Increasingly, as technology becomes more personalised, it will also become more personalisable. By this I mean that not only will users be able to tailor the technology (apps, backgrounds, appearance, functionality) to their own needs, but it will also be used increasingly to appeal to their senses, and even to adjust their perceptions and behaviour. Watching a re-run of the 2002 sci-fi movie Minority Report, reminded me of this. The central character, a Pre-Crime Officer by the name of John Anderton is walking down the street, and animated advertising images are calling him out by name as he passes by: "John Anderton - you need this product today!" We assume that the embedded technology within the advertising hoardings are detecting some personal feature that identifies him - possibly the irises in his eyes - and can then call him by his name. Such advertising, if it were technically feasible (and some would argue it already is) would be very powerful, because as all advertisers know, it is the personal message that is the most powerful.
The Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser had plenty to say about how ideological messages influence the perceptions of individuals. Objects, music, art (and I would add media and technology) can all be used to 'hail' the individual and make them feel as though they are personally being addressed. This process of interpellation could be exemplified in Lord Kitchener's World War One poster 'Your Country Needs You', and all of the subsequent imitations by other governments to encourage young men to enlist in the military to protect and defend their country. His stern expression and the stark message said it all. The eyes of the interpellator followed you wherever you went, and there was apparently no escape from the fact that Lord Kitchener was calling you personally to join him in the struggle against evil.
It is highly likely that such interpellative technologies as those seen in Minority Report will be realised sooner rather than later. But it is the context aware systems and their ability to educate learners that I am most excited about. Such systems will be at the core of the Smart eXtended Web, and equipped with the appropriate handheld or wearable technology, learners will be able to interact with their environments in ways never before achievable. All of this will also be very personal, and will facilitate new and exciting forms of education.
Inspired by a Twitter conversation with Manish Malik @manmalik, Simon Brookes @Pompeysie and Pat Parslow @patparslow.
"The first thing to understand about the NUS is that it does not meaningfully represent students," says Free Radical, discussing Aaron Porter's announcement today that he will not be seeking re-election as the union's president.
Blunt and Disorderly is back with a post accusing politicians of treating the public as a rabid, xenophobic and vengeful mob: "We are not. We believe that human beings have inalienable rights that are not the gentle concession of Parliament, but inherent part of being human. We have duties towards each other and the community at large, and if we breach them, we should make amends. We should be punished, we should give back to the community, but never stop being part of it. We, the people, have some moral decency."
In a thoughtful post, phase.org signs up the late Douglas Adams to the pro-AV cause.
"The recent popular democratic movements in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa would have delighted the late Edward Said," says Bazzfazz.
What If: Projects reports an encouraging development from London: "The basic need for food and outside space for socialising and recreation was developed into a proposal to transform formerly fenced off and neglected pieces of land into allotment gardens. The first Vacant Lot allotment garden was established in Shoreditch ... and has been published and exhibited internationally. Vacant Lot has inspired various similar allotment projects."
Clive Dunn's career, and his 1970 LP Grandad Requests "Permission to Sing Sir" in particular, are reviewed by The Downstairs Lounge. Do listen to Simone.
Writing for the Oxford Student, Ed Watson stands up for the Liberal Democrats: "So, by all means call me and my party incompetent. Call us misguided. Tell us that we�re failing to live up to our principles. Tell us that we�re just plain wrong. But tell us that we lack principles, or impugn our integrity in some other way, and I�ll see you on the meadows with pistols at dawn."
On the OurKingdom site Malcolm Stevens discusses the detention of young offenders and calls on the Coalition to match the liberal achievements of... Margaret Thatcher: "Under her command from the early 1980s, the UK witnessed an unprecedented decline in the numbers of children and young people sentenced to custody: from almost 15000 in 1980 to 1500 in 1991."
Toby Young slaughters Labour MP Andrew Slaughter and his criticisms of free schools on the Daily Telegraph site.
Steve Joseph, on the BME National site, writes about his efforts to do something about "the increasing number of young black men drawn to crime, drugs and, in many cases, guns".
Peter Black AM finds that, entirely predictably, Larry the Downing Street cat is already looking to develop role beyond rodent control.
