Over the next six weeks we are looking for small and medium sized businesses in a wide range of business sectors who have a challenge that technology – and some bright thinking – could solve.

To help create some new enterprises around these problems, we’re also looking for smart technologists and creative designers with whom these businesses from around Scotland can team up.

Small and medium sized businesses, technologists and creative thinkers need to form a team – big or small. They must include:
1. a problem that needs solved from an industry partner outside the realm of technology and tech startups
2. someone who can build technology solutions

We’re encouraging potential team members to meet and work through the challenges they find at one of four StramashLabs around Scotland: design thinking camps to get to the root of the problem and source potential solutions that can increase the bottom line of the companies involved.

Ideas can also be submitted online and, if they impress the judges, the best ones could win an amazing prize of worth over £20,000, ranging from business development, marketing and pitching advice, to help turn their idea to a reality.

Any Scottish business, technologist, potential mentor or investor can sign up for a StramashLab, float their idea, form a team with an industry partner and a geek and present their idea to the judges.

Here are some ideas around the kinds of problems and solutions that we might find, if we can get the right mix of business together:
a) You could build a digital app that helps the food and drink sector reach new customers
b) You could design a range of textiles that charge the products the wearer carries
c) You could create an app that helps you measure how much electricity you are using
d) You could make an app for the financial sector that helps you measure how much you spend
e) You could manufacture a product that enables you to survey your own home
We are actively seeking a range of partners from different sectors who want to work with technologists. If you’re in one of the following sectors, please sign up as an industry partner!
◦ aerospace
◦ chemical science
◦ construction
◦ energy
◦ financial services
◦ food and drink
◦ forest and timber
◦ manufacturing
◦ technology
◦ textiles
◦ tourism
◦ creative industries

The competition takes entries online until 5pm on the 19th March.
What are you waiting for? This is your chance to put Scotland on the map.
Stop dreaming. Start Doing.
www.stramashlabs.com

The leaning away from talkshop and into seeing what this group of entrepreneurs could help make happen added ever more increased sense of urgency. We covered vast ground once more, and once more the Commission’s capacity to explain these critical issues of digital inclusion, education and entrepreneurial support in plain, simple, appealing language came to the fore. Commissioner Kroes has updated her own blog with many of the ideas that stemmed from the discussions we led.

By the end of the day, there were several actions that remained strong in my mind:

1. You said we did
   On many of the school rebuild projects I’ve been on, the construction firm will show that they are learning from the client’s feedback with a board, outlining what the client asked for, and what they firm did about it. A similar “You said we did” wall would help meetings like this, and consultations with the public and with industry, to pick up from the last interaction they had together, rather than recapping old ground unnecessarily.
2. Kill the project
   What would happen in terms of entrepreneurial success in Europe if the significant ‘spend’ of the EU on projects was instead ‘invested’ in funding potential businesses? I’d like to see that mindshift, with demonstrable changes in the way that calls to action for funding are marketed: they should be marketed to entrepreneurs in the same way the great incubators and accelerators do.
3. Insist on entrepreneurs advisors in project teams
   Entrepreneurs do not stand on an equal footing to academia in the funding of European projects, particularly in R&D. What would happen if entrepreneurial skills were valued on an equal basis to where academia stand currently, to increase chances of a) finding better projects and b) increasing the chances of their sustainability and survival at project end date?
4. Insist on PR/sharing to begin on projects from day one
   Portal pages are not enough. We need learning logs, regularly updated with the goings on of funded projects, every week, so that similar projects can find each other and avoid duplication, and so that business outside the funding model can look in and potentially partner up at a later date to commercialise what has been discoved. These activities, though, also have a somewhat PR role: they should make it clear what is in the project for a particular european-wide set of citizens.
5. Create a clear language simple English policy on all research
   Tag research and make it highly searchable for startups who could make ideas viable products and services.
6. Make curating action through projects an EU mission
   The curatorial power of the EU is immense – if only it were harnessed to the maximum. One might consider doing more smaller pieces, but joining them up so much better to realise the economies of scale that we should be.
7. Provide incentives for enterprise and public authorities with empty space to open it to Startups and other businesses
   Offer profile, attraction of euro talent or hard cash tax benefits to Local Authorities who give up space that’s not being used anyway. No startup should be investing half its cash in rent. It should be investing in finding the best talent to make their idea a reality.
8. Insist on high minimum standard for all new home builds to include 30mbps connections
   It’s unacceptable that new properties are not plumbed in to a network that will match the homeworking needs of 2020.

