TreeMeet Thursday 3rd September 2009 6.

45 PM
Treehouse Project Regents Park – Outside Broadcast
Transcript of a live streamed video broadcast using a laptop, sim dongle, high definition
WebCam and audio from a Treehouse in Regents Park

Those present:

Leon Cych – videographer, broadcaster and educational consultant

Drew Buddie - Teacher
Bill Gibbon - Principal Consultant at Implementing Technology in Learning
Merlin John- Freelance journalist who focuses on ICT in learning
Richard Millwood – Researcher University of Bolton – consultant in Learning Technology
John Davitt – Writer and Developer
Anthony Evans – Primary ICT consultant in Redbridge North East London
Dave Smith – ICT consultant in Havering North East London
Andy Broomfield – Freelance interaction Designer
Daren Forsyth – Founder http://140characters.co.uk/
Will Golding – Events Organiser of the Regents Park TreeHouse arts project

The videocast is archived at :

http://twitcam.com/13h2

Broadcast BEGIN

Leon Cych:

Welcome to the treehouse discussion – here we go, stick it down there (puts down webcam for
broadcast) – alright off you go folks!

Drew Buddie:

I'd like thank everyone for coming along, to this really unique location and I'd like to thank, first of
all, Will first of all, for allowing us to use this fantastic location , to be in a unique position of an
hour before Regents Park closes to be sitting under, actually under a tree house, we're not on it
because it's a little bit inclement. But thank you very much Will for allowing us to use this
excellent location for our little discussion. Perhaps it might be useful to just briefly introduce
ourselves as we go round so those who are watching know who's here as well as those we've not
met before. So I'm Drew Buddie I'm an IT co-ordinator at a girls school in Hertfordshire.

Richard Millwood:

Richard Millwood and I do research at the University of Bolton and do consultancy in Learning
Technology.

Merlin John:

I'm Merlin John and I'm a freelance journalist and I focus on ICT in learning.

John Davitt:

I'm John Davitt – a writer and developer. I wanted to say thank you to Drew for having this idea
about bringing us down here tonight – it's a sort of important evening really because it's beyond
TeachMeet; it's a very informal gathering just happening out of the ether like that – it seems quite
important.

Bill Gibbon:

I'm Bill Gibbon I'm a primary school teacher in my heart but I'm a principal consultant for
implementing technology in learning.

Anthony Evans:

I'm Anthony Evans or Skinnyboyevans, I'm a primary ICT consultant in Redbridge North East
London.

Dave Smith:

I'm Dave Smith I'm ICT consultant from London borough of Havering next door to Anthony and
I'm the wider version of him.

Laughter...

Andy Broomfield:

I'm Anthony Broomfield and I'm a freelance interaction designer with a general interest on
education.

Daren Forsyth:

I'm Darren Forsyth, I'm an insultant not a consultant. Ex-entrepreneur, corporate boy, and now just
going around the world connecting different cool patterns with people and initiatives and all
sorts....

Will Golding:

Hello I'm Will Golding, I help with this project, a whole programme of events and that's where I'll
leave it...

Drew Buddie:

So what I thought we might discuss, going back to what John said about the fact that this is a little
bit beyond TeachMeet, was, using as a loose theme, it needn't be anything rigid is about the future
of CPD give the fact that TeachMeet has made radical inroads into the way CPD has been delivered
to some people. Some people's experiences of CPD has never been as inspirational as it has been
over the past couple of years. So using that as a loose theme I just wondered maybe if, and anyone
can chip in, and I suggest we might have to do that given that there's so many of us, is what you
think is meant by CPD first of all? If anyone has thoughts on that?

Anthony Evans:

Perhaps it's two things Drew – it's the quite formal thing where you might go to a centre for a
course or a training session but it's also the informal thing which many of us here are used to :
Twitter, Blogging, communicating by email – whatever...but for me that's the two things but for me
the informal is the most important that's actually where I learn most.

