o AIG www.aiglondon.com

o Conchango www.conchango.com

o Digit www.digitlondon.com

o Digital Outlook www.digital-outlook.com

o Glue www.gluelondon.com

o Imagination www.imagination.com

o Kin www.kin-design.com

o Lateral www.lateral.net

o Moving Brands www.movingbrands.com

o Poke www.pokelondon.com

o Precendent www.precedent.co.uk

o Smoothe www.smoothe.com

o TribalDDB www.ddblondon.com/tribalddb

o Up the Resolution www.uptheresolution.co.uk

Should be an excellent session. It’s part of the conference package (book now), but you can get into this bit for free. More details here.

That’s quite frightening for potential oil-riggers and for people in the oil and gas industry who hire such folk.

I was lucky enough to be at a presentation from Kevin McNulty from Coole Immersive yesterday, part of the Visual Web Convention. They’ve made a simulation game that allows new oil-riggers to get that first six months’ experience for free. That’s to say, the likelihood they’ll have a reportable accident drops to <5% if they’ve used the game. That’s a fairly cast-iron case for games in the workplace, if you ask me.

Earlier in the day, Lord Puttnam gave a challenging keynote suggesting that this field - serious games - was a potential answer to the work he was doing with the climate change commission in the House of Lords. Briefly, his argument was that younger people are more likely to engage with games than any other media - I’d agree with this but suggest that older people are also gamers. Games are also blessed with the ability to offer experiential learning unlike any other pedagogic technique currently available - I think the oil rigger case study shows that’s true. Communicating the things that all of us need to do to avoid the looming disaster that climate change will bring is a tough problem for all professional communicators. We held a private event this week for advertising professionals called Can Advertising Save the Planet? The answer is probably ‘no’, but as communicators, we have the ability and responsibility to make things a little easier and better - the disaster is imminent, after all, but even the lowest of the low can do something to help.

If we are to steer society away from catastrophe and into education, games will have a key part to play.

Unfortunately, as Puttnam admitted, as soon as something is called a ‘game’ then bureaucracy and government recoils. The idea of our government lending public support, and ultimately money, to games, is stymied by its vocabulary. Games are trivial and a social harm in the minds of most bureaucrats and, sadly, most newspaper editors (see the press about the recent Byron Review which, while admitting a need for some governance over which titles were available to younger gamers, was overwhelmingly in favour of video games as a learning resource, if you bother to read the whole thing).

Flipping back to climate change and the emergency we face communicating the facts about it and what needs to be done, then games provide an excellent opportunity. But the flip-side of the problem with bureaucrats then sets in - entertainment providers are terrified of being associated with anything remotely ‘worthy’. Being ethical is, apparently, uncool.  There have already been a few brave attempts - World without Oil, the BBC’s Climate Challenge and others. But the likes of Sony, EA and Microsoft aren’t developing or promoting these sorts of titles. What needs to happen to make the big games publishers alert to their power to change the future?

[Update - Robin Blandford has some videos of what this looks like and a challenge for the rescue industry]

They had CP at my school back then and I don’t believe it made any difference to anyone’s behaviour. I don’t believe it did anyone any good. I remain undecided as to whether it did us any harm, but that’s a moot point, really. As the headteacher in the clip says, he’ll be beating them week after week with no evident impact. As the story goes, Ken Loach, who always uses improvisational techniques with his normally untrained actors, didn’t tell the boys that they’d be properly caned, hence their very realistic reactions.

PS: I bookmarked this link to the fantastically funny football scene in Kes with the much-missed Brian Glover a few weeks ago.

I was at a press briefing for the launch of a new report called Learning 2.0 from the CIM (Chartered Institute of Marketing) this morning (it’s not online till 21/2). They asked me what I thought of the title. I’m not sure they appreciated me saying that calling everything 2.0 makes me roll my eyes nowadays. They reckoned that for mainstream marketing people, the idea would still seem pretty fresh.

Anyway, the report was about training and learning in the marketing industry. The gist of it, which I thought was pretty sound, was as follows:

• People nowadays don’t have jobs or even careers for life. We have these portfolio careers and we’re all entrepreneurial about those careers. The average in-house marketer stays in a job for four years; it’s even lower in agency land.
• Our employers don’t have our individual agenda at heart when they design training or development programmes. They have the company’s interests in mind.
• There’s a conflict of interest here, of course - you might want to do a public speaking course, for example, because you envisage yourself as an effective public speaker. But if your boss doesn’t think that’s part of your job, the chances are, you won’t be doing one.
• Employers also tend to confuse training and learning. Training gets done to you. Learning is something an individual does themselves. Companies tend to think of training as their responsibility, rather than learning. They also think (62% of them - HROs - do) that “done to” training is the most effective way to deliver education for the job, according to survey results.
• Educationalists have identified at least 37 different types of ways in which we learn stuff, from reading a book to playing simulations. Each individual will have their own preferred and most effective learning styles. In-house training tends to focus on one - sit in a room with a bunch of other people and get talked at.

Therefore, there’s a big need for change when it comes to professional development. Individuals need to do more to take the initiative, since they’re ultimately in it for themselves. Their own preferred learning styles might mean that the current provision their company offers is utterly useless. They’d learn more from reading books, or blogging, or going to excellent networking events. Probably a combination of different learning activities. They should push for those things to be recognised as CPD investment, and potentially paid for by their employer.

