A quick Friday post then to point to the Chicago Tribune’s images of past ‘high tech’ gadets.  The weekend homework that accompanies the images – think about stories from science fiction, predictions and forecasts you have heard and look for where parts of them have been realised.

A light-hearted review of some of those are answered in Where’s my jetpack?.

One such ‘Voice of Education’ is Richard Millwood, currently leading CORE and the development of the National Archive of Educational Computing, Richard was a key part in building Ultralab (and the many activities that has involved) and has an incredible ability to bring together hindsight and insight.

The bold text are questions posed to Richard, the lighter text his reponses.

If you could talk with the Oracle at Delphi (or ask questions of the data we’re collecting and generating), what would you want to find out to inform educational policy and practice?

I’m not too fond of static data-of-the-moment – rather I would ask for live data relating to learner satisfaction with learning activity – something which could feed-back into learning environments to inform both learner and teacher.

On a slightly longer time-scale – feedback to the system on learners’ next steps in learning or career.

In scanning the horizon, we often look for ‘weak signals’ – new developments and ideas that may play out in the future in many different ways.  What current developments (policy, practice, tech etc) have you noted that you think have possibilities for making a big difference to education in the future?

Collaborative documents, both synchronous and asynchronous as found in SubEthaEdit and GoogleDocs. The capacity to identify individual contributions to collaborative outcomes may be a clue to helping us to recognise learning achieved in group work.

Forecasters talk of ‘inflection points’ as a way of identifying big changes to come – they are often highlighted by ‘things that don’t fit’ (for example the mis-match between car crashes and developments in sensing technology).  Can you highlight any real world problems within education, with possible developments/solutions outside of it?

The problem of ‘authority’ in knowledge as observed in the debate between supporters and opponents of Wikipedia. Solutions will come from a re-alignment based on real-world utility – people will ‘vote with their feet’ by their use of collectively authored sources.

The problem of marking summative assessment products, as we move towards personalised learning and digital creativity in expression. Sustaining fairness, cost-effectiveness and validity may mean adopting more widely the radical technology-supported methods such as those proposed by Alistair Pollitt and employed in the eScape project.

What do you not want to see in any education in 2025?

A continuation of an overemphasis on selection, elitism and individualism at the cost of collaborative learning & attainment.

What are your hopes for education in 2025?

A democratic and fair system for accessing learning at all ages that fulfils citizens needs and interests, as they identify them.

Comment
There’s plenty in this short Q&A that is of interest, for examples notions of voice and empowerment, but one element specifically is assessment.  Assessment is often seen as a force that controls practice – sometimes to its detriment (perceptions here of ‘teaching to the test’) and sometimes to its benefit (the wide range of practices undertaken by sprinters and their coaches, as they absolutely know the specific details of their measured performance).  Richard points to collaborative authoring environments, not solely from a standard point of view referring to how they can support collective and collaborative endeavour, but of how they can be used to help identify individual activity, as well as the benefits of working with others.  As one of the challenges to collaboration is the individual nature of assessment, investigating how collaborative technologies can support the identification of both individual and collaborative acts is an important step in reducing the resistances of change in developing collaborative practice.  The marvellous eScape project that Richard refers to also highlights how the processes of learning can be made explicit through appropriate use of digital technologies, allowing more formative assessments.

If digital technologies can be used to make explicit these developments and they are linked to the live-student data, Richard refers to, a truly dynamic learning environment can be created that builds around the learners’ interests, satisfaction and of the moment needs.  Personalisation indeed.

Not only is O’Reilly’s post interesting because it contextualises some of his comments about web 2.0 – particularly his absolute focus on the user’s role in successful web 2.0 applications (applications win if they get better the more people use them), but it highlights different types – or levels of use of cloud computing.  O’Reilly labels them: ‘Utility Computing’, ‘Platform as Service’, and ‘Cloud-based end-user applications’.

