I’m familiar enough with the bus ride to the Joshibi Sagamihara campus that I could recount my personal map of that journey and compare it to theirs. This experience lasting only a few seconds is so completely and vividly on my map that I’m genuinely shocked to realise now that it’s a memory from 4 years ago.
As expected, the smell of the chicken farms featured prominently in the cycled versions of the journey…
For the afternoon, I’d prepared a scavenger hunt around Bournville Green and the surrounding area.
This was designed as a team game, but with significant components where each student would be very much working alone (…unless they plucked up the courage to ask passers by for assistance!). Use of the Japanese language was, of course, banned throughout.
The students randomly selected a question to tackle and then had some time to discuss it with their team mates. The questions were worded to avoid typical Japanese constructions of English. I also tried to avoid making them so simple that no discussion was needed to fully understand them.
Examples include.
There is a car park at the Western edge of the park. Around it, with one end in the ground, are wooden “dragon’s teeth”. How many dragon’s teeth are there?
Stand between the Porter’s Lodge and the church. Look at the church. Can you see the carved wooden panel? How many flowers does it have? What is the man holding in his left hand?
Go to the chemists and find a lilac-coloured dog hanging up by a door. What colour is his collar, and how many diamonds are on the front of it?
In the alleyway between the chemists and Louise’s, there are some old style posters. What is the name of a UK city written on one of them?
Go to the butchers shop. What is the name of the sheep on the counter near the window?
Go to the Wyevale garden centre. There is a scarecrow near one of the doors. How much did his hat cost?
There were a range of strategies employed in designing the questions. Some of them, such as the sheep’s name question above, could only be answered if the student asked the appropriate question of the relevant shop keeper. Others would be made infinitely easier if they asked a member of the public for help in explaining what a particular word refers to (e.g. dragon’s teeth).
The other major aim was to get the students out and into parts of Bournville that they would never normally go to. This had the intended bonus of meaning that I had to seek out these places first. I was a student at BCVA for 5 years, and yet there were so many places in that tiny area that I had never been to until the planning stages of this game. I had lots of adventures and conversations: so much of Bournville is hidden away in a secret second-layer-back, and there are some truly class acts working there.
I was also determined that I would work with what was already in situ, and not parachute in any foreign bodies to plant for the game. The sharks, Iggle Piggles and Bill Oddies were all there already, waiting to be discovered and played with.
Right, so we had the basic mechanism of having to go to places and find answers to questions. The other aspect of the game design was about how to make this an intense, sometimes visceral experience.
Prior to explaining the game rules, we’d confiscated (in a nice way!) all their mobile phones, electronic dictionaries and phrasebooks. This was originally done to ensure that looking things up didn’t replace discussion, but I think it also had quite a wrenching effect, because this technology is usually very heavily relied upon.
I deliberately made it so that, after the initial discussion phase, each player then had to go off independently to find the answer. This took away another safety net of group decision making.
The other thing to do was to add a magic vest in the form of some hats for the players to wear whist they were out and about.
This covered my usual criterion for having an element of silliness involved in order to break down a few barriers, but as Holly Gramazio pointed out at Hide and Speak, your players look like criminals and, if the students were going to be in the bank counting CCTV cameras, I wanted it to be clear that they probably weren’t dangerous! The “help me find stuff” labels on the hats were intended as an invitation for people not involved in the game to approach the students and initiate conversations.
The weather was drizzly, the students were extremely tired after spending a long weekend in London (not to mention the jet lag!), energy levels were low, and I had to tweak some stuff on the fly to increase the pacing, but it all worked! It worked a treat!
It was great to see the balloons bobbing around on the green and in front of the parade of shops. It was fun to see the teams playing jan-ken-pon to decide the next runner, but substituting diddle-diddle-dum lyrics so as to avoid the 50 point fine for speaking Japanese. It was satisfying to hear small groups of students with nothing to do standing around and chatting in English. It was worrying to hear that one girl hadn’t been seen for 25 minutes, but heart-warming to hear from the search party that she’d been found in the park with a gang of kids around her trying to help her solve her clue. We giggled to hear the story of people offering to help count dragon’s teeth. It did nothing less than warm my cockles to hear someone describe the hats as being magic, a comfort, and to thank me for making them wear them.