“…Our experience of working with NoTosh on this project has been a real success. From the initial development stage of the project, through the planning and delivery and up to launch NoTosh has worked as part of the team. Tom and Ewan quickly understood our needs and company values and Tom has helped to produce a site that has exceeded all our expectations!” Andrea Carr, MD, Rising Stars

http://www.switchedonict.co.uk

Switched on ICT is an innovative and creative new scheme of work from Rising Stars which enables teachers, regardless of their confidence and experience, to really put ICT at the heart of their teaching. Find out more about the Switched on ICT scheme and download a free sample unit.

Launching at the BETT educational technology trade show the Switched On Community site supports new and existing users of the Rising Stars scheme by providing a:

• Platform for contributing new ideas and examples of work from the classroom.
• An opportunity to connect easily with fellow teachers from around the world who are using the scheme in their schools.
• A space for anyone to share great ideas and resources for the teaching of primary ICT.

NoTosh’s Tom Barrett led a partnership once again with the talented design company Telaco who handled the development of the ITU Metaconference site which proved so successful in October of 2011. The Switched On community site was built around the community and ideas at it’s heart. Clearly tagged and categorised ideas are easily accessible and the author profile for teachers sharing contributions clearly displays further links to social media contacts, websites and blogs.

Although primarily designed for the Switched On ICT user the site will be an excellent resource for anyone to find and contribute ideas of great primary ICT going on in their classroom. The Rising Stars team will be choosing STAR posts every two weeks to be featured throughout the company’s blogs and social media and the school involved will receive a small prize as well.

The site was developed rapidly in under 3 months and already has some excellent examples from teachers using the scheme in their schools. For example Jack Sloan from Ferry Lane Primary School has shared some of the work his Year 6 pupils have completed from unit 6.4 – ‘We are web developers’. Here is a snippet from Jack’s post on the community site:

“…we created websites which linked with our topic on Ancient Egypt. The kids began using Weebly, which was new to me, and were very quickly exremely adept users. They considered audience, content, design and copyright; they peer-reviewed their websites; they thought about how to promote their websites and how to add the basic html coding that they brought with them from blogging; they discussed media, scanning and uploading artwork; they thought about how to write for the web; they looked at other websites and analysed their content. They did some of this at school, but their work was largely done at home, undirected.”

Andrea Carr the Managing Director of Rising Stars shares some of her thoughts about the community site and working with NoTosh:

“Working with external consultants can be a bit hit and miss, but our experience of working with NoTosh on this project has been a real success. From the initial development stage of the project, through the planning and delivery and up to launch NoTosh has worked as part of the team. Tom and Ewan quickly understood our needs and company values and Tom has helped to produce a site that has exceeded all our expectations!”

–

We’ve also had some early feedback from teachers using the community site:

“After finding out about this community where it is possible to share examples etc may be this will be the most powerful feature of the Switched On ICT Schemes.”
David Mitchell, Deputy Headteacher, Heathfield Primary School

“Love the site – really professional and easy to access stuff.”
Jack Sloan, ICT Lead teacher and Year 6 classteacher, Ferry Lane Primary School

The most rewarding teaching experience I’ve ever had”
Class teacher  |  
St Francis Xavier Primary School, Brisbane

25 teachers and the entire education department team participated in intensive kick-off sessions over two days in June 2011, before embarking on individual and whole-school action research projects over five months, supported online by the NoTosh team and each other. They explored how students in both primary and high school could take more control for their learning through the planning, thinking, research and prototyping skills promoted in design thinking.