On the other hand, employers need to open up their definitions of training and learning. Why does only sitting in a room and being talked at tick the box? This doesn’t necessarily imply extra investment or resources on their part. Just an openness to recognising that learning is taking place in other ways. Companies need to fund and provide time for the learning an individual wants to undertake - not just the kind that’s always been provided.

To my mind, this situation has arisen as a consequence of the dreadfulness of appraisal culture:

“Now, Ian, it’s your annual review. You have done OK, but could do better. How can we help you?”

“Well, boss, I agree I could do better. [and really want a pay rise which isn't at all linked to this appraisal. wink-wink.] But you see, I don’t really know much about phone sales.”

“Ah - we’re doing a course in May about phone sales. I’ll send you on that.”

Box ticked. Job done. Next subject. My arse.

(Bonus link to a fab blog post on this very subject from the Chief Happiness Officer - from which I stole the wink-wink gag.)

Afterthought: the worst CPD I have ever received was when I worked as a teacher. In many respects, it’s the loneliest profession - you spend your entire day with clients. Yet, the professional training is zilch - “we’ve bought this new CMS and we’re having a training day on how to use it.” “Yeah, but, how can I be a better teacher?” “Sorry, what?” - How appalling is that?

Most of the people there - from the worlds of media, education and policy making - agreed that there was some need for action on digital media literacy (I guess none of us would have turned up, otherwise) but there were some interesting tensions between the participants about what that might entail, who it is for and why we need it.

This debate is often framed in terms of fear of and for children. Our society is at once terrified of our youngsters and terrified for them. The Finnish multimurderer yesterday was predictably dubbed the ‘YouTube Killer’ by the Mail and Telegraph in this morning’s editions, Ewan McIntosh pointed out. As though his video posts were somehow a reason for the outrage. Adults fret about the amount of time kids spend on the Internet, talking in code. Think about stories about "teenagers …being groomed to be suicide bombers," or the countless stories about hoodies. (Almost every teenage boy in the UK wears a hooded top, yet ‘hoodies’ are framed as a social menace in the popular press here). The other image of children on the Internet is diametrically opposite - the child as victim, as the potential victim of an army of ’sick paedos’, who for some reason, have forsaken parks and schools, and other places where children might actually physically appear, for the Internet.

A lot of the way some sections of society think about children and the Internet is actually about adults and the Internet. Things that are threatening or frightening get projected onto children as a way of distancing ourselves from that.

This is about adults not understanding the Internet, not understanding teens, and demonising both as a consequence. The obvious contradictions in this view are neatly ignored.

Matt Locke made some great points about the need or lack of need for digital media literacy. He argued that the reason that people run into problems on the Internet is because the technology doesn’t work well enough yet. Most people actually have a very good understanding of the protocols and rules that govern internet communications. That there are basically six spaces on the ‘net and we already know how they should run:

1. Private spaces. For 1:1 communications, like email and private chats.
2. Group spaces: for a defined group with a certain interest to talk about that interest. Like newsgroups or forums, also Facebook and Bebo.
3. Public spaces: where you publish whatever you’re producing for the world to share. Most blogs and sites like YouTube fall into this category.
4. Performance spaces: online games come here, maybe some more competitive social media spaces, too.
5. Participation spaces: where a common goal is negotiated publically between individuals, e.g. eBay, Threadless, MySociety.
6. Watching spaces: because not everyone wants to be taking part all the time.

The problems occur because our current technological renditions of these spaces are not advanced, nuanced or simple enough. Private communications fall into the public arena. Commercial entities enter our groups unwanted. This isn’t about our understanding of the medium; what causes problems is the medium’s inability to provide an adequate service to fulfil the roles we demand of it.

So… digital media literacy. Is it kids or adults who need it the most? Not sure, but start with Paul Dacre, wherever it ends up. What does it entail? One delegate, from the National Media Museum, made the point that issues with online media and publishing can largely be addressed without knowing anything about code, codecs, XHTML, MP3s or film editing. A big issue is ‘when is it fair?’ - when is it fair to share a piece of video you’ve taken on your phone with friends or the public, for example? The answer to that has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with experience and moral insight. That’s a very valid point and general teaching from parents and the formal education system still has a huge role to play, as redundant as they may feel if they fail to master iMovie. Another huge issue for me is whether anyone is ready to start delivering digital media literacy lessons that are sufficiently distinct from former understandings of mass media (e.g. Williams, McLuhan, Althusser, Eagleton, Hall). The theorisation of personalised, syndicated, personally-produced media is still very much in its infancy. We have our Marx and Engels, perhaps, but not our Volosinov or Gramsci.

via. Communities Dominate Brands

And apparently the most blogged about video on the ‘net at the moment. The URL of the creators, fleetingly referred to towards the end is http://www.mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/

“… the basic idea is to create a 3 minute video highlighting the most important characteristics of students today - how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime. We already know some things from previous research (and if you know of any interesting statistics, please list them along with the source). Others we will need to find out by doing a class survey. Please add whatever you want to know or present.”