All three teams did really well and the rain mostly stayed away until we had finished playing. The final scores were in the region of 120 points (average 10 points per question) with only maybe 4 failed questions per team.
I finished off the day with a more formal presentation about the use of mechanisms and rule sets to instigate interactions with spaces; how presenting something as a game contrasts with presenting it as a piece of performance artwork; the importance of stories; the importance of magic vests/hats; the importance of silliness (and how it’s easier to be part of a large group doing silly things rather than being by yourself doing silly things) and how doing projects in public spaces confers ownership of that space to you (in the sense of responsibility and empathy, rather than of power).
Anyway, it looks like I may yet end up doing some social stuff with the group on Saturday: I may take the opportunity to quiz them on how the game has affected their perception of Bournville…
It’s taken a while, but I now finally get to say “we did this!” and link to the blog and video from a school project I worked on earlier this year. I’ll let them speak for themselves.
A fab afternoon with a great crowd of people. Heather wrote a nice summary of the first section and Nicky Getgood did a great job of capturing the non-games aspect of the afternoon which was to explore, and temporarily reclaim, some neglected urban spaces.
A song for Skatz
I spent 4 days being a secret agent at Linden Primary School.
We investigated, we hypothesised, we made a humming labyrinth, we transported a minstrel over from a parallel dimension where planets were losing their sunlight, and we helped him write a song that contained all the knowledge about light and shadows that they needed to bring the the sun back.
WOW! A song for Skatz
An excellent project where I was able to draw on a lot of the theory from game design in order to make an immersive experience that each of the 60 pupils could engage with in different ways. I hope to be able to write more about this once I know more about the permissions situation.
Rhubarb Radio
On the 17th of May I was a guest on Steadman and Grimes’ Sunday Social show on Rhubarb Radio. We talked about BARG and the w i d e o p e n s p a c e event. I’ve written the first of two posts on the BARG website that include the audio and a selection of links and further information relating to the things we talked about.
BARG website
Now BARG has been running for a few months and we’ve got a feel for what shape it is, pindec and I spent a lot of time last week coding up a website to cater for the different aspects of the network’s activity. Here’s the result: http://barg.org.uk/. We’ve loads more events planned and we’ll be using the website to put out all the details when the times come, so subscribe to the news feed, or make sure you join the mailing list if you want to get information by email.
Post Digital
Mudlark heralded their transfer to Birmingham and their arrival at Fazeley Studios by organising a “day of talks from inspirational friends and allies”.
Post Digital brought together an interesting collection of view-points and practices, to which I added a deliberately lo-fi potted history indicating how I had arrived at a practice where I hack up cardboard and masking-tape interfaces for GPS units.
I ended my presentation by asking what sort of post-digital spaces a pro-am sort of someone like myself might be prodding in a few years’ time…
I think the keys to interesting mscape projects (as far as my practice is concerned) are either in some seriously nifty programming, or in the interface. I currently lack the programming skills, however I did save a load of cardboard boxes from when I moved house…
The Anticipator wraps a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) in a new housing and uses locational information from the GPS (Global Positioning System) to light some, none or all of a series of LEDs (Light Emitting Diodes).
The Anticipator will be used on the first day of a project involving 60 year 3 pupils in a Leicester school: working in teams of 5 for about 10 minutes, all the pupils will be required to help a Special Agent (me) use The Anticipator to sweep the school grounds looking for whatever it is that The Anticipator detects. (At this stage all the pupils will know is that something unusual is brewing, we’ll use this contact time to get them to speculate on what they think is about to happen and what The Anticipator is measuring.)
The Anticipator will indicate 2 large areas of high Anticipatory activity: one is where we will put the investigation shed, and the other is where… well, who knows what could happen in the other location…
Anyway, that’s the background, here’s how it’s done…
Except for a few lengths of dowel and some bolts, all the structural stuff is made from supermarket fruit boxes. I love this stuff – I don’t have a studio or workshop so it’s great for layering up and using as pseudo wood.
The main block holds the PDA mounted on top of an array of 6 LDRs (Light Dependent Resistors: when light hits their top surface their electrical resistance falls allowing current to pass more easily around the circuit). Each LDR is wired in series with an LED and all the LDR/LED pairs are wired in parallel in a circuit with a 9V battery and a rather nice switch I got from a chandlery (it’s got a very satisfying feel to the switch action!). The LEDs are housed about a metre away in a smaller block.
