 Thank you very much, Marron. Good morning. It's great to see so many people here for the start of day three and a particular well done to all the faces I recognise from the late night photos on Twitter. So, it's my privilege to be introduced in Ollie Bray as the keynote speaker for day three, final day of the All Conference 2019. Ollie is the global director connecting play and education at the Lego Foundation. He is an educator with over 20 years experience, is an award winning teacher, a transformative head teacher at King UC High School, and also an educator who has advised government and public sector on the use of technology in learning and teaching. Perhaps just as importantly, given where we are, Ollie is also an alumni of the University of Edinburgh. He did his first postgraduate in the University of Edinburgh to become a geography teacher and in a postgraduate in educational leadership and management. I was really pleased to hear that I'd be introduced in Ollie, because of the privilege of hearing him speak quite a few years ago now when he came to do the keynote address for a learning and teaching conference at my previous university. Ollie did a very energetic, very enthusiastic and vigorous address about what was happening in the school sector with technology and what the implications of that would be for further and higher education, particularly students transitioned in. That resonates very strongly with our themes for this year, particularly around creativity across the curriculum and learning from each other across the various parts of the education sector. I think within schools, within further education, within higher education, community education, we can go far and we're going far in our digital education practice, but we can go further if we work collectively. The heart of some of our themes for this year is this notion of digital education as a joint project, a joint initiative we can take forward together. So, in the spirit of learning from one another across the various parts of the sector, please give it up for Ollie Bray. I'm just going to quickly zip the slides round. It's really great to be here this morning. I was going to start my talk by sitting on the front of the stage, but that's because my legs are tired and I had a lot of whiskey last night. I'm joking. So, thanks very much for the introduction. It's always great to be in Edinburgh. Before moving to Denmark and more about that in a minute, I spent the first 20 years of my professional career working in Scotland, and some of that's been mentioned already, but I did kind of want to give you a little bit of a sense of background because I think that that is important. So, as Keith mentioned, I did my teacher training in Edinburgh. I did my undergraduate at the University of Plymouth on the South Coast. I moved to Scotland, horrified my mother because I'm originally from Dorset, but I was going to move 600, 700 miles away, but worked originally for Sports Scotland and then trained to be a geography teacher. My first schools were in Edinburgh as a student, but then I worked the first part of my career in East Lothian. If you don't know Scottish Geography, it's the neighbouring local authority to Edinburgh, and I lived in Edinburgh for seven great years of my life. If you know a little bit about Scottish Education, you know that we had a big education reform a number of years ago. Many would argue that that reform is still ongoing at the moment in terms of lots of different ways, and I was quite involved in that at the start in an organisation what was called Learning and Teaching Scotland that then became Education Scotland, the National Agency for Curriculum Design, and now also Improvement. At part of that time, I did a piece of work for the Scottish Government around their first technologies for learning strategy. More recently than that, that to me seems like a million years ago now, and as I was wandering the streets of Edinburgh last night, I was thinking, that seems like a past life that I was here. First of all, I was a student, and then working in Victoria Key down in government, but I guess more recently, over the last seven years really, I took a head teacher job at Canesie High School up in the Scottish Highlands, where developing a digital culture was a big part of my mantra and my mission in terms of transforming the school. I was very, very involved for a period of years with Inverness College at the University of Highlands. I'm very passionate about further education, and I'm very passionate about trying to make better links between further education and secondary schooling in terms of that holistic journey, all the way from three to 18 and beyond. Until I moved to Denmark, I was very, very involved, and I have been very involved for a number of years with BBC Scotland around the Education and Advisory Committee. It's a bit of a long preamble into the different sort of sectors I guess I've worked on, and hopefully bring some of that insight to the conference this morning. But it was time for a change, and I had an opportunity last November to relocate, and we relocated, and we moved to Denmark, we moved to Billund. It's not Copenhagen. This is the LEGO house. It actually exists. It's about 250 metres from where I live in my apartment at the moment. This is not the venue for the old conference 2020. However, we do run conferences from there, in particular the LEGO Idea Conference, but I went and I joined the LEGO Foundation, and I'll talk a little bit more about the LEGO Foundation in a minute, and some of the work that we do, because I think that that is useful. If you've got a great new idea for a new LEGO set, I am not the person to speak to. I do not do that. If you're looking to get a discount on the Star Wars announcement and the new LEGO set Star Wars that comes out today, I am not the person to speak to about that. I don't work for LEGO Education. I think I've got all of my disclaimers now out of the way, but we will talk a little bit about some of the work that we do in the LEGO Foundation because you think it is relevant. As I was preparing for this talk, I was looking through the conference themes, and I got some advice from some of the chairs of the conference. I said, what is it you really want me to talk about? They said, well, you're doing the keynote on the last day. You can pretty much talk about what you want. You've got autonomy there. I thought I would start off with the fact that I really like cycling. I really like cycling. If anybody is ever looking for someone to go cycling with, I am your person to do that. The main reason I mention this is it's a nice introduction, I think, to something I've tried to do all of my career. When I think back to when I learnt to ride a bike, this is the sort of bike that I had. It wasn't quite as cool as this. It was a second-hand striker that my mum bought from a charity shop, but this is the type of bike that I would have wanted. The interesting thing about, when I was younger and I was learning to ride a bike, is that bikes came with these things here, stabilizers or training wheels or whatever you want to call them. There was an interesting interrelationship, I think, between stabilizers and training wheels and the lasterplast. The interesting thing about that, of course, was that when you rode a bike with stabilizers on, it was nothing like riding a bike. The hardest thing about riding a bike, of course, is the balance, isn't it? The easiest part about riding a bike is moving your legs around because we're pretty good at that as we walk. It's just changing the angle slightly. The easiest part about riding a bike is the balance. I don't think for me, moving to Denmark, because in