Dave Smith:

Absolutely, I agree with Anthony on that as well and I think one of the things that concerns me from
the position I'm in is the number of people who don't turn up to the face to face events these days
and they're maybe looking for a more personalised event they can log into anytime anyplace. This is
the sort of TeachMeet – going to that event but also being able to go online and see that is more
beneficial to people but it's certainly about providing a more personalised professional developmetn
programme than we've had up to now which is the one size fits all really.

Drew Buddie:

Yes, I'm wondering how something like TeachMeet, and I think other people have been asking this
question recently is, how you validate what you do when you experience, because it really is going
along in a twilight session like we've come along to this and what validation you can have to show
you've attended that you've actually learned from it as opposed to when you write on your CV the
courses you've attended. I wonder how many people actually write TeachMeet as one of the CPD
things they've attended? Do you think they have validity in that sort of way or is it too early days to
write that down on your CV?

Bill Gibbon:

I think if you look at the professionalism of teachers, the same as any others,that if you feel like you
are doing a good job you are happy, if you feel like you are not doing a good job you want to go
away and do something about it. Quite often the thing that you want to go away and do isn't actually
on offer. So being able to go to a TeachMeet and meeting with other people and just meeting
colleagues and learning from colleagues about what they do is often by far the best CPD that people
do, it's actually learning from others about improving your own performance. The difficulty about
going to events which are provided for you at a training centre often they have to be booked in
advance, the programme has to be there, and in order to get on it you have to fill in a twenty page
form which is a training analysis need and, you know, with the best will in the world, teachers don't
want to do that.

Richard Millwood:

I'm interested in why we're here you know? The reason I came is because a chap called Tony Parkin
at SSAT said to me in a very strident voice a month or two ago, he said, “CPD in the UK is broken.”
You know, so it wasn't just a dissatisfaction with the status quo it was saying well it's just gone to
pot, it's failing, absolutely failing. Is that something that anybody else shares or is it just me? I find
that rang true to me but I'm not in a practitioner's position and I'm not confident.

Merlin John:

It seems generally that people, there's a dissatisfaction with things being done to you, so it's like if
you are kid in school, you think something's been done to you or if you're a teacher with your CPD
or whether you're in BSF and I think most people understand the power of engagement, and that,
you know, that's the trick to pull isn't it really?

Dave Smith:

Absolutely, and you've got a widening audience these days as well. Who are our audience? Who are
we aiming for these days? If we are talking about people in schools is it just the ICT leaders, is that
ICT leader going to be a teacher or a head teacher or is that leadership at all levels so we're only
maybe pitching to one person sometimes so actually events like this can allow us to bring
everybody in, from all different angles, rather than just saying, those are the people in charge, those
are the people leading, so you give it to them; actually no, you don't then develop distributed
leadership, and other people taking in and bringing in their own ideas.

Anthony Evans:

I think, from going to TeachMeets, my whole style of CPD that I deliver, has got an awful lot better,
because I've relied less on my own resources, and opened it up and invited others from the floor to
contribute as well and I still think there's a place for that gathering together in a forma place at a
teachers' centre for example, but I just feel people who come to my events go away inspired that's
not down to me, that's down to the community sharing practice together, and that actually feels a ot
like a huge burden off your shoulders because you do not have to dream up a program six months
before, you can be a bit more organic about it and …

Dave Smith:

...sorry, just one other thing. Why do we have to confined by boundaries of local authority. I work
for a local authority, then why can't we have people come in across the authority, from other
authorities, we can do this, you come to mine, I come to yours, see what's going on and that's really
useful – actually we should be opening that up to more people to do that as well...

Leon Cych:

...a lot of people, the feedback from TeachMeets is that it is the best CPD they've had all year...