Wartime Housewife, that fount of robust good sense and member of the increasingly influential Harborough school of blogging, selects six favourite cultural links for The Dabbler.
If you have a few moments to spare over the next few weeks, you could check out the Manifesto for Media Education site, where educators and media specialists from around the world are being invited to post their thoughts and ideas on best practice, learning philosophy and the future of education, all around the context of media. Here are Pete Fraser and John Wardle, the minds behind the Manifesto project:
"This project is an attempt to develop a shared understanding, some shared reasons, for media education. We hope it will stimulate discussion within course teams and with students. We imagine it will lead to conversations about how we teach and what specific things we teach, but those are secondary questions. We believe we may uncover many reasons but it seems better to have articulated many as opposed to none and as Postman says �A definition is the starting point of a dispute, not the settlement�.
"On this website you will find a variety of writers� summations of their reasoning for media education. These will be context specific and at times may feel at odds with one another. However we hope that by the end of the process we will have a better, more sustaining understanding of the purpose of what we do and that we will be able to draw on this understanding to keep us on track in the classroom and in defending and advocating our subject in the future."
With contributors such as Stephen Heppell, Henry Jenkins, David Buckingham and Natalie Fenton, it's a thought provoking set of readings which should get you reaching for your laptop to respond.
When Doug Belshaw invited me to write a blog post on the purpose of education for the Purpos/ed project I could see the importance of revisiting this vital question. Your own rationale for becoming an educator should reveal quite a lot about your own personal philosophy on education. For me, it's about making a positive impact on people's lives and inspiring them to learn.
Let's start with the word 'education'. One of the Latin root words is 'educere' which means to draw out (from within). If we practice education properly, we will see that it's not about getting students to perform to standardised tests that bear no resemblance to reality. Standardised tests allow governments to check on the performance of the school, not on individual learning. This is not education, it's schooling.
If we practice education properly we will also realise that it's more about learning than teaching. I often think about what I actually learnt in my school years. I was taught to read and write and to perform elementary mathematical functions so I wasn't ripped off when I visited a shop. But this was nothing compared to what I learnt through my own endeavours, in my own time - the science I learnt through my keen interest in the NASA Apollo Moon missions was far superior to anything I picked up in my physics and biology lessons. I wrote my own 'books', made posters of the moon and models of rocketships, knew all the planets, the star systems. Even now I can tell you the exact escape velocity from the Earth's gravity and can describe the physics of an eliptical orbit in fine detail.
My profound appreciation of music is more down to the long hours I devoted learning to play guitar in my bedroom until my fingers bled. In fact I learnt more about music by self-teaching myself guitar and watching films of my rock heroes than I ever learnt playing repetitive scales on a recorder in school.
I think you can see where this is all going. In school, my teachers (with one or two notable exceptions) actually failed to draw out from within me the desire to learn - to develop the aptitude I already possessed to become a reasonably good musician or the ability to convey my thoughts and ideas in a number of ways including writing and public speaking. I'm at the top of my game now, and I owe most of it to ..... me. Sure, others have inspired me to learn, but this has generally happened in the long years since I left school. All of my professional and academic qualifications were achieved studying part-time, after I reached 30. I studied for 3 degrees and a teaching certificate on the basis that I wanted to do so. I was interested, so it was well worth the sacrifice. And I keep learning now, as often and as much as I can, to stay as close to the leading edge of my profession as I can. Because I want to. I have it within me to do so.
School for me wasn't so much a waste of time, as something I had to endure to become who I ultimately have become. I left with very few qualifications. Some teachers inspired me but many were wide of the mark because they didn't have the time or the interest in me to see my potential. One told my parents: 'Stephen is a very sociable lad, but he will never become an academic.' I didn't have it within me, he assured them. 'Maybe he can find something useful to do with his hands' he advised sagely. Well, I did have it within me, but I had to draw it out of myself in the end.
Schools are not all bad news. There are plenty of good teachers who take time to get to know their students and try to find ways to draw them out. Dispense with the rigid, compartmentalised curricula, and the standardised testing, and let the kids express themselves more creatively through their own means (including the open use of personal technologies in the classroom) and school would be a place where people could be drawn out to achieve their highest potential. Take away government meddling and allow schools to govern themselves, and we might see some positive changes taking place, with children engaged more in learning, and actually eager to get into school every day.
