eGov monitor talks to Keri Facer, Director of Learning Research, Nesta Futurelab about developments in educational use of ICT
Q1 What technologies do you think will be having the most impact on children's education in 2010?
This is difficult as the field is changing significantly. I think there may be key themes or characteristics rather than specific technologies that are likely to have the most impact. My hunch is that these key themes would be
- personalisation and mobility - the shift away from centrally managed systems to devices and resources managed and controlled by children which they bring from home to school to college to city streets
- resources that allow children to swap knowledge and information and materials and resources - and to cut these up and repurpose them in any way they wish - the social software side of things
- 'digital layers' of information - with the rise in availability and affordability of GPS, we're likely to be seeing information and resources that are layered over specific places, and which allow children to generate information and resources relevant to specific places
Of course, these are some of the more interesting directions this could take - it will be interesting to see whether school systems and infrastructure can cope with these new approaches as it will require a radical rethink of how systems are managed and controlled to allow greater flexibility and more fluidity between different sites of learning and different systems.
There are a number of other issues that are less visible and less 'sexy' - one of these, for example, is the amount of data that teachers are now able to gather about individual pupils. If we ask the right questions of the data and share this with pupils so that they are able to take joint responsibility for their learning, this offers the opportunity to really respond to individual needs. This could, if we can figure out how to use it well, provide a real impact on children's education.
Q2 It has been indicated that digital technologies have the potential to offer radically new approaches to the process of teaching and learning. What do you believe is the role for digital technologies in the development of a new learning environment?
The role for digital technologies in creating new approaches to teaching and learning is at once central and marginal. It is central in that the new resources we have at our disposal for the analysis, sharing, dissemination and creation of knowledge offers up radically new ways of thinking about learning, about the goals of education and of working and collaborating together to engage with knowledge. At the same time, the technology is only as good as the goals that we set ourselves for education - it will only achieve what we have the imagination and desire to create.
We get the tools we deserve for the education system we can imagine. If we are able to rethink education creatively (not just because of the new technological capacities at our disposal but because it needs rethinking in order to better meet the needs of young people) we will then, of necessity, have to look for creative technologies to support these approaches. If on the other hand, we resort to tinkering at the edges, we are likely to get the technologies that simply reproduce existing approaches.
To some extent this is a strange question - we wouldn't ask 'what is the role of books, or pencils... in the development of a new learning environment' - it's a question of what we want to do with them. But to rattle off a fairly familiar list of the affordances of digital technologies - theyallow us to save our work, revise it, review it, share it, collaborate with others on it. They allow us to simulate our ideas and to explore how these might be developed and changed. They allow us to access ideas outside our immediate geographical and cultural surroundings, and to interact with a wider range of people and places and ideas. The real question is whether these are activities valued within education, or whether they will be considered marginal activities as they are at present because of an assessment system which is dominated by a preference for recall of facts.
Q3 What do you think pupils can teach us about technology use in education?
This is a tricky one. We need to be aware that not all children are the same - so while on the one hand I can think of some children who could teach some of our leading inventors a thing or two about programming and development, at the same time there are children who struggle to get access to and to understand how to use even basic features of computers. There are a number of things that seem to be common to most children - the sense that you 'play' with technologies, the expectation that computers will 'of course' talk to each other and allow you to connect to other places, the sense that you can find information on anything you want. These seem to be some of the key features of generational difference. But there are many areas in which we need to support children in their use of technologies - developing critical literacies to understand how these technologies are produced, that they are not 'neutral', for example, is something that doesn't seem to happen 'naturally' outside school.
All the work I've done in the past on out of school learning with digital technologies, and the implications of this for learning inside schools would seem to suggest that the most important question is not what do children know about technology use in education, but what can these children in this school teach us about use of technology. In other words, the most important shift in our understanding should be towards a set of practices in which it is commonplace and taken for granted that teachers and school leaders regularly talk to and survey their students about their use of technology outside school and their views. This shouldn't be a 'one-off' activity, but an ongoing and embedded dialogue between schools and their students that will change and update with time.
Q4 The UK lags behind many of its economic competitors in driving productivity growth through technology innovation. How do you think we use classroom technology to help close this gap?
'productivity growth through technology innovation' ? :-) I'm translating that into human language to mean - how do we create and nurture great inventors who can generate ideas and services that create wealth?
A first tactic would be to present technologies (or any other inventions) as having been made by people, and therefore as changeable and improvable and updatable. There are many different approaches to this, most of which don't involve the use of technology but the development of classroom cultures in which children are encouraged to think and act creatively, as inventors and as people able to get their hands dirty and make a difference in any area of knowledge or invention. In terms of technology - arguably making source code open to enable children to tinker with this and change it would be a start, so that they are able to see how the stuff is made and how you could improve it. This is already happening in the games industry where children are regularly making new games or modifying old ones. If we want it in the technology sector, we need to open up the black box and encourage children to play with the code.
If we come to the second part of the question, namely wealth creation, we need to acknowledge that coming up with ideas is only half of the challenge, it's also the question of enabling young people to understand and engage with the 'getting it made' side of things. So, enterprise education and citizenship education both have a role to play in enabling children to really get involved in making things that have an impact on the world around them, and in so doing, coming to understand that its not just 'having ideas' but testing them out, seeing how they work, revising them and developing them that has the real impact on communities and society. This requires space in schools that allows children to be seen not just as 'learners' but as social agents who are able to make real businesses (commercial or social), inventions and ideas which can 'go live' in their communities or even society at large. Some children are already doing this outside school.
Q5 The DFES created a five-year strategic plan in 2004 for children and learners aiming to invest more in education in accordance with recent developments, including digital technology. What would you like this investment to have achieved?
The investment has to balance technical innovation with innovation in pedagogy. For at least the last twenty five years we've been creating really innovative digital learning resources, not all of which have fully achieved their potential even today. A key reason for this is that we haven't developed practical and commonly understood ways of teaching with these resources in many classroom contexts. We need just as much investment and work on the contexts within which technology is used as in the technology itself. This means asking hard questions about how schools and curriculum are organised - about how we change the ways in which we use space and time in schools, about what we assess and why, and about the relationship between children and teachers in schools.
If I were to have a magic wand, at a structural level, I'd love to see an education sector that was open to new ideas, to asking hard questions about its practice in local settings, to learning with others in their communities and subject specialisms, to sharing their learning freely across all schools and to rigorously evaluating how these ideas played out in practice. This means that teachers and heads would be able to innovate and act as designers and researchers of learning in their own schools and classrooms and confident in sharing this with others - they would then be able to adapt to changing social, technical and economic contexts in ways that meet the needs of children in their communities. But I don't have a magic wand, and this is very hard to achieve. If we want to get there we need to start having a mature and much wider public debate about the nature and purpose of education and this will take longer than five years to achieve.
