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Here you will find all the details of previous MirandaMods. Many of the links will take you to detailed feedback from the meetings including several with video clips.

You don't know what a MirandaMod is? There's an explanation further down this page.

Previous MirandaMods have covered these topics:

Recent MirandaMods

BETT11 MirandaMods

Professional knowledge building resources from three years of MirandaMods can be found on the MirandaMods section of our website. The resources from the BETT11 week in London from 12th -15th January, listed below, also provide a taster of what to expect from the Education Show (March MirandaMods) as they are all about themes from Achievement for All.

At Olympia, London the MirandaNet team ran four MirandaMods on Achievement for All themes: three on the stand and one in a seminar room. The quality of the resources captured in the room was better than on the stand because the glass and metal roof of Olympia were not acoustically sympathetic.

The events had been marketed by MirandaNet for about two months before BETT11. Before and during the events information issues from the debates were tweeted and re-tweeted to about 500 educators. Some responded on the Twitter stream and others joined the Flash meeting and commented there. Members from Australia, Greece and Gambia who could not obtain the funding to come to BETT11 attended all the debates as a form of Continuing Professional Development. There will be more in the next newsletter about these contributions.

The MirandaNet team now have significant experience in leveraging these social media streams to great effect as the MirandaNet community become more sophisticated in their capacity to share professional knowledge stimulated by expert speakers and participant educators. The potential for outreach is for the AFA community is significant as they learn to use the technology comfortably.

Leading on the MirandaNet/Achievement for All web pages are the talks from the three expert speakers to set the theme: Professor Sonia Blandford on Achievement for all; Dr. Chris Yapp on the implications for future learning and Professor Marilyn Leask on the value of communities of practice in professional learning. Also on the website will be the videostream and FlashMeeting record of the four events, including the transcript. Collaborative maps also present the professional knowledge that was collected.

The MirandaNet team comment that the quality of the MirandaMod resources is good, given this is an 'outside broadcast' but obviously event better results have been achieved in the studio at the WLE centre, Institute of Education, University of London funded by HEFCE and Becta. However, this a small, agile and committed group that can set up a broadcast unit and produce results much faster than a media company and with more authentic results, because we are all committed educators. From this set of MirandaMods at BETT11 we discovered a number of things that will improve our "outside broadcast technique" for the Education Show. The equipment at MirandaNet’s disposal and the limited bandwidth from the stand were challenging. More members need to be trained to co-ordinate all the digital streams.

These are the opening resources:

  1. Professor Blandford's Speech with a transcript of her speech on Scribd
  2. Chris Yapp's Speech
  3. Marilyn Leask's Speech

MirandaMods at the Education Show, Birmingham, March 17th - 19th 2011

The MirandaMod sessions at the Education Show in Birmingham March 17th -19th considered what comes next in digital technologies in association with colleagues from the Department for Education and the Achievement for All Strategy. There were six workshops over three days with the focus on:

Professor Sonia Blandford talked about Achievement for All: Impact and practice following the Lamb inquiry. The MirandaNet team encouraged feedback from the participants and assisted with the videoing, creating maps and so on. The team aslo ran one of the workshops on Thursday afternoon, 17th March when our topic wase 'ICT policy and practice in Achievement for All contexts'. In this workshop we paid tribute to what Becta has achieved and undertook some collaborative thinking about what the ICT community needs to do next.

Resources from the Games Based Learning Conference

MirandaNet ran a well attended MirandaMod at the Games Based Learning conference. After the event Graham Brown Marting reports: the Game Based Learning Conference was attended by more than 400 international delegates for a stimulating, inspiring and possibly exhausting 2 days.

By all accounts it was a success with engaging and provocative conversations sparked during the event itself, on Twitter where the event consistently trended and now continuing amongst various online communities.

MirandaMod October 2010

This took place at the Handheld Learning Festival & Conference 2010, Oct 11th - 13th, London (http://bit.ly/hhl10).