So back to the original question - what is the purpose of education? It is to inspire students to learn to the best of their ability, to draw them out to be the best they can be, and so enable them to aspire to great things. Just make sure you don't confuse education with school.
Warning - this is a rant. On the day the UK government announces its new 'slimmed down' curriculum, here's my personal view on the current situtation in schools:
Guy Claxton once remarked on the complexity of life: 'We have to learn to make our own way through a complex world without the benefit of an accepted trustworthy route map.' In a climate of constant change and disruption, this is more pertinent today than the day it was first written. Disruption is not a bad thing. An enormous amount of things need changing and a great deal of reform needs to be done, particularly in the compulsory education sector. We need to deliberately disrupt what exists to achieve any positive change or meaningful progress. But we don't have a road map. So education sits where it is with little or no forward movement and it stagnates. No matter how much successive governments pontificate on 'the way ahead' and no matter how much (or how little) money they throw at the problem, the fact is - we are standing still, because no one really knows where we are going. Anyone who claims they know the way forward is either deluded, or lying.
Yet we do know this: Education needs reform, because far too many young people are being let down by the current system. My wife, who is a secondary school teacher of English informs me that each year, in every new year 7 intake, there are children who enter secondary school unable to read and write properly, and there are always a few who are completely illiterate. Some go all the way through secondary school, still unable to effectively express themselves in writing. This is completely unacceptable of course. Forget the demographic variables of gender and ethnicity - they are socially constructed anyway - and think about some stark statistics. In March 2010 the Telegraph reported that the number of schools placed in the lowest category by OFSTED had doubled over the previous year. These statistics were published before the change of government. The present economic crisis has prompted the new government to impose deep funding cuts. We don't know what OFSTED's statistics are going to be this year, but with fewer resources available, you can bet your bottom copy of the TES that the new figures won't be an improvement on those of 2010.
Will the academy scheme move us forward? I very much doubt it. What they will do in most cases will be to widen the gap between those who are priviledged and those who aren't. It doesn't matter which government is in power - the scheme will continue regardless. The present government wants academies to use as a weapon to force schools to improve. But throwing a lifeline only to those who can actually swim seems like a ridiculous rescue plan to me. And as the BBC News site warns, in 2011 we are already sinking fast, with only one child in six actually attaining results that measure up to international standards of education.
You see, there is a cycle of failure that is perpetuated by the formal schooling culture and the legislation surrounding it. A child gets poor grades, and the school reacts negatively (as do the parents). This causes the child's self-esteem to suffer a blow. He performs poorly again, doesn't want to do any homework or put any effort in, and struggles to catch up. Perhaps he is dropped down a set. Another blow to his self esteem. His performance drops further and the school and parents react negatively again - it's affecting the school's reputation and may even influence their league table position if the child's performance is reflected in poor exam grades. The child doesn't care anymore. He's apathetic now and just wants to leave school. He becomes a truant. He gives up, saying that school is 'rubbish'. More negative reactions from the school and sanctions taken ... and on it goes, an ever downward spiral. Don't even get me started on post compulsory education. We'd be here all night...
What I think we need to move forward is a change in culture and a change in governance. We need to move away from the standardised testing (and the resultant league tables) that are so needlessly punitive. All standardised testing ultimately achieves is a measure of how successfully a school can get it's children to comply with the rules needed to pass standardised testing. It's tautological. And it's part of the problem rather than part of the solution. When are we going to free up the curriculum to give teachers the freedom to teach in a way that personalises learning and unleashes creativity? When are we going to start assessing children to encourage better, deeper learning? Why do tests have to be used as a political weapon to show how well government funds are being used to educate the next workforce? Will technology provide any answers?
I don't think we'll have the answers to any of these questions until we deliberately disrupt and radically reform the tired, outmoded and hopelessly inadequate systems that currently exist. I made my own views on alternatives to the current system in a recent blogpost - outrageous alternatives. Sorry, there is no roadmap, because we are still building the road. And we are rapidly running out of construction materials. What we now need is knowledgeable, passionate and fearless outriders who will forge ahead to lay down a pathway for us. They need to be allowed to do so without fear and without sanction. Rant over.
