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#LWF11 – Jimmy Wales, Founder, Wikipedia – Evolving The Dream & Final Questions

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia. Another presenter who is challenged by presenting ‘in the round’! Seeing a massive change in the quality and quantity of informal learning.  Talk about the dream of free knowledge for everyone.  Free access to the sum of all human knowledge. What is free access?  Free as in speech, not as in…

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#LWF11 – Lord David Puttnam of Queensgate

Lord David Puttnam, man of many hats, but perhaps pertinently Chairman of Futurelab: Joked that Stephen Heppel and he had have achieved so little in the last 20 years!  Not yet a state where what’s best for the child is also what’s best for the child. Left film industry as it had ceased to be inspirational…

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#LWF11 – David McCandless, Author & Information Designer – Infographics & Data

David is the author of http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/. Worked through some fantastic infographics from his site, go look at them now.  Better still see his TED talk: Some interesting insights from using Google InSights to track search terms.  Great tool for use in the classroom. Nice talk about needing to compare proportions rather than totals, in the concept of…

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#LWF11 – Keri Facer, Prof of Education, MMU

Keri Facer. Can’t continue to argue about whether we focus on the individual or whether we use technology to bring learners together. We need to learn to live with connectivity that we’ve never imagined before.  Evolution of non-human-like intelligence. Need a curriculum for collaborative and collective intelligence.  Diminishing economy and rapidly changing aging demographic.  Need to understand the relationships between…

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#LWF11 Katharine Birbalsingh, Teacher & Author

Katharine Birbalsingh, the former Head Teacher famously sacked following her outspoken speech at the Tory Party conference. Started with the story of challenging behaviour in Secondary Schools.  How have we got to this point, a dark age of education?  How can we move schools on into the 21st Century?  Need to equip children with a bag…

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LWF11 Prof Andrew Blake – MD: Microsoft Research Cambridge – NUI

Talk about NUI – Natural User Interfaces (no touch). Obvious plug for Kinect.  Showed Anybot robot that allows you to attend a meeting without actually being there. Talked through other examples of such tech. Challenges of creating Kinect: Have to be able to capture body pose.  Come in many shapes, sizes and flexibilities! Depth camera made all this…

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#LWF11 David Braben – Frontier Developments & Legendary Games Designer

David is one of our greatest games designers, I was excited to hear him talk as I’ve been playing his games since the 80s! What motivates kids today?  Fame, money, instant gratification.  Not hard work and days of graft.  So are today’s kids doomed? Games are a great weapon for education, as Dawn greatly pre-empted.  Games…

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#LWF11 Dawn Hallybone – Games Based Learning in Primary

Disclaimer: I would consider Dawn a friend, thanks to many interactions via Twitter & Teachmeets etc even though we’ve only met a handful of times..  I won’t go into great detail about the work she has done as her blog has details of it all. LWF Bio. Dawn discussed using Nintendo DS & Wii with the pupils are so engaged…

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#LWF11 David Samuelson, Pearson – Game Based Learning

David Samuelson is the grandly titled Director of Games & Augmented Reality Type! A third of Pearson’s revenues now through digital content.  Showed wonder, focus and engagement of playing games through Philip Toledano’s photography . Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi‘s state of flow covered again. Learning in games:  Discussed the phenomenon of Farmville and the wealth of stats that are crunched by…

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#LWF11 Ray Mcguire – Sony Vice President Sony UK

Inspired by Ewan McIntosh & David Muir to blog while I watch at Learning Without Frontiers 2011, instead of making notes and probably never getting round to blogging them! Ray started by talking through the position of Sony within the industry and then talking through his daughters life mapping key tech developments such as the birth of Facebook…