MirandaMod Chair: Terry Freedman (www.terry-freedman.org.uk)
MirandaNet team: Christina Preston, John Cuthell, Leon Cych and Theo Kuechel

Thanks to our partners:

One World, One Web (click for larger image)Effect of the Internet and Web 2.0 on cognition

MirandaMod at the Pan-Hellenic Conference on ICT in Education
Friday 24th September 18:00 - 21:00 (local time in Greece) which is 16:00 - 19:00 (Local time in the UK) or 15:00 - 18:00 (GMT/UTC)

Socrates said writing would destroy human thinking processes: are the Internet and Web 2.0 having a more profound effect on cognition?

Chair: C. Preston: Lead speaker, A. Jimoyiannis:
MirandaNet team: T. Kuechel, L. Cych

We welcome your contribution on this theme and offer the suggestions below:

HCICTE 2010 covers technological, pedagogical, organizational, instructional, as well as policy aspects of ICT in Education and e-Learning. Special emphasis is given to applied research relevant to educational practice guided by the educational realities in schools, colleges, universities and informal learning organizations. In a more generic scope, the Conference aims to encompass broader issues determining ICT integration in practice, including learning and teaching, curriculum and instructional design, learning media and environments, teacher education and professional development, assessment and evaluation, etc.

 

 

‘Mobile learning, handheld learning?’ What do we mean?

The presentations during the seminar considered the issues of mobile and handheld learning from four key perspectives: the different mediums in which learning now takes place informally; the value to teachers of digital resources; the scholarly underpinnings of this developing area and the influence of companies on the directions taken by schools in implementing the associated hardware and software. In the MirandaMod that followed Elizabeth Hartnell-Young joined the debate from New Zealand. Other contributors came from across the United Kingdom. Two of the conclusions were that: to make mobile and handheld learning worth the investment there needed to be significant changes in classroom practice and assessment; and, as a profession we still do not know enough about the process of collaborative knowledge creation online.

Balancing digital literacy with digital safety: a growing dilemma for educators

This second MirandaMod in October took place on 22nd October 2009 at the WLE Centre, Institute of Education, London and online, 16:00 - 21:00. It was led by Leon Cych with Allison Allen, and raised some significant issues.

MirandaMod at the Handheld Learning Conference, October 5th 2009

Participants in the Handheld Learning MirandaMod raised a fascinating range of issues linking theory and practice about the use of ubiquitous technologies in informal learning, and the ways in which they can impact formal education.

September MirandaMod: Communities of practice; do they have a role in education?

With Etienne Wenger

This event took place at the WLE Centre, Institute of Education, London, and of course Online on 22 September 2009, 16:00 - 21:00

What is a MirandaMod?

MirandaMod is an informal, loosely structured unconference (see Wikipedia definition) of like-minded educators to share ideas about the use of technology to inspire others. We hope they will become a regular feature in the MirandaNet calendar. It is likely that MirandaMods will usually (but not always) be a fringe event following or attached to a formal MirandaNet seminar/workshop or meeting. It is hoped to establish an International dimension to this event.

Historically Mod comes from the Gaelic word for a gathering, assembly or parliament.*

Institute of Education, London - location of first MirandaMod

Image credit Steve Cadman CCLicence Flickr

It is always free to attend a MirandaMod (and you will be fed and watered)
There will be a Wifi connection, so please bring your laptops etc

Some Background

* Borrowing its name from the MirandaNet community and the Gaelic word for a 'gathering or assembly', MirandaMod acknowledges its indebtedness to other unconferences, especially Teachmeet, under whose banner the original MirandaNet unconference was going to fly. However, organisational considerations mean that MirandaMod has to meet a different set of criteria to Teachmeet. We see MirandaMod as an addition, rather than a competitor, to Teachmeet in the educational unconference world, and it is more than likely that members of the MirandaMod community will be involved with Teachmeet events and vice versa.

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