I doubt if there is anyone reading this blog who has not used Wikipedia in some way in the last 12 months. The free online encyclopedia has become such a part of our daily lives I sometimes wonder what we did without it. And we all have one man to thank for it (all right, two if you also count Larry Sangar. Well, OK - also one or two others...).
The final keynote speaker at Learning without Frontiers was the Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. He started with a statement that very few changes seem to be happening in the world of education. The most important changes, he argued, were happening in the world of informal learning and this was being led by technology, and particularly the web. And that is where services such as Wikipedia come in.
When people contribute to Wikipedia they are contributing to the entire storehouse of human knowledge, not just one encyclopedia, said Jimmy Wales. Wikipedia is not a text book, nor even a volume of content - therefore it should not be used as such in formal education, he warned. Rather it is a free online resource which is a growing treasure house of knowledge for everyone to use, repurpose and share. If you want to understand Wikipedia, he said, you need to consider all of the thousands of volunteers out there - the community of users, authors and editors, rather than the office staff - who have no direct official input into the content or its organisation. Wikipedia is a global phenomenon which means that it differs from culture to culture around the world. 408 million people each month edit and generate content on Wikipedia. For young people, Wikipedia is the prime source of knowledge for them. They don't reach for the encyclopedia on the shelf - they go to Wikipedia. It is such an important source of information today, that we should know who makes it - so just who are the Wikipedians? asked Wales. He showed a video to illustrate the diversity of backgrounds and cultures of those who are 'Wikipedians':
Two thirds of those creating and editing content are at least educated to graduate level and many contributors hold PhDs. They are sharing their knowledge and expertise freely. No-one writes an article alone, said Wales. They are collaborating with other people who have similar interest and knowledge around the same topic. That is both the beauty and the power of Wikipedia.
Speech to text. Natural gesture interfaces. MIT's Sixth Sense wearable computer. Touch surfaces and non-touch interfaces. All of them have one thing in common. They do away with the need to use a standard keyboard or mouse. Computing is changing, and the place to hear about where we are heading with it all, is at Learning Without Frontiers.
Natural user interfaces (NUIs) just happened to be the theme of an invited presentation by Microsoft's Head of Research, Professor Andrew Blake (pictured) this morning at LWF. Although, as some of the audience tweeted, non-touch interfaces are already here, it was interesting to see how Microsoft and other large corporations plan to incorporate this technology into their products in the near future. We are clearly headed for a world of intuitive computer use according to Professor Blake. He started by demonstrating how technology is capturing and recognising the shape and movement of the human body and he discussed the challenges involved in achieving this. Different body shapes, sizes and people standing in groups can all confuse cameras, because they 'see' us as flat images rather than in 3D, he said. How does the camera select human limbs from their background surroundings for example? he asked. The use of the depth camera achieves this. Using the example of the special effects in the Hollywood movie Titanic and its extensive use of matte technology (what we used to call colour separation overlay in television studio work) Professor Blake deftly applied a similar approach to visual manipulation for practical applications. This technology builds on previous research into object recognition and is used for example in games playing technologies such as the XBox 360 Kinect.
Computers can even recognise emotions now, said Blake, and this was an unexpected spin-off from autism research, where facial feature recognition software was first developed. Blake admits that all this important research is leading somewhere significant, but he admits he doesn't really know what shape it will take yet. The final summing up remark was that with new non-touch interfaces, it is likely that computers will learn from us, just as we learn from computers.
Increasingly, as technology becomes more personalised, it will also become more personalisable. By this I mean that not only will users be able to tailor the technology (apps, backgrounds, appearance, functionality) to their own needs, but it will also be used increasingly to appeal to their senses, and even to adjust their perceptions and behaviour. Watching a re-run of the 2002 sci-fi movie Minority Report, reminded me of this. The central character, a Pre-Crime Officer by the name of John Anderton is walking down the street, and animated advertising images are calling him out by name as he passes by: "John Anderton - you need this product today!" We assume that the embedded technology within the advertising hoardings are detecting some personal feature that identifies him - possibly the irises in his eyes - and can then call him by his name. Such advertising, if it were technically feasible (and some would argue it already is) would be very powerful, because as all advertisers know, it is the personal message that is the most powerful.