Drew Buddie:

I was just going to explain we've been using that word TeachMeet and I'm as guilty of using it
without explaining for the three gents who aren't aware of what that is, it's a kind of recent upsurge
in teachers choosing to stand at the front of other teachers at large gatherings, so this multiplied by
fiftyfold and Anthony and David arranged one at Havering and we've organised some others and
other places other people have organised them all over the country, in fact all over the world now
and it's just a way in which a teacher who wouldn't normally get a chance to say what they've done
in the classroom can speak to other teachers and therefore make it more informal than training
normally would be.

Questioner(?):

Can we clarify that is it just with an IT focus?

DrewBuddie:

They have been to a certain degree but I think you've just said there's no reason why or as David
said, there's no reason why it needs to be. Most of the TeachMeets I've attended have been the use
of technology but it doesn't have to be and somebody had one in the borders (of Scotland) it was a
physics one. Which was physics based so it was physics teachers talking about how they had got
difficult concepts across or tricks of the trade.

Richard Millwood:
If you compare the different subjects that teachers teach, and ask yourself where do things change
the most of the time and leave people most unsettled, it's where the cutting edge of technology is
hitting schools, that they don't quite know what it means for them, what it means for their children
and how to go forward. So for them it's more challenging than almost anything else going on.

Daren Forsyth:

Surely it moves so fast that the encumbent bodies that work with you just can't keep up so whether
that's with purchase order processes, whether that's standards of more desktops you're going to use,
what hardware or devices...I mean you just operate in this system of can't react like that – right?

Drew Buddie:

Yes and I think part of the reason why TeachMeets have taken on and their ilk have taken off is so
many people are discovering Web 2.0 tools they don't need to buy anymore, so no longer are they
dependent...and I think that's been responsible for the upsurges; now anybody who discovers a little
program no-one else has ever heard of before can stand up and wow an audience by saying “Look
what I did with my class the other day.” and just blow them away with what you've managed to do.

Dave Smith:

And with respect with a move to see this in the media at the moment, of cuts going to be happening
financially to schools and education, we worry about this but this is a very cost effective means of
delivering, of facilitating Continual Professional Development and like you say Drew through Web
2.0 technologies, and gatherings where you are bringing people together and actually the event we
did we had some sponsorship alongside it so it cost us, as authorities, nothing but it cost our time in,
but actually in terms of that, and so it could be looked at as a way to deliver things in a more cost
effective way … look at the Centre for Policy Studies...

Drew Buddie:

A little issue that comes up and maybe that leads on to is some people talking about how you ensure
the quality control of what you see because obviously the most impassioned speaker may not be the
best at delivering something in a presentation or what they've got to talk about may be to them be
exciting but may be old hat to somebody else so is there an issue there do you think?

Richard Millwood:

There would be except the best TeachMeets have been the ones where people don't get to speak for
too long. So if anybody is *&^% they get something thrown at them and they get off the stage
quick.

(The camel*...

All in agreement – the camel...)

Drew Buddie:

David we should point out that the time for speaking is seven minutes, anyone can stand up for a
maximum of seven minutes, or two minutes, and that's it. And if you're talking shop as in promoting
a product then we have a camel (soft toy camel), we've had a camel, a stuffed camel, and that gets
thrown at you, or if you've gone on too long or other issues.

Richard Millwood:

We're missing that today aren't we ..? (General laughter)

Merlin John:

Also, to be fair, the context in which the term “quality assurance” is brought up, I mean it's a bit
unfortunate that some people see to have reacted badly to that, because all that meant was let's say
North(East) London TeachMeet, Ollie Bray for example, who's a great teacher from Scotland, and
he was coming down to London, now, if you were just going to have a random way of getting
people to go on stage and you left Ollie knowing he had come from Scotland, I mean that's bad
manners, not even quality assurance. But if you know he's really good you should ensure that at
least some people, who you know will be there, that people will have an opportunity to hear him.
And I think that, that's the context in which that was used, and some people seem to think it means
something else – it doesn't mean anything more than that. That is just what you were doing at North
East London TeachMeet.

