Xtranormal and the Bleeding Edge

In 2001, I was encouraged to ‘dream wildly’ about what educational technology should look like in the future. I was no better at predicting the future than anyone else but I did have a view as to how education should work with developers of new technologies.

What strikes me as important in this whole ‘dreaming wildly’ thing is that much of the ‘bleeding edge’ technology is never applied in every day education until it has been ‘sterilised’ for children’s consumption years later by the big educational software publishers. It only becomes educational technology when it is ‘safe’. I would love to see children and teachers machete their way through the buffer zone offered by the big publishing houses and get to the get to the sharp end where new technology is developed and have their say about how it might work for them. Children actually have much more vision and insight into these matters than we give them credit for. Dave [Winer] advocates a regular ‘Take a developer/programmer to Lunch’ day. Let the developers have lunch in our classrooms and see what we cook up together.

Things have definitely changed for the better in this regard over the last years. With the rise of the educational prosumer and the ‘perpetual beta’ state of software development educators have more opportunity then ever to harness the potential of ‘bleeding edge’ technologies. Often you just have to ask and forward-thinking companies will listen and respond.

My experience with Xtranormal is a case in point.  I was reading Drew Buddie’s blog post that included at link to Xtranormal – the site that lets you make movies from text! I signed up and explored played for nearly a couple of hours without realising it. My nine-year-old daughter also joined in. That for me is normally a useful indication of some software that might be effective to use with pupils. I then noticed that there was a a 13+ age limit (which isn’t untypical) making it very tricky for me to then use in schools. Surely the creators of such a good product have a vision for its educational use?

I decided to contact them and received a swift response from Richard Gratton, the VP Marketing at Xtranormal,  with a very clear vision for educational strategy.

Indeed it is on our radar. We’re launching conusmer/commercial
offerings first, but will follow up with an educational offering soon
thereafter. Idea in general is to offer mini-sites where a teacher can
administer their own xtranormal site, creating up to 30 accounts for
their students. The teacher will have full content moderation tools.

We are also developing a desktop version of our software that already
many educators have expressed interest in for their labs.

Lastly, even for our flagship site, we are currently working on a
content rating and filtering system so we can allow kids under 13 to
register.

Look for many changes to xtranormal.com over the next 2 months.

If you are at all interested in beta-testing the desktop software
(ideally in a classroom environment), please let me know.

This is a potentially great product for education but more exciting for me,  is the way companies such as Xtranormal are willing to invite educators  on to the ‘bleeding edge’ of testing their offerings.  If this is progress then I’m all for it!