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Table of contents

1 NESTA Learning Brainstorming Day September '05 2 A communication revolution 2.1 Different skill sets for a shifting economy 3 Emerging themes from the presentations and brainstorms 4 How was the day organised? 4.1 Peter Higgins, Land Design 4.2 Wendy Keay-Bright, Reactive Colours 4.3 Zach Lieberman 4.4 Fiddian Warman and Ed Burton, Soda 4.5 Paul Miller - Glasgow School of Art, Digital Design Studio 5 Structured Knowledge Sharing Activity 5.1 Group 1 5.1.1 The Pitch 5.2 Group 2 5.2.1 The pitch 5.3 Group 3 5.3.1 The Pitch 5.4 Group 4 5.4.1 The Pitch 6 Conclusion

NESTA Learning Brainstorming Day September '05

NESTA Learning (http://www.nesta.org.uk/) supports and nurtures action research projects in the field of learning that cross between the disciplines of science, technology and the arts

Just-b. Productions (http://www.just-b.com) were commissioned to conduct a piece of action research to explore the crossover between disciplines. The session should also generate intelligence on learning possibilities that emerge as connectivity improves and media platforms converge.

We brought together a diverse group of talented industry professionals to discuss the potential of convergent and interactive media in formal and informal education, in and out of school. They came from the worlds of art, software design, research, commercial new media design, learning, games and interactive TV.

This document is an analysis of that knowledge transfer process, aiming to inform NESTA (http://www.nesta.org.uk/) future strategy and that of other policy-making bodies. The day demonstrated how even a short period of concentrated activity by a group of experienced practitioners can generate a wealth of useful information.

A communication revolution

We are in one of the most dynamic periods of human history. As our technologies become increasingly networked, we can access content and information and communicate with each other more readily. The challenge within the educational realm is to determine how relevant learning environments can be designed in this convergence revolution.

After many years of development, convergence is becoming a reality at last. The number of households with domestic broadband is rising exponentially. 550 million smart phones have already been shipped across the world and by 2008 there will be 2 billion more. UK homes have adopted digital TV, and within a few years, as more TVs are sold with broadband capability, interactive TV and interactive advertising will become more commonplace. The sale of online, interactive television and mobile phone games alone is expected to generate US$873 million by the end of 2005.

There has been a profound shift in the way young people interact with content and media over the last few years and their culture has changed correspondingly. Mobile phones have infiltrated faster and further than anyone would ever have thought possible. Over 100 billion text messages were sent in the UK in March 2004 alone. Texting proficiency among teenagers has reached impressive levels. There are reports of students texting blindly under school desks while pretending they are entirely focused on the lesson in hand. 91% of 13-18 year-olds text. 34% send 36+ messages a week. Whether we approve or not, teenagers have adopted the mobile phone and SMS as an emblem of independence. Texting belongs to the teenager.

89% of 11 to 21-year-old mobile users text at least once a day and 54% at least five times a day (Telegraph Dec 04), and according to Mobile Youth the average age for a first mobile is 8. 45% of 9 to 19 year olds in the UK use instant massaging, a form of communication that prioritises speed and understanding over spelling or grammar.

Similarly, the vast majority of teenagers have regular access to the Internet and own their own games consoles. Social media such as blogs, social networking sites, collaboration tools and syndication feeds are relatively new to UK youth but are being embraced into youth culture at a phenomenal rate. There are currently over 13.6 million blogs worldwide, with about 100,000 new ones being created daily. Live Journal, just one of many blog hosting services, states that 1.8 million of their hosted blogs are written by teenagers. A relatively small but growing proportion of these bloggers live in the UK. Gaming consoles are massively popular: 7.5 million UK homes own a Playstation 2. 84% of 9-19 year olds regularly use the Internet and 34% of this group have built their own website. 12 million children under 13 have a Neopets account (Neopets is a popular interactive community for virtual pet owners). TV’s status in this changing media scape is diminishing. Young adults are more likely to log on or turn on the console than to switch on and veg out in front of the TV. Kids today expect to communicate, to interact, and to explore. No longer content to passively accept preordained narratives, they expect to be in constant communication with their peers, by phone or instant messenger, locally and remotely. This new generation are members of global tribes defined by interests rather than geography.

As long ago as 2003, a study conducted by Harris Interactive and Teenage Research Unlimited reported that young adults (13–24) spend more time on the Internet than watching TV. And while they’re online, they engage in other media activity. Whether it’s listening to MP3s, watching TV, talking on the phone or over VoIP, instant messaging, listening to the radio or doing homework. Their ability to multitask is phenomenal; they welcome the media fragmentation that adults find distracting. They enjoy managing multiple layers of information and personalising them to their own needs. They are no longer tied to passive forms of media entertainment, and become frustrated and bored when limited to passive learning experiences. An educational system that ignores these cultural and commercial shifts does so at its own peril. It seems clear that, since young people tend to be the earliest adopters of any cultural change or new technology, such an educational system may quickly become obsolete.

Yet this radical cultural shift is hardly reflected in our educational structures at all. Interdisciplinary practice is increasing in industry, but remains largely unseen in schools. Evolving and converging technologies have the capacity to change the face of education. What are the opportunities and the challenges, and what is the Government role in helping to overcome these challenges? How can teachers keep up with the increasingly sophisticated generations they are attempting to teach? How can educational policy makers keep up with these frequent and rapid technological and cultural shifts? How can we integrate these changes into the learning experience and what changes in the curricular activities are necessary to allow for their effective implementation? These are all questions we explored during this technology in learning day.

Different skill sets for a shifting economy

There can no doubt that we are fast moving into an information age. As countries struggle to compete in established markets like manufacturing, the creative industries are seen as the holy grail of a new and expanding knowledge economy. In the near future, imaginative and innovative content is predicted to replace widgets as a country’s greatest asset. The DTI’s Competitiveness White Paper recognised as far back as 1998 that the UK’s distinctive capabilities would depend on the knowledge, skills, innovation and creativity of its people. Are schools and colleges preparing the country’s students for life in this dynamic and changing economy?

The UK is universally renowned for its creativity and creative research, but this lofty position will only be maintained if our educational systems inspire the next generation of innovators in relevant and engaging ways. How do we prepare the next generation for an economy where creative thinking, capacity for innovation and ability to deliver innovative product in shorter timescales than ever before is crucially important? We need to nurture and celebrate a culture of experimentation and creativity, where learners are encouraged to actively seek knowledge, make unexpected connections between previously unconnected facts and to learn to share knowledge with their peers.

There has supposedly been a significant departure from didactic pedagogies towards approaches that look at how to obtain and analyse information. These new approaches begin to focus on ‘why’ rather than ‘what’ and allow students to discover facts and theories for themselves, giving them ownership of their learning. In this dynamic and changing world it is crucial that young people develop a vision and a creative instinct and learn to trust that instinct as soon as possible. How can emerging and converging media platforms be used to support this change in the culture of learning and make the learning experience more engaging and relevant to the increasingly sophisticated ‘wired generation’?

A child’s mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.” Plutarch

How can we develop engaging educational models that guide rather than dictate, that encourage inquisitiveness and self-motivation rather than deliver facts and answers? In a world where a seemingly endless wealth of global information is only a click away, where no question has to remain unanswered, has the skill to absorb and regurgitate facts become redundant? New useful skill sets may involve knowing how to intelligently navigate, record and evaluate information. What kind of educational models would teach these skills while offering the learner a necessary understanding of the broad range of shared knowledge that glue our communities together?

