Schools without frontiers?

Keri FacerFuturelab

LondonFeb 6 2007

About Futurelab

• Research and Development Lab

• Charity

• Interdisciplinary – educators, technical experts, researchers, creative experts

• Prototype Development

• Curriculum Development

• Research

Overview

• Young people’s use of digital technologies outside schools

• Emerging practices and the ‘digital generation’

• Educational Case studies

• Future visions – 2020 and beyond…

• I will not do all the talking

Young people’s use of digital technologies

Some national numbers ….• 89% of children aged 10-16 have

computer at home• 84% of Year 2 parents report children use

computer at home• 90% have games console• 70% have handheld games machine• 93% of teenagers have a mobile phone for

their own use

(sources Valentine, Marsh & Pattie for DFES 2005; Interactive Education, 2001, Bristol; European Research Into Consumer Affairs Survey, 2004; LSE, Children-Go-Online; Futurelab/EA ‘Teaching with Games’ survey)

Everyday activities• Mean time spent using a computer outside school 5-7 hours a week

(1.5 for formal educational purposes)• 75-88% of children use the internet outside school • 84% of children play games at least once a fortnight• 80% use mobile phone every day

– Games – Writing– Phoning/ texting / instant messaging– Finding things out– Fiddling – Playing with images / representations

• 14-15% of children have own webpage

Digital Differences / Divides

• Socio-economic– 12% have three or more computers, 16% have no computers– 75% households A/B have internet, 33% D/E

• Parental occupation– Technical support, supplies, software, upgrades

• Age – 41% year 11 pupils have own computer in bedroom, compared with

31% Year 6– Educational use increases, games use peaks Year 7 then goes

down

• Gender– games/ education activities

• Ethnicity – limited data

• What levels of access to digital technologies (like computers, internet, games machines, mobiles) are there among young people in your local authority?

• What do young people use them for outside school?

• Are there differences in access and use by different groups of young people?

Questions

Emerging Practices and Questions

• Machinima 1, 2, 3

• Playing with fonts/images

• ‘bricolage’ – Working on what is already there,

repurposing, ‘mash-ups’

• What counts as ‘creativity’ in these environments?

What ‘counts’ as knowledge, how do we find it and share it?

Social Software / Web 2.0• Personal as public

– Weblogs http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts – Collation of blogs http://www.wefeelfine.org/

• Collective knowledge production– Wikis www.en.wikipedia.org

• New means of finding and sharing knowledge– Tagging/ folksonomies– http://del.icio.us

• Audio and visual– Photos www.flickr.com – Videos www.youtube.com

Where are these boys?

Multiple spaces

• Immediate

• Virtual

• Networked

Personal map and spaces

• Draw a rapid mind map with yourself at the middle ( use words or pictures)– How do you personally use digital technologies?– What digital/virtual/real spaces are you connected with

when you use them?– What sources of information and knowledge are you

connected with when you use them? – Where do you use digital technologies?

• Compare your map with others’ on the table – what are the differences/similarities?

Education for aliens?

For most adults the digital ecology in which we now find ourselves grew up around us and we have adapted accordingly, some more readily than others. Our young were born into it; it is their natural environment. For them, the high density of communication vectors is entirely and unequivocally natural, something which they learn to adapt to, to use and to exploit, just as we learned to adapt to the sparse electronic ecology in which we grew up. (Green and Bigum, 1993, p135)

Generational divides?

• 84% of young people play computer games at least once a fortnight

• 72% of teachers never play computer games

• Children entering school this year were born 10 years after the invention of the web – it is old technology to them…

‘digital natives’ ?

Twitch Speed vs. Conventional SpeedParallel Processing vs. Linear ProcessingRandom Access vs. Linear ThinkingGraphics First vs. Text FirstConnected vs. Stand-aloneActive vs. PassivePlay vs. WorkPayoff vs. PatienceFantasy vs. RealityTechnology as Friend vs. Technology as Foe

http://www.games2train.com/site/html/article.html

New learning communities

• Authentic activities – working on something meaningful• Different roles/ different contributions/ different expertise

– teachers & learners• Collective experimentation – and recording what works• Knowledge building – shared activity towards a common

goal

Alan puts it on, then Karen messes with it and then Alan will mess with it and do a bit more and Karen says ‘no do that with it’, or ‘we can do that with it’. They’re swapping facts. Karen knows something that Dad doesn’t and Dad knows something that Karen doesn’t

New learning relationships

… a lot of it I’ve learned as well from Joe, my friend. He knows a bit about computers but he doesn’t know anything about making a webpage. So sometimes like if I don’t know how to do something…. I had to phone Joe… ‘Oh look, its bla bla bla’ and he tells me, you know…. I didn’t know how to use this when I first had it’….but when it came to like doing the web page he phones me and I’ll tell him how to do other things, you know, its like a compromise between the both of us. We both tell each other how to do things.