Now, as we head into 2012 we will continue working with new schools throughout the city, harnessing several of the staff who have been through the action research process as coaches. The Department has also created online and offline support material to help spread practice even further through the community.

The five-stage design thinking process provides a useful set of tools for co-designing a curriculum with students, parents, colleagues and even the wider community.

We took participants through the four-part Design Thinking process, with an additional concentration on how ongoing feedback and formative assessment can be best harnessed throughout learning. We then had them prepare their ‘pitches’ for change, in order to take their compelling one-classroom-at-a-time or one-school-at-a-time practice and spread it beyond their own walls (Pitch 1, Pitch 2, Pitch 3, Pitch 4, Pitch 5)

Why try this framework?

• It provides a useful structure for the learner to know where they are in the learning journey without needing told.
• It provides choice to the learner in what they’re going to learn, and how – the student needs to work out what knowledge and understanding they’re lacking in order to achieve what they want to achieve.
• It places the responsibility for finding a compelling area to learn and an interesting approach to learning it firmly in the hands of the learner.
• It always presents the whole game of learning, the big picture, even if students have to learn some ‘expert elements’ along the way, they see where they slot in to a bigger, more epic problem they are trying to solve.

1. Immersion: Observation and Empathy

Tom: At Mount Vernon School in the United States, as part of the ITU Telecom World conference that we helped to reinvent with the participation of 10,000 young people through design thinking, one picture sticks in my mind. As part of the empathy phase young students, no more than six or seven years old, carried water, large canisters of water, from home to school. They had pain on their faces, sweat pouring down their cheeks. All this to better understand what it’s like. Because they did that, they thought up better products, through a broader range of solutions.

Ewan: It’s hard to teach that empathy/observation part. Teachers want to cover what they feel they want to cover. But empathy and observation is going to go beyond what you need to cover in any six week period, because this isn’t a six week project. It’s a way of working, a way of learning that frees up so much time later in the year or in the child’s school career, with enough cooperation between schools. I wonder whether this is why 3-18 schools, independent mostly, are able to better understand the potential time saving and the ability to reduce the repetition most school students have to put up with.

Cassie: The immersion stage is a very difficult stage. It’s not about generating a solution, drawing in a sketchbook, or Googling ideas or finding information. It’s about finding emotions, people’s feelings, finding empathy for the problem.

Miriam: When we were in that immersion stage and we were really trying to create that empathy, we were trying to get out of the students their feelings, what they thought about it and then what action can we take to be better? It was sort of empowering to them to see that they can do something about it. It’s not just your teachers, your parents your school, you can actually go out there and do something about it.

2. Synthesis

Immersion encourages us to keep adding, adding, adding to the mess of knowledge and understanding we’re gaining on a given subject, and then the process of synthesis can finally take place, where some order appears. It’s a spell, between divergent thinking of immersion and coming up with ideas, where you’re naturally heading towards more convergent thinking.

Miriam: The first question we started with, which I thought sounded epic but wasn’t sure about, was “How might we read more?”.

How do we read, what do we read, and where do we read. And it was the “Where we read” that caught their imagination. We talked about how they read at school – around a green desk, in groups of six. We went on an adventure and started looking at all these amazing reading spaces. It got them out of their bubble. Out there, people have amazing reading spaces that they have access to, and we don’t. They really had this sense of “we deserve that as much as anyone else”. That took us to our next question: “How might we persuade corporate business to provide an amazing reading space for us?”

Ewan: Key to synthesis is the Project Corner. While schools often have student work on display, it’s the final draft of their work. It serves no learning purpose as by the time it’s up the children have moved on to learning about something else.

Miriam: At the beginning of our project we set up a project corner, and once we had those immersion elements up on the corner we were able to starting bringing things together. We used some of the techniques: combinations, opposites…

Then there were the outliers. There weren’t a lot of these, and you knew that they belonged somewhere else, but you were still able to have them there.

