Workshop B - Session 2

Title: Using Broadcasting and the New Technologies - Broadcasting and Adult Learning Chair: Naomi Sargant, NIACE, UK Dai Smith, British Broadcasting Corporation, UK

Dai Smith was a Professor of History. Dai has also bridged from academic life to broadcasting. He has moved very rapidly from a Professorship of History in the University of Cardiff and has worked his way up to the top job in BBC Wales.

One of the aspects of my work has been concerned with the adult educationalist and cultural studies guru Raymond Williams. Williams as long ago as 1962 said that, if we change merely the political and economic order, we do not create a human order. These changes will have very little effect unless, he said, we integrate work and life, and include the activities we call cultural in the ordinary social organisation. This was a catalyst towards what he called in 1962 an alternative form of society.

Since broadcasting can entertain and can be enticing, the partnership seems to be made in heaven if only the two can somehow be made to meet up, beyond the minority hours of a learning zone on the BBC, beyond even perhaps the minority hours of a learning channel from the BBC - not that those things are to be in any sense put aside. Somehow we continue to be making that distinction between training and education. As has been pointed out, doctors are trained as well as educated, historians are trained as well as educated, so the split is a false one. But the word 'learning' itself which we have now conveniently embraced is also, I would suggest, a fudge.

Broadcasting can take us to the heart of questions about modern citizenship, because it is not technology which would change human societies, it is the use certain cultures will make of the available technology. It is the existing culture, the culture we live in, not the culture we choose to create, which will in fact inhibit the way in which we can release that shared ambition. I think the current British Government is at least right in its use of the phrase 'The Third Way' in this application; any way that is the application to adult education and broadcasting would be something like this - and I speak as somebody who is involved in the commissioning of mainstream programmes.

Democratic Institution

I am not an educationalist within the broadcasting world. I am somebody whose commissioning process is beyond systemic broadcasting for educational needs. I am also not in that field of gatekeepers for wider cultural enhancement in British terms, like David Attenborough or the wildlife or the history films. In our mainstream culture of broadcasting, we can still focus on an educational purpose if we understand learning culture to mean that public service broadcasting has to be attached to the democratic institutions and to the community requirements and the social purposes. These are in turn the life support systems of public service broadcasting. In other words, when we talk about face-to-face one-to-one educational needs, I think in broadcasting terms we have to understand that the audience is on the doorstep.

I come from regional broadcasting, from local broadcasting. My net is cast wide but it is also cast for my particular audience. I believe that the devolution of broadcasting purposes to audiences even in mainstream broadcasting can in turn empower them so that interacting with the broadcaster can mean more than the use of the telephone or more than the use of support materials.

It can actually mean being attached to the culture which the broadcaster not so much will be promoting for covert purposes, but will be overtly bragging or boasting about.

Digital College

In Wales at the moment broadcasters are discussing the concept of a free standing institution which is called the digital college. The digital college is meant to be a facilitator of the use of broadcasting for all kinds of educational purposes, acting in Wales as the hub for the University for Industry, but being rather wider in its remit than the UfI proposes. Whether that works or not, whether it will go on to validate courses, content, accreditation, and also take this more generous remit over lifelong learning, is nonetheless an attempt to bridge that gap between education and training.

To try to talk to adults in any kind of manner which patronises them is the biggest turn-off that educationalists could ever commit. So the message in Wales will be, in terms of this conference's needs, that we will be open as to the purposes of the educational delivery, will be flexible in the form of that delivery and we will definitely be learner-led in both content and approach.

The historian can sometimes bring lessons from the past that allow us to feel more optimistic in our endeavours. In the late 1920s in that much depressed and soulfully miserable and mass unemployed community, The Carnegie Trust installed radio sets for communal listening in miners' halls and miners' institutes across the coalfield for people who could not afford them. Their report said: 'The sets are intended to be used for amusement and recreation as well as for instruction. It will be entirely wrong for anyone to suppose that the wireless set was to be looked upon as a kind of schoolmaster. Such an attitude will show a complete misapprehension of the whole business. The thing which wireless - radio - can do is to bring into every institute the living voice discussing all kinds of subjects, subjects which have a broad human value and are not confined to any one way of life, or any one attitude towards it.'

I feel, as we are at the dawn of this technological revolution, that reminders of pluralistic purposes and tolerance in our attitudes towards what people already know, and what they understand their learning to be, might be one of the ways in which we actually attach ourselves to them, as the broadcaster does, in reaching out for the mass audience.

Back

Home

Next