If there is to be an educational shift away from facts, tests and tangible outputs, how can the softer experiential skills gained through the use of open-ended tools be assessed in a structured way? It seems clear that assessment of some sort is inevitable, given that individuals will always need to show their strengths and weaknesses to potential employers.

Emerging themes from the presentations and brainstorms

The NESTA Learning Brainstorming Day explored innovations in education and how educational models might look once barriers are lifted and the potent educational possibilities offered by evolving technologies can be fully exploited. New communication tools are already having a significant impact on entertainment, art and the way we interact with each other. Participants were asked to explore how lessons learned in these spaces could be transferred effectively into learning environments. If a good learning experience is one where the learner engages deeply with ideas, how can emerging technological applications enhance the learning experience by offering an engaging and immersive experience?

As new technological possibilities emerge, the traditional concept of ‘classroom’ is undergoing a process of transformation. Vastly improved connectivity and new communication/information technologies enable new kinds of immediate, interactive and engaging teaching methodologies. Emerging technologies like blogs and wikis allow students to collaborate on learning projects more easily than ever before. Learners can use wikis and blogs to share their thoughts and reflections as they work through a project, to write collaboratively or to review other users’ work and comments. They can be used to create persistent archives of user generated content that continue to develop as long as the user group continue to add to them, dynamic growing resources that can be used by future learners. Remote collaboration with other schools, communities, cultures and nations is now easy to implement and manage. Software can be written collaboratively to implement a shared creative vision by people that have never met or even talked. Not so very long ago we would have marvelled at these astonishing opportunities and how powerfully they would impact on the education world.

Yet when entering a typical classroom, students are still encouraged to learn from teachers and from books, to collect information primarily to pass exams and to ensure that their learning institution retains its place in the all important league tables. What separates one child from another is often little more than a child’s capability to retain received wisdom and regurgitate it on order to achieve high grades. Has the Victorian model changed so very much? Our generation expected teachers to be all knowing, great vessels of knowledge. In the world of the web, knowledge is easily accessible and the edges to knowledge and information are blurred. The teacher should rather be a guide than a sage, but implementing this change is difficult. It is far less challenging for teachers to plan a structured lesson where the journey is linear and the end point predictable. This is how most older teachers were trained to teach. To accept an entirely different pedagogy is both uncomfortable and unnerving. Change generally is.

The group agreed unanimously that communication technologies could enable an important democratisation of interaction between students and their peers. As long as the current educational system is based around facts, figures and league tables, it will be difficult to integrate these democratising technologies into the present schooling systems. Education itself has to be democratised and students need to be at the heart of education before new models can be fully tested.

It seems inevitable that teaching and learning practice will change as technological horizons broaden. Conversely, it would be a mistake to see communications technologies as a panacea for all the ills of today’s education system. The idea and the student have to be the starting point, not the technology. Technology is no more than an enabler and unless technologies are invisible (i.e. they perform their function so well that the learner is no longer aware of them) they can hinder rather than enhance the learning experience. Unless a model has been designed with the end user in mind, technology in education can be frustrating and disruptive.

This pervasive mediascape, while offering a multitude of new cultural opportunities, presents a whole new set of challenges. In a world where young people are bombarded by real-time stories of war, famine, terrorism and natural disasters, how do we offer structures to examine and attempt to make sense of these issues? Are these experiences dealt with more effectively through peer interaction and, if so, should the teacher’s role move towards facilitating and supporting these structured relationships?

Participants were agreed that deep learning comes from a fully engaged learning community. The teacher is only one limited source of information amongst a variety of learning sources including peers, parents, teachers, professionals and other members of the local community. Some of our most valuable learning happens outside the formal educational environment. This extended network could provide a far more engaging multi-layered knowledge resource than we can hope to generate within schools and communications technologies make it more practical than ever to bring this worldwide resource into our classrooms. Yet many young adults feel as if they have no place in their own community, don’t know how to deal with relationships, and how to make sense of a rapidly changing world.

Educational models designed by the participants through rapid brainstorming show the range of educational projects possible in this converging technological landscape. There is certainly no shortage of ideas or of creative talent to deliver and maintain these exciting applications. The major barrier remains how to integrate these projects into our schools to engage the younger generation. Without significant transformation of the present output-driven schooling systems and revision of strict subject divisions, significant enhancement of the learning systems will be slow.

The new dawn of possibilities outlined in this document must be understood and accepted by strategists, businesses, policy makers, communities and teachers at all levels before the current educational system can be redefined and it can be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

How was the day organised?

The creative research of some of UK’s most notable innovators is currently being supported by NESTA learning funding. The NESTA learning day opened with a series of presentations on the work of a number of these successful awardees. The presentations were intended to inspire participants to consider what is already happening and what might be possible in the future of education. Some of the UK’s most talented creatives and researchers from very different spheres discussed the aims, objectives and processes used to deliver technology based interaction projects. You can find edited highlights of these presentations below.

Peter Higgins, Land Design

Making space work

Land Design (http://www.landdesignstudio.co.uk/) work to commercial briefs, designing memorable and playful interactive spaces in the public realm. They create tailor-made installations and narratives that work within designated spaces rather than fight against them. They explore the interaction between architecture and spatial design, interpretation and curation, writing and narrative. They explore effectively media communication ways while attempting to balance each of these elements.

As interpretive designers, they were commissioned to design a space in the Millennium Dome (http://wwp.millennium-dome.com/). The resulting Playzone (http://www.londonnet.co.uk/ln/guide/about/dome-play.html) explored the notion of play in the digital age: play to learn, play to express and play to challenge. The dome organisers predicted that there would be sizable visitor flow through of around 23,000 people a day. As user centric designers, Land Design (http://www.landdesignstudio.co.uk/) had to find a way to filter these vast numbers effectively while ensuring a level of meaningful interaction. Playzone offered visitors a clear route through the exhibition and a clear overview of zone activity way before the installations themselves were reached. To accommodate the high flow through, every piece allowed 'passive interactivity, i.e. they were as much fun for viewers as for the active participants themselves. The need for rapid filter also meant that installations had to be easy to use to avoid time wasting and frustration.

International digital artists were invited to design the installations, including "Kids' Room" by MIT (http://web.mit.edu/) group Neolife, which mapped the movement of children and engaged them in simple fun interactivity.

Land Design (http://www.landdesignstudio.co.uk/) were more recently responsible for the immensely successful UK pavilion for Expo 2005 (http://www.expo2005.or.jp/en/index.html) in Japan, produced in collaboration with an independent production company. The Natural History Museum (http://www.nhm.ac.uk/) was largely responsible for content development for the installations themselves. Again, expected large numbers meant the interfaces had to be simple to interact with and interesting to watch. Each of the seven interactive exhibitions showed the UK as a centre of innovation and each drew inspiration from nature. Peter Higgns found that even within this rich tapestry of digital media, the associated printed book proved to be an important aspect of the installation. Peter also spoke about how important it is to include trained architects in any design process to ensure that the building and its contents are well integrated. Similarly, architects need to understand how interactivity affects everyday life and to think about the way that people will use the spaces they design. Really successful digital installations can only be built by bringing together the expertise of architects, media producers and narrative creators.

