Pat

I've had a bit of a go slow with posts this week. It's down to a couple of factors, one of which is the passing of a friend of mine. I'd like to talk a little bit about him here, he was a gentleman and I think it's worth saying a few words about him.

I met Pat through his brother, Danny who is my martial arts instructor and a good friend himself. Pat was pretty unlike Danny, who is a gregarious and extremely outgoing kind of man even now as he approaches 60. Pat was a quiet, thoughtful kind of person, someone who would usually say hello have a quiet few words with you and a quiet laugh and then spend some time thinking over what had just passed. Give him the chance to talk about one of his favoured subjects however and the man would suddenly burst into animated discussion and debate on the topic.

The friendship between any two people will never be quite like any other, I'm sure Pat was many different things to many different people, I'm sure there are people who had similar conversations with him as I did, and I am sure there are sides of the man that I simply never saw. To me this is what friendship is, something constructed from the points of view of those involved. The friendship I held with Pat centered on discussions of history, documentaries and those reality television/documentaries you often find on the Discovery or History channels, Ice Road Truckers and the likes. You see Pat was a sponge for knowledge, he consumed it voraciously, through the media of video, film, television and book. He always had something interesting to talk about, even if I just happened to bump into him in the street.

One of his favoured topics as far as I could tell was history, especially the history of martial arts and military history to an extent. His interest in history went beyond the well known names of Bruce Lee or Masaaki Hatsumi, he was interested in the minutiae, from the likes of Mas Oyama and his background and Korean ethnicity to details concerning certain battles that he found interesting, I'll be honest I fail to remember a lot of them now. He was animated and engaging when talking about these topics and he was capable of spotting connections between events and incidents that usually only get talked about at a research level.

Beyond these conversations our friendship was one that often took place as we waited for this or that, as we picked up someone when he was driving to or from classes and demonstrations, as we waited in his and Danny's living room for Danny to get his gear together to go. It was a friendship that happened mostly in the between times of life. This does not mean I will miss it or him any less.

Farewell Pat.

First Time Game

Last night a very good friend of mine decided to run a Dungeon World game, I believe this is the first time he has ever run a game with our group and he had only run a couple of games previously, a World of Darkness game with some college friends and I think some PDQ stuff at some point. We had spent a while talking about him running a game of some description and yesterday afternoon he was batting the idea around, I think in the end he just decided to bite the bullet so to speak.

What ensued was pretty fun, I ended up being Rurgosh The Cleric, a dwarf and member of the cult of Cyrnbul a god who's cult is bent on using the structures of civilisation to their own ends and who gain favor by discovering secrets. We also have Kenta The Fighter, a warrior of fierce personal honor who has taken it upon himself to watch over Rurgosh until his debt to him is repaid, Kenta is distinguished my the massive, sharp and bloody sword the hangs by his side. Finally there is Qotho The Druid, a member of the roving tribes of the vast desert, he is searching for something in the Ancient City and does not trust Rurgosh but for some reason which is unknown at this time is travelling with both he and Kenta.

Our party were sat about a campfire in a library towards the centre of the Ancient Ruined city, reclaimed by the sands of the desert some 250 years ago. Our brooding silence was broken by a sound in the darkness, Rurgosh, unnerved by the broken remains of civilisation surrounding them jumped to his feet and armed himself, stepping forward to the edge of the campfire's light, Kenta stood and peered into the darkness, listening for some other sign of movement while Qotho sat implacable and still by the fire. A cat jumped out of the darkness and wound his way about Rurgosh's legs. Being frightened and fearing an imminent attack Rurgosh punted the cat into the darkness, only to hear a much louder thud as something man sized hit a wall in the direction of his kick.

This quick exchange eventually devolved into a messy fight between some shape-changing denizens of the city who claimed to be of Qotho's people. This left 4 men dead, smashed and gutted by Rurgosh and Kenta and their leader running screaming into the dark, terrified and bloody. Our GM, my friend, a man who has done his fair share of good-natured trolling in games for all of the regular GMs sat and looked about at us, unsure, shell-shocked and apologising. We wrapped the game up there for the night and told him we'd like to play again, it was great fun, we had built some very atmospheric stuff into our world, out friend had chanced his arm at GM'ing a group who between them have upwards of 25 years of GM experience at this point, if some of our other members had been there this would have jumped to 40 years between us. He took on what I can only imagine was a fairly daunting task and managed it pretty well.

I barely saw the panic in his eyes.

