Cyber Curricula: The Future of the UK e-Learning Market
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Introductory Remarks for an Accessibility and Usability Workshop, Westminster Media Forum National One Day Conference
Date: 15/12/2003
Venue: University of Westminster, London
Article
Our major problem is that we don't know what it's like, to borrow a Marxist term, to be alienated. Here we are, many of us brought up in working class families, so moulded by grammar school education that we cannot think ourselves into the physical and mental world of the socially excluded; and, of course, we don't try to alleviate that situation by going to sink estates, or even working in them. Well, maybe I am being a little unkind to us but I think the general direction of the comments is legitimate.
So my starting point is to ask what makes excluded people excluded; to which one important though not comprehensive answer is a lack of self esteem. Of course, as J.K. Galbraith pointed out more than thirty years ago, democracy makes it very difficult for us to attack the root cause of such a lack of self esteem which is poverty - in a materialist society how could we expect it to be otherwise - and so educators, social services, the police and our health services are all spending much more to deal with the consequences of social exclusion than it would cost to reduce it radically through a fairer redistribution of income and wealth. I am saying this not to be provocative but because we have to be deeply aware of how intractable exclusion is when the chief weapon of tackling it is denied to us.
e-learning now and ICT before it are not panaceas; they are not even as powerful as better basic education which, in turn, is not as powerful as proper pre school child care which, in turn, is not as powerful as hope, as the situation of knowing that striving will have its rewards. So let us not hold out too much hope for e-Learning.
My basic question, then, is what forms of learning are most likely to enhance self esteem? Not, I think, systems which become circular when a wrong answer is chosen or a key mistakenly prodded; not, I think, systems which synthetically praise mediocrity; not systems which purport to complement but actually replace human contact; not, I think, systems that depend upon self motivation.
We, here, are askers; if we don't know, we send out a question to an email list. Those who lack self esteem are poor askers because they think that asking belittles already little people.
We also live in a culture of complexity; faced with 100 options we occlude without thinking; we multi task without disruption; we have taken well to the time ratchet of the letter, the telephone call, the fax and now the email. We recognise patterns and anomalies and where we don't, we improvise; and at the very worst we bluff. The socially excluded don't have so many and such sharp tools.
This is why I am extremely excited by the prospect of blended e-learning which broad band will allow. For my people, forget for now the CD ROM and the self-assessment, the learn at your own pace and the phoney interactivity; give me the best of broadcasting and the best of dialogue and combine them. In the consumption of broadcasting and the participation in dialogue people who lack self confidence have a degree of control denied to them in computing; for people who have not learned to ingest, to weigh, to value, the idea of constructive self expression is over ambitious with huge preparation; excluded people may need to blog for the purpose of relieving personal tension but their primary need is to understand the society they live in, the extent to which they can enjoy it and change it and the personal commitment required.
In gradgrind we prostituted education for mass industrial production; now we have the opportunity to do better but the basis of self esteem is to trust and be trusted. To that extent we are safer with the television than the PC but we would be served best by sound information and dialogue. The user interface is not critical to the process but our cultural history would indicate that something with a television at its core will be more effective than a PC. Of course content matters but not so much as a feeling of security and control, of mastering rather than being intimidated by the process. Tools may be helpful, too, but not so much as people. If teachers were prepared to let broadcasters deliver the basics they would have more time to prepare themselves for human dialogue.
Drilling down from this high level to accessibility and usability, I have to say that the debates on both topics and how they relate has been academically fascinating but practically sterile. For perhaps 40% of the general population most of the systems and applications of the ICT sector might as well be sanskrit. Microsoft has just reported that 60% of its own users have substantial problems with its products, so where does that leave those who hardly ever or never use them? I shall go to my grave reminding people of the (7 + or - 2) rule for optimal choice; I will go hoarse advocating customisation; I will go on attracting general ridicule because I advocate the use of intelligent agents to enable systems to react to user behaviour; and, above all, I will continue in this collaborative world to bang my head against the brick wall of an examination system based on solo achievement.
So if we don't get some fundamentals right, about self esteem, about dialogue and trust, about systems that correspond as nearly as possible with human behaviour, about adapting education to the realities of today rather than sealing it in a nostalgia capsule, the impact of e-learning will be unduly limited.
So we have some very simple but difficult questions to ask ourselves:
- First, is e-Learning a case of technology 'push' or 'pull'?
- Secondly, what makes e-Learning different from all its digital cousins such as the undifferentiated web?
- Why is there such a disjuncture between the theory of customisable learning progression and the practice of customisable learning materials?
I used, until quite recently, to think that ICT products were so complex because of the economics of the inexorable upgrade but I now tend to the view that the digital creation industries think they are part of the media, very close to television, rather than being the makers of the digital equivalent of graph paper. We are also still in the middle of a surprisingly underground but still fundamental disagreement about the purpose of digital technologies. The designers think that the computer is part of a way of being whereas bewildered users stubbornly hang on to the view that it is a set of tools for achieving a series of largely sequential tasks. This, then, raises another set of questions:
- What can e-learning learn from broadcasting?
- What justification is there for digital information design to diverge radically from user requirements?
- Why are users so infrequently part of the product testing phase?
I don't think it will be difficult for us to answer these questions in principle but I do urge us to be concrete. We don't want to generalise about the establishment of benchmarks and the dissemination of good practice; what we need are active, sustained, open minded experiments in the field which allow us to establish good practice from a user perspective. On that basis we may not need our social imagination because we have taken the trouble to encounter reality.
Kevin Carey
Director, humanITy
8.12.03