Daren Forsyth:

I'm glad you covered it because I was just going to ask that – how do you trust if somebody said
their best learning is informal learning, so from those altogether, how do you trust that information
that is coming through which I guess is related to quality assurance. I mean, online, purely online, a
crowd gathers around voices and people with insight that they can trust but how you do that
physically...

Drew Buddie:

It's often demonstrative, you have to demonstrate, like the one that jumps into my head is Greg
Hodgson from Chalfont school, showed Photoshop tennis, and all he had was a forum and it was
just photographs using a concept he called Photoshop tennis and you couldn't deny what you were
looking at was class learning.

Richard Millwood:

So you've got to put that in an abstract set of words. It's about having primary evidence in front of
you all the time because you've got captured the techniques for getting it, so you're not being
presented with bar charts and statistics only that wouldn't be all bad if it was good, but you're
getting actually pictures of children looking with smiling faces or children full of excitement and
happiness or people like headteachers giving testimonials; these primary evidences are what makes
a difference to what teachers then react to what they're hearing.

John Davitt:

That's right and paradoxically the issues of quality control probably, the bar gets raised, because
you're there under the relentless judgement of your peers. You've stood up to say this is what I
value, this is something that's powerful and in a way I suppose it's a fact it has become sort of fairly
ad hoc, the age of ad hocracy, everyone has a different direction or perspective on this but it is the
open sharing of those that gets powerful.

Leon Cych:
But what's interesting, in particular, is that, I'm writing for Naace, the Moodle for Using ICT for
CPD online, the free one, and we're doing the digital media aspect, Theo (Kuechel) and myself and
in nearly every case people's use of digital media is based around a community and the community
use and that's very hard top deliver generic CPD to but it's very easy to show exemplars of use with
your own community so that seems to be a model coming out of use of Web 2.0 tools; it's the old
think of Think Global Act Local you are able to take those models but you use them in your own
community and that's quite interesting. That's one of the things that seems to be emerging out of the
mists of all this activity.

Drew Buddie:

And coming back then to the attendance at TeachMeet as many of us have done if you are a teacher
do you think that adds validity to written down on a CV that “I attended a TeachMeet” because
anyone could say that – any event could be a TeachMeet – this could be one – so how do people
gain value – that they can say they attended – because I am sure that if saw somebody say that they
have attended a TeachMeet and they wanted top work in my department I'd love to have them
because it showed that they had gone out and looked at that sort of thing but that might not be
evident if they can't right it down.

Dave Smith:

There's an issue there Drew actually – is that we know what TeachMeets are but how do you
demonstrate this – unpick this to the guys to my right here...- does the world out there in general
know what TeachMeets are? Is it something to do with undertanding the branding of the awareness
that people have or that – because the more people are aware of that in schools, the more they see
the impact and can pick that up, the more it is in the media etc, the mainstream media then maybe
yes, people might well put that down. I would put it down, and certainly in a CV I would put down
I was involved in doing it because I think it's right. And I think it's about people then asking us the
questions about what it is but I think it's about getting that message out to the wider audience about
what it is rather than just the community within which we tend to operate. I think there's a wider
audience, I think there definitely is.

Merlin John:

At the very least it is a demonstration of commitment.

Drew Buddie:

Yes, exactly but the point you've rise there leads on to something else. That something a couple of
other people have asked me which was:

“How you prevent the same old faces, hand up as having spoken art several, becoming like a
roadshow of the same old faces – how does it cascade further so that other people, new faces,
people who've not spoken before, or anybody can stand up... “

Leon Cych:

What I've been looking at recently is cross-silo working – which is “Amplified”. You know the
people in Amplified, Amplified are Web 2.0 social media groups that have got together but they are
in diverse areas they are in Medicine, the health care service, social services, all the different
sectors, and basically the idea of Amplified funded by NESTA is to get some cross-fertilisation
going there about how people actually come up with solutions for things and for me I think that;s
quite interesting including the business community because I think they've got a lot of value added
to offer in that sense; not in the sense that you've got something like a TeachMeet where people
stack it in favour of their product to sell but in terms of what people's expertise is and there is a hell
of a lot of expertise in business out there it is just not being tapped into and cross-fertilised with
people. I think people have got this idee fixe about big bad business in TeachMeet – if you can get
those elements in, those cross-elements where people use their expertise and people can gain from
that expertise in education or as, likewise business can or in the health service with its much bigger
infrastructure, then I think it starts to get interesting as well.