Campaign: London Calling

Last night was Dresden Files RP night, we use the Dresden Files FATE game for this published by Evil Hat Productions, I very much recommend it. This is the first FATE or FUDGE game we have played as a group, it uses those nifty little fudge dice with the pluses and minuses that I had often seen in gaming stores over the years but never knew what they were for. We've did a faltering Dresden Files Dublin game a few months back but to be honest the GM wasn't up to snuff. As in I was pretty bad at GM'ing this particular system. It's not the system's fault though, it just didn't seem like my GM style gelled well with the system itself and especially the prep end of the system centering on the player's aspects. I will probably give it a whirl in the future but to be honest I am very much enjoying just playing this game at the moment.

DFRP uses a very cool and well thought out process for developing both the world you will be playing in, usually a CIty, and character creation. It took us about 2 1/2 sessions to pull all of this together, about 8 hours in total, but it was great fun. The City for our game is London, a London a little different from the real thing but very cool. We have an active police unit involved in supernatural affairs who unlike the Black Cat or S.I. units in the the Jim Butcher books have a direct connection with the White Council of Wizards. We have the fairy courts struggling for a power with each other, including the waning Autumn and Spring court, a combined court of transition. The White Council themselves are a bit on the prideful side and don't supply London with much by way of Wardens, after all it's in their back yard, who would stir up trouble there? London itself has a very haunted feel mixed with that of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere series, there's a sort of London Below. We've hit most of the clichés, but that's the fun in playing these games, the clichés are grounded points we all can connect to, they then get twisted up in play in interesting and new ways.

Our cast of characters is a nice mixed bunch, we have the Autumn Knight, Danny, freshly minted and previously mostly unaware of the supernatural side of London; a White Council reluctant librarian, Eames, he wanted nothing more to join the army but his family's business keeps him locked down; a Minor Talent, Liesel,  she suffers from Cassandra's Tears but is also a walking font of knowledge; a Shinto Priest Whitechapel Police Officer, Megumi, a Champion who can leverage her faith into action; a Pure Mortal, Leon, he's a Whitechapel officer who has a habit of finding the Autumn Knight in awkward circumstances; and a Punk White Council Wizard, Drury, a throwback to 1970s London. It's a nice colorful cast of characters who have plenty of scope for growth and development but also have great character traits for the GM to work with and creating interesting scenarios out of.

So what has happened to our little troupe so far? Well we've had Danny at no less than two major crime scenes, the first after being semi-tricked by a Sidhe friend of his into finding the body seconds before Whitechapel arrived in the form of Leon and Megumi, the second was at what could only look like a terrorist attack after a Warlock summoned a whole heap of specters into a crowded market. Drury has dragged Eames and Liesel into a fracas with the Jack Frost a Sidhe noble, he now owes Lord Frost 2 favors in return for some information given. Finally the whole group ended up knee deep in specters in a crowded marketplace, leaving the Punk in some considerable distress having thrown himself into the middle of the fray to counter the ritual that had drawn the specters there. We have but one real casualty and some information to work with: our Warlock friend was having his mind worked over magically by some form of Necromancer, also London is becoming more haunted by the hour.

Yay!

Don't make any plans!

Who remembers their first time GM'ing a game? I found it kind of terrifying. It was like laying myself bare, like I was all raw nerve endings and the slightest rub was going to be agony. I planned and planned and planned, I think I sunk about 20 hours into just planning that first game, I went into my first session of my first ever campaign with everything planned out, I mean everything.

This was my downfall. My plans fell apart at first contact with the other people at the table. It was a nightmare. See I had made a pretty fatal error in how I planned my adventure: I thought of it as *MY* adventure. I had not actually planned a roleplaying game, a share myth for myself and my friends to explore, I had planned a book I wanted to read to my players and that they got to make minor choices in, but choices that ultimately wouldn't affect the outcome. This isn't how I think roleplaying games should be played. Maybe you disagree, if you do it's fine, tell me why I'm wrong, I'll learn something.

I think this is probably pretty common for first time GMs. especially teenagers, but I don't have any backing evidence of this so I'll just present my experience as a sort of case study. I felt at the time that I had to provide a great epic story, something that mixed Conan, Druss, Lord of the Rings and at the time various Anime and JRPG cliches I had a love for. I though I had to craft this great baroque thing, this sprawling narrative into which the other player's characters would fit and become the heroes of the story. I had applied all that I knew about writing at the time, not very much then, only a little more now. My story had a beginning, middle and end, themes were lovingly hammered into place and concepts were primed for ramming.