In the video below you can see how the amount of light hitting the LDRs controls the brightness of the LEDs. I’m using a really simple mscape consisting of concentric regions that show one of 6 .gifs with between 1 and 6 small white squares on a black background. When there is a white square above a LDR it lights the corresponding LED. It turns out that there’s enough light coming from the black background that LDRs without a square above them still make their LEDs glow a little. Placing a few layers of tissue paper between the screen and the LDRs cuts out enough of the ambient glow that the contrast between “on” and “off” LEDs is adequate for use outside in daylight.
And that’s it really; it’s not rocket science. Well, it might be, but that’s up to the imagination of the kids interacting with it.
There will be one child either side, carrying the main block (thereby stopping their bodies from getting too close to the PDA and affecting the GPS signal) and a third carrying the LED block. The LEDs will need shading from direct sunlight (it’s a project about light and shadow – can’t hurt to get them thinking about stuff like that right from the start!) and there will need to be people noting down how many LEDs are lit and whereabouts in the school grounds we are.
I’ve deliberately not labelled anything so there’s enough space for it to be whatever each child wants it to be. This is part of a very deliberate strategy to try and leave as many gaps as possible where there are no right or wrong answers. Using the principle that “the pictures are better on radio”, leaving details to the imagination makes for a vivid experience. Each child can have their own interpretation of what’s going on and that’s what makes it powerful: it’s theirs.
Working with the children and The Anticipator on day one will allow me to plant whatever seeds are necessary and see what direction they’re growing in. It also gives the children a space in which they can meet my character and ask any questions they have. I’m not saying I’ll be able to answer them though… that’s for them to do by the end of the week!
As indicated in this post I’m often thwarted in my desire to share fantastic projects that I’ve worked on in schools because issues around online documentation are not clarified, discussed and agreed upon right at the start of the project, much less built into the time and financial planning.
I think we can – and should – do better.
The sorts of projects I’m talking about are typically – but not exclusively – those that come about through Creative Partnerships (CP) programmes that link artists and other creative practitioners with schools. I started working in schools about a year ago, and am about to embark on my 5th such project. There are obviously important child-protection issues that need to be taken into account when working with young people, however for this to be the only online documentation of the preceding 4 projects that I can officially and confidently link to is very frustrating for a number of reasons:
Fabulous stuff has happened and I want to share it.
Sharing fabulous stuff helps inspire more fabulous stuff to happen, where successive layers of fabulous stuff can build on what’s gone before it, rather than continuously having to re-invent the wheel.
As a freelancer, my career development relies on my being able to evidence the projects I have worked on to potential future collaborators. Absence of public documentation leaves something of a black-hole that’s bad for me on a variety of different levels. (NB Part of the CP remit is to contribute to the professional development of the artists they work with.)
Documentation and discussion of projects as they are in progress allows for valuable conversations that can shape the direction of the project in unpredictable, serendipitous ways.
Whilst CP is pretty good at stipulating OK daily rates for artists, I always find that I spend more time on projects that what I am getting paid for. Utilising documentation to at least help secure the next chunk of income is a way of gaining more value from the project.
When you’re pitching to a school that they should do something they wouldn’t normally do, it helps to be able to a) show them images/videos of something similar and b) some sort of evaluation of what the benefits were so that they have a reassuring frame of reference for your ideas.
There are various tactics that can be employed to ensure that images of vulnerable children are not circulated online. At a fundamental level, these often hinge upon a release signed by parents/guardians giving permission for images of their child to be used. Sometimes these are on a project-by-project basis, but increasingly I’m coming across schools that organises for blanket releases to be pursued for every child either at the start of their time at the school, or at the beginning of each academic year.
Working on CP-style projects though brings new things into the equation, so, even in schools that have acquired release permissions for all of their pupils, there is still a place for a document that outlines the implications of having different forms of online documentation and how the school wishes to address them. Not least because I am probably used to using the Internet and various online tools in a way unfamiliar to many teachers. I can’t assume that they are aware of blogging, video-streaming and discursive spaces in the same way that I am. Best to make sure everything is spelled out, right from the beginning.
