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Workshop B
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Workshop A |
Workshop B |
Workshop C |
Workshop D
Workshop B - Session 2 - Questions and Contributions
Q: (Josie Taylor, Open University, UK): I want to pick up on your comments about audiences and what they want and in particular your comment that they seem to want entertainment. I wonder, though, to what extent. Certainly in the UK, being part of an educational community, being educated, is not something that the sorts of audiences that you are targeting would celebrate. It is not something that they would particularly seek. I wonder what is happening to the young lads that are coming through in the less privileged communities? In educational terms, in schools, these lads do not find it fashionable to be seen to be clever and that is having a huge impact on what is going to happen in the UK's employment market. As they come out from school, they are being disbarred. They are lost causes. Nick Corner-Calder: I think what I am saying is about labelling, not about what is actually there. People enjoy watching Discovery, but it is a question of what you call it and what you tell people you are doing. I think it is interesting that people say they do not want to feel they are learning. They do not want to have a label on them. It is not that they like something because it is smart television to watch. In fact, one of the things that we know is that a lot of our male viewers very much like the nuggets of facts you get from Discovery. Discovery is full of moments when something which you never understood, suddenly becomes clear. For example, there was a brilliant recent programme about time travel which was extraordinarily well described by an Italian physicist on a bicycle somewhere in America. Suddenly you think, 'Oh yes, I've got it. That's what time travel is about.' That is the kind of thing Discovery does well. That is the kind of thing that we are much appreciated for. But if you had said to someone would you like to watch this educational programme about time travel, they would not have watched it. Q: (Josie Taylor, Open University, UK): It seems to me what you have said is that we are trying to sell the wrong product. We have been talking about the learning age. We are talking about lifelong learning. We are talking about selling and branding and marketing learning to a market in which maybe this product cannot be sold. The argument for young men is that they do not see learning as having anything to do with what they see as a satisfactory life. It does not lead anywhere and therefore it is something you reject. Now the argument is that learning is fun, learning is exciting, learning changes your life, enhances your opportunities, all those things. Maybe we should be selling the opportunities not the learning. Q: (Peter Galor formerly of Cardiff Business School, currently of the European Network) We have in South Wales vast tracts of unemployment and unemployability because of the actual spatial shape of employment in South Wales, especially for males. It is a typical UK region in that respect. So, when we think about those social groups that we are trying to reach, I really have to question whether we are going in the wrong direction. This raises the question what is the right direction to reach the social groups who, with the best will in the world, will acquire knowledge but at the end of it no job? Q: (Gareth Dent, University for Industry Division, Department for Education and Employment, England) Do people actually learn from broadcasting media like television? On one level you can say that somebody who watches a television programme is better informed on the topic of that programme at the end of the day, but if they are not able to do or understand something in a new way, have they actually learnt? Dai raised the example of the radios in miners' halls. I would perhaps put it that most of the learning that went on as a consequence of that was as a result of the debate that might have followed some of the broadcasts. The question then is, if we believe that that is the way that people learn, through that discourse, through that dialogue, how do we actually build the infrastructure that enables that discourse and dialogue to take place? Q: (Josie Taylor, Open University, UK): The Open University has collected an enormous amount of data on people learning from broadcast television. It is not a question of saying, 'Can you do everything you want to do through broadcast television in terms of your educational objectives?' I think it is the role that broadcasting is playing in the wider framework that is the key question. It is not a question of 'If I teleport this into your home you will instantly have learned something that you never knew before, and you will recognise it and you will be able to use it.' I think that is why we become entranced by the digital opportunities. They provide us with that golden opportunity to do more than just broadcast into the home. The OU is still undoubtedly very middle class and the issue that we are getting at here is that it is still targeting the middle class. Q: Have you done research on what people learn from watching Open University programmes, as well as what they get from watching other programmes which are not labelled learning programmes? Q: (Josie Taylor, Open University, UK): We do not just look at students' learning. What I do is research into how students are learning from television, based in that educational framework with all the support materials. We also ask people who view Open University programmes who are not students and never have been and ask them, 'Why do you do that?' The range of response is very broad. For instance, we do have quite a number of viewers who will write in and say, 'My education was disrupted during the War,' so we know something about how old they are. Or they say, 'I really enjoy filling in the gaps now,' and 'I just watch anything and everything because I like it.' A lot of people say, 'I've always been told I'm stupid and the fact that I can understand Open University programmes makes me happy.' Dai Smith: So far the only time the word class is being used is when the word middle has been applied to it. That disaffected youth laddish culture we were talking about refers to working-class boys or working-class men. One of the reasons why they are disaffected, of course, is that learning cultures in areas like South Wales have gone. And you can multiply that across Europe wherever you had, for example, steel or coal industries. Those men, even if they went away from education early, were influenced by people who were didactic in those communities, who were listening to the radios, who conducted those discussions, led those debates, acted as leader education figures. That process of education through work has gone, has been expunged. Some of the emphasis quite rightly is on the education for girls and women within those societies which has also led to some of those problems. I would like to add one or two other things from the Welsh example, one of which is encouraging but in a sense potentially dangerous. This is that there has been an educational process