While Land Design (http://www.landdesignstudio.co.uk/) doesn't work within educational institutions and tends not to work with curriculum based formal Education (with a capital 'E'), their interactive installations are designed to engage and educate the user by playful interaction. Their interdisciplinary design processes are crucial in designing effective learning environments for the future.

Wendy Keay-Bright, Reactive Colours

Driver: End user need and iterative design

Wendy originally trained as an animator. She believes that by showing learners the production processes behind telling stories and making films, they can use those technical skills to find creative solutions. She knows by experience that even children with severe special needs enjoy engaging with a storytelling process once they are introduced to the appropriate tools.

Reactive Colours (http://www.reactivecolours.org/) are currently designing software to meet the needs of autistic learners within formal learning institutions. Anxiety is a significant barrier to learning for autistic children. They tend to find the sharing experience very difficult. They react well to digital interfaces only when they realise the interactivity is safe and controllable. An initial feasibility study showed conclusively that autistic children could benefit from customisable purpose-built software that allowed non task-based and exploratory expression. The Reactive Colours software will be the result of a long and thorough design process to answer these needs.

It aims to provide an interface to help autistic learners relax and communicate with each other, making the learning experience easier and more enjoyable for all concerned. Aimed at 4-7 year olds, it will encourage autistic children to use computers while learning to watch and share. The software will let children explore without a specific purpose, avoiding the anxiety associated with carrying out a prescribed function. The children are not taught directly by a teacher but through interaction with the software and through watching each other, a form of peer-to-peer learning. Wendy and her team worked with experts on autism, therapists, teachers, ICT advisors and with autistic children throughout the design process.

The project is about providing a structured environment that allows unstructured play. Initial teacher concern was, not surprisingly, about how this free flow activity would impact on their all important curriculum targets. Luckily, when reactivities were measured against ICT performance descriptors, teachers were satisfied and surprised that children were evidencing skills and using technology in ways no one imagined they would. Leaving a computer open on a desk and letting the children play showed that the software intrigued users so much that they were prepared to watch their peers playing with it. This was seen as a significant move towards turn taking by their teachers.

The software is open source and will allow users to customise their experience using the source code (a lot of autistic adults are involved in programming). It will also include easily customisable elements to accommodate individual needs and teaching styles. All technology-in-education designers must provide simple and intuitive interfaces if less technically literate teachers are to accept new programmes.

Zach Lieberman

Driver: “I wonder if”, a need to experiment – then taking arts into education

Unlike the previous practitioners, Zach’s work is not based around specific needs, but around experimentation and ‘what ifs’. The first work outlined started with a simple question: ‘If we could see our speech, what would it look like?’ Messa Di Voce was designed to answer this question, designed through collaboration between two interactive artists (Zach Lieberman and Golan Levin) and two vocal performers (Jaap Blonk and Joan La Barbara). The aim was to build a performance that explored speaking but without using speech. The performers had a fairly clear idea of what their sounds would look like. After a lengthy period of development the resultant performance presented the vocalists integrated into a back projected cartoon frame showing visual representations of the sounds being produced.

Zach’s working process is to guess that something might work, then produce work based on that guess. He then assesses the result of that initial process before moving on to make other guesses, eventually converging on good creative solutions through this iterative process. He designs projects through a structured process of play, by imagining a scenario and working with collaborators to achieve the realisation of this scenario. Each project evolves from or is a reaction to the last one, keeping the elements that work well and improving on those that don’t.

Recently (working with Land Design, Futurelab in Austria and NESTA), Zach had the opportunity to explore the core principals of Messa Di Voce in the classroom with profound multiple and learning disability students. The resultant project used camera-based interaction to amplify motion into visual and sonic form, helping students understand cause and effect. Students understood what was happening and were fully engaged as they leaned to use it as a performance tool.

Zach found the experience of taking the experiences gained through his arts project into the classroom satisfying. There can be no doubt that much of the research done in the information arts world could be useful in the world of education.

Fiddian Warman and Ed Burton, Soda

Driver: Design tools well and let them play!

Soda is a successful creative software company specializing in the application of digital technologies in the interrelated fields of play, learning and art. They are best known for their application sodaconstructor, which was designed 9 years ago essentially as a learning aid. Ed wanted to learn Java, he learns best through play, so he imagined a toy he would like to play with and set about learning Java to build it. The toy was a simple drawing interface where elements built into the system are controlled by physical laws, by the rules that make a spring a spring. Dots and lines on the screen acted as masses and springs when moved about, creating a strangely tactile interaction.

Sodaconstructor sat in obscurity on the soda website until, in 2000, there was a sudden unexplained explosion of traffic from a few hits a day to over 100 000. Soda quickly created sodazoo, a shared space for visitors to display their creations. A growing user community found endless ways of making these automata walk, exhibiting phenomenal levels of skill and for no other reason than to be creative. A P2P knowledge transfer process led to an organic evolution of ideas on how best to use the software. Complicated models were created through remote collaboration groups of people, a convergence of different ideas. Automata were developing that were far more complicated than Ed would have ever thought possible.

This surge of activity took place without any instruction. The community taught themselves and passed on their knowledge to others. They created their own independent sites to publish tutorials and discuss new construction methods. People were even writing new versions of the software. This was a working model where there was no need for a teacher, where a creative space and good tools were enough to satiate a successful peer-to-peer learning community. “I wanted to use this toy to make little walking automata, but soon discovered it was quite difficult. I could make little four legged walking things, but only through quite a protracted process of trial and error, an iterative process of human feedback converging on a solution.” Ed Burton Building on this potential, they were funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council to build Sodarace, where sodaconstructor models are raced over virtual terrains. Users could plug in artificial intelligences like genetic algorithms that apply a simulated version of evolution to the model. They were invited into the design process of Sodarace via a discussion forum and the structure of the competition changed according to user comments. As usual, users used Sodarace in unexpected ways. Research students designed genetic algorithms and children drew simple models and applied those algorithms to develop complex automata. This evolving project proves how much people can achieve given the freedom to play within an intriguing and well-designed framework. NESTA Learning is currently funding the next stage of work to allow users to influence and evolve the software itself. They hope this will lead to a new platform called playforge, where sodaconstructor will be one of many evolving applications, some of which would be designed by users. Users assumed different roles and interfaced with sodaconstructor in different ways. A minority of people published content in the zoo but the majority were voyeurs who came to play with the content. Soda want to make playforge sustainable as a creative community, and as such see the voyeurs are an integral part of the user group. Sodaconstructor is being widely used by teachers internationally as a visualisation tool while teaching various curriculum topics. A testament to Sodaplay's success is that it still gets several million-page impressions and around a quarter of a million users per month while many web phenomena have a short lived appeal. Soda is building on this by designing a project called sodacities to explore architecture and city planning. Starting with the target end users, they went into schools and ran workshops that asked students to draw on layers of acetate to collaboratively create cities. These physical experiments will be translated into the virtual, and they are developing a software prototype that combines the process of drawing a city with the process of drawing the concepts that underline that city. They adopt an iterative design process: making a prototype, taking it to users, asking for feedback, which is taken on board while developing the next iteration. They converge with their users by offering them a degree of authorship.