3. Ideation

Miriam: Ideation is trying to get the students to be what you’ve always wanted them to be: risk takers. Any idea is a good idea. it might be a far out idea but sometimes there’s a little part of that that you might be able to bring back to something else. We had so much fun looking back at different concepts, and asking ourselves what we want again, talking about the reading spaces that they wanted. Their ideas were amazing.

Cassie: During the ideation phase we brainstormed some of the ideas around our problem: “How might we make multiplication more fun?”

Kelly: We had an ideas quota – where the children were asked to come up with 100 ideas in a 10 minute time slot.

Anthony Lucey, Principal, Our Lady of Delours Catholic Primary School: Ewan talks about listening to people who are different to school and listening with new eyes and I think that’s the thing about generating new ideas. Tapping into our freedom to come up with new ideas. Encouraging us to think big and not to be limited by what we think are the constraints of our ideas. It’s reignited my passion for the fact that kids can do anything. What we’re doing with learning communities in our schools is the opportunity for kids to be passionate enthusiastic committed learners who can take risks and ultimately make changes.

4. Prototyping and Feedback

Prototyping from Danielle Carter on Vimeo.

Miriam: When we started out our project and we got through to the prototyping phase, that’s where we needed to convince administration that we really needed a secret (reading) space within our school. We had to make a presentation to our administration team. The kids had to learn how to inject empathy into what we’re doing, but they also had to have data to support what they were doing. They were learning about not just asking for something and getting a result. They had to realise that there was every chance that the answer would be ‘no’ and that if the answer is no that’s not a failure. We just have to go back to the drawing board and work out how we’re going to go about making it.

How can we make sure that what they’re doing is really their own work, and not something that as a teacher I’ve contracted and said that they must do it?

Ewan: When I went to New Brunswick on a teaching tour and saw how they did French immersion, a key part of the process was keeping a learning log, or a journal de bord. In it you write down what you think you’ve learned, what you think you want to do tomorrow, and what you have to do between now and then to be able to do what you want to do. Vitally, keeping this log up to date is in the student’s hands. It’s nearly always self or peer initiated, it’s not the teacher telling them to do this. And the minute you have generated a culture of self-reflection it can happen anywhere – on the bus, at home, or in the classroom. You’ve finally freed the student from only being able to learn in a classroom.

If you look at it from a teacher’s point of view, the whole notion of being a teacher is that you are self-reflective. And sharing that reflection isn’t an extra. It’s absolutely part and parcel of being part of a profession. Every other profession shares through journals, conferences or online. In teaching, it’s a minority who share what they do, publicly. I don’t think one can call oneself a professional if you don’t share what you’re learning and doing differently with your colleagues, at scale. And that means more than teaching once a year at a conference. Most teachers could manage five minutes at the end of a day to write down the one thing they have learned that day, on a blog.

Kate Campbell: I have really enjoyed it. It has really challenged me to think of things really differently. I like to have control and I like to know what’s going on, and through my degree that’s been the thing that everyone said: “You’re really organised” etc etc. It was really a big challenge for me to step back and give up some of that control. But that has been the most useful learning experience ever.

I can sit there and try to create resources for them to get engaged and motivated, and get frustrated when it doesn’t happen. Whereas if I sit with them and talk with them and spend quality time with them working with them working towards something of quality that’s they’re learning and you’re enjoying the whole process of learning.

5. 8-minute Overview of the NoTosh Design Thinking School process

Design Thinking Brisbane from Danielle Carter on Vimeo.

Some of Dell’s Education team leaders, including Bob Moore and Adam Garry joined NoTosh’s Ewan McIntosh and Tom Barrett facilitating discussion about the changing educational landscape. The discussions were framed by those attending and contributing live via Twitter and covered many areas including:

• What are your happiest and least happy moments of learning?
• Is school setup for serendipity?
• How can we make learning more efficient in schools?
• What is the role of collaboration in schools?
• Can we sacrifice grades for happiness and confidence?