Denmark, all of the children learn to ride bikes on these things. Increasingly, within the UK, we see more and more young children learning to ride balance bikes on these things, where they actually get the balance bit first, and once they've got the balance bit, then they progress onto a bigger bike with pedals, or if you've not got very much money or if you're clever about it, you just have to start with and take the pedals off, and the kids balance, and then you put the pedals on, and eventually you get the balance, and then you do the easy bit after that. You're probably wondering what the point of this is, and the point of it is that what I've tried to do, I think, during my career, is I've always tried to think about things that work well. There's no doubt about it. Millions and millions of children around the world have been taught to ride bikes by using stabilizers. They've just had that torturous time to stabilise us off to get to that next part. Yet there's lots of research now and lots of evidence that we can teach children to ride bikes in better ways within the norm of still riding to ride a bike. So my point really, I guess, and the premise of this talk is around, how do we operate within boundaries, within cultural boundaries, within schools, within the system, but how can we do things a little bit differently in order to improve things? One of my favourite quotes that I often use in conferences is a quote from the superintendent of schools, Chris Kennedy, and he's superintendent in the Vancouver schools. I just think that this is really, really useful, and I've used this a lot both at conferences, but also working with teachers and school leaders. This whole idea that technology is not going to make teaching easier, but it is going to make it different. In fact, if we're really passionate educators, we know that education is like a really complicated, really, really hard job, and that's actually one of the reasons that we love it. We might hate it towards the end of term, but one of the reasons that we're in this is because it's complicated, and if it wasn't complicated, we would have figured it out already. For me, it's about the difference and how we can think about making things different. That kind of links quite nicely, I guess, into what we do at the LEGO Foundation, because if we look at the LEGO Foundation's aims, are to redefine play, because a lot of people think that play is just for very, very small children, or that play is just about fun, and it's not about that, and we'll maybe get into some of that later on, but a highly complex thing, and we know that it's really, really important to try and be playful throughout our lives, but also this idea of reimagining learning. I was really, really taken to these two aims from the LEGO Foundation, because, of course, really these are about doing things differently, and they're reimagining, and you are redefining about doing things differently. I was really super excited in particular if this one here about how do we reimagine learning into what it could be, but still working within the boundaries of the system, if you like. So I thought I would just kind of... I'm not going to talk lots and lots about play during this talk, although we'll link back into it, but I was looking at this report just recently, which is a white paper that's been produced by LEGO Foundation. I'll share the slides, and I'll share all of the links with you in the talk, and I was quite interested in this as I was listening to some of the presentations yesterday when we were talking about online learning, we were talking about MOOCs, and we were talking about spectrums of online practice, if you like, and I was thinking, well, it's really, really interesting, because there's something about spectrums of online practice which actually are also very, very similar to spectrums of play, where we've got kind of free play at one end where it's completely the child's choice. You think about that in terms of just like stuff that's on the internet that people kind of find and they kind of learn from. You know, all the way through to the other end of the continuum where we're talking about real structure and real instruction, that kind of didactic approach to using technology. Yeah, for me, and in the LEGO Foundation, we think the most powerful part is where you get the balance between that child agency and that intervention from the adult to really make the kind of learning happen, and the messages that I was getting certainly in the presentations that I was attending to yesterday is that actually in terms of online environments, online learning environments, again, you know, you want that notion of learner agency in there, but also there needs to be some sort of structure, there needs to be some kind of guiding, there needs to be some kind of coaching that goes on with there as well. So it really got me interesting thinking about the parallels between this. Another interesting link between play and technology is as we've been working at the International School of Billund, for example, and thinking about our work about learning through play in schools, particularly in the formal school setting, we've drawn on a lot of the research and a lot of the learning from technology rich environments and some of the learning that comes from that to really get the parent body on board around things because it's thinking about things in a different way and I think that there are some interesting parallels in the literature around that. So that's a useful aside which maybe links to you and resonates with you. So let's just talk a little bit about the LEGO Foundation and how that works because I think that is useful and maybe we'll save questions later. So this is LEGO and underneath LEGO we've got various different LEGO brands, for example LEGO Education, the LEGO House, I showed you that nice picture of that earlier, the brands that are associated with LEGO Lands and the LEGO Land Discovery Centre, we've got the LEGO Store online and the retail stores as part of it. And you may or may not know but LEGO is still owned by a family, a Danish family, a very well-off Danish family, but also like a really passionate Danish family, the Christian family that are really, really keen in terms of doing social good in the world and are absolutely passionate about children, both in Denmark but globally as well. So the LEGO Group itself, all of that kind of LEGO stuff in there is owned by two people, it's owned by Cookby, which is the family's holding company. They own 75% of the LEGO Group and then the LEGO Foundation owns 25% of the LEGO Group and the mission of the LEGO Foundation that I've mentioned already is to redefine play and to reimagine learning and what happens with that is that 25% of the profits that would come from the LEGO Group would come to us for philanthropic use around that. Now that's pretty huge if you think about it, you know you sometimes see announcements from big companies that they will donate 1% of their profits for philanthropic goods, so in terms of a corporation around this, it's a really big investment from the Christian family to try and do social good around the world. In terms of what I do there is I work on the collecting play and global education programme and I guess the bits that would be relevant to this conference is that the partnerships that I manage at the moment, one is to do with the International School of Billins which is an international school in Denmark. One is the work that we do with the MIT media lab which is particularly around the lifelong kindergarten and the personal robotics group. So many of you will be familiar with the Scratch programming language. It's our ongoing work