There are a few things I always try and flag up in the first meetings I have with school staff, however there are often gaps or grey areas that prevent me from actively using online spaces to share projects that I’m involved in a similar way to that which I take for granted with my other work. I want to produce a document that outlines the different ways I might want to talk about the project online, what the implications of these might be and to allow the school to say “no, please don’t do that” to all or selected parts of that.
A standard, succinct, plain English guide that let’s everyone know where they stand and ensures that the documentation gathered (and there’s always lots that could potentially be used) isn’t left gathering dust afterwards.
After the response to the braindump of practicalities of using blogs in schools I’m sure this is a document that others would find invaluable too, so let’s crowdsource the process to get input from a range of viewpoints.
Creative practitioners, creative agents, agencies, schools and social media types: what do you think should be included in this document?
My initial thoughts of what could be included:
Making it absolutely clear that once stuff is online it can be linked to, embedded and remixed by others.
Reiterating that the internet has a memory, so you have to be sure before you put things online.
Including discussion of work in progress, as well as showcasing completed projects.
Gently reminding people that this all takes time and should be worked into the planning, rather than cobbled together as an afterthought.
Getting explicit person-by-person confirmation (or otherwise) of permission status.
Getting permission to write about projects on my blog, to link to this documentation from other places and to have permission to circulate links/documentation amongst my mailing lists etc
How about you? What challenges do you encounter and how can we work to lessen these? Please add your thoughts to the comments so I can begin to compile them into a useful tool for people working in this area.
I recently completed a project in a school as part of the Ignition programme. Although I’ve suggested to other schools that I’ve worked with that blogs may be a useful tool, this is the first time we’ve had permission to go ahead with one so I wanted to share something of the process. I’m always a bit reticent to blog much about school projects on this site because of various issues with working with schools and young people, but there’s important learning to be done here from all directions, so here are some notes brain-dumping the main points.
Why blog?
In general terms they’re great for documenting the trials and tribulations of a project, as the project evolves, allowing you to potentially share the process and get feedback from classmates, other teachers, parents and other creative practitioners.
Not this project so much, but I’m getting asked to do ‘wow!’ projects that completely take over the timetable for one or more year-groups for a week – it would help everyone involved in these if we could see examples of work like this that has happened before so we can a) reassure those that need to be reassured and b) build on the work of others.
If the pupils are writing content for the blog, it’s a great way to check on their perceptions of what’s working well and what isn’t. Also to get a feel for what motivates them.
Someone once described it to me as “writing your evaluation report as you go along”.
Celebration! I’ve only been working in education settings for the last couple of years, but it’s my feeling that the documentation for what might be genuinely fantastic projects is pretty much comprehensively rubbish. We can do better. Documentation should not be an afterthought.
Permissions:
Questions I always ask at the first meeting: “What’s the situation with permissions for photos etc?” and “I usually blog my practice, how do you feel about me blogging this project?”
Check at every opportunity that permissions are in place. Ask, ask and ask again.
In this case consent had already been given for all the pupils to have their photos used via a generic permission request.
Ask again, just to make sure.
(Some artists have described how, if there are one or two pupils in a class who cannot have their photo published, they get them to wear an armband. If the armband shows up in any photo, don’t use that photo.)
I think there’s scope for being even more black and white about permissions: I’m contemplating producing a document that outlines how I might want to blog about a project (both here and/or on a project-dedicated blog) and the implications of this in terms of images/videos potentially being linked to and embedded elsewhere etc. Also including space for a signature saying: “yes you have permission to do this”. Any thoughts?
Surnames were removed from posts before publishing.
Platform:
Schools often have their own websites, but these are usually shockingly bad and nowhere near the point of being able to incorporate blog posts.
Some schools have options for using the intranet – check in advance if these have the PHP/MySQL resources you’d need for a self-hosted install. Also ask about what ftp access you could get.
This school has a platform (Frog) we could have used, but our delivery days were Thursday and Fridays and response times from the IT department during initial communications indicated we wouldn’t be able to get material online within realistic time-frames.
I’ve lots of experience with WordPress, so we went for a free WordPress.com account. You’re not being paid to figure out a new system – stick with what you know so it can get done fast and not detract from contact time with the pupils.
This particular context:
A secondary school in what’s probably best described as a ’socially disadvantaged’ part area of a large city.