All of these have implications for the way in which some educational services can be organised and delivered.  The implications of ‘Utility Computing’ of mass procurement of infrastructure; supporting developers of educational resources, to providing the necessary computational power for high level simulations and games.  The implications of ‘Platform as Service’, potentially with lower barriers to entry than that described as ‘utility computing’ is the possibility for more specific applications being developed from existing APIs for education.  This level of cloud computing allows those closer to the end user to develop more specific application:  what tweaks would you make to Google Docs to use it more effectively in your classroom?  How would a collaborative mindmapping tool be different if it were designed for your students and location?  The possibilities of greater customisation and development for local need becomes more apparent and potentially opens up routes for greater collaboration between developers and educators/students.

The most obvious implications for education though come in O’Reilly’s category ‘Cloud-based end-user applications’.  Any web 2.0 tool you care to think of, that provides the structure or tools for learners to build on their own input, is part of ‘the cloud’.  Learners accessing the tools they need, when they need them to make sense of their own data.  The possibilities of harnessing this potential in education is that we can really support the mobile learner where it is not the technology that is mobile, but the learner and – importantly – their personal data and information.  The possibilities of cloud computing for enhancing education, if not defined are certainly becoming clearer.  The task now is to investigate the preferable nature of these opportunities.

The March issue of the British Journal of Educational Technology highlighted this. In an introduction from Nick Rushby and Jan Seabrook, the authors suggest that most current efforts to support learning with technology don’t tend to show any awareness of previous efforts: in their words, “It is almost as if our field started in the late 1990s, and that nothing of importance happened before that time. Yet, the two decades from 1980–1999 encompass a great deal of UK research and development in the use of technology in education and training”. The penalty of working in this state of ignorance, of course, is that progress comes hard and energy is wasted.

So what can combat this lack of awareness? One initiative that has the potential to provide researchers into learning technologies with the kind of perspective Rushby and Seabrook are looking for is the fledgling National Archive of Educational Computing, a collection of memories, documents, artefacts and software herded together by Richard Millwood of Core UK and previously Ultralab. Launched at the Institute of Education last week (read Merlin John’s report of the event), NAEC aims to document the history of learning technologies and the experiences of those who built and used them. It’s a huge and much-needed undertaking, and if you can contribute a story or support the project in any other way you’d be doing a valuable service.

The BCH project is looking at the futures that lie ahead for education and technology, not the past, so NAEC might not seem like the most obvious topic for us to look at. But the archive offers us the promise of perspective and context, the chance to step back from what seems like a constant rush of technological excitement and learn from what’s happened already. An example: the recent reorganisation of government departments that gave birth to the DCSF, DIUS and BERR might prompt us to consider whether educational technology is something that stimulates industry and is an economic asset to the UK, or whether its economic value is more indirect, through its equipping learners with modern technological skills (or indeed, whether there is more to education than just supporting the economic health of the country). This is a current debate. But it takes access to the experience of people like Mike Aston for us to know that the Department for Trade and Industry and the Department for Education and Science were struggling to control this new approach to learning back in the late 1970s. Or that calls for “systems thinking” or “algorithmic thinking” have been made for nearly forty years. When a debate seems less novel it’s easier to assess its impact or importance than when caught up in the urgency of the present-day.

There’s a “but”, of course. The archive itself could benefit from a similar sense of perspective: at the moment, it seems to be working under the assumption that all learning technology comes in the form of disks and tapes and printed documents (listings and manuals and worksheets). But the technologies being pressed into service to support learning won’t allow themselves to be so neatly archived. How do you store the internet, or distributed programmes, or documents that change every few minutes, or activities that exist half in this world and half in another? The archive needs to be more future-focussed, if it isn’t going to end up in a museum itself. No doubt it will be, once it’s up and running.

But even if it confines itself to the last forty years of work, its presence will still help to remind us to guard against being seduced by narrow-minded presentism. And that is already a pretty useful contribution to any exploration of the future.