with Scratch and how we do that with Professor Mitch Resnick and Cynthia Brasill in parallel and personal robotics. Also our work on what we call the pedagogy of play with Harvard Graduate School of Education and how we link that into schools and develop resources. So working with two university partners and the schools. Some of the things that we're thinking about and again I thought that this might be useful for this conference. When we think about our pedagogy of play work is we're doing a lot of thinking around at the moment what are the paradoxes. The paradoxes between play in schools or play in schools within the formal system. And again, I think this is quite useful because I think that we could learn a lot from this and its contribution to the field in terms of technology and technology integration as well. But there's some nice things in there. So how do you get more playful schools? How do you exist within the system? Plays can be pretty chaotic but school tends to be orderly. How can we get more playfulness into the system? How do we work around the edges around that? Play can sometimes be risky but schools need to be safe. So how do we get more risk and that kind of risk taking culture in there? How do we make that work? Play tends to be child led, school tends to be adult led. How do we get those kind of sweet spots in the middle with that graph that I was talking about earlier? So that's some of the things that we were doing and as I was sort of talking yesterday about some of the things I might talk about somebody did say to me, yes well it is a technology conference Oly, so you should probably talk a little bit about technology as well in terms of what you're doing there. So I thought I would make a statement about technology so I do think technology is important first of all and it's obviously important for lots and lots of reasons and reasons that I don't need to talk to you guys about because you work extensively in this field at different areas and we know obviously and we're very aware of all of these huge technology drivers that are going to impact on young people, that are going to impact on our universities but there are kind of other things that I think we need to think about here in terms of how we position some of these large technology drivers particularly in education, particularly in school education so we're doing a bit of thinking around this at the moment so there's a lot of talk and there's a lot of rhetoric around AI in education, you've probably heard a lot about that I'm really pleased to be in an audience where probably many people in this room could actually tell me what AI is and machine learning is and it's not just being used to sell a product or a service which is what tends to happen quite a lot and there's lots of people that are obviously out there saying that AI will solve education and of course as a lot of people are talking about these things is what they mean is that we can actually use AI to generate really really successful learning practices that we've had for the last 100 years it's not really thinking about how we can redefine and how we can transform learning and I mention it because I think I think that we need to in terms of education really get away from this term AI in education and we need to play with the narrative a little bit more because for me it's really about what is education like in the era of AI and I think that that links in quite nicely to some of the themes from yesterday morning's keynote which is really talking about the ethics of AI around that and we're not doing enough at the moment with working with young people around the ethics of AI the ethics of data in terms of how that works and we've got some interesting work at the moment with the media lab which is looking at that but it's not just the narrative when we're thinking about obviously technology in schools or colleges or universities there's lots and lots of challenges out there whether that is time whether that's children, young people, families adult learners whether it's the curriculum, whether it's driving results whether it's a research output that needs to be produced it is kind of hugely challenging times and the more I've thought about this and the more I've listened over the last two days is that if we really want to solve some of these problems for me it comes down to this whole idea of people the people that make this happen behind it but also the leadership and I think that word leadership has been available at this conference for the last two days but maybe not in the sense that we really need it, need it, need it in we're all technology leaders in this field and we all play our certain part in the system but one of the interesting things that seem to be coming out of the morning keynote yesterday over coffee and over lunchtime is that we might be technology leaders but we're not always the technology decision makers or institutes in terms of making that work so how do we really help the decision makers also be technology leaders, that's a really important question I think that we need to go over and I'm going to give an example about this and I think it's a bit of a controversial example but we do need to be very very careful when we talk about devices in schools for example where sometimes the purchasing of a large amount of devices in schools is made by one person or two people yet the people that they're buying these devices from exist within a framework and the people that sell those devices in that framework sell two or three or four different devices from different manufacturers and one of the increasing challenges that I think that we see across the whole of the UK in fact the whole of Western Europe is that people are seduced into buying a device from a manufacturer that sells three different devices from three different manufacturers and the device that that person ends up making a decision about is the one where the people get the most sales royalties on it because that's the truth that is the truth around some of the things it's not because of the pedagogical reasons behind it a lot of the time it's because that this person can sell you three different devices some might be cheaper, some might be more appropriate but they're really pushing the one because they know that they will take more sales royalties out of that and maybe I'm being a bit unfair there but I do think that that is a real kind of ethical challenge that we have and that's why we need you know good technology leadership and maybe to sort of be a bit more lighted heart about it it's then really thinking about you know what are the appropriate tools that we want to use I always like you know example when she talks about the triple E free market well if you wanted to like put a picture on the wall then you'd probably use a hammer like you could use a chainsaw but it wouldn't be an appropriate tool to do it I think it's quite a good example of things and we do need to be a little bit careful of some of these things and we do need to be a little bit careful of course that sometimes people increasingly buying these new tools maybe they're a little bit shiny but we're still using them to do the same things an online conference and meetings are great like examples of that so we do need to be taping and step back and need to be thinking a little bit more about how are we making sure that we're making the right purchasing decisions for the children that we've got in front of us like I'm massively worried about cloud computing in East Africa but these are the devices that are being sold in East Africa at the moment a lot of the time but the infrastructure requirements aren't there so we really need to think about some of