City Learning Centres: DfES managers' conference
I promised a quick summary of the points I addressed, after I'd spoken.
Now that I know what I've said(!), I can write that summary and this is it - you have my email I think.
Firstly I suggested that technological change is accelerating. Your phone is becoming your media player (MP3, video, etc), camera (video and still), organiser, locator, recorder, games device, phone, TXT device, browser, etc., etc. At the same time, the box-that-was-once-your-TV is becoming another place where you interact with, select, store and annotate video and audio. In the middle the PDA is not going to survive (indeed is vanishing already), but the computer may be squeezed too. Are this year's primary intake the first post-PC generation? I think so.
In the keynote I contrasted a (7 year old's) clay animation from 1993 with one from 2004 and reflected on how criterion referencing might seem to offer a "prison" that would seem to be a barrier to such progress. I offered the analogy of an American football team where you are the burly bunch who rush ahead of the ball carrier knocking down all obstructions!. What are the obstructions? In answer to that later question I suggested that although assessment, school organisation, etc etc seem like barriers the BIGGEST may prove to be the way we cap our ambition for how well learners might progress...
Then an analogy about railways! A host of institutions that were provided and resourced at a national level have, over the years, found that, once technology allowed alternatives, that individual or community choice eventually came to replaced their national provision with an alternative more closely tailored to the individual and diverse needs of their formerly loyal clientele. Libraries, the railways, increasingly the Post Office, perhaps BT all offer worrying examples through history:
The railway network, which was unified and standardised in the name of efficiency, thought it knew both what journeys people wanted to make and the destinations that they needed. In practice new technology, specifically increasingly efficient and affordable motor cars, gave people an alternative which not only met the needs of travellers better, but also allowed them to define new and exciting behaviours for their travel and leisure that could not have been supported by a rail network. Today many families and individuals arrange their transport through a mix of personal provision and small group arrangements (the "school run" shared car for example) and railways have become largely irrelevant for all but those with no viable alternative (for example commuters) who place a capacity burden on the network that hurts rather than helps.
At this stage it is clear that schools themselves do not have an automatic right to survive... Significant numbers of children have very poor experiences in schools - bullying, lack of ambition, over regulation, more failure than success, lack (and closure) of a local rural schools (c.f. Beeching?!), even toilets contribute to a less than seductive learning experience. New technology is beginning to offer some powerful alternatives - over one million children are now home educated in the US for example.
Whether those school alternatives come from individuals building their own provision, or from solutions in the viral, peer to peer kind of way that we have seen technology enable elsewhere, or whether this is the beginning of a commoditisation of learning, schools' survival at this stage is far from certain. Hence the need for CLCs to, above all, explore and legitimise alternatives and to work in that space between denial (it can't be like that...") and legislation (it must be like this...") that has proved to be so fruitful in making change happen. You have the freedom, must defend it (e.g. against being forced to take the LEA's ICT service provision) and need a better community structure (e.g. Talking Heads) and arguably a framework of professional accreditation and development too. That will need facilitation and resources.
I illustrated some radical looks at the design of the learning institution, or learning environment. A good reference for this work is a research project I completed for CABE/RIBA (http://rubble.ultralab.net/cabe) answering the questions: "what does pedagogy look like in the future?... are we building the right structures to house it now?". This morning we looked at Unlimited in NZ, at some phone camera images of the Ingenium project in Richmond on Thames and at a makeover for TV of 4 Dwellings School in Birmingham with some simple but effective ideas in it.
Then, in exploring The Future a little we ranged (rather eclectically I'm afraid) from the SMS service at Cowes for yacht races, through sociometric diagrams of face to face seminars and staff meetings, (the work of Stan Owers by the way) a phone based assessment initiative with QCA (eVIVA) and some other thoughts. Finally exploring the notion of community a little I hoped that you would all see that the internal e xpertise of the CLC community was a hugely valuable resource and in a world of user-generated-content there was enormous value to be had from a really strong community, on-line, that joined you all up. We looked at the example of Talking Heads - in the video clip all the heads referred to the value of their community as an asset.
I spoke a little more of the mismatch between the peer-to-peer world of mutual support and exchange that the under 30s are in with the formal "centralised" "controlled" model of the curriculum. That gap should be a real concern. We glanced at Notschool.net's private website front page - designed by its learners and indicative of the complex network of a peer to peer world - the icons here represent various Notschool sub communities and debates.
A final (before your questions) image shown was of a dismayingly poor fringe Saharan village in Tunisia - no Internet, no computers, but a mass of powered satellite dishes and a population who knew a cool phone (Sony Ericsson K700i) when they saw one. Makes you think....
I was delighted to see you CLC lot, and to see you all on such good form, with such confidence. I hope you will all think hard about how to cement your community of practice and to share, exchange, exhibit, the wisdoms and action research that it holds.
This page created by Prof Stephen Heppell on Tuesday, January 11, 2005, 12.10 PM
last updated on Tuesday, January 11, 2005 3:54 PM©SJH 2005
