| D O O R S O F P E R C E P T I O N 5 | |
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| "Espresso" we're moving forward |  |
| PDF link for printable transcription | Lewis Bronze |
I'm from a small company called Espresso, in London. I used to be with the BBC where I produced a children's show for many years called Blue Peter, which is a very well known show in England but not very well known outside Britain at all. But here's a private joke for anyone from Britain: when I produced Blue Peter, the program was as pure as the driven snow. And the good news is: it still is. Okay, I'm gonna show you some screens from material that my company produced for a trial which we did earlier this year in a school as a proof of concept trial. The delivery method for these fat, updatable files was package delivery via satellite data broadcasting. We used France Telecom satellite 2d. The files are downloaded and stored on a server. The PC is accessed off-line locally over a network. We also offer Internet delivery at a minimum of twice the speed of ISDN2, but I'm not talking about that this morning. So we're very focused on the commercial problems, the commercial necessity of delivering educational multimedia by this innovative method to classrooms. And if anyone has experienced the hour I've just had with some corrupted Shockwave files, then they would wonder why we're bothering and they would also wonder if they understand how incredibly difficult it is to actually deliver IT into classrooms, because the stuff has to work and it has to work first time. So I'm gonna show you some screens here, as I said, from this trial earlier in the year. The idea was that with the satellite facility you can update the files on a very regular basis. We did it weekly. So here is a news broadcast. So that is a one or two minute news piece which was taken from the BBC, who we work with on this trial. We've incorporated it into our framework. The idea is to deliver news that is relevant to the curriculum, to bring the curriculum alive in the classroom. So then we scooped (it up) from the news area, which changes every week, to a curriculum section. And this section is focused on the national curriculum in Britain. It's very prescriptive in Britain so in that sense it makes it easy for companies like ours to actually know what you have to do, because you have to address programs of study that the children go through. So here we are in a geography module for 13-year-olds. The topic is national hazards and we go into a module about earthquakes. The video for this module comes from Channel 4 Schools in Britain. This is a 25 minute program which we have dissected into a number of short clips. So the children can see what an earthquake looks like. They move forward to the next clip. This is targeted at particular areas of study. The idea is to teach and direct - this is not an Encarta-type of product; it's not a big encyclopaedia to sit on a shelf, but a key classroom resource, that's the idea. So here's an open-ended question: 'Why were so many buildings destroyed?' And here is the answer. And that resource is supported by us. For lack of time I won't show it to you now, but it's supported by a glossary, by activities and by further video clips. I quickly move over to another site. This isn't a canned presentation. This is the site as it actually was used by the students. The navigation that I'm doing is the same navigation the children will have done. The trial was a great success. On the back of it, Oxfordshire, the area where the two schools were, has actually bought this for 90 schools. And we're installing it at the moment. This is a 500 megabyte file, a topic on rivers containing geography, history and science. It's for nine and ten-year-olds. It's a term's work and it was used in a primary school. The resources come from Channel 4 again and from stuff we filmed ourselves. So here's a local river, local to the school, and they can compare that with a European example - in this example, the river Rhone. The same educational points, looking at flooded areas on the river Rhone. And once again, the supporting information that comes off the web, there's an activity, there's a glossary. Georgia Karkanes from Oxford wrote her Master's (thesis) on it, and one of her observations about IT in general, is that it made a very limited impact in the classroom. The primary obstacle she notes are the teachers themselves, who remain resistant to change. In my opinion teachers have good reason to be circumspect or plain suspicious of multimedia in the classroom. Bad multimedia is no more use than bad books and it shouldn't find a place in their teaching model. So why is our government spending a 110 million pounds this year and the same for the next three years on putting hardware into schools? I was talking with three middle-aged, experienced primary school head teachers from Middle England - Oxfordshire - earlier this week, and they showed me that they were very suspicious about this rush to computer aided learning. They feel most existing CD-ROMs fail to deliver as well as books. Between them their three schools had just one machine connected to the Internet and that particular machine sits on a trolley and it has to be wheeled into another room to be connected to a telephone point. Nevertheless, all three schools are rushing into complete computer sets with up to 20 multimedia PC's and they're enlisting the help of parents with ambitious fund-raising targets. But there's a sense that those head teachers are acting against their will, that this is an imperative, that they're being pushed towards some sort of Nirvana, represented by a Windows NT server and a lot of network cabling. And it will not work. The very words 'multimedia' and 'interactivity' are so overused and obligatory in the description of any new piece of software that they're in danger of becoming meaningless. Of course multimedia or interactive is a continuum. We're a little bit of the way along what I consider where we're heading in the levels of interactivity and multimedia that we can get into Espresso. But we are addressing those teachers' fears and our ambitions by working very closely with teachers testing and evaluating our development in the classroom. We know that the children who use Espresso love it. But that's not good enough. We have to prove to teachers that the use of this powerful resource aids learning and that the learning is retained. Now I heard Seymore Papert speak in London a few months ago and he basically said that the existing teaching model in our schools is all crap and it's gonna be changing. And if he's right then we're wasting our time. But let's assume that he's wrong, because our government is obsessed by standards and driving standards up and also reducing costs possibly in a long term. Costs of teachers maybe, and we suspect they might see this kind of media as a way of not replacing teachers but certainly augmenting them. I'm not able to show you how our production has moved on due to some corrupted Shockwave files. But I'll tell you some of the things we've learned, which is that multimedia can't do everything. It sounds pretty obvious, but we're building a science module and materials for young children at the moment. You can't show on a screen the difference between a piece of hardwood and a piece of softwood. You can't beat actually holding two bits of wood in your hand. So it's important for people like us to remember that, because one of the great things about developing ICT, about developing multimedia, is to know when not to use it. So we're an innovator: we believe in the creation and delivery of video-rich websites. We've come to this model because the company is largely made up of ex-BBC people, from TV production, from education, from multimedia development, but all BBC and all used to a kind of broadcast television model and expecting the screen to be full of high quality, informative, moving images whether the screen is on a computer or a television set. Equally we're aware of the potential of the technology to remove us from the broadcasting model. We want to narrowcast. We already are narrow-casting in the sense that we're creating customised content for local areas. We want to go on to include authoring tools with our content that allows people to create their own lessons and incorporate their own content into our packages. We understand that we're invading the classroom more than an educational television program. We're trying to form a contract with the teacher. We're trying to create an imaginative and useful resource, attractive to use, easy to navigate. We're trying to help teachers spend their time in more profitable ways. But we also know that there are many underfunded schools that will never ever be able to afford an IT technician, or will expect the teacher to be that technician. Therefore teacher resistance is potentially a great barrier. Not just to Espresso but to all software in the classroom. To conclude, I'll put in a plug: we're moving forward on a 200-school trial in Britain and in Italy funded mainly by the European Space Agency. We're planning to be launching a commercial service very shortly. We're looking for partnerships with broadcasters and with independent production companies, particularly those clever enough to obtain the multimedia rights to their programs. So if you want to contact me through our website, I look forward to hearing from you. |
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url: DOORS OF PERCEPTION |
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