Working with 20 Year 8 girls identified as being non-enthused with school in general and likely not to raise their attainment above the Level 4 they start with.
Our original brief: to spark a bit of enthusiasm for learning, particularly with respect to Science.
A lot of our efforts turned out to be focused towards building self-confidence in the girls and managing behavioural issues.
Project duration: about 8 contact days spread over a month or two. (Two creative practitioners for 75% of the time, the remainder being one creative practitioner with a Science teacher present.
Feedback from the initial sessions was overwhelmingly “we don’t like writing reports!”.
The blog allowed pupils to document their work in a variety of different media: we used video, text, photo and audio.
Access:
WordPress.com allows for a variety different privacy settings: we negotiated a trial period where the blog was accessible only to people with an authorised log-on, and then once we could demonstrate the content was OK, we were allowed to make it freely accessible.
We’ve yet to hear back from the school about how they feel about us actively publicising the blog, so that’s a) why I’m not linking to it here and b) another thing I’d want to include in the permission document so it’s clear right from the start.
Account management:
The pupils we were working with were moderately disruptive and rarely bought anything like pen or paper to class with them. It was not feasible to give each pupil their own log-on details.
We used two log-ons: the admin level one for myself and a contributor role for the pupils to use.
The contributor role allowed pupils to write their own posts, but not to publish them. Admin could moderate posts, edit if necessary, and then publish.
After publishing, the author of the post was switched to belonging to the admin account so pupils could no longer edit the post. (Either ones they had written, or ones other pupils had written).
Pupils did their best to get the admin password – don’t write it down and consider changing the password every so often!
Editorial decisions:
The standard of writing amongst the pupils we worked with was generally very poor. We had neither the resources nor the desire to spend our time correcting grammar and spelling and it was important to the project that we put as few barriers in the way of the pupils communicating as possible. The school were understandably reluctant to have writing of this quality published, but we reached a compromise whereby we would correct the basics such as use of capital letters and full stops before publishing each post.
It was originally our intention to have only the pupils writing for the blog, but as the project progressed and gaps started to appear, it became necessary to provide some sort of commentary from the point of view of the creative practitioners to bind it together.
Post were written in non-chronological order, so it became necessary to tweak the publishing dates to relate to the events the posts described.
All the above were outlined in a statement about editorial policy on the blog. I feel this was an important thing to do.
Tags, categories and comments:
Since we couldn’t use individual accounts to keep track of who was writing what, we tried using tags to store this information. Pupils were asked to add a tage of AuthorXX where XX were their initials. This mostly worked.
We also asked them to add initial tags for other pupils involved in the activity they were posting about, however this turned out to not be very practical.
Two different categories were used: one to hold post written by the pupils and another for commentary from the creative practitioners.
The creative practitioners made an effort to give positive and constructive comments on each post. It would have been nice for the teachers to have done likewise and it would also have been good to have had the time and resources to encourage the pupils to leave comments too so as to build in some peer review. (This would have had to have been very carefully managed though, because there were some serious clashes going on between several of the pupils.)
All comments are moderated before being published.
Random thoughts and observations:
We initially made a variety of recording devices (digital cameras, video camera, voice recorder) freely available to the students so they could document things from their point of view. This began to be used by some of the pupils as an excuse not to get involved (by hiding behind the camera), so we reduced it down to just one camera that could do photos and video and controlled the access to it.
Lots of documentation is great, but it all takes time to process and there’s only a limited amount you can use on the blog.
Check what formats school-owned devices record in. The video camera we were using turned out to be quite old and recorded in a format we couldn’t edit. When it was uploaded to Vimeo the aspect ratio was a bit squished.
Build in a system for recharging batteries and taking data off the devices at the end of each day – cameras get used whilst you’re not there and you can’t guarantee your files won’t get deleted.
The classrooms were were working in had one computer (at the front, attached to a video projector). We would direct selected students to write about a particular activity and give them a time limit of about 10 minutes to ensure that other people got a chance to write too.
Sometimes it’s great to display the blogging process on the projector. Other times it’s very distracting to the other pupils.
It’s difficult to manage use of other media – photos need uploading and video needs editing and uploading before they can be used. This makes it difficult for ‘real time’ blogging so some of the authorship decisions about what media is used to accompany text got taken away from the pupils. Not ideal, but part of the practicalities of the situation.