Upon contact with my story the players decided to attach to some throwaway line about a city in the south that seemed interesting. It was just some fluff in the background I had pulled out of thin air, it had nothing to do with the story. So I laid down the railroad tracks and how. I think about it now and see the almost literal battle that was happening between my story and the much more interesting shared mythology that could have developed. I was proud and petulant, so I let the game die. I don't think I intellectualised it very much at the time, I think I just did what was pretty typical of teenage me, I took my ball and went home, without telling anyone. I never ran another session of that game. I was dejected and horrified by what had happened to my poor story.

In the end I ended up running my next game some 5 years later in University, I was covering for a friend who had been slated to run a very cool Ravenloft one-shot based on pirates. I took his game, and seeing as I didn't have a full grasp of his story or the ideas he was trying to present I just used it as a framework around which to allow the other players to play and for me to react to. This felt so much more natural, I had fun, the other players had fun, we shared a story in which the only survivor was the innocent and damaged young pirate who rowed out of the mists to his freedom. My friend's reaction to this? "I was not aiming for that at all, but it sounds cool" Cheers John, that one line set me up to GM again and again, it was pretty formative in the way I game.

So what's the point of all this? Well I guess if by some magic you're a starting GM and you're reading this, I would like to be so bold as to offer you the one piece of advice I would have loved to have heard when I started: Don't plan anything, react and build your myth collaboratively.

Maybe that’s two pieces of advice?

Sweetness

The weekend just past has been one of those so very, very busy weekends with lots of things to do both at home and with work commitments. I've got today off to get some things done at home, to spend a bit of time with the little ones and the likes, I also have one very quick thing to do for work, which I'm getting done while Ella is in school and Oliver is having an afternoon nap. Once I'm done writing here off course. Now I've sat down for this first time in about 72 hours without the intention of immediately going asleep!

All in all though it's not something I feel I can or even want to complain about, it's been a pretty good weekend. Visitors in work, showing off what we do. Family visits, my brother-in-law, one of my best friends and his lovely girlfriend, who is also quickly becoming one of my good friends after only a couple of visits. A small party on Saturday night for said brother-in-law's birthday, all without a hitch, a couple of pints beforehand. Sunday was spent doing a bit of window shopping with my wife, her brother and his girlfriend, she tried on some clothes in preparation for a wedding and hen party later in the year.

The point, I guess, of this ramble is to reflect in a positive way on the nice weekend and indeed all the positive things that go on in my life. Yes, absolutely we have problems and hiccups that we have to deal with, family members in dire straits that we are only equipped to help in the smallest ways at the moment. These problems seem much less dark and deadly when viewed in the light of the positives, the family days, watching my kids grow, my oldest two becoming young women, some family members getting past the harder times into something a bit better, good friends, a job that I enjoy and that provides enough for my family to get by on.

I also have plenty of things to look forward too this year, such as a wedding, a few trips for work, wedding anniversary, birthdays, a good friend coming home from Japan and a bachelor party in Hamburg. It’s going to be a busy kind of year and I’m looking forward to it. I’m feeling pretty good about this year all told, and I’m looking forward to everything to come.

Hmm this has all been a bit saccharine, oh well!

Rivenhold Campaign: Rising Tide

Aziz and Selena lay in their bedding beside the fire, Loughlan was on watch; Thorn sat beside him and stared into the darkness of the cavern. Two days travel and a further day of clearing out this cavern system of Goblins had left them too tired to travel back to Mayhill immediately. This probably saved them. A complete lack of any golden Dwarven armour, said by a local merchant to be in the hands of the Goblins, had dampened their spirits. Suddenly Thorn growled, something was moving in the dark, something had entered the caves. Loughlan heard it then himself, the sound of guttural, broken Elven, he only barely recognised it.

He woke the others, who were to their feet and armed in seconds. They peered into the tunnel that lead to their camp site. Selena recognised some of the speech, it was Pale Elvish, a group of Elves, cavern dwellers, from far lands. Still it did not seem like the words were right somehow, but she couldn't be sure. Between the grunts and speech of the Elves they heard the sounds of men begging, two maybe, begging for their lives.

Aziz took the initiative and transformed himself in a small wave of constriction that rose from his feet until he was but a small serpent, a milk snake of the Sapphire Isles.  He slithered his way down the tunnel to the crossroads, there he found a grim sight, Pale Elves, naked and covered in some sort of ugly growths. They were feasting upon what was left of two guards, employees of the local Goldenroot merchants in Mayhill. Sharp, sharklike teeth crunched on bone and tore through soft flesh. Aziz made his way back, relating what he had seen to his companions.

Selena now took the lead, moving quietly and carefully through the shadows of the tunnels until she was in striking distance. Loughlan stood further down the tunnel training two arrows upon the crouched forms of the Pale Elves. Selena struck, diving forward and plunging her rapier into the base of an Elven skull. The Elf slumped forward to the floor, Selena had slipped back into the shadows unseen in her grace and swiftness. The Elves cast about for their attacker, spotting Loughlan as he loosed the pair of arrows into the back of another Elf.