Andy Broomfield:

Perhaps just following on and coming from an outside perspective but it sounds to me you're really
looking to move to something like the unconference or barcamp model? When people are coming
down with a little thing prepared that they want to then speak about, putting their ideas out there
and then using that as an opportunity for the audience as kind of learners, to say, “OK, what do you
want to then learn?” and then using that to pick up the kind of sessions you might want to look at –
I think that might be something interesting for you to look at. And also I kind of like the way you
trying to move to this rather than selling something with a product – it's much more about telling
experiences and actually telling the experience of teaching and specifically focusing on the
experience of learning and how people learn from each other and also be interested in your thoughts
on things like peer to peer learning or learning off each other rather standard classroom models and
these kinds of conferences.

John Davitt:

Yes that's a good overview of it in a way and I suppose we could almost, if we focus too much on
TeachMeet we miss the bigger picture and perhaps if we zoom back, it's about all of these tools and
this may be the CPD in these silos as Leon was saying. Maybe it isn't broken – it's just redundant
because there are now new ways in which people can connect. It doesn't have to be Twitter but it's a
useful micro-blogging example, probably the best we've got at the moment, I looked at that on a
Saturday afternoon in February, a couple of hours before the rugby was about to start on the telly
and, of the people I follow, I think 70 / 80 per cent of the screen were teachers giving informal
professional development to each other so this is one o'clock on a Saturday afternoon, in February. I
could analyse the screen and 80 per cent of it was CPD and then I thought maybe there is more
professional development going on there would happen in an average LEA and that of course could
be the same across the board.

Andy Broomfield:

Er what's CPD?

John Davitt:

Professional Development – you know – helping someone to get better, providing some clues,
pointers, advice.

Richard Millwood:

But the 'C' is for continuing – so it's talking about the ongoing, throughout your life, kind of
professional development. Not the initial development like you get/do a degree at a university.
Drew Buddie:

But the traditional model of that has been to go on a course and that's why these are kind of
different. But I think you're right that's why, or I believe, you're right about Twitter because that's
why I think it is such a completely different product or piece of software or whatever, or tool, to
anything else I've ever used because not only am I finding out from us who are here, and this was
gathered through Twitter, for one thing and this is proof positive how it can work, a year ago I
would never have dreamt except by emailing you all, maybe do you fancy coming – the immediacy
of Twitter affords, means we could organise something like this but secondly the fact that with it
you're learning from people 24 hours a day because, whilst, I'm learning from Australians,
Americans, New Zealanders, Canadians, Mexicans all the time and they're learning things and we're
learning things daily that we would neverwise come across.

Daren Forsyth:

And that's not happening on Facebook – just for the record. I don't think you were defensive there
about Twitter because it's a little, you know, it's the only one around. And I'm very bloody proud of
it actually because for a 140 characters the depth of knowledge and insight and connections on that
platform is just unbelievable.

John Davitt:

It's constraint is its power really.

Drew Buddie:

Which is why that Woofer at minimum of 1400 characters it has to be a joke. It just defeats the
object.

Daren Forsyth:

Just on your point of organising this by Twitter, I saw a message where people were actually asking
you if they could come along. So that was powerful too...