New learning relationshipsIf the teacher doesn’t have too many limitations, you know, say for example you wanted to insert a clipart from a different file and the teacher originally knew, you know, this is the way you should do it, and then you said ‘No I know another way to do it to get better images and stuff’. Then a good teacher like Miss Andrews would let you do this. Okay And then she would take on your information that you inputted into the lesson. She learns from you and you learn from her. So it’s like a two-way system. It’s not like some teachers who, you know, pound it into you, try to just get information into you, they don’t get anything back, that’s a bad teaching manner. I don’t like that type of teaching at all when the teacher just gives you information and says ‘write it down’ bla bla bla. ‘This is it. Revise from it’. That’s not good teaching at all. … But when they just give you information and that’s it, they don’t answer questions, they don’t let you involve yourself in the lesson, that’s not a good type of teaching, that’s really bad teaching’.

• Is there a generational divide between adults and children in terms of using digital technologies ?

• What are adults good at and what are children good at today (not just in terms of using technology) ?

• How might we design schools to foster exchanges of skills and knowledge between children and teachers?

Questions

Case studies

Education for the information age

• Generic Workers… These ‘human terminals’ can, of course, be replaced by machines, or by any other body around the city, the country or the world, depending on business decisions. While they are collectively indispensable to the production process, they are individually expendable (Castells, 1997:340)

• Self-generative workers… able constantly to redefine the necessary skills for a given task, and to access the sources for learning these skills. (Castells, 1996)

New SpacesSavannah:

http://www.futurelab.org.uk/showcase/savannah/index.htm

Mudlarking

http://www.futurelab.org.uk/showcase/mudlarking/index.htm

Create A Scape:

http://www.futurelab.org.uk/showcase/create_a_scape/index.htm

Games, collaborationRacing Academy:

http://www.futurelab.org.uk/showcase/racing_academy/index.htm

Space Mission:

http://www.futurelab.org.uk/showcase/space_mission/index.htm

Learning Communities

Notschool, UK

Unlimited, NZ

Bishops Park, UK

Enquiring Minds, UKFountaineers: http://www.futurelab.org.uk/showcase/fountaineers/index.htm

Future Visions – 2020 and beyond…

19th Century…

Electric light, phonographs, wireless cinema, early globalisation, mass production

Invented playgrounds and new school spaces, universal primary education, widening access to higher education and laws banning child labour

by 2020 …?

Intelligent and responsive public and private spaces in which we live unconsciously with ‘invisible’ personalised technologies embedded in our everyday attire, enabling us to access free personal memory banks which have recorded our entire life and interactions and which allow us to run NASA quality simulations on personal and mobile devices which generate immersive collaborative environments…

We might live forever…

Collaborative and immersive spaces

What If…

• Learning institutions were designed for flexibility, and to cope with future social and educational change ?

• Learning settings were designed to foster creativity and collaboration amongst learners ?

• Learning settings were designed to encourage interactions between different age groups ?

• Learning settings were designed to meet the preferences of individual learners over how, where, when and in what ways they learn ?

Personalised Pods

http://www.futurelab.org.uk/research/opening_education/learning_spaces_01.htm

Zoned workflow spaces: http://www.futurelab.org.uk/research/opening_education/learning_spaces_01.htm

Over to you….

What if things could be very very different? What would we want them to be?

1. Imagine a day in the life of a learner in 2020 (ignore all practical constraints, imagine what you would want it to be)- what happens?

2. What do we have now that can make this possible ?

3. What do we need to invent, change or enable to bridge the gap?

Bioscience developments – design for change….

• What does education look like if we can all live forever by 2020 ?

• What does education look like if it is possible to take drugs to enhance mental processing powers by 2010 ?

• What does education look like if neuroscience offers radically new insights into learning that challenge everything we have understood until now…?

• What does education look like if there is bird flu…

www.futurelab.org.uk/research

Ben Williamson, Dan Sutch, Sarah Godfrey, Tash Lee,

Lyndsay Grant, Mary Ulicsak, Richard Sandford, Jessica Pykett,

Tim Rudd, John Morgan

Thank you