“We’d like in to see a shift in education from facts, content, testing towards the softer skills of experience, open-ended tools and functionality. We have issues with the way that curriculum supporting tomes created by monolithic publishers make it difficult for smaller people like us or collaborative communities to get this stuff through to market. We’d like to see a shift of emphasis away from quantitative assessment by pedagogues.” Fiddian Warman, Director, Soda

Paul Miller - Glasgow School of Art, Digital Design Studio

The Digital Design Studio looks at areas of innovation in society that are not being presently addressed in formal education and consider the potentials of virtual reality technologies. ‘Innovation’ covers product design, but also to the design of processes, organisations and political structures. They attempt to redress the lack of cross-curricular activity and engage in research exploring the need for a shift in education towards innovation and creativity. Their research shows that science and engineering teachers feel trapped within the lecture/tutorial/exam model and are deeply dissatisfied with the present systems. They feel that test-based education gets in the way of deep learning. Arts teaching is slowly changing, seeing smaller intensive groups learning through hands on collaborative activity. Science teachers, with the best will in the world, are finding it difficult to adopt these new techniques. Teachers also report a shift in student attitude, with students becoming more like consumers. They need to see that the lecture offers something tangible or will stay away. If they are not engaged, they simply won’t attend. If science teaching is seen as boring, students simply won’t choose those subjects. Their research has shown, sadly, that students leaving a science lab often can’t outline what they’ve just been taught. These subjects often uncontexualised, students cant visualise how to apply the new found knowledge in the real world. While art and design students can often reflect their own processes, and are allowed to work at their own speed in their own way. Science education is tied to a huge body of theory, and therefore struggles to meet the needs of increasingly sophisticated young adults with different learning processes. Arts teachers accept individual learners absorb information in different ways, some from written word, some need to work things out on paper, others through hands on interaction. These different modes of learning are just as true to science students, but options are not offered to accommodate them. The Digital Design Studio receives clear messages from industry: specialists are easy to recruit, while creative problem solvers who can grasp new things easily are hard to find. Design is no longer just about making particular tangible things for particular purposes, but is strategically important across the board. Technology companies are finding it increasingly difficult to find people who can both design and understand technology. Industry needs subject experts, but they also increasingly need generalists. To educate these generalists, the Design Studio suggests that educational establishments should teach the philosophy and history of science as well as the actual science itself. As science matures, we’ve moved from an arts/science divide to a situation where science has grown so big that there are whole scientific disciplines that don’t talk to each other and that are essentially as different from each other as from the arts. This situation is inevitable and will deepen as we accumulate more knowledge. Organisations that want to make new things, processes and products need larger and more interdisciplinary teams. The ability to work in an interdisciplinary team is something that has to start at school, yet the truth is that teachers who choose to work in an interdisciplinary way have to work twice as hard, because they’re often running against the main grain of the institution. Technology on its own is merely a tool. Teachers often have years of invaluable experience. It is the combination of these skills with the powers of technology that has massive potential for real change in education.

Structured Knowledge Sharing Activity

The afternoon session aimed to explore ways technology could be used in innovative ways to bridge the divide between disciplines and the chasms between lessons and real life. The intention was to identify some of the stumbling blocks to integrating technology into educational environments and to think about ways of filling some of the gaps in today’s schooling system. Separating the participants into small groups encouraged individuals to get a feeling for other people’s drivers and to share their own areas of expertise. Crucially, participants were brought into contact with people working in different disciplines in order to broaden their understanding of the topic as a whole.

Prompt cards were distributed randomly to participants, each showing a technology (PC, newspaper, radio, PVR, robot…) or a use for those technologies (peer-to-peer file sharing, instant messaging, email, performance…). Groups were asked to use the cards as prompts while collaboratively imagining how connected technologies could enhance the learning experience. They were asked to discuss examples of how the technologies have been used in other spheres (arts/industry) and to develop an educational model referencing these works. They were asked to elect a specific target group and think about how those users would benefit. They were also asked to consider who should be responsible for commissioning projects in this innovative space and what the barriers for implementation might be. Each group was given an hour to brainstorm before the idea was pitched back to the complete group for feedback and questions. A token prize was offered for the most idea most popular with the group.

Both the discussions and the final pitches are archived below in an attempt to present a clear overview of topics covered and the creative process.

Group 1

Andrew Burn, Ed Burton, Ju Row Farr, Darren Garret, Peter Higgins, Wendy Keay-Bright, Will Pearson

The group’s discussion focused primarily on the relative importance of formal output-based education versus the learned ability to feel connected through effective communication with local communities.

Tools like IMS, SMS, MMS are empowering in that they allow easy communicate from anywhere at anytime, but are these same tools leading to a demise in youth literacy? Various views were expressed on whether standards are actually falling, or whether this is view is purely a media-driven illusion to mask rising educational achievement.

The group looked at the redefinition of literacy in a world with scaffolding tools; predictive text and spell check. When long awaited effective voice activation software finally arrives, will traditional concepts of literacy (spelling, grammatical correctness) become less important or even redundant over time?

New shared languages are being developed which are substantially different to the English that we grew up with. Is this a creative social innovation or a potential threat to literacy levels? 45% of 9 to 19 year olds in the UK regularly use instant massaging, a form of communication that prioritises speed and understanding over spelling or grammar. In this rapid context, Standard English would seem overlong and incongruous.

There is a tension between academic achievement and the ability to communicate and be creative. If children in today’s quick-fire mediascape aren’t fired up by learning to read and write in Standard English, does that mean their grasp of language and communication skills are better or worse? It was suggested that there should be a significantly longer focus on creative thinking and doing before young people are pushed into the formal world of qualifications.

The group agreed that a clear understand of target audience is crucial in the design of technological/ educational interventions, and that time for play should bean integral part of the design process. ‘Tribes’ (virtual communities based on shared likes and dislikes) was one of the group’s prompt cards. They thought that tribes are generally seeded around play themes before any ‘formal’ projects’ are embarked on They briefly touched on knowledge sharing through wikis, then considered the skill levels required to start using a wiki creatively and collaboratively, and on the relative merits of a rapid idea creation versus a slow evolution of ideas.

The group discussed the relative importance of knowledge gained through formal learning systems and the skills picked up outside the school environment with family, community and peers. If the latter is more important, could formal learning systems be made more relevant to the contemporary world by converging the Educational and educational systems in structured models. Ju Row Farr’s work with her arts community, Blast Theory, explores the relationship between the real and virtual and questions the realities of a fractured society. Blast Theory works like Can You See me Now? and Uncle Roy all Around You create genuine and nuanced online relationships between player and performer. Their projects explore emotional nature of virtual spaces, so often seen as unemotional or threatening places.

Ju talked about two different communities groups who question their place in society for two very different reasons. The first, disenfranchised teenagers, often find them selves with nowhere to go and feeling alienated from society. Their energy and rebelliousness is at best tolerated and at worst despised by the wider community. The second user group were those approaching retirement, concerned that their clearly defined role in the community will soon disappear, yet are brimming with a wealth of life experience. This experience could be an invaluable resource for both groups if delivered through effective knowledge transfer structures.

They set about thinking of how to design a project to enable these two groups to make constructive contact and begin to rebuild a cohesive community. Disenfranchised teenagers are expected to make one of their most important life decisions at this stage in their education: which career path do they want to follow? Hormonal and confused by a world apparently in turmoil, this is a difficult decision to make. They have little understanding of what it’s like to work in any given industry and have no clear idea of where their decisions might lead. Traditionally, career planning is detached from real world stories. In the networked world, connections could easily be built between schools and individuals with a wealth of real world experience.

