This week, I have been reading...   Researching prior learning: How toddlers study movies by Carey Bazalgette (2018) Negotiated, contested and political: the disruptive third spaces of youth media production by Parry, Howard and Penfold (2020) Video games design and aesthetic by James Gee (2016) A summary in ten words: Disrupting the traditional teacher-learner power balance makes for interesting results. Word of the week: Bazalgette (now I realise how you pronounce it). Caffeinated sips to words-read ratio: 3:1   The theme of this set of reading is children’s engagement with digital media outside of the classroom. Bazalgette challenges the assumptions about how toddlers watch and understand films through informal viewing; Parry and others consider the creation of text-based video games by young people outside of a formal educational setting. One key idea that links these articles relates to the positionality of the learner in relation to traditional ‘authority’ in...

    A fter a chance bit of Googling this week, I stumbled across Twine - an interactive storytelling platform for building text-based games. It is a platform with pot ential for developing narrative in our schools . ⌚ 6 minutes   I have spent my summer reading. After spending lockdown in Thailand with a rapidly deleting selection of books (reading A Casual Vacancy was a last resort), coming back to a house of full bookshelves was a treat. It felt good for the soul to escape the worries of the present by slipping into another, fictional world whose problems were not my concern. I have also been playing a lot of computer games, revisiting many of the games that I enjoyed as a child: The Settlers , Civilisation , Frontier Elite , Rome Total War . If you're not a 1990s computer game fan then, no, you're not alone but please indulge me as I reminisce. This summer, with time on my hands, I started to think seriously about why it was I enjoy playing these games, and why they se...