The Elves charged forward, exposing the growths, the outcroppings of yellowed fungus the marked their forms. Aziz burst into a spring, shifting into the form of a great Gorilla as he grabbed one of the Elves by the head and smashed him it into the wall. Their eyes, their eyes were gone, replaced by a cluster of fungi and mould. The final three Elves were dispatched, Aziz's great strength smashing the twisted Elves as Selena darted in and out of their view, taking what she could and felling another Elf.

After searching the bodies of the fallen guards, relieving them of their coin and seeing the spread of fungal tendrils from their bodies, they made their way to the cavern mouth. Selena pulled herself free of the cavern first, looking out across the outcropping in which the caverns were set. Across the marsh ran groups of the twisted, fungus infected Elves, five or six to each and a count of twenty groups at a glance. They ate almost everything in their path, tree, root and man. Some animal or men were being dragged away, to some unknown fate.

A tide was rising.

Important to me.

I listen to quite a few podcasts, in fact when I lost my phone just before Christmas I probably lamented the loss of all the podcasts I listened to on it more than the loss of a mode of contact. It took me us two months to have the spare cash to pick up a cheap phone to hold me over, but this cheap phone is still an Android and I once again have my podcasts back.

On Wednesday I listened to this particular Radiolab episode:

The Bitter End

I wish it had been there around December/January 2011/12. It would have given me some measure of comfort. Last year a very important person in my life died. My grandmother Elizabeth Smith, she was instrumental in me becoming who I am today. She lived with us throughout my life until I moved in with my then girlfriend and now wife. My mother was quite ill when I was a baby and my father was in the army in different part of the country until we moved to said area when I was just one year old. So my grandmother did a lot of looking after me when I was a baby, when I was colic-y and screaming, when my mother wasn't able to carry me due to a gallbladder problem. I developed a very deep bond with her.

My earliest memory in fact is of helping her to lay down a tablecloth across the kitchen table in one of our old houses. My childhood was spent in her small flat that was attached to the main house, watching old war movies or cartoons with her while I played with Lego on her floor. She was a wonderful, kind and caring woman, who spent time as a mental health nurse, ran a nursing home and eventually helped in raising me. To say that I love her doesn't do it justice.

January of last year she passed away as a result of, well now that I think about it I can't make the exact details of her passing stick, my brain slides around the subject still. What is concrete in my head is that it was slow, around the time I hit university, maybe a couple of years in, she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, she later developed Parkinson's, she eventually began to lose the power to swallow and while she remembered a lot towards the end one of the worst experiences of my life was a day when she could not remember who I was at all, confusing me with her own son John. It very nearly killed me. As a result of losing the power to swallow she landed up being fed by something called a PEG feeding tube. Eventually she asked that she no longer be kept alive this way. She passed away a couple of weeks later maybe, having spent an afternoon with my children, my wife, some of my cousins and my mother & aunt. A last family get together in the hospital room that I missed due to work, she wasn't completely aware I'm told.

At the time that she was taken off the PEG feeding I was so conflicted, it ended up being my mother's decision and she asked my opinion on the matter. I knew my Nan wanted to have it end but this way seemed cruel somehow. If I had heard that particular podcast at the time I feel the decision would have been, not easier, but maybe less conflicting? I'm not sure. This is still hard for me to think about. Writing it down is worse. I think there is a case here for quality of life versus prolonging the mechanical act of living. My point I guess is that this podcast in particular has offered me a little bit of comfort, maybe that's not the right word either. Anyway, I urge you to listen to it.

It's got something important to say.

Gone Adventurin'

Last night myself and three of my friends tried out Dungeon World. Normally Wednesday night is either Dresden Files (FATE) or Firefly (Cinematic Unisystem); on alternating weeks. This week our very,very busy DFRP GM wasn't available, he's all artsy and has a killer job, and our Firefly GM didn't have prep done, so a quick couple of texts and a late bus journey from work later we were sitting around my kitchen table looking at the character sheets, everyone deciding what they were going to play and me starting to take some notes of things people were saying, just idle chat; and draw the start of our simple map.