Drew Buddie:

...And another good example is he ended up saying that he couldn't do it because the time was too
close to his fast so I then asked him about that and it took the conversation in a completely different
direction, maybe learn things I didn't know about and there was that for organising this and yes
you're right its quite remarkable that way and the other example I'd give was I was at a conference
that MirandaNet were organising with Brunel University trying to find out about software that
schools use and we were only something like 40 people in the room but because everyone was from
the little tables we sat at were sending out to their Twitter Stream what questions it meant we
actually had about a 1,000 people in the room – and it wasn't just like people – if there is anyone
listening to this, - wasn't just passively listening – it was actually we were setting a question of :

What software do you use? And crowdsourcing the answer and giving that to our group. So
instantly you added more validation to what we were talking about.

Anthony Evans:

Drew – can I ask – I think all of us are Twitterite's, Facebookers, Bloggers whatever, and my
authority, despite being completely evangelical about these tools, I'd say there's only 4 people who
are dedicated on Twitter – sometimes I think how are they actually teaching because they are on
Twitter right throughout the day (laughter...) but what do we do – do we wait for everyone to catch
up with the web 2.0 tools or do we try and fix the other bit of CPD that needs fixing which is the
courses and standard advice and you know...

Richard Millwood:

...are we weird or are we in the vanguard?

Anthony Evans:

I worry!

Drew Buddie:

I think it's easy to latch onto one thing and frequently conversations these days do, but because
Twitter is so different I personally believe that it will end up being, if not Twitter, some other
product will be as ubiquitous as email is now because I noticed that my kids at school don't email
each other although I give them email accounts but in school they don't chat – they don't have
Facebook, they don't have anything that allows chatting to go on in lessons. But what I've
discovered just at the end of term was they'd all sussed this and realised I give them email so they
just send each other short snappy messages in email and it acts like a chat client because they've
their email open they're allowed to do that – so they're having very short messages to each other and
they're choosing to do that which kind of refutes the “Teens don't Tweet” which was also refuted
last week when A's, B's, C's and GCSE's were the world wide top trending topic.

Leon Cych:

But I think that people are in different stages of their life-cycles – some people are time poor
because they've got families, they are trying to teach – they are not going to go on Twitter they
haven't got the time; other people they've got the time to do that they've got the space to do that...

Dave Smith:

So something coming out here then is it seems to be the concise nature of the means of delivery of
the CPD as well in that under 140 characters or the TeachMeet with the 7 minutes – so is that telling
us something about the face to face as well that it needs to be more snappy. So people used to say
“Oh well can't do anything longer than 45 minutes because people will switch off “– is it that you
need to take a different approach – so you need to say - “Well actually let's do something for an
hour – within that hour we have short, snappy topics rather than keep on always saying we must
have half a day, must have a full day and do it like that – I don't know...?

Drew Buddie:

Tom Barrett's been a great exponent of an issue you're almost hinting at there and that is that, almost
blogs are becoming methods of delivering CPD, because I've learned all I know, which isn't very
much I hasten to add, about Google Earth and the use of it through Tom Barrett's brilliant blog posts
about it. I've not been on a course to learn it, I've not read a book, and I'm hanging on Tom's next
blog post when he tells me hopw to do something else …

Leon Cych:
Like Ollie (Bray) he's developed this sort of thing that's happened in business as well it's just fast
protoyping, crowd sourcing, so you pull in lots and lots and lots of resources very quickly from
people all over the world so it's distributed working, distributed CPD, that's where it counts, that's
where you can get value added in many ways, that's why Tom's blog is so good because basically
he'll put up a Google presentation slide and within 3 days he'll have 50 exemplars up there and that's
just a really, really, very, very powerful efficient way of doing some things - we need to find more
mechanisms like that...