Throughout the day the group connected with educators from the US who recently participated in a similar Think Tank, sharing best practices, ideas and thoughts back and forth across the Pond and from around the world.

The team at Dell Education did a great job of capturing the day using Storify which you can see below:

All pics by Dell

In late 2011, for the United Nations agency for ICT, we designed and delivered an innovation competition and accelerator programme for young entrepreneurs and not-for-profits whose ideas could solve some of the world’s most pressing problems. The idea was developed in partnership with Katz Kiely, long-time NoTosh collaborator on education and creative industries programmes.

Shortlisted participants developed their nascent idea into a workable business model through our workshops, and delivered a pitch to an audience of global leaders in technology. One of the winning pitches was Andrew Benson-Greene’s, and he was given CHF 8500 to take his idea to its first prototype.

The “Digital Hope” programme has now been unveiled in the Northern suburb town of Makeni, at the Oslo amputee camp. The B-Gifted Team journeyed from the Sierra Leone capital Freetown, some considerable distance to the project site, with technology and expertise that can now bring a voice to the victims of amputation, who are largely marginalised from mainstream ICT, and as a result do not get equal access to education and services. The Chairman at the Oslo Camp, thanked the B-Gifted Foundation for putting into reality a dream centre. He said that ‘these technologies will help them to share their pains and hope with the rest of the world’.

Prejudice

Andrew Benson-Greene, pictured left, above, explained in his video pitch why this technology issue was key to opening up services and education to large numbers of amputees in Sierra Leone:

Even though many amputees could work despite their injuries, prejudice in Sierra Leone often means they are passed over for jobs. It’s a double blow for those who have been victims of the war, and are still held-back by the past.

From the time peace was declared in Sierra Leone in 2002, leading to the holding of elections, the country has been graded as one of the poorest in the world, hugely depending on international aid for survival, and meaning help for war victims has become one of the serious challenges in the country.

Over 50,000 people died as a result of the war, with thousands of people having their hands and legs chopped off and many more people displaced. Although there is peace across the entire country currently, most of the war victims, amputee survivors of war, still cannot live as normal human beings. Even though many have professions in wood carving, farming, capentary, Honda maintenance, gara dying and so on, they can hardly make a good living without a way to sell their products.

A “unique chance to communicate”

An amputee Mohamed, who is a student at one of the Higher Institutes of Learning in Makeni Town, noted that “the challenges we face as amputees are huge and nobody seems to have time for us, not even government, but with these technologies we expect soon, and the opportunity created, we will ourselves informed and share our voices so others around the world can hear us and know our plight”.

Another student, Archippus T. Sesay, said that “these technologies will help us at the time when many people in Sierra Leone feel or believe that having time for amputees would only waste their time or make life more uncomfortable for them in their current harsh conditions”. He added that “with the thought of the unique chance to communicate now, with these technologies and support created by B-Gifted and ITU, we are full of hope, even as much as we were full of hope when the 11-year conflict ended in 2002”.

Archippus affirmed that “our major challenges are discrimination against getting access to education and health, and gaining employment, and this can be achieved through ICT.”

Andrew Benson-Greene, after attending the design thinking and business workshops run by NoTosh and receiving investment from the ITU, said that “in a country with very severe economic and social challenges, this is even more of a challenging situation when it comes to amputees and disabled people in the country”. He said that “for us Sierra Leoneans, we need to help our fellow compatriots who as a result of a decade of brutal civil war and carnage that has left behind thousands of maimed children, women and men, we must not make this disability of amputee a distant notion anymore but to think it as a reality close to our hearts and work hard to help them, or else the reality of suffering will continue.

“I believe that these technologies will help to inform, educate and change the lives of people from these established amputee camps.”

These last two days have fast-tracked my staff about five years. This is the best value professional development we’ve had.

