Using Broadcasting and New Technologies - Report Back

Reporter Lucia Jones, BBC, with John Humphrys

We first of all looked at the European overview and concluded the following: that our focus must be on the learners; we must make learning fun; we must give learners the tools to create their own content; we must define the new skills set that is needed to create products which span broadcasting and information technology. We have got to develop and evolve our understanding of how people learn in different media formats. We still don’t know enough about that. We need to articulate a new role for teachers. We need to make progress on integrating public and private approaches. We need to create much greater coherence at a policy level in Europe. We need to begin to regulate for things instead of against things all the time. For instance, we must regulate for things like universal access, and we must recognise that the mania for measuring things, which bugs our education system at the moment, is making learning boring. So those were the conclusions of the European level, the European overview.

Then we got down to some specifics and looked first at broadcasting and then at new technologies. We concluded that broadcasting can re-establish or play a significant part in re-establishing a culture of learning. But broadcasting must be audience-led, it must be learner-led and it can be provocative, it can be inspiring, but it must start from where the viewer is or the listener is. It must be from them, because giving audiences a voice is hugely empowering. However, we have got to be aware that words like ‘learning’ and ‘education’ are a turn-off for many people. So broadcasters should be promoting concrete opportunities rather than broad concepts like learning. What we really know is that TV is primarily a motivational medium when it comes to learning. Somebody provocatively in our group asked how effective TV was in helping people learn. He argued that learning often happens, not in the programme or in watching the programme, but in the dialogue, the discourse and the interaction that happens afterwards.

Multiple Channels

We felt that new technologies would allow learners to access and activate multiple ways of learning, multiple channels of learning. We all learn differently; we all learn best in different ways. One overriding thing was that we concluded that people would only want to learn when they could see a tangible benefit to them to themselves. We looked forward then to the new technologies and stated that digital interactive technologies would offer a step change to learners. However, we must not get carried away because it will be some time before they are universally available.

The assets of the information age are knowledge and learning, and learning our industry colleagues told us is a major business opportunity in the digital age. Others told us that we should draw on the fact that IT has been proved to raise skills. It is the enemy of social exclusion; it can re-establish self esteem and it can break up the circle of failure. But we must put people first and technology second. We must not reinvent what we already know; we must build on partnerships; we must create new models of learning or pedagogy; we must create new cost models for things like copyright and intellectual property rights for the digital age.

We must not forget that for most of us technology is a struggle. Much of it is not designed for learning and there is an awful lot more work that our industry colleagues can do at the user interface, and in terms of reliability, in helping us to make it a lot more accessible. Finally, we must tackle the major cultural and language issues in the context of new technologies, particularly the overwhelming dominance of English which we saw as one of the biggest learning issues that we all face in Europe.

John Humphrys: When you talk about television as a learning medium, do you separate learning television, learning and broadcasting, from the mainstream of broadcasting, and if so why? Should you not be bringing pressure to bear on the broadcasters generally, not to deliver propaganda because clearly people recognise propaganda, but to take a slightly more intelligent view of broadcasting as an educational medium. - I speak as a broadcaster - Lord Reith of the BBC used to talk about the BBC having three roles, to inform, to educate and to entertain. I do not think, when he said that, he was splitting off the educational bit into a ghetto that you watch at 6 o’clock on a Sunday morning or something. That was the role of the broadcaster, to do all of those three things.

Learning from TV

Lucia Jones: I think that it is a complicated question with several strands. For instance, if you want people to do some learning from a broadcast, they have to be prepared to do that, they have to learn how to do it, because if you watch educational television in some kind of relaxed frame of mind, sitting back with a whisky and your feet up you are unlikely to be in the right receptive frame of mind to benefit.

Experience from the Open University suggests that we have to train students how to use the television and they have to be sitting, notepad and pen in hand. They have to do some preparatory reading beforehand perhaps. I think you are right that it does not reflect the themes of this conference to split away our education with a capital E from everything else that we do. Television and broadcasting have the great power to reach into the homes of the people that we want to target, the most disenfranchised, the people least able to take advantage of all the opportunities we are trying to offer. Although it can do that and do it very effectively, it is not actually the broadcast itself that is doing the teaching and the learning, it is all the support activities that go on around it. These cost money and it is a huge piece of organisation. The BBC has a lot of experience in running these things and they are aware of the cost, not just in financial terms, but in the willingness of other people outside the BBC to participate.

Then there is also another element which is, what do you do with the learning once you have got it? I think that sometimes is the area that we are the weakest on. Several speakers we have already heard mentioned moving the responsibility from the employer to the employee, so that the employee takes control. I think that is great, but we have to recognise that some of the audiences we are targeting are not in the best position to know what to do with something when they have learned it. We have to do things like teach them how to cope with failure, how to learn from failure. Perhaps failure is OK, but how do you cope with it if you have committed two years of your life learning to doing something and it flops, and no employer is interested in you? If you misjudged it, you made a mistake, what do you do then? Who is standing around to help you out of that situation? I think these are the sort of more peripheral elements we need to take into account.

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