Instigating the contributor role and distributing this log-on to the pupils allowed them to write posts between sessions. We initially did this in response to requests from many of the pupils. A couple of the pupils did write several posts away from our sessions, which was great!
Sometimes the girls would use their posts to manipulate us into letting them change groups and work with different people. Although we had no control over the groupings, we did have to make some tricky editorial decisions about what to edit out.
Occasionally, writing for the blog was used as a tactic for pupils to not engage with the activities in class. Conversely, we could also use it as a tactic for dealing with unruly pupils, or to re-engage pupils who had lost focus.
The pupils were very internet-savvy, but do not underestimate the computer illiteracy of other members of staff. You will probably have to walk them through processes of setting up accounts and the differences between control panel admin screens and the actual front-facing website itself.
The pupils were very internet-savvy, but their Internet was a different one to the one I use. Different networks, different search engines…
Seeing images of themselves in various slouching and sulking poses going online helped to raise the levels of professionalism we were seeing from the girls, although we also had to be careful with those with fragile self-esteem.
Sounds like a huge behavioural management and logistical nightmare, would you ever consider doing it again?
Yes,
Absolutely.
No doubt about it.
Running a blog alongside a project needs to be planned as an integral part of activities. It takes a lot of time and needs very careful planning in advance, but the rewards in terms of documenting the project, giving the pupils a space to air their responses and having something to show to people and say “look what we did!” are well worth the effort.
It actually turns out that our girls loved to write!
…creating a memorable learning experience for Year 3 children… a real ‘Wow’ experience… allowing them to use a range of creative approaches to explore real science… memorable learning experience… a lively, enquiring mind and a love of learning… the ability to question, to argue rationally and to think for themselves… the ability to work hard and to succeed at tasks both independently and with other people… identify and solve problems, take risks… activities that are open ended- so that the children can shape the direction of the investigation… creating a fantastical narrative which is developed by pupils, staff and artists…
So, 56 Y3 (about 7 years old) pupils with a suspended timetable for a few days so they can work/play on the themes of ‘light and shadows’ and ‘rocks and materials’. I can’t wait!
No, really, I can’t wait! I’ve been exploring a few different candidates for special objects that different parts of the narrative/exploration might hang on. I’ve just finished assembling a solar-powered spider and yesterday afternoon was spent putting RFID technology into a toy bat.
The bat currently opens different images depending on whether the left or right wing is folded across the chest. This project was initially just for my own playtime, but in the middle of sewing up the bat I realised it could be used as a simple true/false answering device to respond to questions relating either to the narrative or to the curriculum.
I’d also like to use the touchatag RFID system to construct an array of objects that have to be placed in the correct position in order to demonstrate that a puzzle has been solved. For example this could be the correct arrangement of the Sun, Moon and Earth to show when an eclipse happens.
Ideally I’d like to be able to work with 2 separate events: when the tag is placed on the reader and when the tag is removed from the reader, however the touchatag system currently only supports a single tag-on-reader event to trigger an action.
There have been a couple of suggestions as to how to get around this: using a programme to monitor the touchatag application to see when there is an increase and decrease in activity corresponding to the two events (thanks Tom), or to work with the hardware API from the manufacturers of the electronics within the reader (thanks Ted).
Are there any programmers out there who fancy tackling the challenge to make a touchatag app that can distinguish between putting a tag on a reader, taking a tag off a reader, and which reader (out of at least 4) is having tags taken on or off it?
Hello
I work in the grey areas between and across Art, Science and Technology, instigating enquiry-led processes that are
often highly participatory in nature. This website is where I track the projects I'm involved in and the things that feed
into and sprout off from my work.
"Genzaichi" (audio clip for pronunciation) resonates strongly with my work which often tackles underlying themes of how we respond to and interact
with the stuff around us. For a more general overview of my work, try the projects and cv pages.
If you'd like to start a conversation regarding a new piece of work, then there's more information on the
commissions & collaborations page.
General blog contents released under a Creative Commons
by-nc-sa license.
Artworks and other projects copyright Nicola Pugh 2003-2009, all rights reserved.
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The theme used on this site started off life as Modern Clix, by Rodrigo Galindez.
