A long time ago, then I was gainfully employed by the Catholic Education Office I was part of what was called eLearning 2007 – or Learnscope. This is also pre Wordle so this t-shirt was perhaps a poignant example of the foresight of the group of people involved.
Learnscope 2007 was promptly killed off the year after, due to lack of money and vision. Back then, there was no theatre of self-proclaiming expert protagonists, farming Twitter and building speaking careers — there were just people exploring new media technologies, creating projects with kids and connecting. It was pre-commodification and I’m damn lucky to have been in the right place at the right time I guess.
I have to thank Robyn Jay for posting this to Facebook this week as it sparked an interesting conversion about how homogonised and ‘groupthink’ the current generation of exploration appears to be, given these things are not almost a decade old. It’s also interesting here that Second Life is mentioned, as it had a huge influence on what media might be — regardless of whether or not you ‘liked’ it. Back in 2007, there were many seminal projects being developed in mobile learning (which pre-dated the iPhone) as well as the clear vision of convergence and on-line communities.
Now a decade later, people are asking me about games or whether or not a ‘flipped classroom’ is new. The problem has always been quite simple: the system funds, then kills. We go around and around until we simply get sick of the ride and leave. I still connect with the Learnscopers — and can only guess at the impact they made to pave the way for … well pretty much the same. So what will does the t-shirt of 2014 look like?
Playable 