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Plenary Speeches
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What do we know from our many, many projects at Ultralab - some generously funded; some desperately under-funded? Most under-funded. We know a lot. Fundamentally we know that there are new ways of structuring and supporting learning. We know that the model of learning has not changed. People still learn from doing something. They still get there quicker if somebody mediates that task. They need a sense of audience. They need passion. They need delight. And they need some sense of progress to stroke their self-esteem, to keep them engaged as learners. We know that delight is at the heart of great learning. We do know that new technology is opening the door to some new ways of managing and mediating. It is offering some new audiences for learning as well. Online learning, I can stand here and say with absolute confidence, works. A lot of partnership work has gone into some of these big projects, and I'm just going to list the headline news from them that inform about our certainties about what works with online learning. The schools online project was funded by the DTI with the massive support of pretty much the whole UK IT industry. The key thing we learnt from this project is that identity matters. Every one of the hundreds of children involved in the project had their own passport, had their own identity, knew who they were. How can you expect them to be learners in cyberspace if nobody knows their name? Their identity matters. And that is why we are plugging ahead with this extraordinarily ambitious Millennium project to try and give every child in the country their own e-mail identity. Exciting Resource We have been running our University for Industry project with Josh Hillman and the Institute of Public Policy Research since last June. We've discovered bluntly that people are a great resource. That does not sound very exciting but it is exciting. We joined 108 people into a huge on-line learning community at the beginning of the project. They had one thing in common: they were learning professionals. They were in museums and galleries, industrial/commercial training centres, schools and some of them were full-time parents. Everybody had a full-time occupation that absorbed them with learning in some shape or form. And they all said, 'Right, where's the course? We're ready.' And we said, 'There isn't a course. You're it'. And you can imagine, some of them looked a bit sheepish at that point. We then spent a lot of time and a lot of effort building a structure that gave them the confidence to share the experiences and capabilities they had. We had to try all sorts of quite bizarre things. When you bring 108 people together who have never met before, and they are never going to meet, and you bring them together electronically, what sort of virtual places can you construct where they feel comfortable with the uncertainty of not knowing anyone? Well, we had electronic broken trains, wedding lunches, ski lodges, all sorts of quite extraordinary places. Electronic broken trains. You know, the train stops; there is a long pause; then you start to talk. What was interesting was even a term after the project had started, when they were heavily engaged in debates about it enhancing self-esteem and about how you manage closure in an on-line debate and so on and so forth, we have still got these little throw away lines in the electronic mail. 'I see the train still hasn't moved yet!' This kind of metaphor of uncertainty was pinned on the project in a really interesting way. In another project we've been connecting children and scientists and engineers in a 7 year project across the Internet. We were interested deeply at the start in whether we could move children's science education forward quickly. What we did not expect was the quality of learning that would come out of the scientists and engineers too, average age 28, average qualification PhD. The teachers who were there for the children turned out to be the key catalyst that made learning happen for the scientists and engineers too. We walked away confident from the first phase of this project with the absolute certainty that everybody is hungry to be part of a learning community. With the World Health Organisation we were challenged, provoked really, to wonder how we could build a learning community in Third World countries who had not got the Internet, had not got computers, had not got literacy. We used telephone technology to allow people to simply talk into a phone on to a server and to contribute and listen to conferences and debates on the server. Basically they exchanged good ideas and good practice about what worked, and what did not work, with each other. Masters We've been running an online Masters course since 1994. We never see the students; they walk away with a degree. It was an interesting moment when after we'd given away the course freely on the Internet and anybody in the world could log on and enjoy the course and do it; my vice chancellor said thoughtfully, 'How do we make money out of this?' In fact, his exact words were, 'You've given away the Crown Jewels.' Of course, we hadn't. And the bit that we were selling was the argument. Having enjoyed the course, looked at the notes, enjoyed the material, if you wanted to be in the argument and have the argument managed, you had to register as a student. You can see that that is the incredibly valuable thing. It is at the heart of higher and further education, in the heart of learning, in lots of other places too. It was the managing and mediating that was of value, not the content, otherwise universities would lock up their libraries and not let anybody in, for fear that people would learn for free by mistake. With Tesco we are engaged in a huge project at the moment. We think it is going to involve about 4 million children, we're putting a lab into every store in the country. The project went live, became public, at the beginning of last week. We've got at the moment 600 schools a day registering, which is high level of engagement, a lot of people want to be part of it. Last of all, we just heard today we've been funded by ESPRIT to really have a long lingering look at electronic toys. With this we've realised that you have to just use computers to make all this happen, there's a whole mass of places where technology can really give learning a special edge. So that's a long list, £30 million worth of partnership, £25 million worth of research, and a number of simple certainties:
New Problems First, it is complicated. The models of learning we built in the past always assumed that people simply did a bit of text and a bit of listening, watched a bit of video. And we did it typically in the school, maybe in another learning institution, perhaps with TV and radio. What we are saying now is that speech, symbolic representation, animation, other languages - everything - matters. We're saying you can do it from a laptop, from a workstation, in the family, in the community, of course, and fundamentally in the workplace. We can do it singly, we can do it collaboratively, we can do it public. All those things are possible; they're all happening now around the country. But what a challenge that is for us as we manage new environments, because I do not believe there is anybody in Britain that is good at all those things. That means we have got to allow people to learn with a subset of that broad portfolio of possibilities. Which would you pick? Somebody that was great at listening, could speak well, but was rubbish with symbols, managed animation, did not like video, could work in one other language, loved working with television, did not like a laptop, hated a workstation, wanted to do all the working at home, and did not enjoy working on their own? What would they pick? Would it be acceptable? It is a debate we are in as we push forward the frontiers of what learning can look like. The debate we are in is about what learning we value? That is a very tough debate indeed. I am not going get into the answers to it right now, but you can see that it is not straightforward, certainly not as straightforward as maybe our assessment models would have led us to believe. Let's talk about assessment for a minute. Our assessment model, the certainty that we've imposed in the past on learning, has been a certainty that says once we have got uniformity, once we've got moderation, once we can look at a finished product, we can look at a summative assessment, and we can give it a mark. Creativity Now, most of the discussion and debate you'll hear today in the coffee bars and the rostrum, everywhere else, is much more about the other end of the learning spectrum. It is about creativity, the complexity of learning, the focus on progress rather than product, on professional trust, on the research and, you know, our assessment model struggles to make it down to that end of the spectrum. It's very, very hard to be certain about what we want our models of assessment to look like, and yet we know we've got to tackle it. Here's a little quote from Japan; I stole this from an external Japanese Government document where they were reflecting on how things were going with their educational reform, '… the Japanese education system sought to eliminate deviations in students and deliver an equal uniform education throughout the land. It was effective in reaching the goal of catching up industrialisation. Now however the nation is in need of highly creative and independent individuals. Fostering individuals with these characteristics will require educational reform, starting at the elementary level and taking at least 10 to 20 years to be effective.' During 1995/96 they kicked off with that 20 year programme. So, you know, this is tough stuff. Beyond certainty we want imagination, beyond certainty we want creativity. And we've got to look for as many places to build our learning futures as possible if we're going to get there. We are talking about communication, allowing people to build a community of learners where they exchange and communicate with each other. Let's have good practice, let's swap good ideas, you know, that's the sort of model we're talking about. There is not a telecommunications company in Europe that does not think it has got a role now in learning and publishing, and radio, television, and even entertainment organisations, goodness knows, are getting in on the act. What we've got to be very careful about, of course, is that all this lot crowd the centre stage and we could end up with some nasty multi-mediocre middle. What we're looking for is the learning at the heart of all this, and that's a tough call of course, but isn't it nice to have such a big army with so many players all fighting on our side? Finally, there's a lot said about how we move forward the staff and lecturers and training managers and facilitators and mediators. How do we move them forward and not get them stuck in the sort of plateau that we seem to be in at the moment where we're not making progress with over 40% of teachers and lecturers. Where we're not fighting it out into the small and medium-sized enterprises and not making the sort of progress there we have seen in our very large companies? Certainties Well, again, we can turn to the certainties that we have identified from those huge number of research projects at the Lab. These include the following: Personal use matters. People need their own stuff, and they need to be able to use it. Slightly bizarre, but even at this stage you cannot claim a learning computer against your Income Tax, but goodness knows, let's hope that changes in the next Budget. Ownership matters too. It needs to be not just your equipment, but your space, your pace, your stuff that is on the screen. Relevance matters. We need everybody to be engaged in the uncertainty of simply not knowing what is going on enough that we start saying, 'Don't tell me the answer; I'd like to be part of the research please'. We have to be honest enough to say we do not know all the answers yet. Please help us find them. Have a look at the Web site, don't go away from here thinking uncertainty is an excuse for lack of action. The certainties are there, but what we need now is enthusiasm and a little delight.
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