these things and we cannot get seduced into the nice and shiny things that are there just because they're nice and shiny and try and retrofit them into education and that's why we need the strong leadership linked into the good teaching and linked into the good pedagogy so moving sort of slightly sideways around some of these things I guess it's important to reflect on what we're trying to do I think we all know this we're within education we're not getting too philosophical about it we're trying to make sure that young people have got a good balance obviously between the skills and knowledge both are important people that argue that one is more important than the other don't really understand education a lot of the time in terms of making that work I don't believe there's a difference between academic and vocational we need to get beyond these arguments and we need to lose that historical rhetoric I think of the past but we do need to think about what are the skills that young people are going to need for the future and again there's no shortage of national and international advice and lead tables which tell us what skills may or may not be appropriate in the past but actually if you look at all of these skills they kind of all say the same things they're examples of holistic skills but the important point with all of this of course it's making sure that we firmly root the importance of these holistic skills within our context and that needs to be within our local context in terms of local employability and local social needs and that needs to be within national context and then eventually international context as well and so often many of these skills frameworks are built the other way around they're built within international context and then only the local context is thought about at the last moment which is why we don't get the buy-in from teachers and it doesn't ultimately go on to impact on the young people but I do suppose if we're thinking about developing skills in these different ways then I believe any way that you develop skills through engaging and immersive experiences it's one of the reasons I've always been a massive fan as a head teacher in outdoor learning it's also one of the reasons that I've also been a huge advocate for digital technology and play-based approaches because I do think that if we can combine the outdoors digital technology play-based approaches we can create these wonderful engaging and immersive experiences and slightly tongue-in-cheek that if we're really thinking about trying to create these immersive experiences it's not just being told about things it's not just being told about stuff all the time and we need to be careful not to create digital online learning environments that are just telling people stuff it needs to be two-way and it needs to be interactive and it probably would come as no surprise to you that one of the ways that I think that we can do this from a pedagogical point of view is that we can think about the characteristics of play within the LEGO Foundation these are some of our beliefs around the characteristics of play is that a playful experience is something which is meaningful, it's joyful that word came across yesterday right at the start of the keynote and I love that, that whole notion of joy the joy in learning so important socially interactive, actively engaging and iterative where young people can prototype and they can reinvent things and even though I'm using this in the context of playful learning experiences if I was in school or when I work with teachers at the International School of Billins these are the characteristics of playful experiences but you know what, these are also the characteristics of an excellent lesson where you might not get all five of these things in your lesson at any one time and it may work as a bit of a continuum where you've got a little bit more of one thing and a little bit less of another thing but actually if you're working towards an excellent lesson this gives you a pretty interesting framework to work towards, how you're making it meaningful for the students how are they walking away with that kind of joyful feeling of hard fun that goes with it how are they able to iterate on their learning to improve, are they socially interactive are they actively engaged so let's just go back to lego a second here and a bit of history so lego comes from two Danish words which basically means play well and here's another history lesson for you, this is the Christensen family so we've got all at the top there the founder of the company got Godfrey in the middle at the bottom keller's now in his early 70s he's still actually involved in the company there's a big event in Denmark tomorrow which keller's heading up for sort of lego employers which is why we need to sort of rush off tonight and the fourth generation is now very very involved in the company and the fifth generation which are six girls are also starting to get involved and they range between the ages of seven and the age of 14 and started off not making plastic toys but making wooden toys one of the best selling wooden toys was this duck and what I thought we would do just because I've been trying to emphasise the importance of play and that playful experience of those five characteristics is I thought that we would have a go at a playful experience so that we can imagine what that's like and this has got two purposes really one, I think it's important it'll give you something to play with the rest of the talk if you don't like what I'm saying so we're going to hand out some little bags to you now and you're not to open your bag until I tell you to this is the first exercise in what it feels like there's a lot of rattling there okay if you've got one hold it up and shake it in an annoying fashion that's good so we can see who's not got one just about there shake it back shake it towards someone that's good okay so this is what we're going to do first of all the health and safety briefing in a minute we're going to open these bags do not open it too enthusiastically unless the person next to you is wearing glasses try and control how this goes okay so when I say go in a minute I'm going to give you 40 seconds and in that 40 seconds you are going to make a duck five four three two one go ten seconds two one hold up your duck have a look at look at some of these some of these are quite interesting that's good great have a little look to the person to your left and your right okay great so loads of loads of good things and interesting activity and I suspect if we had a chance and we put all of our ducks on the stage we would end up with a picture a little bit like this all of all of the things that you've built are obviously a duck to you and many people many people would recognise them as a duck as well but let's just have a little think about what happened around that lots of things probably so first of all I mentioned already there was probably that whole kind of business of a bit of self-regulation at the start I mean you could see people as soon as they got their bag desperate to open it they were sort of shaking that around you know around things wanting to sort of try and make that work there was a bit of there was definitely a bit of symbolic representation now I turned the slide off at the front where's the picture how am I going to make a duck it's not as if nobody's ever seen a duck before but again cooling that out from the back of your head what does it look like to make a duck sort of pulling that in there was obviously some fine motor skills some of you needed to improve your fine motor skills I noticed that from the hitting of lego bricks off this wonderful historic floor that