Three and half hours later and we were finishing up, what for me at least, has been one of the most satisfying high fantasy GM'ing experiences of my gaming life. The whole night was whirlwind of ideas coming from all corners, during character creation we established some fantastic stuff about the world, a list of some of these ideas is below:

• There is a kingdom ruled by the coastal city of Rivenhold
• Rivenhold has an army that employs assassins and spies in it's ranks
• Ironhill is a keep which provides protection to the village of Harren
• A river runs by both Harren and the town of Mayhill on the way to Rivenhold
• Mayhill has cornered the market on a root called Goldenroot, used in medicines and poisons alike
• Mayhill is situated on the edge of the marsh where this root grows in abundance
• There is a swarm of shark toothed, fungus infected, psychotic elves moving from the hills in the northeast to the southwest, following the river
• These elves eat anything living, humans, trees, roots, animals
• They sometimes drag prey away, to some unknown fate
• There is a Rite that can control the currents of the sea to some extent

These facts all came out of questions I asked the players, just their answers created all of these lovely details. This is the result of my friend's boundless creativity married with the Apocalypse Engine, which Dungeon World runs on. I've run both this and Apocalypse World and in both cases a vivid living world of moving ideals, people and environments just pops out, it's really very satisfying.

In our party we have Selena The Thief (possibly Catwoman inspired), Loughlan The Ranger and Aziz The Druid. They have already through play established some very cool facts about themselves and behaviours, Selena is adept at hit and run tactics, poison and fighting the enemy unseen; Loughlan is very protective of his do Thorn, he put himself in danger to save the dog rather than running, he's also something of a marksman with his bow and a little bit of a conman; Aziz is almost nature incarnate, he took the form of a Gorilla, an Albatross, a Turtle and a Milksnake, flitting from one form to the next as naturally as one breathes, he also has a deep hatred of the unnatural.

This all came so naturally, flowing from questions and moves, with mechanics rarely actually breaking the flow of play. Two of our group had already played Apocalypse World, so were pretty familiar, Aziz's player took to the game like a duck to water despite not having played the style before. I found that with no prep per se and little control over the direction of the game I was free to focus on the immediate and play to the themes presented naturally. In giving up control I got to enjoy it more.

What new myth will we create?

Rules of the Game

I've said before that I'm a big fan of games, pen and paper roleplaying games are my game of choice, though boardgames run a very close second. I've run through my gaming history before so I won't do it again here, I'll get sick of hearing myself speak on the same things. Recently I've made a somewhat seismic shift in how I play roleplaying games in terms of being a PC and a GM.

It started about 18 months ago when I started listening to two podcasts, the first is The Walking Eye and the second is The Jank Cast. Up until I started listening to these casts I had played in an almost completely mechanical sort of way, nothing wrong with this per se but it wasn't what I nor what my regular group of friends and gamers were looking for. We were playing all sort of different games, mostly of the non-indie and non-story driven variety, but we were always looking for a good story. Now I have to say that two of the regular GMs in our gaming group are masters of the epic yarn, very good with prep and great a weaving our characters into the narrative of the prep they've done. They're really great at working with the awful wrenches PCs tend to throw into plans as well. A third GM I've only had the pleasure of playing in a couple of her games but she's exceptional at building atmosphere into her scenarios through lots of research and prep beforehand.

Despite my relatively academic nature I suck at prep for roleplaying games, I've always found that the more I prep the more stilted a session will feel, I also suck at weaving big stories for people to inhabit. My strength has usually been in dealing with unexpected ideas and letting players take the lead, introducing and reintroducing vague overarching antagonists for my group. I've always felt more comfortable with this sort of GM style, I also used to love simulationist-ish games as well or gamist games with lots of balance. My need for emergent story and my love for these sorts of rulesets didn't gel overly well. I GM'ed my share of 3.x D&D and 4e, I liked the combat in 4e quite a lot in fact, but I couldn't do the prep necessary for these games to float. I GM'ed a Planescape game using Mutants and Masterminds 2e with the Warriors and Warlocks content, it worked sort of but I ended up letting it slide away, much to the chagrin of the people playing in it (sorry by the way).

Then through the above mentioned podcasts I found two pretty awesome games, the first being The Dresden  Files game using FATE, where your background and history inform the themes of the game, the group work together on world building and your traits as a character can be compelled in game to affect them. I thought this was awesome! The whole game works toward weaving a narrative inside the themes that you as a group build. Neat stuff this, but the prep side brought me down again, I love playing this game but running it doesn't really fall in my skillset as a GM, one of the other regular GMs has it down though, his game is great!

The other game and indeed system I suppose is Apocalypse World and the attached engine, basically zero prep beyond a few between game notes, pickup in an evening and begin playing inside an hour and importantly the rules and role of the GM are defined in such a way as to be an engine of creation for emergent story. The shift for me has been from trying to balance and simulate to simply pushing and prodding players into making the story for themselves. This game has already produced what have been some of the most memorable moments of GM'ing for me. I'll probably do a post on those moments later this week in fact. 