The group felt there are problems with currently available careers guidance. Students, uninformed and unused to considered decision-making processes, are expected to label themselves through choices of GCSE and A level subjects. They wanted to provide an innovative way for young people to imagine themselves in different roles and consider where their decisions might lead. They felt a wiki-based project might enable this.

The group wanted to design a structure to connect teenagers and older people in a meaningful, creative and constructive way. The project would aim to educate students, careers teachers and the retired people involved. Each group would gain insight into the other’s reality, promoting intergenerational understanding across communities. The languages, models and technologies used would need to be easy to use for both groups. The group discussed a possible place for fantasy and a quest structure as a way of drawing young people into the project. They also considered avatars might act as useful mentors, and that this might sit well alongside a wiki structure.

One suggestion was for each school to identify a local influential person (either in the community or within the school) and build up a picture of their life online and through interviews. An online persistent world would provide a space to be fed by members of both user groups who would gradually start to form a single tribe-like group. The virtual world would contextualise career decisions by learning from real people with real stories. Teenagers would be able to ask older participants about their memories of the central character. Peter Higgins talked about turning this content into a local site specific installation for the rest of the community to learn from and enjoy, inviting the wider community to contribute to the unfolding story. The project would raise questions about how to judge whether someone is worth trusting and listening to.

The group agreed it is time to move away from top-down media projects, and to move away from policing of content and mediated approaches. Communities can mediate themselves if they are trusted to do so. They felt that the project might fail if created and delivered by authority figures, given that there is already mistrust around formal careers service. It might be appropriate to provide trade-offs for student participation, such as deals for students to have days off school/curriculum to do the work. The process would need to be democratic, and participants would need to fully buy into the project before meaningful wiki-based content could be created.

The Pitch

“We narrowed down out cards to Tribes, DVDs and Wikis, with wikis as the clear focus. Wikis are democratic collections of information, and we attempted to define a social and educational need that they could respond to.

We thought about the whole process of life choices and decision making in schools. We wanted to replace the usual guesswork around imagining what your life will be like in the future by having an enormous resource based around different professions and different life choices. The resource would be fed by local communities and be accessed by kids in schools. Various activities would result in the kids making physical contact with individuals featured in the resource and making a media production collection of those person’s life choices as a DVD.

This kind of activity could be used to replace career lessons, a democratic system focusing on real stories by real people. The resource would be exhaustive and generous and rich, rather than narrow and thin. It would marry up kids’ fantasy choices of an ideal future with real choices that real people have made and their evaluation of those choices with the benefit of hindsight. The chosen technologies would make this possible.

The project might be funded by the DTI and NESTA and might address questions about how to build a closer and more sustainable community by bringing old people and teenagers together in a structured environment and showing the kids that there is something to learn from other people’s experiences.”

Group 2

Tim Diggins, David Docherty, Justin Hewelt, Katz Kiely, Stuart Nolan

This group started with a set of prompt cards which included 30-second TV advert, user generated content, PVRs, 3D visualisation, cards, mobile phone, voicemail and website. The early part of their discussion focused on persistent worlds and possible educational applications of simulated environments. The group considered the possibility of creating a blank canvas to allow students to relive history, perhaps looking at cause and effect by experimenting with what might have happened if any particular event hadn’t happened.

There is no doubt that children enjoy Microsoft’s Age of Empires, a strategy game where players build their own tribes and grand civilisations. The group considered creating an equivalent focusing on curriculum topics. David Docherty stated his irritation at the shortcuts provided by cheats. Players can bypass the need to send their avatars out to work by typing in a simple cheat code, which renders them $1 million richer. The group agreed that any multiplayer online world developed for use in the educational sector should avoid these cheat options, since children need to learn to take responsibility for their actions and understand the laws of cause and effects. Real life seldom offers an easy way out, and snap decisions often lead to far reaching consequences.

The potential of wikis for collaborative writing project was discussed and the issue of mediated raised. Wikis could provide a space where children could write more honestly behind the anonymity of an avatar. The group agreed that any such system would need to be well constructed to hold the interest of the target audience.

Stuart Nolan brought up Perplex City, an email and card based puzzle game where solving mysteries will lead one committed individual to a pot of gold. Though the basic puzzles on the cards are age old, the game is made absorbing by skinning them in a 21st century cartoon world. Some of the cards are more rare than others and unique codes can be gained by solving puzzles. The educational potential of limiting resources in this way is yet untapped.

Vlogs were also discussed. The Carol and Steve show is a real reality show, where an ordinary couple regularly post short Vlogs onto their site, each showing them performing mundane tasks; (eating breakfast, cleaning out the fridge). Viewed together they offer a portal into another way of life, a different culture. This concept could be used to provide school children across the country or across the globe with a shared bank of shared snippets. A student making a 30 second clip on any subject would be far more likely to understand and remember the facts.

The group considered a project based around 30 second mini films on historical events, each as gruesome as their creators choose, but the students would gain a firm grip on the facts behind their chosen topic. The project would be a competition and a dedicated website would house the user generated content. The first year would invite a number of forward-thinking schools in a proof of concept before expanding the participants in later years. Clips could be entered at any time, allowing schools to fit the project into their crammed timetable. The group felt strongly that users should be empowered rather than having rules imposed on them. The project should be design to allow the community themselves to vote for their own rules and that a voting system would enable the best clips to rise to the top of a chart.

Learners could work in the medium of their choice (animation, machinema, video…) and in any style (comedy, horror, romance…). A voting system would encourage users to check out other entries, picking up historical knowledge snippets along the way. The whole project would act as a kind of user-generated Bitesize, allowing students to download each other’s 30-second history snippets and use them to revise. The project would provide a lasting resource for future years, tools to introduce a subject in an engaging way and in the students’ own language. The same concept could be used within any curriculum subject and the website (grouped by easily searchable topic) would become increasingly useful as the years wore on.

Students would explore the creation of films (screen writing, acting, camera work, editing) as well as finding out about history through self-motivated research. As an interdisciplinary subject, who would be responsible for it? IT teacher, history teacher, drama teacher? How could this cross-curricular activity work in today’s rigidly timetabled schooling environments? The head would have to take the lead and provide a more open structure that allowed collaboration.

The group considered various financing options including the BBC (perhaps as a partner to Bitesize) or through commercial sponsorship. They eventually settled on a public/ private match concept. The site would be hosted and maintained with government funds. The marketing and branding would be provided by a commercial sponsor (potentially someone like PSP). The possibility of feeding the best of the shorts into a TV show was also considered

Stuart Nolan mentioned that he believed head teachers often are the main barriers to innovation due to the output driven nature of the present schooling systems. Teachers are already under massive pressure to deliver curricular activity and have to be given clear reasons to take on new projects

The pitch

User Generated Bitesize

“We all felt user-generated content was very important so we spent some time talking about wikis and the use of wikis in shared discussions. We moved on to look at the idea of something more complicated than a wiki: a historically based persistent world. It would be an Age of Empires project for the curriculum and would generate alternative history lines. We wanted the users to be able to judge each other’s work. We felt it important to leave that kind of judgment to the people making these worlds.