we've got here there was definitely a bit of visualisation that was going on there was that kind of inner motivation when I said right you've got 10 seconds left here and you can see the kind of pace really starting to move up again there was more kind of self-regulation there particularly as you looked around and you realised the person to your right duck looked a lot like you looked like duck than yours and the person to your left duck was still on the floor trying to pick it up but again you kind of pulled this together I would like to say that there was a little bit then of in terms of like ideation going on after you had a quick look around the room or look over your shoulder you started to iterate on your duck it was a bit better in school we called that cheating in business we called that collaboration obviously and at the end of it when we said stop there there was that little bit of self-assessment oh yeah my duck is definitely better than yours yours looks like a deer that looks like a deer and then there was still that kind of iteration and things that were going on so there's loads of stuff going on in here and we could actually talk about this very short process where we can kind of encapsulate what we mean by playful learning but it's a short exercise to do it and you can keep your ducks and put that on your desk and take it apart and see if you can build it in different ways and just remind yourself that sometimes that doing these little simple things can be incredibly playful in nature and how do we pull these back into our practice and when I think about what makes a good lego duck and when I think about activity good and there are lots of different times is I always come back to what makes it kind of powerful and I think well probably within the activity there it was suitable for the size of the audience in terms of what it was we could have done it with a bigger audience we could have done it with a smaller audience as well and it involved hopefully some appropriate pedagogy I wouldn't say the pedagogy was good necessarily but some appropriate pedagogy but at the same time the activity was interesting the context that we were doing it in if I'd have asked you to build a duck and that activity was going to take an hour that probably wouldn't have been appropriate but for the context it was in it seemed to work quite well and if I go back to my characteristics of play and I think through it then it did have a lot of these things in it there was meaning for you because you all know what a duck is in terms of doing that and it was meaning because it was culturally set within the conference and the task that we were doing in it I think it was joyful in nature I don't know whether it was tears or laughter that I heard but there were, you know, people seemed to kind of enjoy the task or the challenge of doing the task it was socially interactive perhaps socially interactive in different ways sometimes in terms of dialogue sometimes in terms of looking at other people in terms of sharing all of these different things that we've had here certainly actively engaging and I'm pretty sure that there was nobody in the room that just put the six blocks together and said I've made a duck it was definitely iterative in nature as you look round the room now and you can continue to do this there are still people that are being iterative in nature there are still people that are working on their ducks still trying to improve these ducks and what I wanted to do for the last little bit of a talk was maybe to unpack two of these characteristics a little bit more we won't have time to unpack all of them but actually what do we mean by some of these things what do we mean by actively engaging and I'm thinking about here obviously in the context of play and I guess the idea here would be to think about how can we then translate this to learning environments or online learning environments or classroom learning environments if you're operating there as well so we'll unpack actively and engaging and then we'll also unpack iterative because that will give us an interesting opportunity to talk about creativity then we'll sum up and then there'll be a bit of time for questions at the end so that doesn't sound right as a plan you can try and build a reindeer or you can try and build a frog or whatever you want with the LEGO bricks that you've got in front of you so a couple of things that I guess around actively engaging pedagogies at the moment one of the things that I wanted to kind of give a bit of a shout out for and this is related to learning through play in schools but we've just done a piece of research with the Australian Council of Education Research around this report on learning through play in schools and what we've done is we've taken the five characteristics of play and we've tried to cross match them to existing evidence based practice so which of in terms of evidence based practice which of the practices, the established practices out there that would tend to be more playful in nature and this is the kind of list of things that we've got here active learning, collaborative learning, cooperative learning et cetera et cetera I'm not going to go through the list but the reason that I mentioned it and the reason I think it's relevant to this conference is because the next piece of research that we're going to be doing on here is we're going to be taking this report and we're going to be thinking about technology, you know, contribute to these types of actively engaging teaching and learning pedagogies so that we're developing learning through play with technology if that makes sense because at the moment there's not a body of research that really pulls that together in one place we've got isolated examples of it but not a body of research that pulls that together in one place the interesting thing for me I think about all of these types of practice here to go back to my picture inside the lego house that I used at the start of the slide show is that for me they they link into one of the academics, famous academics that was mentioned in yesterday's keynote which was Seymour Pape in the context of teaching logo back in the 1960s one of the early pioneers of artificial intelligence and Pape had this great kind of phrase that the best learning activities for students and I guess he was really talking about offline but I think he would now talk about online as well and things would change is there activities that have got a low floor and they've got a high ceiling so activities that are accessible to all but different students at different places within their learning journey can climb those steps either quicker or slower than others in order to progress with their learning and the whole concept of course having the high ceiling is this whole idea about open-ended learning activity so the learning just doesn't stop now that's a real challenge for us if we think about online education because quite often online education and formal education systems come to an end we talk a lot about we talk a lot about lifelong learning but actually we don't and we talk about the skills that are there to develop lifelong learning but quite often actually the courses come to an end the year group within the school comes to an end and everything has a bit of a hard stop so thinking about how are we not just giving the kids the skills but how are we designing learning activities in order for them to progress Mitresnick again from the media lab who's one of the who interestingly now has got the title professor of play professor of learning research added to this metaphor around the whole notion of we've got a low floor, we've got a high ceiling but we also need