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I am starting to see some of the fruits of my labours in the different range of schools that I am working in currently.  The video you see here was taken in a school recently, when a student who I have worked with a couple of times came up to me wanting to share his latest creation.  When we last met he showed me the stop motion video he had created using a webcam and some LEGO characters, it was excellent.  He had done the work in collaboration with a friend during their lunchtimes at school.  It was not part of any project related to school, it was simply something that they wanted to do.

He is the kind of student that once he has got his teeth into something, he will not let it go.  In other words he shows remarkable resilience and tenacity.  When we met again recently he showed me his LEGO NXT creation, it is in short brilliant.  He told me that it took him “…literally hours to work out the bugs in the programming.”  But he stuck at it, and the video results speak for themselves.  I have now suggested that he adapt the shooting mechanism to not fire pellets but rather to trigger a digital camera.  In other words turn the attack robot into a surveillance robot.  I have no doubt that he will do that and I look forward to my next visit to this school.

What this student has shown are many of the key statements in the NZC vision statements.  How do you plan to create situations in a classroom that engender resilience for example?  A tool such as the LEGO NXT can and does do this as do tools such as Gamemaker, which I am starting a unit on in another school this Friday.  I have long been a fan of LEGO NXT as a teaching and learning tool and have posted about it before on the Supertanker It is these kinds of scenario enabling tools that should, I believe, be given greater prominence in classes to build capacity for resilience in our students.  Not to mention the quality of thinking, collaboration, engagement and authenticity that these tools provide.

I ran a VC session into Haast School last week.  The session was aimed at community and business leaders harnessing web2.0 technology to communicate and collaborate.  The special impact here being that Haast being so remote from the rest of New Zealand has a special need to harness this kind of technology, in order to keep the community alive and connected to the rest of the world, whilst keeping the community viable and vibrant in Haast.  It was a good session and from my end was facilitated by the good guys at Gen-i in Auckland, on the 17th floor to be exact.  Once I had been set up the staff melted away and left me to it, I had the Pukeko room to myself.  Whilst there I took the liberty to run a speedtest on the network connection I was using for my Internet access, not the VC connection.  This is the result that it returned:

The speeds were stellar!  Just imagine what a school could do with that kind of bandwidth, imagine the collaboration opportunities, the multi-media rich potential of such a resource.  I went to share this information on Twitter, but was blocked.  I tried Skype, but was blocked.  I wanted to use Team Viewer, but was blocked.  What an irony, stellar internet performance in a business environment where  sending e-mails and browsing filtered internet are the norm.  By comparison look at the kind of performance a school that I work in gets on their Telecom connection 5.5km from the exchange and an apathetic at best indifferent,help desk who have taken 63 calls to get some kind of attention to the fault evident in these stats.  The school and the staff are bursting to use the Internet to its fullest potential but with this kind of connectivity find they can’t.  As the crow flies this school is 10km from Gen-i and their blistering connection.  This has all the echoes of a story I posted in 2008 http://dakinane.wordpress.com/2008/07/22/limping-along-in-the-internets-slow-lane/ How many other schools, not even in remote situations like Haast, but in urban settings like the school below, in New Zealand get results like this?

Working on the website has taken quite a while.  The design has gone through several iterations and still we have questions.  But launch it we will and work on the changes based on feedback, so comments welcome!  It has become a case of looking at something for too long and now not quite seeing the wood for the trees.

Running this blog from a business perspective is proving to be something of a challenge.  What content should appear here?  In the first instance we will look at adding pages that contain resources and reviews, such as those on the Supertanker, although the presentation here will be different.  In addition links to the tutorials already published on You Tube will be linked to too.  As for post content, we will see what happens, but it is expected that the content will relate to what projects are in the offing and how current projects are progressing.