I've run over word count by quite a bit...

Monday Ramblings

I think disliking Monday is one of those fundamental rights, I just can't seem to ever dislike it though. I kind of like Mondays most of the time, in fact I would say I like or dislike Mondays just as often as I like or dislike any other day of the working week. When I hit I day that just seems to simultaneously drag, not have enough hours in the day and keeps throwing up problem after problem to fix, those days that have what I think is the feel of the traditional Monday Blues kind of Monday that TV loves to tell us about, then I think of that day as a Monday sort of day.

I'm thinking about my research a lot at the moment, when the room is quiet and nobody is talking to me directly my thoughts become filled with all sort of ideas, mostly right now to do with literature reviews and philosophies of research. My lit review has to cover two key areas definitely in the form of Digital Education (specifically online learning, virtual learning environments and webinar type things) and Gifted & Talented education, I probably have to cover Assessment and Evaluation as well, but I'll see how that pans out. Each of these areas is pretty damn big and there are some seminal works that I really need to bone up on.

There's also my leadership assignment as well to think about, I have to pull together an interview schedule, read a few more books on leadership and get some data together for this assignment. I feel, personally, that this will be the weakest of my assignments for this year. Leadership as a field of study is so unbelievably subjective, there are as many theories as there are researchers in the field, plus som researchers have different theories dependent upon the context of the leaders position. It's all very confusing, it's the only area of my Ed. Doc. that makes me pine for the simpler days of physics, with fairly definitive methods to approaching a given problem.

See I've made a shift of sorts in taking up both my current position in work and indeed in taking up my Ed. Doc. studies. I came from a very much empirical background, grounded in Experimental Physics, I went all the way to the masters level in the field. Something felt missing though, I was casting around for ideas for a Ph.D. or even to become a post-primary teacher, but research in science and teaching in the mainstream education system didn't feel right. I had a couple of sputtering runs at getting myself into a couple of different Ph.D. positions, one in Climate Science another in Nanotechnology, but I called off at the last minute.

The financial collapse and start of the recession here left me with a lot of time on my hands as I only had occasional employment as a tutor in the Centre for Talented Youth. This lead me eventually to an admin job there as well as teaching and now I'm sort of a self-taught IT support guy for them, as well as all the other hats I wear. My views now have changed somewhat from the simplistic "Science is King" approach I had always had, I still think that in the fields of medicine, physical sciences and some others that the scientific method is the way to go absolutely, but in the fields of education and social studies I've taken a more pragmatic "right tool for the job" approach, people and their feelings are messy, their interactions are messy too, numbers will only tell me so much, a pointer to what questions I need to ask and if I want to ask questions of people I need to ask them, face to face to get their voice. That's important.

Funny how life works out.

Time's are changing

Today CTYI held a Technology Day for parents, a way for us to share some of the techie things we and our tutors use on a fairly regular basis. We had a good crowd for the day somewhere around 150 attendees in total. There were a few really cool topics covered, my slides centered on the general things available to folks on the web, a quick explanation of open source and creative commons and some bits and pieces I think were important for parents to know about, really I guess it was mostly context for how CTYI uses these things in our courses and content. Slides are embedded below and you can see my speaker notes if you click the gear icon.

My talk was followed by four other, a fantastic Multimedia tools talk that covered GIMP, Pixlr, Sculptris and some other really cool stuff; a talk on App Development and Coding that covered some of my personal favourites such as MIT App Builder, Scratch and general introductions to coding for parents; a talk about a great new web app and soon to be iOS app called Symmetry School made by Spraoi School; and a quick talk about the Gifted and Talented Network Ireland, a support group and community of parents of gifted kids.

All of the other talks were great, really interesting and I came away with some great ideas for some of our correspondence courses and some other cool projects. Overall the whole experience left me with lots of ideas. The idea that's rolling around in my head right now is how the internet has so fundamentally changed what is available to education, things like YouTube offer a wealth of information for students and teachers, Khan Academy provide lots of cool lesson that are pretty entrenched in the flipped classroom and gamification ideals and the likes of edX are making learning available for free to anyone with a connection. That's a far cry from just reading texts and cramming the facts in.

I feel the internet is offering so many ways for us to learn, not just kids, and especially for everyone to create things that help themselves and others learn. So many different ideas are available in creative commons and open source licenses, coding is becoming an essential skill for almost any endeavour,  it's more and more important that people are able to create things for the web to show their portfolios or what have you.

