Telling stories about digital
futures
Helen Beetham
e-learning consultant
stories we tell about the future
are stories about our present
(and past)
Telling stories about digital futures
Because…
• There are different ways of telling
• There are different stories to be told
• There are different possible futures
top hit on ‘education 2.0’
‘Want an education? Open up a
browser. With the information
available online you could probably
get a complete education without
ever leaving your house’
‘…to make best use of emergent
technologies (such as those that are
now becoming synonymous with Web
2.0 and social software), creating a
community that is equipped to rapidly
adapt and adopt to provide a more
coherent and personalised user
experience’
Focus groups with teachers and young
people: what challenges face education?
• Students and teachers envisage similar learning
environments in the future, specifically they want:
learning environments to continue to exist in a physical
form; real people as teachers; similar technologies, for
example: “I want more interactive whiteboards“.
• Students felt ‘What we will need to know’ was the most
important challenge, as it addressed what they felt to be
a key purpose of education - which is to enable them to
get a job. [In other words a focus on content.]
• Despite the focus on social interactions, teachers and
students think that the least important challenges
include: ‘How we interact with each other and
information with and through technology’
‘Beyond Current Horizons’ programme 2008
Surveys of 16-18 year olds and new
students about their expectations of ICT
• Students value face-to-face interaction and
really need to see the value and relevance of
technology before they are persuaded
• Although generally open to the idea of new
technologies, just 57% say they look for new
technologies to help their learning
• Students make wide use of social networking but
struggle to see how it could be used in learning
JISC/Ipsos MORI 2007/08
Stories must be familiar But new enough to
enough to be heard be worth hearing
But innovations
must hope to
change their users
Innovations must find
users (must ‘fit’ with at
least some existing
practices, rules, roles)
Some parallel stories
Users 2.0?
Hypertext Writers and
Read/writers
is blurring (wikis, fan
readers fiction)
Web 2.0 the Media producers
Pro-sumers, sharers
(sharing) and consumers
(Flickr, Youtube)
boundaries
Web 2.0 (kn. taggers, producers
Knwldgebloggers,
building) between: and consumers
commentators
OpenSource Developers and
Agile developersand
users
adopters (sourceforge)
e-learning? ‘Agile’ learners?
Teachers and
learners?
BUT: ‘traditional’ roles are powerful
• Even in the most democratic online spaces, the
‘powerful’ (writers, teachers, developers, media
producers) maintain their own:
– Separate communities – often with their own
unwritten rules and specialist languages
– Professional codes, values and identities
– Economic models (usually: we get paid, you don’t)
• Consider the different rules that govern:
– Content produced by professional designers,
publishers, teachers, and learners
– Content/code owned by Facebook, its application
developers, its advertisers, and its users (none!)
‘Old’ users ‘New’ users
Orchestrating Aggregation
technologies (VLEs) technologies
User requirements (‘we Agile development (‘tell
know who you are’) us what you want today’)
Text books Searches
TV and radio progs YouTube, podcasts
Curriculum Bite-sized learning
opportunities
Less ‘story’ in the technology
Tagging refuses any final order or
finished story. It passes on a
fragment of sense to future users,
leaving them with the task of
making new sense in a new
context.
A person is always located at
“nodal points” of specific
communication circuits... Or better:
one is always located at a post
through which various kinds of
messages pass.
J.-F. Lyotard (1979, trans 1984)
The Postmodern Condition
Blurred boundaries/
permeable layers
Permeable layers of actors, with different rules,
roles and expertise:
• Expert creators Researchers, innovators
• Expert communicators Teachers?
• Chatters, taggers and twitterers Reflective
– commentators, ‘enrichers’, active remixers,
personalisers, hybridisers, optimisers... learners?
– pursuing their own goals they consciously leave traces
for others
• Users/consumers
– participation at the level of choice (opting in/out?)
– through ‘architectures of participation’, choices can
create new traces for others, and even new knowledge
These ‘new’ users need
new skills and agilities
• act in different roles and move between them
• engage critically with ideas in multiple media
• re-purpose what they know for different contexts
• accumulate personal and public knowledge
• record their journeys
• reflect and plan purposefully
Tell their own stories
Developing effective e-learners
Digital pioneers
Creative producers Learners are creating
Everyday communicators attributes/ their own learning
Information gatherers identities environments and
(Green and Hannon 2007) blends. Personal
attributes and styles
Readiness
strategies of learning/technology
use come to the fore.
Resourcefulness
They are active
Resilience
participants in
Remembering skills communities of
Reflecting
knowledge building
(Higgins et al 2005)
and sharing.
access
Attention
Creativity
Social participation
Developing and projecting identities (based on Owens et al 2007)
“A story is an attempt to create
order and security out of a
chaotic world.” Doyle (2004)
quoted in Hughes (2005)
Tangled weblogs as spaces for
transformational stories of
lifelong learning
Stories traditionally put us into
place, and into history.
Alternative stories: alternative futures
• flexibility, (re)aggregation
– Modular ‘memes’ (learning objects, video clips, datasets, widgets)
– BUT: do we sacrifice rationales, contexts, unifying narratives?
• personalisation
– Learning is always ‘my story’
– BUT: also ‘our story’ (cohort) and ‘their story’ (education system)
– Who owns the stories we create and share with technologies?
• knowledge as use-value
– ‘cool’, popular and ‘linked-in’ are key Web 2.0 values
– knowledge must be ‘just-in-time’ and ‘just-for-me’
– the eternal present of web information
– BUT: academic knowledge has different values
– (plagiarism as crunch-point)
• multiple identities
– resources to be playfully managed
– BUT: deep personal development? Learning as self-actualisation?
Better to ask:
• How are the roles of writer/reader, producer/
consumer, developer/user, teacher/learner
changing with respect to one another?
• How do their different stories intersect?
– Where do the different intentions and meanings of the
writer/teacher, reader/learner etc find common
expression?
• As writers/producers/developers/teachers:
– What space is there for the user here? How can she
make this her own?
• As readers/consumers/users/learners:
– What can I make of/in this space? Who can I be?
• How can we enable learners to
become creative storytellers, and
actors in their own stories?
• How can we keep telling ‘traditional’
stories we value, for example about
disciplinary ways of knowing?
• What role can technologies play?