The Technologies of Self Esteem in the Process of Collaborative Content Creation
Introduction
Last time I was in Sheffield I took part in what I can only describe as a surreal debate. It was a conference closer, with no formal resolution, a bit of knockabout to keep the excitement going until the rubber chicken civic dinner. The subject of the conference and the debate was e-Learning. My contribution was, as usual, evidence based but, as usual, was dismissed as gratuitously provocative, so I am going to begin with my main propositions and see how they go down here:
- First, if e-Learning products remain as they are now, e-learning will widen rather than narrow the socio-economic and skills divides
- Secondly, hybrid or 'blended' learning through the use of broad band should be developed immediately
- Thirdly, (and this is where the hackles rose) broadcasting is an important tool in developing lifelong learning.
Let me take these three in order.
e-Learning products rarely go far beyond the digitised book. Their major justification in the Government's document "Towards an Integrated e-Learning Strategy" is that they allow students to learn at their own pace in their own time. Their problem, not acknowledged, is that using such materials requires a very high degree of self motivation and often requires persistence, the very qualities which students on the wrong side of the learning divide clearly tend to lack. There is no hiding the fact that most of the products are pieces of digital didactic tedium. I grant immediately that there are also some interactive products that attempt to ingratiate but even children who lack certain academic skills know when they are being condescended to and when they are being condescended to by a schmaltzy avatar from the "Have a nice day" school of drama they quite naturally fail to value congratulations for their correct answers. Not unnaturally, e-learning products bear the same relationship to computing that feature films bore to television in the late 1950s but surely it is time for a genuine e-learning industry. Without this, well motivated, bright students who can benefit from learning alone at their own pace will widen the gap between themselves and those who cannot.
My second point on broadband was a plea for us not to repeat our most recent error with the distribution of computing and networking power to everyone in general and schools in particular; to provide universal access to hardware and networking is not the same thing as providing the benefits of these technologies to everyone. You don't need me to tell you how perverse much of our ICT systems still are; and you know better than me that giving every school an internet connection is not the same thing as giving every child internet access through autonomous activity. Add to this mistake my first proposition about the content of most e-learning and you see the problem. Now apply the same scenario to broadband. You give it to every school but do nothing about the
way it is used and you continue to broaden the divide between technologically competent and technologically challenged or deprived students. It is now almost a decade since the specifications for broadband were debated and decided; since 1996 it has been a 'when' rather than a 'whether' issue, so why are there not hundreds of products which take advantage of the great, the unique selling point of broadband; not the ability to download fat files, though that is nice but the ability to use digital information on screen and the traditional voice telephone at the same time. Blended learning takes the loneliness out of e-learning; it means that a student and a tutor half a planet away can see why the student is stuck or where she might go next for better results. It also makes it much easier for tutors, with consent, to monitor students as they work at a distance. This is an amazing development which will ultimately not only transform that somewhat marginal activity we call e-learning, it will ultimately re-model the whole child and adult education system, making large, expensive buildings redundant and many indifferent teachers, too; so there are good reasons why what I say on this point will be resisted and dubbed "provocative" but it isn't really, it's obvious.
My third point, about broadcasting, was, I thought, equally obvious. Television, it is said, changed our lives; well, everywhere except the classroom where it has had hardly any effect at all. It has had the power for half a century to provide basic, factual, groundwork to save thousands of teachers preparing the same course work. It hasn't even been used successfully for subjects like art and drama in schools with meagre art book libraries and no drama teacher. Most of us were taught Shakespeare as if he wrote plays to be read, not acted, as if he were a poet not a dramatist. We currently face a crisis in the teaching of science and mathematics and there are some wonderful networking experiments to give access by more children to the finest teachers but there is so much work from microscopic analysis to planetary gazing that works better on television than in books. The failure arises from the insistence of teachers on retaining their relaying monopoly instead of transforming themselves into facilitators, into real tutors. The result is that the most powerful technology of the second half of the 20th Century was not harnessed by educators to do what in this country it does best. I say "in this country" because the broadcasting duopoly from 1955-85 was uniquely trusted in this country; what we did better than most people was make television and we had particular strength in drama and documentaries.
So why am I so worked up about this now? The answer is that although television has become more fragmented and less trusted, the other side of that diversity coin is that we will soon have reached the point where it is cheaper to start and run your own television channel than build and maintain a large web site.
Having made these introductory remarks, I want to tie them to the main body of what I have to say which is about three inter linked ideas:
- Judging technologies according to how they affect self esteem;
- The crucial importance of collaborative, content creation for the socially excluded; and
- The role of self esteem in collaboration.