Dean Clark |  Director, Learning and Innovation, Mark Oliphant College

The school is a new build after the closure of four local district schools in a challenging area of North Adelaide. But students and their parents are incredibly keen to attend the new school, flush with with iPads for elementary students, and creative media tools throughout the campus. The vision of the school as it opened in early 2011 had been to transform learners from consumers of digital media into creators, producers of digital media. Our job was to help them on that journey.

The challenge of bringing lots of new technology together in a new space, while also creating a new vision for a local community, is no small one. NoTosh was asked to work with the school over five months to help make the most of the physical space, all by looking at the virtual, pedagogical and planning aspects of the school.

In an initial two-day intensive workshop we explored how Design Thinking principles can be applied by staff to create curriculum-covering projects that are meaningful and exciting.

Design Thinking in schools is about developing young people as problem finders as well as problem solvers, and about making ideas concrete. It consists of a few simple stages which the staff of the college explored in two stages:

Day One kicked off the five-part process (Immersion, Synthesis, Ideation, Prototyping, Feedback; you can find a more detailed account of the Design Thinking process for schools here) to work through some management and teaching challenges in the school. We used the time on that first day to get to grips with immersion in particular. One of the challenges for talented teaching staff is just to observe where challenges are, rather than inferring or assuming what they are – talented teachers think too much for the immersion phase! So, after broadening the observations of what challenges lay ahead for the new school, the teachers started to hone down to two key areas:

How might we enable our students to take control of their learning, develop their creativity and pursue their dreams for the future? (click question to see their ideas)

How might we bring the outside in to achieve the learning goals of MOC?  (click question to see their ideas)

Over the weekend, in snippets of free time when ideas came to them, the workshop participants generated over 50 ideas as to how these epic questions about their school’s future might be answered. You can read them in the links above. Many of these ideas, generated quickly in the course of an intense but structured process, have now come into action, with a games-design course, robotics and projects that involve as much of the local community and outside experts as possible. Much of this would probably have happened eventually, but the process and thinking skills the teachers learned, and now use with their own students, sped up that process and made any failure a useful part of the learning journey.

Day Two saw us apply the same principles we had used in tackling a school management challenge to create a set of new projects, experimenting with forward planning form a student’s perspective, learning how to plan for the unplannable through the design thinking process:

Over the subsequent five months, NoTosh remained online in support of Mark Oliphant College through our shared blog, with teachers sharing their emerging projects, and seeking advice when they needed it.

Some examples of design thinking in action at Mark Oliphant College

The newly built institute has a science focus and the school’s namesake, the late Sir Mark Oliphant was one of Australia’s most famous scientists. It is no surprise, then, that many of the projects using Design Thinking, which itself is a creatives’ version of the scientific method, were science-based:

• Two year seven classes have ‘taken a dip’ into water for 4 weeks now. It has been incredible to see the students lead their research and cover everything from waterslides, bottled water, hydro electricity, tidal power, toilets, biggest/deepest oceans and the surprising, yet now inevitable question, do fish have sex in water?
  The students were never stuck for ideas, as they used our immersion wall amazingly. They answered each others questions, and used our two walls well. (digital and physical) Through assessment conferencing, Mel and I are amazed at the depth of knowledge. Most students are able to describe at least 2 or 3 aspects of their learning in great depth, and show an incredible passion for what they want to focus on beyond immersion.
  The students kept an ‘EOL’ (Evidence of Learning) in anyway they wanted. Most kept keynotes and pages documents that grew with screenshots, images, words, notetaking and audio files. They were encouraged to look at each others EOL’s to see new avenues to look at. To complete the immersion, students completed an observation walk and interviewed people about their use of water. From this, they wrote a community water report.
• Four year olds used the Design Thinking process to redesign part of their classroom, and worked out a plan to engage older students in building it.
• A LEGO League was founded to engage students’ understanding from several subject areas under one global, and competitive, project.
• A virtual learning environment was harnessed to synthesise a vast amount of digital and analogue data that students had observed.