wide walls and that's about choice and that's about personalisation and he does make a distinction between the difference between choice but often we can give students a lot of choices but that doesn't mean it's personalised to the learning to the learner thinking about that and again various other people have iterated with this over the years around windows, ramps and ladders and all of these terms are linked to accessibility and how we work so I guess as we're thinking about designing these online playful learning environments keeping this idea of low floors, high ceilings wide walls in mind is a really really important thing about what we do otherwise we're really just reinventing the past in a digital way and then we've got kind of iterative and we've done lots of iterative activities this morning but iterative in terms of how do we try things out, so how do we imagine something how do we then go and create something just like we did this morning how do we play with it to sort of get it work how do we make it look a bit more like a duck how do we kind of share our knowledge and feelings around that, how do we reflect on it how do we reimagine it, how do we get on with it there's kind of these big iterative loops and circles and circles and iteration gives us a great opportunity to talk a little bit about creativity and that's what we'll just do for the last few minutes of the talk so second part of audience participation who believes that children are more creative than adults I don't by the way but I like to put my hand up to see if people will just copy me so I don't, now I might be wrong about that but my personal belief is I don't but I just like to put my hand up to see and you're probably thinking to yourself well children must be more creative than adults because I've seen this TED talk which has been viewed several million times and in this TED talk there's definitely a piece of research which is quoted in there from Head Start in the UK which also references NASA by George Land which suggests that when children are 5 years old they're 98% creative and when they're an adult they're 2% creative now I've got obviously there as academics it's very easy to think about actually how on earth is this measured in the first place and secondly you know and secondly the interesting thing about this and one of the researchers at the Lego Foundation at Dr Rutherford's Booker she was tasked to kind of go out and try and find this research and she is careful to use the term that the research doesn't exist but what she will say is that she can find no evidence of it existing and in fact when she spoke to the people from this isn't, this isn't Ken Robinson's fault by the way he was probably informed that it did exist he was using it or it's quoted from somewhere else but when she spoke to the people from NASA about it they described it as an urban myth so it's interesting you know it's interesting around that and I'm not saying for a moment that the young people aren't more creative I don't believe that and the reason that I don't believe that is partly because the body of evidence has also changed but partly because I think we get confused in our words and giving an example about this is that when I was younger I used to have a tree house and I had great plans for this tree house I wanted it for example to have a ladder going up to it which it eventually did but I also wanted it to have a pole that came down electricity in a swimming pool and not only are there some very obvious health and safety concerns right with my plan of doing this but actually you know as a child my mum might have said are all these really really creative but actually I wasn't that creative at all what I was of course I had a good sense of imagination and if we look at the research like over the last decade in particular what we do know now of course is that creativity is not the same as imagination and sometimes we get those words confused and sometimes we use those terms interchangeably and of course if we really want young people or if we really want students to be creative again it comes back to that term how do you become creative in context if we're going to produce creative products and produce services and creative solutions it's got to be useful for someone it's got to be useful for someone so what we know now is that really if we want to be creative or if we want to encourage the creative process we need that kind of combination of originality and we need appropriateness we need it to converge somewhere in the middle and there are lots of different examples of this and we could spend time looking at this but we need to sort of try and merge the two together so the second question children learn more flexibly than adults do you agree or disagree? I'm putting my hand up to agree of course I could be lying now I do agree with this one around this there's lots of evidence to suggest that this might be true it's why the first 1,000 years of child development is really really important because as young people are growing up they learn stuff incredibly quickly for example yesterday with Instagram at the front about how a young person is learning and soaking up that information straight away what's my point well my point here is that if we really want young people or learners to be creative then probably what we need is we need children and adults working together in co-creative teams and by this I don't just mean working together I also mean learning together so in terms of developing the skill of creativity like within our schools and within our classrooms and universities the challenge here might be this question so in your class or school how often the children and adults learn together now you can replace that within your college or university how often do learners and teachers or lecturers learn together or work on something new and my answer to this is that this probably doesn't happen a lot I meet a lot of teachers and I meet a lot of lecturers and a lot of professors that say I learn a lot from my students but very rarely do they say I learn a lot with my students they might learn a lot from them in terms of who they are but actually learning with them is something that we don't do very often yet very very important in terms of developing the creative process it's really important that adults and children are learning together so what am I saying here just want to sum up this part because I do think it's important I'll just be careful what I say here to make sure I get my wording right so I think it would be fair to say that children are not the creative geniuses but we've got a huge amount to learn from them and we must be as adults or responsible adults be really really careful not to communicate that the highest form of learning is expertise that said are certainly not creative failures and we should be careful not to shame one another for knowledge and expertise which is needed to bring these ideas into reality which is the important part and that leads us of course to the next question which is around how do we teach creativity and again coming back to see more paper and all the things he says is that we invite children to create new things we invite children to build new things and there's loads and loads of examples of this and we do a lot of work around this one of the examples that we do quite often is just using these kind of household objects little electric motors Papett was obsessed with electric motors and vibrations a lot of these ideas come from that and pens and different workshops for adults and also for children as well and the whole idea behind this is that you kind of build a unique machine and this unique machine kind of creates this