John Davitt:

And I suppose the other big worry is if there is this fast prototyping and this rapid feedback and all
the opportunities to learn like that screen on that Saturday afternoon, all these people getting
smarter, quicker, but they weren't everyone...You know there's a lot of people excluded from it so
we might have come up with the best model possible but maybe that's disconnecting what's
happening from most people and it throws it back to that point again to those silos – how do you
make sure that doesn't happen – how do you make sure if this is full of enormous promise that it
gets shared, replicated – it's almost like there's a geological model where professional development
in the past was you got laid down like sedimentary rock – you start in as a beginner and slowly over
the years you took on these layers and shales of improvement and obviously now it's like igneous
extrusions, volcanic bursts but that's not the whole picture – what's the worry there.

Richard Millwood:

But even if it isn't the whole picture, there's some very obvious and simple things to say that come
out of it. One of them is that teachers trust teachers, teachers don't like to be bored, like everybody
else in the world and they are bored with most CPD. It's obvious to me that even if you went back
to the traditional Local Authority setting out of a course to get the speakers in what you would do is
you would make damn sure that those speakers were teachers, many of them at least, and you'd
make sure they spoke only for 10 – 15 minutes. And if you had a really good guy coming along
you'd say, “Do 15 minutes at 9 o'clock and do another 15 minutes at 11 o'clock – we'll spread you
over the day – we won't have you for an hour – wittering on for an hour.”

Dave Smith:

Actually some of the most powerful CPD I've seen has been delivered by the pupils and students
themselves. So coming back to this – and you were saying about switching off the facilities for the
children in your school to be able to communicate with each other and they found their own way –
well that's telling us something isn't it? I think Anthony we had somebody who came to present,
Edith came to present and the feedback we got on her presentation...it was a student doing this... So
it's looking at not just saying it's the adults making the decisions, the adults providing the CPD – it's
actually that engagement with the pupil voice that's coming out here that's built into the CPD which
has a real impact because the children, again, are trusted by us – the facilitators, teachers,
practitioners whatever you want to call us...

Merlin John:

But it's not really just about how short something is or long something is and avoid the long – it's
about pace and appropriateness... I went to an event in Kent which was for teachers and they had a
really remarkable teacher giving a presentation and he deliberately did it for two hours! And there
were teachers who said when he started, “Oh no I have to go at 4 o'clock – nobody left – nobody
left at all and they loved it and afterwards they were buzzing. Absolutely buzzing so it's what's
useful isn't it?

Richard Millwood:

Yes, be wary not to exclude that kind of style...

Merlin John:

What's appropriate in that context and in that configuration.

Richard Millwood:

I would argue that defence of my point earlier that 90 per cent of presenters aren't like that. SO you
can't give them all two hours …. (laughter)

John Davitt:

I was about to ask was there a hash tag for this as I was about to Tweet what Richard just said...

Richard Millwood:

(laughter) TreeMeet talk

General talk about ending the session because of the increasing rain...

Daren Forsyth:

While you're on that it did make me think when Drew talked about blogs – it just took my mind off
to when I was at primary school and there was a teacher and there was this really exciting moment
where the teacher used to pull out a wooden box that had this speaker in it and we used to tune into
a programme that was going to teach us for that half an hour and my mind went off and here we are
sitting in the middle of a park with a laptop, with a camera, with a light, good sound, and for me this
technology means you can have any guest in your classroom at any time you want any subject. Just
sitting here getting excited by that I wouldn't know how to implement it but that's for me what it
offers you...

Dave Smith:

My best learning memory was from Look and Read with Derek Griffiths and his songs. Now I
know where an apostrophe goes on the line because he taught me it.

Andy Broomfield:

...and interesting thing from what the School of Everything was talking about a couple of weeks ago
and that is was one of the preparations that has been happening foe the Swine Flu epidemic is the
BBC to either the Open University or their Byte Sized programme going to be stepping in to bring
to broadcast lessons and one of the things that authorities have been saying is that some people
might be a bit worried because they might end up doing a slightly better job than the classroom – I
wondered what on distance learning are …

Richard Millwoood:
That would probably be another two hours probably....but your point is well taken because that is
why we're here...

Leon Cych:

I am going to have to stop because the laptop is starting to get soaked...

Broadcast Ends...