Looking at our 3D visualisation card we thought about machinema. We’re interested in the way that young people are using that and in mobile phones as another way of making mobile content. Justin brought up horrid histories, and since we were on the topic of history we came up with the idea of producing a 30 second TV ad for an event in history. How could you take something from history and convince everybody else that it’s actually really exciting? That idea moved forward into a competition around making 30 second pieces of content based on specific moments in history. The pieces would be user generated, and you could make them using mobile phones cameras or machinema. There would be a website based on a timeline so that you can browse through other people’s entries.

We thought hard about how the competition could be judged. How do you run a competition that’s fair? How do you have not just user generated content but user generated rules and user generated judgement for a persistent world? We wanted the judging to be review based so that people can take it upon themselves to give out the awards. Perhaps you’d need to be seen as a good award winner before your awards had value.

There would be another mode to the project. The permanent record on the website could be used a teaching resource in future years to pull people in to curriculum topics. You could use the best 30-second pieces as an introduction to your next topic. If you were about to launch into the gunpowder plot you would introduce it using content from the website, and then by the end of the topic the student’s would be in a position to make their own 30 second short. The record would be self-sustaining.

The major barriers would be around which teachers would support the students to make the shorts and how this activity would fit into their already overloaded schedules.

The permanent record would be funded by the Government, but given that the Government has a very poor record of inserting new strategies into schools, why not bring a heavy brand name to push the promotional packs? Brands like PSP could be somehow involved in the promotion of the project.”

Emma Williams: Which themes would this cover?

Tim Diggins: The project could cover any part of curriculum history. You would be able to attach nodes within a timeline or a browsable space. Kids can then go back and look at it, showing off their own film and browsing through others from the same period. It’s all about having an immersive educational space around that area of history.

Ju Row Farr: I’m interested in the whole notion of interdisciplinary teaching. How do you make that work? How do you do projects across disciplines and how do you get schools to collaborate with each other? How do you make it fit with their curriculum and timescales?

Stuart Nolan: The CAPE project is a good example. It was originally “Chicago Artists Practise in Education”. The idea is that you take an artist to work in a school but instead of working in an arts department they work with other departments. If it’s an artist who works with history a lot then they might work in the history department. Some of those have been really good because it forces that sort of interdisciplinary interaction almost without trying.

Wendy Keay-Bright: I worked on an integrated studies project trying to set up foundations in the UK. It’s really difficult, especially with a subject like environment which is important and hugely interesting to young people. We tried to make the lessons relevant to science, maths and other subjects, but finding space in the tight curriculum was extremely difficult. The project was successful but trying to get any cross-curricular project off the ground is very difficult.

Chris Yapp: There’s a need to create new models over the next two to three years to make extended schools work. We’ve been talking about these kinds of projects and there is space in these schools when teachers aren’t teaching in traditional ways. There is potential to fill these spaces with other models. Some of those may be historical models rather than future ones.

Matt Gould: It seems to me that the best learning brings in real world contextualised learning. Why shouldn’t the curriculum area define why it should have the time within the teaching area? These projects have got something to do with the real world, bringing teaching alive with real issues. It seems a long way off before we can genuinely engage with those in power to make learning really exciting and convince them that this is really essential rather than additional.

Group 3

Karen Chilton, Paul Coombs, David Squire, Fiddian Warman, and Emma Williams

This group focused on the podcasting and SMS prompt cards as the basis for their discussion. Podcasting is a fast emerging phenomenon. The BBC intends to roll out podcasting of its services extensively, so the trend is expected to grow over the coming years. iPods have changed the way people listen to music, and are now being used to download topical spoken content. New licensing laws for podcasting are currently in development. Based on an assumption that 28% of 16-24 year olds have MP3 players, podcasting is potentially a great way to reach young people.

The group felt that teenagers feel largely disconnected from politics and have few avenues to express their opinions. Group 3 wanted to conceive an idea to address this issue. Given that teenagers like to moan, a service that encourages them to voice their concerns and opinions might serve as a gentle introduction into politics. To engage the audience they felt it would be important to present the project as non-curricular activity rather than teacher led Education with a capital ‘E’. The project should not be associated with formal Personal, Health and Social Education, and instead needs to be seen as cool and as belonging to the participants. The point is that young people don’t learn by being told things but by being allowed to experience them first hand and by hearing their peers’ perspectives on life.

Emma Williams felt that the public sector might be interested in funding a user-generated content project as a way to introduce this age range to politics or as a route for promoting government or public health initiatives aimed at this hard to reach group. David Squire illustrated this ‘advertising route’ aspect by discussing Galaxy FM, a radio station aimed at a very specific target audience (14-20). This provides an ideal route for public information services to reach this hard to reach demographic, and every other advert is for contraceptives and safe sex. Similarly, by building up a loyal user-group, this project could cultivate a useful communication channels by which to send public information to the user group. This communication route could work both ways, providing a perfect opportunity for governmental bodies to stay aware of what young people opinions on specific issues.

The vast majority of their target user group own and are in constant communication via mobile phones. The group felt this would be the most obvious way of collecting their freeform self-moderated rants. They felt strongly that the project should not be influenced by adult categories but should be built by the user group for the user group. Users need to be able to set up their own metadata and tags in something that feels like their own world.

There can be no question that these kinds of projects would be popular with the target group. They have already been tested in the commercial arena. Clash of the MCs, for example, was a competition run by Drum and Bass Arena and delivered by Arts Empire Industries. Budding MCs could ring a premium rate number to record their ‘chats’, which were automatically uploaded to a site. Other members of the community could download, listen to and rate user entries. Users could also register to receive top 10 ‘chat’ updates on their mobiles and updates on chart positions. The competition ran over a 6-week period with little or no marketing, yet 300 young people contributed content to the site and over 5000 users rated the content contributed by others.

Group 3 initially envisaged the project running on a national scale, then considered a local context by providing connections with local government and enabling them to identify key issues for young people. On either scale it would create an opportunity for teenagers to feel engaged, to learn and to share opinions with each other. It would also allow the Government to gain insight into their priorities and agendas in order to begin to address them.

Audio rants would be uploaded onto a site where other users could peer review and vote via SMS. The group felt that, although this would doubtlessly lead to an initial period of swear rants, users would soon start to talk about things which are important to them. Initially, this may be football and pop music, but the anonymity of the communication through this system may enable people to talk about issues they would normally feel uncomfortable to raise, introducing politics with a small ‘p’ into the discussion. Young people have strong opinions on war, terrorism, and other global issues. This rant service would offer a channel to voice those concerns. The model would also encourage creative forms of expression like rapping, depending on how the community chose to use the site.

Voting for one another’s rants would give the community the opportunity to bring the most important to the top of the ranking and to other people’s attention. The best could possibly be aired in regular chart sessions on local or national radio. Feeding the communities opinions back to peers over the airwaves would offer another level of “ getting their voice heard” and competition, and encourage more users to participate.

Mediation issues were discussed. The group felt that if the swear ranting continued, intervention might have to be made, but also felt that community moderation is more effective than often assumed, and that fear of losing the service may be enough to guarantee effective community moderation. They cited Wikipedia (a massive user-generated encyclopaedia project) as an example. This massive global community establishes their own ground rules and disallows entry to users who flout those rules. Self-moderation is a strong force if the community feels ownership and understands the worth of the service

The Pitch

Bitch Cast

“Bitch Cast is a synthesis of Why Don’t You? and podcasting aimed at 14-16 year olds though it could work equally well for 11-18 year olds. It addresses curricular needs around citizenship and PHSE, in particular dealing with identity, politics, engagement, voting and sense of community. The project is education with a small ‘e’ designed to be delivered outside the school context.