in Wales around the Welsh language. The Welsh Language Act of the 1982 Government allowed minority television through the Welsh language. The one area in life where people are signing up for adult education, and in the schools and so on, is the learning of the Welsh language. Now the fact is that this has become a mode of production. That knowledge of the Welsh language has in turn led to employment for those who have picked it up. The sad side of that of course is that it is excluding the majority. Last point, we are currently filming a project called 'Coal' in the Rhondda Valleys which were the greatest coal exporting valleys of the world. It is a drama documentary shot by Michael Bogdanoff with local people taking the parts in what is a fictional script. The notion behind that is that it is hopefully going to be provocative, challenging and controversial. It is deliberately going to poke people in the eye. I think that is what adult education is also about, that you dare to say to somebody in the end, 'Look, you trust me, you like me. I like opera, so let me tell you about this opera called "Carmen" in which this woman rolls cigars, and come along and see it.' It is part of that process of actually bringing people with you, because you have inspired confidence in them, by virtue of the fact that you share their desires. Q: (Tony Camm, University for Industry Transitional Team, England) I think people turn on the television or go to learning for a number of reasons, one is to be entertained, but one is when the learning is of benefit to them. You would be absolutely surprised how quickly people go to a learning place or want to learn when it is actually vital for them to do so. For instance, when your children are very good at computing and you are losing their respect because you cannot turn on a computer, very quickly you go and you try to learn about computers. You learn very quickly because you have the motivation to benefit yourself, that means to benefit yourself in the eyes of your children. Or it may be that you want to learn because you want to win the right partner, or it may be that you want to learn because you want to order a meal in Italian and make your holiday more beneficial. So learning has to be very beneficial for people. I think a lot of learning in the traditional way that it has been put forward has not actually been terribly beneficial. So I think we have to look at the benefit of learning to people and how they perceive that benefit to them. I think that is probably one of the missing elements. Will people come to learning? We have to make sure that they see and they feel and they experience, not just entertainment, but probably entertainment and benefit. Nick Corner-Calder: I think that people like Discovery because it makes them smarter. I mean in their daily intercourse they know things that people who do not watch Discovery do not know, or they can swap things. If there is a group of Discovery viewers there are things to be swapped at the workplace: 'Oh by the way did you see that? Did you know blah blah blah?' I think that is important. I think what was being said about the University for Industry today was that the focus was on employability for the individual and competitiveness for the company that employs that individual. It seems to me that is very much about talking about people who are already to some extent in work. The company is going to be the place where you are going to get in touch with the University for Industry. Missing from that is the most important group which we seem to be focusing on as 'disenfranchised working class lads'. Actually they do watch Discovery, not a lot but they watch it a bit. I was hugely proud to find that in recent research, something like 16% of children tune into Discovery in a week or a month, I forget what exactly. 7% of them actually stay and watch the channel. Now I would not change an iota at Discovery if I thought it was going to lose any of those people. I believe that any form of education is valuable. Even if it is only facts about space, at least it is intelligent programming which does not patronise. It is pretty basic; it makes no assumptions about what knowledge you have; but it does assume you are interested and can follow a story. Naomi Sargant: There are a number of ways in which broadcasting can help people to learn and offer them information that stimulates learning. Of course you do not teach sequential curriculum material in broadcasting. Let me give 3 or 4 very brief examples from when I first went to Channel 4. Everyone was very proud of the BBC literacy series. Yorkshire Television went on almost immediately afterwards and did a much more modest numeracy series, which taught people directly at home. It did not send them off to find a tutor, and when I ran the evaluation of that I discovered that more than 50% of people who had replied to the follow up card were watching all of the programmes, sending the material back into the National Extension College and actually improving their numeracy. The second example is advertising. I have never understood why people say we cannot learn from television, when we know the millions of pounds that are spent on advertising and we know the effect of advertising. We know all those mechanisms work and we spend money refining the advertisements to get a conversion of another 'n' percent. It is not an accident that the BBC for some of its most successful modern campaigns, like Family Literacy, and LWT with its community education, have chosen the model of using advertising in that way. Education is not just about learning the skills and the facts. We are a profoundly under-educated country in terms of visual education and creativity. Jeremy Isaacs, the then director of Channel 4, put another million into budgets just to do that: seeing with new eyes, integrating design, architecture, town planning. That incredibly powerful area of visual education and visual literacy is absolutely best done through a visual medium. The other key thing of course is in partnerships - I mean the classic Open University thing about science is that the science faculty in the Open University desegregated what was conventionally taught in the laboratory and used for the observation of the experiment. It used the television to show people what was typically done in an experiment, used the home experiment kit and summer schools to do the technical laboratory experiments, used the radio for interviews with experts, taking people to Geneva for example. It desegregated the knowledge into its component parts and offered it, using the best appropriate medium for the different bits of it, so learners reconstructed it. We have learnt all these lessons and we keep on forgetting them. It is really important that we choose to use what we have and use it powerfully. At a minimum many people will use broadcasting to deliver stuff cheaply to people at home, which is the main thing that happens with night time. The BBC, at minimum, will do that but, at maximum, will use it creatively for all these purposes and in partnerships. If I have a mission, it is that the UfI thinks about it in a broad and creative way.
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