unique pattern and there's something about that which is incredibly meaningful because it's part of it and there's obviously no Lego that's involved in any of this here but there are other things where we could use Lego or other bits and pieces this is an activity called Sky Parade I was working on this workshop down in South Africa with these South African teachers and we were building and iterating and kind of making these cable cars that sort of come out from nowhere and you can see the different designs that we've got here with joy and excitement on different people's faces they came up and one catches up with the other and we've got one here which is not quite as successful a different one and a different design but this idea of making things and kind of creating things and then we do a lot of thinking again with our partners at MIT around kind of scratch visual programming language and how do we take the concept of Lego blocks and put that into the digital realm so making things a lot of work around well it's not just about following instructions but how can we actually get kids to start with the basics that kind of low floor and then iterate on their own designs to solve new problems in terms of robotics but actually really trying to get kids to create to make and I have this kind of massive concern at the moment that a lot of education products that come out of there are really all about solving puzzles rather than about kids working on projects and there's nothing wrong with solving a puzzle but I kind of think that the skills associated with solving one puzzle can kind of be transferred to the other but solving a problem, a real problem problems are different and how do we get more of that into our learning and our teaching and the things that I've talked about there are obviously these kind of like robotics, making, tinkering, creative coding pulling these things together but again it's for me it's about working together and making things work in these kind of collective teams and I'm just going to slip through these I thought I deleted them but I haven't and so for me the thing that kind of binds all of those activities together and playfulness and the use of technology is this word is this word curious and I'm passionate about this word and the reason I'm passionate about this word is because I believe that if we can really develop curious people then curious people tend to be playful in nature and I think that we can really use these to sort of try and tackle some of the problems that we've got and I guess sort of my final remark would be is that in terms of developing curious people we also cannot forget that as educators wherever we work within the system very very young children to older lifelong learners that we can't forget that we're in the business of developing people or we're in the business of developing curious people and my key kind of takeaways from the talk would really be around if we're really trying to develop people we need to go back and we really need to understand what do these people need what do people need what are we trying to do local context, national context, international context not the other way around a lot of the time because need is very much a local and it's very much a personal thing then we need to understand well what are the skills that we need in order to help with this again we talk about creativity but creativity can mean so many different things to people depending on the local context the creativity skills that you need in East Africa are very different to the creativity skills for example that you might need in Edinburgh so what is the actual skill we need to unpack the skill it can't just be these kind of hollow words and then we need to understand how to develop the skill to suit the need so the unpacking has got to be around the need and it's got to be around the skill and then we need to think about how we link both of the things together and if we get that and if we've got curious people then I honestly believe I honestly believe that we can move the whole system forward and we can move the whole system forward by encouraging teachers and lecturers to think about looking inwards looking outwards and looking forwards being curious all the time developing practice, developing pedagogies developing technology solutions in order to meet these learner outcomes so I've talked a lot there I've talked about some a bit of a journey in terms of some of the work we've done the LEGO foundation some of the work and how that links into play and how it links into technology and hopefully there might be some takeaways for some people to take away in terms of context certainly hopefully there's some things to think about I personally don't think I've been talking about very much than this and I like to use this slide particularly in Edinburgh it's also very useful in Denmark when it rains a lot because I don't think I think a lot of what I've hopefully been talking about over the last little while really has been an awful lot of common sense but I think that sometimes in our jobs we forget about the common sense because we get burdened with all of the other pressures that come in and sometimes it's just a case of being able to step back and to think to ourselves right what are we actually trying to do in terms of developing people what do people need what are the skills they're going to need for the need and how do two of these things come together and how can we do that in a curious and hopefully playful way so thanks very much this seems not to be working that was a great keynote and a great start to day 3 there's a lot of love for your keynote and a lot of enthusiasm for what you were saying both on Twitter and in the VBOX what I think I'll do is just go to the floor just now and see if anyone has a first question we've got Sheila down here thank you very much Ollie that was a great keynote I'm so happy I have a duck I think it's really interesting about play but as you were talking what was going through my head was the power and power dynamics and actually how people quite a lot of people are scared of play so how do you think we can start to make those cultural changes around people not being scared of play and I was thinking particularly in more online environments when we're thinking more about individual things and I think there's just a lack of play and curiosity and creativity because we have these bigger things coming and it's just like you go through tick tick tick I just wonder if you'd any thoughts on that so I don't know if I've got the answer to that but maybe to statements which might be useful one of the things is that in terms of education systems we're sat in a country at the moment that's possibly got the licence for the most playful education system in the world other than New Zealand in many ways the licence to play within formal education within Scottish schools is incredibly powerful helped by the fact that quite recent announcement from Nicola Surgeon around the fact that the willingness to enshrine the UN Convention of Human of Child Rights into law which includes the right to play and of course the child is defined from 0 to 18 which is a really useful thing as well and I guess the other thing is that we spend a lot of time on the Lego Foundation this is maybe a criticism of what we do working with countries that aren't as playful and we're trying to build up a bit of momentum at the moment for actually going out and working within countries and with the context where the system and the structures are in place to see whether we can meet in the middle somewhere so I'm not sure I'm really answering your question but there's a commitment there to do things the other thing