If you want to join NoTosh’s family of Design Thinking Schools, please get in touch and see how your teams and students can be empowered to create lasting, dramatic change in teaching and learning.

The school, founded in 1992, has British, French and German sections and has a student population of around 1,250 students from around 870 international families, with a staff of 270 teachers and support personnel, and operations across two campuses.

Over the course of three days NoTosh provided workshops on the basics of digital storytelling, with a particular emphasis on the use of the Apple iPad and how this can be used as a single all-in-one device for many storytelling activities. We also helped the staff with a workshop on the uses of Google tools as they begin to make use of Apps for Education throughout the school.

On our final day with over 50 members of staff from the British sector we provided a design thinking workshop that helped all members of staff, from leadership to teaching assistants engage with the structures to rethink their approach to learning.We provided some keynote presentations to the whole group that sparked debate and discussion and then a range of group activities across the course of the full day to dig deeper into the challenges they face and the changes that might be needed.

In addition NoTosh challenged the staff to make a pledge about their next steps – to make a record of what they were going to do with what had been introduced throughout the technology workshops and the introduction of design thinking as an approach to curriculum design. We will be following up with the staff pledges in 2012.

We asked all staff to provide us with 2 Stars and a Wish. Here is some feedback about our time with them:

“Took student-centered learning to the next level.”

“Very informative and since I am quite “behind” with IT, the workshop definitely has brought my confidence back.”

“Tom and Ewan were both engaging as speakers and I felt encouraged by their positive and encouraging attitudes”

“Inspirational and refreshing!”

“1 Star = permission to break free of the ‘curriculum constraints’”

“I LOVED the freedom to think outside the box and create a unit of work that allowed me to be creative. What a breath of fresh air! I’m very excited about what this could possibly lead to for our learners! “

The October 24-27 event was 40th anniversary of the flagship meeting of the world’s telecoms industries, brought together by the ITU. In the run up to the event, and during it, we’ll be showcasing the ideas of young people, aged 8-18, alongside the debates, panels and corridor discussions of these influential delegates.

It was a real chance for students to make a global impact on problems that matter, wherever they are. It has to be among the most real world project-based learning opportunities we’ve seen, that ties into most teachers’ curriculum at any given point in the year.

NoTosh provided some brief points of inspiration to get teachers and their students started, over seven key themes, and opened up a wiki space where teachers could collaborate and add to each other’s resources on the areas. Our first theme, appropriately, was how can we provide an education for all?

By October 24, we began to see videos, photos, blogs and examples or prototypes of what young people believe might help solve challenges on their own doorstep. Their ideas fell across the themes:

• alleviate poverty and hunger
• improve education for all
• address gender inequality
• make sure everyone has access to health care
• protect our environment
• make disabled people’s lives easier
• close the gap between the developed and developing world

Throughout the prototype-building, over 21 days or so, we saw:

10,917 students actively building prototypes of a better tomorrow in classrooms around the world, many of them shared and continuing to be shared on this site. [figures from numbers submitted by educators]

103 schools taking part, from five continents, from 24 countries, including

Canada, Australia, United Kingdom, South Africa, New Zealand, Greece, United States, Ireland, Argentina, Colombia, Taiwan – Province of China, Portugal, China, Tunisia, Kenya, India, Norway, Brazil, France, Tanzania, Pakistan, Uganda, Congo, Rwanda, Nigeria, Netherlands, Belgium, and the Seychelles.

Their reach through tweets alone has been over 1 million [approx 1,162,200, using Tweetreach analytics and Twapperkeeper stats], and their ideas through the world2011.us website have reached 127 countries.

The average time on site visitor viewed their ideas was over 3 minutes (according to Google analytics)

By taking their ideas and what they’ve learned to their schoolmates at their own schools alone, they will influence a further 152427 students, up to 300,000 parents and the wider school community (based on the whole school student number provided by participants).

