|
|
Workshop B
|
|
Workshop A |
Workshop B |
Workshop C |
Workshop D
Workshop B - Session 1 - Questions and Contributions
Q. (Nigel Payne, Chief Executive of Scottish Council for Education and Technology). I would like to make three points. The first point is that in this debate we should be looking two years ahead, not two years behind. In other words we have got to look at a world where the Internet is merely a delivery system, like satellite, cable and all sorts of other ways of pulling information into the home, into the workplace. So the issue is about how we manage convergence, not whether we should be saying this or that works or does not work. That is the first one. The second point is, where are the people who are defining the digital media? The answer is they are sitting in a thousand small companies, all over Europe, and building digital media for the new age. The issue is not whether we have the skills to build digital media, it is whether these people will be recognised - they are not broadcasters, not producers in the conventional sense - but they are there. We have the talent. The third point is that if we have that kind of convergence, who are the people conceptualising that new age? What we have got are people trying to see it as television, or trying to see it as computers, or computer-based learning, or trying to see it as distance learning packages. All of those models are completely irrelevant and what we need to do is see a world that brings those things together and focuses on learning and the needs of learning, and the supply of information and the turning of information into knowledge and the support infrastructure for delivering that. That is where I see the gap. The people who are trying to bring that together, where are they, the conceptualists? Chris Yapp: The point that Nigel made about small companies is absolutely essential to this debate.When we looked at a number of small companies doing work at the leading edge of multi-media, we are finding a lot of them have very young talented people who have 'no qualifications'. The conceptualisation and the ability to work in this media does not seem to sit well with traditional education. Nigel's point about will we recognise them, is a big issue. If we are going to create 30,000-50,000 new jobs in this area, most of it will be created in small and medium sized enterprises because the hot bed of creativity needs to come in small working groups. Trying to give those groups the leverage to access the capital, the funding and the infrastructure that will be built, is going to be one of the big challenges. Q: I would just like to urge a word of caution here. Digital is going to have a very slow start, and I do not think we should really get confused by seeing Digital as something special which is going to change everything overnight. The take up by consumers is going to be very small. Certainly in terms of the low income and disadvantaged groups which have got to be our main concern, the take up will be absolutely zero, because this is going to be a very expensive add-on. In the long term Digital will revolutionise television; there will be a vast increase in channels. But most of those will be commercially driven; most of them in fact will not be of great interest to the disadvantaged. Q: (Ian Johnston, University for Industry Transition Team) I find these debates very difficult to handle, particularly as I look at the University for Industry and think of three completely different markets. There is the person who is not a learner at all at the present time, has never really been a learner, who fell out of traditional education quite young. The biggest challenge for us is to access that sort of learner, the sort of person that Chris was just talking about. I think these people are afraid of classrooms, they are afraid of meetings like that, and they are afraid of computer keyboards, to start with at least. We need to find some whole new way of getting at them. Secondly, there is the traditional education and training system where of course what we are talking about can enhance the quality and possibly the effectiveness, enrich the learning experience. And thirdly - and if you look at the UFI prospectus, there is a quite a big strand of this - there is continuing training to produce specific skills. I would like to focus on the first of those three categories now. I think the most important single thing that we can do apart from making learning friendly and fun, is make it relevant to the experience of the individual, which means they have got to be able to put in their own content and relate their experience to it immediately. I am not sure that broadcasting itself can do that. I think broadcasting can raise the profile; it can, if it is in traditional broadcasting not digital mode, bring it into the home in a way that perhaps is not done fully by the media at the present time. But I would be very interested to hear the panel's view on whether they think we can allow individuals to create their own content, and indeed make the learning programmes fun and more like a game and an entertainment than the learning experience that they have learnt to hate. That is question one. Question two is, how do you feel about advertising? We have talked a lot in policy mode in other parts of this conference about who is going to fund this. Is it absolutely out of the question for it to be funded entirely by advertising? If it was fun, people might be prepared to learn and watch if there was advertising included in it? Is that a no-no? Christina Loglio: I think that each media is for specific audience. That is the basic concept. If we really cancel the general television from our schedules, we risk losing the main audience, because the ordinary people, and mainly the disadvantaged people, do not have enough money to have a Digital system or other things. It is important for all of us as public broadcasters to save some good window in the main channels in order to offer appealing products in order to catch people's attention, to move the attention from the basic level to a necessarily more advanced level. The problem is how and when could you do the second and the third steps, because they need money for doing it. The Italian experience is to try to put a lot of public money, State money, into bringing the necessary equipment to each school, because the school anyway is a democratic approach. It is for all the children. Of course it is a limited audience and in a way the adults have more needs than the children, but schools are anyway an important target. But there is another problem. You spoke about the gains. In a way it is clear that the general audience need to be approached by telling stories. That is good for the general audience, but when we move to another step, for example to Internet, we have to offer another added value, and in this case the added value is a relationship, answering questions and being interactive. In or4der to have a result in terms of education and learning we have to find a way to have the message back, and this can be done with a Digital system, and with the Internet, and also with radio. Radio is a very cheap way, and it is fun because you can