I think about online environments is if we went back to that slide that I showed showing the continuum of play and I was trying to link that into the continuum is I think that at the moment and I think we're seeing a change in this but I think in a lot of online environments people have been very very obsessed with the term gamification like over time and although I'm not saying that there's not a time and a place for gamification just like there's a time and a place for games within play play is more than that so if we've kind of got that gamification bit right-ish online environments how do we now work towards the other spectrums and the continuums to make that work so I'm not really sure I've answered your question but I do think there's a place in terms of policy and linking policy together and I do think there's a place in terms of well you know we've already got a bit of this in online environments but it's a narrow view of what play is how do we now work around the edges to make that better in a more open-ended way great thank you Ollie we have a number of questions on VBOX as well I wonder if we could maybe take a look at where is it yes the middle one which would be something that I think a number of us might be thinking about do you think your education systems format us in a way that make us not use our natural creativity yeah I think I think that's true because it kind of maybe links into the first question forward is that I do the more and more I've thought about this and I've been doing a lot of thinking about this certainly over the last five years and the more and more I've read on it like become absorbed in it since during the Lego Foundation is there's definitely something in in that co-creation between the child and the adult coming together to make and to create things but quite often I think within schools and sometimes I've been further in higher education settings there's that power dynamic so it still is all about the knowledge transfer rather than about actually making new things and making that work so from that point of view I think that the system can stifle creativity in terms of making that making that work and I also think that certainly within schools is that there's not always the time and space for things to be creative because quite often if we think about the creative process the creative process is always associated with a huge amount of failure whereas you know quite often in schools failure is associated with with the wrong thing we're doing the wrong thing so we gear a lot of education towards success which translates to spoon feeding which is not helpful for the creative process and I think I think we've got some major challenges ahead you know as PISA 2021 starts to assess creative thinking you know as part of their thing we've got some major challenges ahead of what that might look like you know can you actually assess creativity or creative thinking via a standardized test are we then standardizing creativity I mean these are some big questions that we need to kind of really wrestle with I think in the next couple of years we'll go back to the floor are there any questions one in the very back there and if you could say who you are and where you're joining us from that would be great John Traxler from the University of Wolverhampton I wonder when I listen to talks that infrastructure and resources and material issues are presented as barriers and wonder actually if you get beyond those what you reach are barriers in terms of culture so in hearing what you're saying I'm worrying about words and concepts like innovation risk taking, play and so on problematic in some cultures inherently even after you've removed any barriers in terms of material assets it's a great question and I think there are two points there the first is if we remove the challenges of resources there will be some institutions here that are very well resourced we always want more but there will be some institutions here that are very well resourced and there will be some institutions that aren't but even when these institutions are very well resourced there may be not using that resource to really encourage collaboration between learners and teachers in terms of improving practice around that so I do think that we need to work on both of these things in parallel is I don't think that we should become too obsessed with the resourcing we should always keep focusing on that culture first because the resourcing actually if you look at it historically we'll always get there but then when it gets there the culture's not there you're actually not moving things forward Thank you John We'll be taking another question from Feebox and reading it out mainly for the benefit of colleagues who might be watching online Could we take Jilly's question how does learning with the class mesh with having clear learning outcomes and a somewhat assessment driven education structure So so some of the some of the work that we've been doing around the pedagogy of play as I say has been has been designed to look at what the playful learning environments within the formal school setting and by formal school setting we mean settings where learning outcomes have to be met so everything that happens within the confines of the system So we think it's possible We've done some work on this in an international school in Denmark We've done some work on this in three very very different schools in the Johannesburg area of South Africa and next week we're kicking off the third stage of the research in three different schools in Boston in the US and our idea behind that is that what we're trying to do is trying to create a metamodel of what learning through play looks like within the formal setting and to give people the tools to be able to recognise that because once you've got the tools to be able to recognise that within your cultural setting then you can start to think about how does that link into learning outcomes and how can it link into assessment around that as well and I do agree around the assessment question there's a massive amount of evidence there's a massive lack of evidence at the moment and a big gap in the field about learning through play and assessment all of the research literature when we talk about play and assessment is very obsessed with game metrics particularly in the digital contracts rather than looking at the spectrum of play making that work so I think that's a gap in the field at the moment We're just a bit on time so all these didn't have the questions addressed I think the number of questions has probably testament how engaged people found the keynote so thank you very much we'll give a final thank you to all the please future developments include a text and data mining service working with satellite data and machine learning and smart campus technology Edina's work with learning technologies helps to develop skilled data literate students who can change our world for the better teachers and students can develop and share coding skills with notable our Jupiter Notebook service our DigiMap services deliver high quality mapping data for all stages of education future developments include a text and data mining service working with satellite data and machine learning and smart campus technology Edina's work with learning technologies helps to develop skilled data literate students who can change our world for the better teachers and students can develop and share coding skills with notable our Jupiter Notebook service our DigiMap services deliver high quality mapping data for all stages of education future developments include a text and data mining service working with satellite data and machine learning and smart campus technology