Some of these ideas were summed up in NoTosh CEO Ewan McIntosh’s speech in the closing ceremony of the ITU Telecom World 11 event:

What their ideas have revealed is that, despite being painted as “digital natives” who enjoy clicking, dragging, texting and Facebooking – no matter where they live – most young people, most of the time, are most concerned with making sure that basic inequalities are ironed out before we start to ponder how we can make the internet ever-faster, or ever more mobile.

While the VIPs, elected officials and CEOs of telcos spent four days at ITU Telecom World 11 stating that it is through increased access to broadband and mobile technologies that developing countries will succeed, most of our #world11kids metaconference kids were not yet convinced. It’ll be interesting to see how this view develops over the coming year as more developing countries start to leapfrog the technology level many of our (mostly developed country) schools are at.

Live Twitter chatter

It’s not just in this creative work that students have had an impact on the conference itself. During live streamed sessions, classes joined in from around the world to pose their own questions to panellists. Moderators and panel chairs received their questions and were constantly referring back to the arguments, ideas and questions posed by 6-18 year olds as they tried to understand and weigh up the importance of issues as diverse as spectrum, disruption and revolution, social media’s impact on safety and cyber security, financing the internet and even the very future of a connected world as we know it.

You can listen in to any of the Forum sessions to see this in action through the archive of the live feed. One of my favourite chairs has to be Gerd Leonhard as he constantly refers back to young people from Poughkeepsie giving a panel of futurists a run for their money! Or how about the panel on reaching the edge of existing spectrum, where the initial question is from school students and sets the panellists off for their first 30 minutes of debate?

The impact on learning has been profound: it’s the one project that has made students feel that their voice and ideas are worth something, that their learning has been “for real”.

We’ve also curated one-on-one video replies from some of the experts on those panels to students, responding to questions posed by youngsters during the live sessions or in the weeks prior to ITU Telecom World 11. For example, we have Elizabeth Migwalla of Qualcomm explaining what her organisation and others are doing to make sure the internet does not run out:

Juliana Rotich, the founder of disruptive crisis mapping platform Ushahidi, advises young people on how they can disrupt the world:

Or Morgan Holt, from the brand agency behind London 2012′s Olympic branding, explains what he thinks young people should do to get their ideas noticed:

If you have stories you still want to tell about your #world11kids adventure, then please do post them on the world2011.us site, by signing up and using the post function.

You can also see more about the whole ITU Telecom World 11 event, see who was saying what, in a brief summary video of the entire four days:

NoTosh was engaged by the Cultural Enterprise Office and Interactive Scotland to plan and deliver a Brokerage Workshop, bringing creative and technology sectors together from across Scotland in one room, and gain expert input on Product Marketing and Business Model Generation.

Feedback from the event has been second-to-none, with businesses feeling that through one intensive day, with a follow-up planned towards the end of their process as they ready for investment, they are increasingly ready to team up with technology or creative partners to make their idea come alive. Cameron Caine saw it as an ideal way to “escape from my bubble” as a sole-founder, as well as a seriously challenging process for defining clearer, in his own head as well as the head of his potential users, what his business is all about:

Key to the process is taking great ideas, that may have met some success already, and questioning them further, breaking them down temporarily, to see if there’s an unturned stone that might lead to even more success:

In Scotland, partnership between industries is a big deal, as explains David Smith, Programme Manager for Starter for Six in our video clip, below. In a small country like Scotland, creatives and technologists are often going after the same, relatively small sums of work. Achieving, through one day, a mood of cooperation and partnership is a heck of an achievement.

Partnership is key to startup success, even though it seems counterintuitive to those starting out with their “precious idea”. Lesley Dickson and Nana Hughs-Lartey saw value in the workshops not only for meeting expertise that can fill in where their own experience and skills are less strong, but also in the way that our Product Marketing process hones an idea down to its principle components:

NoTosh will be publishing a Product Marketing Bluffer’s Guide through the Cultural Enterprise Office this winter, featured, of course, on these web pages, too!