As a teacher, especially in mainstream schools with national curricula and everything that comes with that it must be absolutely daunting. I'm lucky in that I get to use or do just about anything I want when I teach and I'm not bound by many restrictions thanks to our place as an educational enrichment programme. I get to test out all the cool toys and see what combinations work best, I even get to do a whole doctorate on it!

I'm a pretty lucky guy.

Tomorrow's Work

It's the end of the week for most but I have a day in work tomorrow. Mind you I like my work, I work in Gifted and Talented Education, a field I feel pretty lucky to be involved with. I help provide classes to students who are in the 95th percentile or above in terms of one a number of literature supported intelligences. Usually Verbal or Numerical reasoning but Abstract pops up regularly and if a student makes it to us by way of an educational psychologist then they can qualify under a number of different areas. 

Now when I say I work in Gifted and Talented Ed. that's not the only thing we do, we have high ability and non-tested programmes as well, we offer people a way to try academic subjects they wouldn't normally get to look at in mainstream primary and post-primary education in Ireland, it's all about educational enrichment. We also provide various access opportunities to students who come from difficult circumstances. 

So what do I do exactly? Well like most all of us in the office I wear a number of different hats, I do some admin, some course development, some teaching, some programme development and some research, I also take care of most of our day to day IT problems that can be sorted without annoying the general IT dept. 

My real interest though is currently in the research and programme development area. I'm undertaking an Educational Doctorate in Leadership, my main project focus will be on developing a set of online programmes for our students. A set of virtual learning classes they can do synchronously with other students and our staff. I'm really interested in what the internet can do for education and how we can utilise it in our particular field.

This leads me back around to my original point, tomorrow I'm delivering a talk entitled "A whistle-stop tour of techie things" it's a roundup of a few of my favourite areas and ideas when it comes to the internet and education. I'll see if I can make the slides available here tomorrow once I'm done, have to clear that with my employer first. So tomorrow I get to share some of my passions in education, creative commons, open source, wikis and the outline of my own research to name a few of them. 

All of these things are important to me when I teach, there's a whole wealth of knowledge there for students to get to grips with for free. Knowledge, it's the sort of thing that should be free in my opinion. With this comes a host of new problems of course, I think the Mozilla Foundation white paper on web literacies is a great place to start with addressing these new educational issues, it's being put together by Dr. Doug Belshaw, a gent I had the pleasure of meeting a conference not so long ago, go take a look. I guess that's why I don't mind going in on a Saturday, I enjoy it, I feel like I get to do something interesting a get paid for it!

Tonight though? Some beer I think.

Shared Mythologies

I've been asked by a good friend and relation of mine to run a game for him and his group of friends. Turns out that back in the day, that's the mid '90s, they played a lot of games together. This friend, my cousin's husband, who was fairly instrumental in getting me interested in the idea of roleplaying games; I jumped at the chance to run a game for them.

This will be their first time playing as a group for a while, I've never ran a game for them before. It's a tiny bit intimidating. They were AD&D players, I don't think they got into D&D3.x which is the bulk of my D&D/D20 experience. I'm a huge fan of Apocalypse World Engine games and I've heard really great things about the AW-Hack Dungeon World, it's old school style which is good for this group but new school rules, in fact a mechanic set I'm very familiar with and really enjoy. So I'm hoping they'll be on-board with the whole idea for their game. Not least because I don't want to have to relearn THAC0 rules and percentile scores for STR-18 characters...

I'm quite looking forward to this game, I haven't GM'ed high or dark fantasy in a couple of years, I actually stepped out of the long running Dragon Age game that my friends play when my son was born. This gave me a chance to get out of fantasy for a good long while and I feel I'd like to go back to it now, with this new and interesting ruleset and mechanics.

If you've never played roleplaying games you probably wouldn't get the idea of something like this I guess. I really didn't get my own interest in the whole hobby myself until I happened to speak of my love of it to a gent I met at an education conference. He put me onto the idea of shared narrative in oral education and mythology, his own love of horror and especially zombie movies and our conversation evolved over the course of several glasses of port to the point that I finally understood what I loved about roleplaying games as a hobby for all those years; those things aside from the social aspects that keep me playing.

I suddenly discovered that roleplaying games to me were the same as the mythologies I loved as a child, things I would often add to when I retold them. These games are a chance to develop our own shared mythology, sometimes fleeting and ephemeral; dying at the table in a one-shot game. Sometimes more solid, played over the course of years, like my friends' Dragon Age game, a rich tapestry of characters and players.

I think these games are my myths and legends now. I think I see here the Dagda, Nuada the Silver Hand, the Fomorians, Lug, the Fir Bolg. All those beautiful and fierce and imaginative things I loved as a child, things I hope to share with my children as well. I think these are the natural extension of my imagination that was cultivated in these legends when I was only 5 or 6.