Essentially it uses podcasting to get kids to produce rants, which are then uploaded and distributed to people’s MP3 players or MP3 playing phones. They can then text back a response. There might be links in the rants saying ‘if you really like this text xyz to 1234’ and that feeds into an automated rating system. The idea is that our community would generate their own categorisation system. They might design their own emoticons in order to rate the rant. The best ranters would rise to the top of the charts and become celebrity ranters.

These star rants could be presented on radio. We thought local radio would be particularly interesting for local interest rants. Groups in schools could work together in order to vote on a specific day and put their star school ranter up to the top of the chart so that they get to go on local radio. That brings in a collaborative element. The top ranter would get to choose a prompt topic for the next week, and would have real clout in the community.

The service wouldn’t be expensive to run since the content would be user-generated. The main costs would be around site build, servers and bandwidth. We could syndicate it to local radio and they might pay a small amount for it. Advertising could be clearly targeted towards the user group, and we might also charge users to text.

Getting critical mass would present serious potential problems. If there aren’t a lot of people generating these rants it won’t be terribly exciting! There would also be issues around getting how to categorize the rants so that what they say has context and relevance. It’s a matter of trying to get kids interested in politics by allowing them to address issues in a fun and tribal way. It’s about relationships and peer learning and giving them a way of commenting on their lives and hearing other people’s experiences. The chance to be anonymous gives kids a chance to be more honest about their issues because they can be anonymous, hide behind a mask.

This is not a big ‘E’ Education project, this is extra-curricular. It’s an attempt to move away from handholding citizenship lessons where everything is censored. Wikipedia shows that self-moderation can work. If there were any hint of PSHE and teachers, the users would run a mile. This has to be seen as a fun activity by and for the user community. If we want kids to buy into these kind of schemes we’ve got to use their language and their style.”

Group 4

Bill Best, Matt Gould, Paul Miller, Jo Morrison, Chris Yapp

Issues covered by the group included the idea that children are natural philosophers that it is important to change the way that teachers teach, that learning is most effective in an organic iterative space and that these factors should be embedded in approaches to teaching and learning. The group questioned whether new technologies in the educational space are still emerging rather than converging.

The new generation of learners have access to a myriad of information sources through the web and are no longer tied to one teacher with necessarily limited knowledge. Interdisciplinary activity is important if subjects are to be contextualised and become relevant to these learners. It is also important to look at peer-to-peer knowledge transfer rather than focusing solely on teacher-student interaction.

Jo Morrison talked about a learning project that NESTA Futurelab recently worked on with the National Space Centre. The children involved had to pretend they were mission control and guide a stranded astronaut back to earth. The environment was deliberately open-ended and immersive. On one particular occasion, learners were fully engaged in the project until the broadband connection failed. Rather than this spoiling the experience, the kids continued to role-play and accepted the technological failure as yet another challenge. This story highlighted the limitations of technology, and the group therefore felt they did not want their project to be technology led or dependant. Analogue and digital should both be important. Technology should merely support a situation where the learner is encouraged to use their own imagination and to communicate with each other in order to learn.

The group felt their project should be interdisciplinary and not necessarily classroom based. Communications technologies would allow a project to work between different schools, with the groups of pupils deciding whether to be rivals or co-operate and then observing how those decisions affect the situation and outcomes.

The group looked at the importance of dialogue with the real-world agencies to ensure that any role-play activity was convincing and authentic. In the past, schools would invite a police officer into the classroom to talk about his or her work. Connectivity enables this concept to be brought into the digital age by allowing real-time real-life contact as the scenario unfolds to check what would actually happen.

Chris Yapp felt that this digital role-play concept could be applied effectively to moral questions in PHSE lessons and discussion extended between schools using available communication technologies. The project should have no right or wrong answer, but should inspire an open-ended immersive environment to encourage teenagers to explore difficult issues. By doing so, it would also allow them to explore media literacy.

The group were keen on using their ‘blog’ card in some way. Chris asked, “If Einstein had published his theory of relativity as a blog, would that have made it more or less credible?” The group considered blogging to be a young communication channel with a general lack of credibility. There was a general consensus that the medium still has some way to go to before it becomes as credible as other more established media. Blogging, they said, is seen as subjective, which led to discussions on whether any media is truly objective.

The group felt that blogs could be a useful and simple student record for as they move through an emerging scenario. Their journeys could be archived and reviewed by other students in future years as inspiration for their own explorations.

The Pitch

iPlod

“The cards we started from were PC, Blogs, TV, Radio and Mobile TV. We were slightly put out by the fact that we were being guided by technology. We felt that meaningful consultation starts from a need, and that perhaps this was putting the cart before the horse. The need that we wanted to address was the absence of a sense of community between teachers and pupils.

There are some interesting combinations in our cards. We had PC blogs together with mobile TV and radio. That led us to iPlod: a new imaginative immersive learning opportunity where a school or a number of schools are divided into class-size units and take on different roles. One group might be a faction of the television industry, another one might be a right wing newspaper, and another one could be a left wing newspaper. You might also include public services like the police force or health service.

What happens is that these kids get real-world situations thrown at them through technologies like big screens, video diaries, Bluetooth and so on. They have to work in their roles to tackle those situations, which might be a natural disaster or a major terrorist attack. These are real issues that they are engaging with in their own time. By bringing then into the classroom we are introducing real world learning that they are genuinely interested in and has real importance to them. It also gives the public service agencies an opportunity to genuinely engage with young people about these issues and find out what they think, and where they think services like the police force are going wrong.

Young people would learn about the realities that the services have to deal with when they are faced with these natural disasters, and could decide how they would do things differently. It’s about citizenship and PHSE, but we don’t necessarily want to force it into a curriculum slot. This project should work in a cross curricular way.

It may be that technology doesn’t have a role in this project. If public service agencies want to use technologies and if there is a genuine need for it then they should be encouraged and be trained how to employ it. Technology should only be used as and when necessary to answer need.”

Will Pearson: What do you think about the exposure of kids to these terrible situations, terrorism and these horrific natural disasters? I find it difficult to know what to say to them.

Matt Gould: Sims might be an interesting way of exploring these situations. The fact is that even young children are seeing this stuff anyway. We’re being slightly naïve to think that because we don’t choose to engage them in talking about these events that they aren’t aware of them. You’ve got to be realistic.

We spent a lot of time debating the relationships within a group of learners and what happens when a group of young people collaborate. Some have the verbal skills to articulate a problem or an answer whereas others may be less inclined to come forward. The point is that by engaging young people in groups they will have an opportunity to do some of that negotiating for themselves. Perhaps that will give them an opportunity to get their head around something that might be dealt with better by interacting with their peers than by talking to a teacher or an adult. That kind of interaction should be encouraged.”

Chris Yapp: Kids are doing all these different subjects that aren’t joined up. If you put them into a simulation when someone texts you in Spanish and you can’t help them, you suddenly realise that a foreign language could be useful. We’re providing justifications for complaints like “I’m not interested in that, why would I want to do that?” You’re showing them why in the real world a broad base of skills is actually quite important. You could build up a module strand around ethics: is it right to loot and riot to get food and water for a baby? You can build a system which lets you add stuff to it and build situations around it and which provides a justification for taking on board a broad knowledge base.

