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Digital Childhoods
The Future of Learning for the Under-10s
5-6 March 2003, Robinson College, Cambridge
Overview by Ben Williamson, Researcher, Futurelab |
Cambridge and education have had a long and illustrious partnership. Fitting then that Futurelab should choose the youngest of the University's colleges for their latest conference, Digital Childhoods: the Future of Education for the Under 10s. Speakers from the worlds of media production, academia, experimental technology, and policymaking converged at Robinson College for two days of presentations, discussions, demonstrations and workshops.
The conference was centred around key themes of play and learning, children as co-designers, home-school links, and tangible interfaces; a demonstration session by children from local schools showed the extent to which these new technologies and innovative approaches to schooling can inspire creative work and greater learning.
In a "deliberately somewhat provocative" introduction to these issues and to the event, David Puttnam, the Chairman of Enigma Productions and NESTA, and President of UNICEF, opened proceedings with a direct challenge. He encouraged delegates to develop creative approaches that "balance the opportunities of the technology with the real challenges of real learning and of being a full, rounded person", and to confront the barriers that prevent educational and social transformation in the UK.
Dr Lydia Plowman of the University of Stirling followed this with a keynote focused on play and learning, based on work emerging from the Computers and Children's Electronic Toys (CACHET) project she leads. Tracing the development of children's toys from the middle of the 20th century to the present, Dr Plowman suggested 'play' activities with toys and computers can lead to increased interactivity between children, although some digital and 'smart' toys such as electronic baby dolls and Furbies are irritating and distasteful to parents.
Jocelyn Stephenson Senior Vice President of Global Creative Production at HIT Entertainment, and part of the original team behind Sesame Street, explored the role of television in enhancing children's play. Television-makers, she said, now realise that "a child's default setting is playing", and are making programmes which stimulate interactivity by inviting their young viewers to sing, dance and play along with characters such as the Hoobs and the Teletubbies by emulating what is occurring on screen.
A similar ethic underpins the approach of Anna Home, Chief Executive of the Children's Film and Television foundation. Anna Home was part of the team who launched Play School, the landmark programme for young children, and she discussed, to the nostalgia of some present, how Jemima, Hamble, Big Ted, Little Ted and Humpty, along with some enthusiastic presenters, helped define television for pre-school children. Simon Fuller, the Deputy Managing Director of 4Learning, introduced the latest generation of educational television from Channel 4's educational division. Fuller emphasised particularly the crossover to online interactive content that 4Learning is developing with GridClub and The Number Crew, websites aimed primarily at the primary years.
From the perspective of working with older children on television projects, Cathy Derrick, a producer with CBBC, described a research pilot which encourages the production of user-generated content. Input CBBC is a project aiming to establish film-making methodologies for young people. With minimal supervision from adults, except as security and for technical assistance, young children engaged in the project are becoming sole authors of TV, taking on responsibilities of scripting and directing as well as acting.
This dialectic of children rather than adults as producers was also the focus for case study sessions by Lieselotte van Leeuwen of the University of Sunderland and Dai Griffiths of Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, in which the roles of children as co-designers were discussed.
Dr van Leeuwen, drawing on work from the KidsLab and SaM projects she has led, argued that children's relationships with technology differ from those experienced by adults, and that adult design methodologies don't always work with youngsters. Towards a design methodology for the future, then, she suggested, "you have to make a design problem the child's problem." Dai Griffiths reinforced this point in describing work on eTui, an educational computational toy for which children submitted pictorial designs. Children, Griffiths argued, are arbiters of the success of a project. They're experts and they should be involved as co-researchers on products aimed at them.
During a parallel case studies session, Stephanie Gauld of the BBC discussed children's use of interactive online materials in the pre-school years, and Paul Nuttall, Head of SEMERC at Granada Learning, focused on the development of role-play through computer software.
Kimiko Ryokai's keynote explored tangible interfaces for learning that replace wholly screen-based tasks controlled through handheld input mechanisms. Kimiko, who is a researcher with the Gesture and Narrative Language Group at MIT MediaLab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, presented a variety of projects using experimental interfaces. StoryMat, for instance, is a stitched quilt embedded with nano-sensors and audio pick-ups which allow children to record stories they are playing out on parts of the mat, so that other children can listen to those stories at a later time and incorporate them into their own imaginative narratives.
In a timely demonstration of collaborative new technologies in action, Professor Mike Cole of the University of California delivered a keynote via video link from his office in San Diego. After a preamble from Charles Crook of the University of Loughborough in which he discussed social interactivity between humans and the role of social practice in learning, Professor Cole argued for a hybrid approach to learning wherein activities are drawn from children's world of "play-inhabited time" as well as formal education.
In a summary of recent research, Doug Brown of the DfES presented findings to support the digitalisation of education in the UK, and the new forms of communicative and collaborative learning across locations emerging through this process. Brown demonstrated statistics showing the pace with which schools are buying digital technologies and stated that all UK schools will have Broadband internet access by 2006. However, he stated, it is the creativity of teachers that affects improved standards using these technologies-not the technology itself, not school managers or policymakers, nor even socio-economic influences.
Keri Facer, Head of Learning Research at Futurelab, argued in her keynote that digital technologies have brought with them a shift away from text and language as the primary modes of communication. Instead, children are developing communicative and collaborative skills through social practice with their peers while using digital media. Indeed, Keri suggested, computers and video consoles have become integral to children's relationships with one another outside of school, and the activities they perform with them authentic to their lives in ways that formal schooling activities often are not.
A series of workshops during the second day of the conference helped to reinforce delegates' understanding of the potential of digital technologies to merge this authenticity with learning activities which are neither dull nor dumbed-down.
With key issues arising from the conference being the need for ambitious collaborations at the student level, establishment level, and community level, transformation of learning is going to be far from easy. Intelligent and creative approaches to these problems are though already being developed, and in many cases practised, as the speakers at Digital Childhoods demonstrated. Understanding and acceptance of the social model of learning is also growing. Dialogue and collaboration between learners, teachers, community leaders, designers and academics working in partnerships are essential as this shift is realised.
Futurelab's focus through its events programme, research activities, and prototype development agenda is on engendering such creative relationships between these disparate partners. The next ten years are going to prove to be exciting and fruitful for the under-10s as they develop as learners in a re-invigorated educational community of joined-up expertise and practice.
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