It's wonderful to share these legends.

Social Glue

I'm a gamer, I like to play games, all varieties of games in fact. I enjoy card games, board games, pen and paper roleplaying, computer games and even the occasional wargame though it's a rarity thanks to the fiscal and time costs. I play games for a variety of reasons, escapism, decompressing, creativity and simple enjoyment. I'm lucky enough to have a group of friends who are also gamers and for at least one of my kids to have developed an enjoyment of board games, we can play together from time to time.

The games I play most nowadays are pen and paper roleplaying games, like Dungeons and Dragons and the plethora of other games out there. I've been playing these since I was about 14 or 15 years old. It started with a wargames club I had joined in school, turns out a couple of the guys, from Australia, were D&D players. Specifically Ravenloft. I was a huge fan of fantasy at the time and have always been a horror fan, I read Bram Stoker's Dracula at quite a young age, it was pretty formative for me, so this looked like just about the most amazing thing I had ever seen.

Being teenagers these games were sputtering at best, I don't even remember much by way of details connected to these games but I do remember the feeling that creating something with my friends gave me. It was exciting and fun and simple. After those friends, whom I still miss, moved back to Australia when I was about 15 or so, another friend of mine had found his way into another social circle, which I became part of over time. This social circle also happened to be gamers, mostly computer games, but they were huge fans of Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights and Icewind Dale. Between that and the fact that a few of them were into online play by post gaming we ended up going through a phase of making our own games, back-engineering the rules of D&D out of these computer games, adding our own twists and ideas. Some were successful, most weren't, but we had fun all the time.  

My friend, the one who introduced me into this social circle, calls these the Lost Years, on account of our lack of funds for buying actual gaming books and just cobbling what we could together. I prefer to think of these as the years I really found myself and the people I would be friends with to this day, nearly 15 years later. We still game together, even with jobs and marriage and kids, we find the time to game together. We play as reluctant heroes, smuggling goods between planets; as wizard detectives in modern London, desperately working inside a deadly political system; as hardened survivors of a psychic apocalypse, trying to make our way in world out to kill us; and as sword swinging adventurers, employees of a swarthy rogue. We do other things as well, obviously, we still have get togethers in each other's houses, drinks and chatting, our non-gaming friends and families hanging out, but I think games have definitely helped keep my circle of friends cohesive.

I'm pretty thankful for this.

It's a Start

So, I’ve often thought about this whole blogging thing. Like very often. I always say to myself I should start it on Monday or next month, then I get to thinking about what I could write? Why would people want to listen to what I have to say? What do I have to offer? Today, as I was reflecting upon things on my morning commute, I suddenly realised that I was thinking about this the wrong way. Why should I be trying to offer anything to anyone? Why should I worry about what I can write about and if it’s interesting? I came to a decision: I’ll just write about things I find interesting, I won’t write some sort of column blog or try to pick a theme or anything else. Instead I’ll just write for me, sounds selfish but why shouldn’t I use this as a place to reflect? If anyone reads it and writes a comment maybe it will offer me a new perspective, why shouldn’t I just get something out of this for myself?

So here it is, after what is probably the better part of six months of having this blog set up and waiting, idling, taken up space on the internet and not doing anything with it, here’s my first 500 or so words. I’m going to keep a journal here, of my thoughts, what’s happening in my life and maybe, hopefully, a bit of reflection that will lead to positive changes.

I’m a pragmatist, in the philosophical sense. The value or worth of something like an idea or an object is described in the consequences of believing in or using that something. Let’s see what the consequences of this blog will be for me and what its value to me will be as well.

I think I should start by taking a little inventory about myself, what do I think about myself and how do I think about myself, maybe I’ll look back on this at some point in the future and see improvements. Maybe not.

 So here goes, two things I like about myself:

• I am a father and husband, possibly not the world’s greatest, probably not the world’s worst. I make mistakes but I try. I love them in a way I simply can’t put words to.
• I am flexible, I can learn quickly by doing, I improve the way I do things with each iteration of doing it. I thrive in chaos, things do not need to be neat and orderly for me to work, this works well with my wife who is very orderly, she brings structure to our family, I help deal with the unexpected.

Two things I’m not so pleased about

• I am not entirely comfortable with my body, I am usually quite comfortable with it but I think I would like it to be a little bit stronger, a little bit slimmer.
• I’m not the world’s best manager of time, I sometimes become focussed on something to the exclusion of other things, or procrastinate when I’m stressed. Maybe this will keep me on track?

Ok, it’s a start.