Conclusion

Technology is advancing rapidly, connectivity continues to improve and access to a boundless wealth of information is only a click away. There has been a major shift in the way that young people interact with media over the last few years and their culture has changed correspondingly. When they want to figure something out, they are more likely to consult Google than the classroom sage. Search engines offer a choice of facts relating to their query; the boundaries of the knowledge offered are blurred and made relevant through association with other topics. Kids like to manage multiple layers of information and communication simultaneously and expect to be able to personalise them to their own needs. They become frustrated and bored when limited to passive learning experiences. If the educational system continues to ignore rather than embrace these cultural shifts, it will become increasingly irrelevant to learners.

Keeping up with this increasingly sophisticated younger generation is no mean feat, and current educational structures make it more difficult to address. The web offers a virtually unlimited store of knowledge, and makes the current exam based school system, based on storing and regurgitating information on command, outmoded. We thought it more useful to teach young people how to navigate, record and evaluate information in an intelligent and informed way.

Industry is crying out for generalists, for collaboranauts; people who can learn quickly and who can collaborate and communicate across disciplines. In today’s economy, creative thinking, capacity for innovation and ability to deliver innovative product in shorter timescales than ever before is crucially important. There was an overwhelming consensus that the present curriculum and the rigid barriers between subjects do not prepare young people for this changing landscape.

Technology is no more than a means to an end and can be frustrating and disruptive if delivered through badly designed projects. Many of the e-learning products currently found in schools are tragically poor reflections of non-learning interactions. It is important that projects are designed through an iterative process with target users consulted at all stages of the design process if they are to engage the target groups. E-learning companies could learn from practitioners in the commercial and creative sectors of new media, who know how to make content sticky and addictive. We only have to look at what kids choose to do in their spare time to imagine what kind of educational models would engage them. Commissioners could do worse than approaching digital artists, games producers and creative technologists to address these challenges in relevant ways.

Role playing games, for example, are popular with young gamers, and could be used effectively as learning vehicles, challenging young people to consider action and reaction and showing how knowledge that seems irrelevant in their day to day life may be essential in other real world scenarios, reinforcing the necessity of a broad knowledge base.

The learning day itself brought together a number of experts from different sectors, showing that even a short period of concentrated creative activity with the right participants can generate a wealth of useful ideas. One of the key issues raised during the workshop was the necessity of developing interdisciplinary projects to embed learning in reality and break down the unnatural boundaries between subjects. Developing effective inter-disciplinary projects necessarily involves collaboration between individuals with different but complementary skills. Cross-disciplinary activity is challenging, but leads to challenging work and deep learning.

The depth and breadth of ideas generated during the learning day suggests that commissioning processes could benefit from similar activity, with greater emphasis on ideas contextualised within the realities of the marketplace, the educational sector and the user group. Just as effective learning experiences need to be embedded in the real world, design processes could be enhanced by building connections with target audiences and potential partners from day one.

As part of a structured commissioning process, workshops would connect creative SMEs with potential delivery partners, from public funding bodies to major broadcasters and potential commercial sponsors. Potential user groups might also be invited to offer feedback on how pitched project ideas could be improved. Pulling these disparate groups together to develop innovative ideas would ensure that projects seeded at the workshops are grounded in a real world context and have clear development routes. They would also extend and consolidate professional networks, leading to potential interdisciplinary collaborations between participants.

The brainstorming process during the NESTA learning day invited participants to explore the realms of how emerging communications technologies could be used in the field of learning. Having learned from this experience, the sessions outlined above would generate seed ideas for products with stakeholders and potential delivery partners involved from project conception. Ideas conceived through this programme could be developed into project outlines closely tailored to commissioners’ aims and objectives.

NESTA Learning day activity included presentations aimed at outlining the range of learning activity currently supported by NESTA, and a short brainstorming session designed to generate brief pitches for educational projects. Groups were invited to establish their own target user group, but all chose to design for secondary school age learners. The groups were given the freedom to design projects that worked either inside or outside the formal learning school structure, yet most groups chose to explore how school learning could be enhanced and made more relevant. Many of the projects outlined at the workshop were not output driven, but rather encouraged creative thinking and offered immersion, engagement, exploration, sharing and collaboration. They offered quick sketches of how emerging technologies could be used to enhance learning experiences. Many of the projects outlined involved a high level of user-generated content and peer review.

All of the projects pitched spilled across subjects and would not fit comfortably into the present school systems. The group felt strongly that cross-disciplinary activity is important if subjects are to be contextualised and made relevant to learners. This kind of activity is difficult to achieve in the rigidly timetabled and league table driven school environments of today. As an example, ICT may appear to be dull, and girls especially tend to drop out early in their schooling. If it were introduced as an integral part of a bigger, more exciting creative project, it might appear more attractive. Projects like User Generated Bitesize would address this challenge, linking history, IT and drama, but would be near impossible to introduce into the current educational regime. Major changes would have to be implemented to allow for the effective delivery of interdisciplinary projects.

Most of the groups felt that the target group had a deep distrust of authority, and felt that external mediation would mean the kiss of death for the projects pitched. If the user group is to feel ownership and buy into the projects, the rules, categories and mediation should be left to the users themselves. Though there is proof that communities are more than capable of mediating themselves if trusted to do so, all the groups felt that it would be difficult to get potentially risky projects commissioned by risk averse public bodies. All felt that a culture of trust might lead to more considered and responsible behaviour by the target group.

Soda have shown with Sodaconstructor (http://www.sodaplay.com/constructor/) that kids are happy to learn even in their spare time if the tools provided are interesting enough. Users may not realise that they are learning simple laws of physics; they explore and absorb facts without realising it, and develop programming skills in the process. This is learning presented as play, education by stealth. If this kind of educational activity is to be more widely adopted, new criteria will have to be designed to assess the softer experiential skills gained through these more open-ended tools and interdisciplinary models. It seems likely that pioneering companies like Desq., Soda, Littleloud and Land Design who have long explored the realms between play and learning may soon come into their own.

Only a small proportion of learning is done within school walls. Some might say that our most important learning is done outside the school environment, with peers, family and with the wider community. We learn through experience, absorbing and exploring reality through our day-to-day interactions. All agreed that the best learning experiences involve real world contextualisation and many of the projects pitched involved real world links to out of school communities. Remote collaboration with other schools, communities, cultures and nations is now possible and relatively easy to manage. Much of the discussion concentrated on how communications technologies could be used to address fractured communities, enabling disconnected groups to make constructive contact and begin to rebuild a cohesive community.

If the educational system is to remain relevant to the increasingly sophisticated youth of today, learning has to be presented as essential rather than additional. This kind of connected and interdisciplinary project could help in some way to achieve this aim. Without the full support of strategic bodies on the highest level and that of head teachers on a local level, these possibilities cannot be adopted by the educational system. Similarly, these new pedagogies must be introduced from the earliest stages of teacher development.

The journey to introduce technology and interdisciplinary projects into schools will be difficult and will inevitably involve successes and failures. It is crucial that NESTA and other educational bodies support risky projects that push boundaries and test the possible and the development of such pioneering projects must be contextualised. Educational establishments need space within their structures and timetables to deliver such cross-disciplinary learning. NESTA and other bodies must continue to work at the highest strategic level to ensure that structural changes are implemented to allow schools the freedom to deliver such pioneering projects.