ICT Development and Basic Skills Strategy
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humanITy Briefing Paper 1
Date: 05/02/2003
Article
1. Introduction
Many of the literacy and ICT skills which are classified as basic will continue to be central to people as citizens but they will increasingly be economically marginal. humanITy is involved in work with socially excluded people but we are also involved in work at the cutting edge of machine processing of information, so we have some understanding of both phenomena as the latter impinges on the prospects of the former. This brief analysis, therefore, attempts to link the two aspects of our work so that the public policy implications can be considered in a holistic manner.
2. Machines and People
What machines do best is repetitive, predictable, rules-based work which reflects the analogue process of the division of labour in manufacturing. This is, in effect, what we are still expecting our humans with basic skills to undertake. Machine processing is actually developing a great deal faster than our capacity to develop learning materials and change courseware. The Semantic Web (embodied in such developments as Resource Description Frameworks - RDF), natural language processing for language simplification, intelligent agents for searching and collating, algorithm-based decision processors.
3. Human Capacity
What we need to concentrate on in the next ten years are those areas where humans are likely to continue to out perform machines. This is mainly in procedures that are semi-rules based or non-rules based, in content creation, complex processing and merging. These are all areas of added value.
4. Narrow Skills Bases
People with narrow skills bases will not be particularly good at adding value to content or creating it on their own but they may - we say "may" because there has been no adequate research in this crucial field - be able to undertake such work in a collaborative environment, in social firms, for example, either in a real environment, on the net, or a combination of the two. With cable free communications user interfaces it is conceivable that people will be able to work in micro collectives, moving between houses according to child care needs, receiving raw material and delivering content through broad band.
5. Skills Implications
Such developments have massive implications for skills development.
5.1 Collaboration
We need to move away from an almost obsessive concern with autonomous creativity (the novel) to collaborative creativity (the movie). This involves developing procedures and tools for asynchronous collaboration. It also means moving away from the examination hall as the icon of achievement where people are penalised for copying or consulting and where they are not allowed to look up information; in real life the first thing we do when we are faced with a problem is to consult or copy or search. Collaboration also needs an understanding of mutual dependencies, courtesy, structured decision making and shared goals.
5.2 Education and Training
The education and work processes are moving further apart. Many senior managers cannot stop thinking about what they learned and how they learned some forty years ago. Education is broadly concerned with the development of the knowledge of process whereas training is broadly concerned with producing an output. In our system the cleverer you are the more you get involved in the former and many of us leave university having only been involved in education and process. Where we decide to move people from education to training, from process to output, we do this simultaneously for every branch of every subject; the worse somebody appears to be at process the earlier we move them to training. A simple example of what we need to look at is the calculator: many people can use this effectively for long multiplication and there is no particular reason why they should understand the process but few people know how to use a calculator to calculate percentages because they don't understand the process and need to.
5.3 Voice In/Voice Out
We also need to spend much less time on learning to process symbolic language (reading) as if it could not be accessed simultaneously with voice out; and we need to consider writing in the context of voice in. This is particularly true if we have abandoned education/process in favour of training/output. What matters is the ability to secure and process information not the medium by which we do this. Many people would benefit enormously from accessing information simultaneously in speech, language and pictogram, applying the rule that multimedia should be multimodal.
5.4 Language Engineering
We also need to look carefully at the implications of language simplification in terms both of the need for syntactic and lexicographic understanding. Clearly, in a society of massive and available information and an ageing population, navigation, search strategies and an understanding of the status and reliability of resources is far more important than learning by rote.
6. Redundant Learning
It can be seen from all of the above that we are still cluttering our not very bright people with a mass of process they do not necessarily need, which deprives them of the time and opportunity to work on what they do need: * Defining Searches * Searching * Navigating * Evaluating Results * Collating * Collaging * Merging * Creating * Collaborating * Exercising restraint * Developing confidence.
One of the ironies of these last two items on this list is that it is the clever who ask and the not so clever who do not have the confidence to ask. This is the cultural problem behind the refusal to become interested in on-line material (apart from the fact that the hardware, software and data are mostly inappropriate); people with low or no skills are poor askers and we kill this skill by emphasising solo achievement.
7. Literacies
Traditionally we have emphasised traditional, autonomous, discrete literacy which says:
The more complex the set of skills to complete a task the fewer those who can perform them all.
ICT, Inclusive, collaborative literacy says:
The more complex the set of skills to complete a task, the greater the number who can become involved.
We need to think much more of the second and much less of the first.
8. Political
Although this Brief contains extremely important material to spark debate, the political conditions in which it might take place are extremely unpromising. The national obsession with the regular, intense testing of autonomous skills might now have over-reached itself but a call to abolish all such tests and replace them with assessed, syndicated learning would be so radical that any political party seriously interested in power could not afford to support such a change. The consequence, however, of leaving things as they are is that the current set of basic skills being imparted to the disadvantaged will simply ensure that they stay where they are, at the bottom of the heap.
References
- Berners-Lee, T. (2001) The Semantic Web. Feature Article. Scientific American: May 2001
http://www.sciam.com/2001/0501issue/0501berners-leebox1.html - Berners-Lee, T. with Fischetti, M. (1999) Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Its Inventor. Harper San Francisco
- Carey, K. (2002) Machine Processing and Basic Skills Literacy. HumanITy (paper available on request)
- Carey, K. (2002) The Relevance of Language Engineering to Public Policy. Paper presented at the University of Sunderland. October 2002. (Paper available on request).
- Facer,K. ; Furlong, J. and Sutherland, R. What’s the point of using computers? The development of young people’s computer expertise at home. New Media and Society Vol 3 no. 2
- Gracia – Luque, R. (2002) HUBS II. Developments and exit strategies 2001-2002 www.humanity.org.uk/directassistance/
- Lassila, Ora and Swick, Ralph (editors). Resource Description Framework (RDF) model and syntax. W3C, February 1998. http://www.w3.org/RDF/Group/WD-rdf-syntax/
- Lassila, Ora. Introduction to RDF Metadata, W3C., Note 1997-11-13 http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-rdf-simple-intro