take your telephone and you speak with a scientist who broadcast the day before. I think that integration between the different medias is important. Is it possible to integrate public and private approaches as well as advertisement? Yes, of course because we need money. It is possible to accept an advertisement that clearly says 'I am an advertisement, please buy me', but in friendly terms and also clearly giving the opportunity for a lot of people to reach the programmes. Chris Yapp: I'd like to pick up two points. I think advertising has to be part of the mix but I would be very reluctant for it to be the sole source of funding because I have a great concern that as an advertiser precisely the sort of people we would want to reach at, and use these technologies for, would not be the target of advertising. I mean if you have no money and you have no job and whatever, and you need the skills, then I cannot see why an advertiser would go for you, so I think advertising has to be part of it, but I would be reluctant to depend on it. The point about learners creating content - I think all of our experience in the last four years working with adult learners is that you do not get learning gains from new technology until people are creating content. And I think that this, you know the industrial society, separated out the producer and the consumer in all sorts of sectors of the economy, and I think one of the things that we are going to see is a blurring where people create their own content. We are talking about participative technologies. Q: At the College where I am a governor we have been looking at not the learner but the future of the teacher, or whether it is a teacher in the future, or whether it is actually a completely different role. I would like to get some views on what sort of skill sets we think we are going to need to have in those teachers/facilitators/ guiders/counsellors - whatever we are going to call them - which is going to actually help support the new technology. Our experience has shown that learners by themselves do not access learning through new technologie; they do need guidance, but something very different from the traditional classroom model has taken things up to this point. Q: (Stephen McNair, NIACE) It seems to me that there are two problems. One is our notion of what is the teacher, which is about who articulates the relationship between the knowledge and the learner. There is also a question about the notion of content, and we talk about content in this context as if learning were about pouring volumes of stuff out of one person's head into another person's head. We know that is not what learning is like, but we have grown up with that model of what the process is. The gatekeeper is the teacher; the teacher is the one who has the knowledge who pours it into the learners. The teacher's role is about helping me to learn how to understand what I need to know and how to draw that out of this vast resource base. That is a very different notion of learning and how we create learning. And the notion of content begins to dissolve, and producing the content and transmitting the content is not the issue; the issue is about how to manage the processes of assembling what I need to be able to do and understand in order to function. Q: I was taken by the idea of management leading from behind, and when you ask who is going to decide or prompt what is you need to learn, certainly management leading from behind will prompt that. Looking around one's peer groups, seeing people who perform very well in certain things, will also indicate to people what they need to learn and how they need to improve themselves. I would like to take a pharmaceutical argument forward, because as with many drugs today it is not a single drug that solves the problem, it's usually a concoction or a mixture of different ones. In our learning situation today, it is not actually just a piece of television, it is actually a complete mixture of different things, and that's what we need to find. Chris Yapp: It seems to me that the real key is that we have a mania about measurable and measured things that is getting in the way. An employer actually wants well-motivated high self-esteemed flexible individual, and so actually it is EQ (esteem quotient) not IQ we need. I think the big problem is that actually the current mania for metrics on supply side quality actually makes learning boring for the teachers, and of course that then switches off the learners. Q: (Alan Ward, LGG Charlesworth UK) I am Director of Quality and Business Development for a small manufacturing company in the UK, so I am speaking on behalf of business. Two things really. First, I find this debate quite stimulating because, certainly from my own company's point of view, releasing the potential of our workforce has led to the biggest return on investment we have ever had, so we are continually looking at ways of creating a learning culture, and so I am interested to see how receptive people are when they come in through our door. I like what Christina has been saying In effect a lot of our learning internally is based on 10 minute sessions one-to-one, because everybody's got different learning needs. We try and use all the media that we can to put across that learning. The only thing I would say to Chris Yapp is this: from a business point of view things do have to measurable. We cannot afford to train into a vacuum, and certainly those enlightened ones of us in business have become to learn how to measure the soft issues. So I would say to the panel: how do we capture European best practice? And how do I as a business person tap into that? Sally Reynolds: There is a big, big problem I think with the current model of regulation, which is that we currently regulate against, so we regulate against monopoly, we regulate against abuse. One of the key things that we have to do is to move to start regulating for things, so what we want is to regulate for universal access, for entitlement, for parity. Then, on measuring, let me say, you cannot individualise learning and have the same measure for everybody. I mean one of the points I made earlier about the fact we are getting kids with no skills apparently, and no qualifications, who can use multi-media and be very creative in it. I want diversity of measures rather than a single bat with which to hit people. Q: Information technology is globalising learning. I know of many American University and Community Colleges that are using existing technologies such as the Web, electronic mail, video conferencing, video streaming, to deliver distance learning. Yet I do not see much evidence of that happening in European higher education/further education. So the question is to the panel: is this an opportunity or a great risk for European universities and colleges of further education? Josie Taylor: It depends which ones you talk to, basically. The Open Universities for example in Europe are very strong in this area. So I do not think it is fair to say that it is only happening in the States. It is happening here maybe in smaller niche markets, simply because of linguistic issues and cultural differences, more so than at a Pan European level.
|
