| D O O R S O F P E R C E P T I O N 5 | |
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| UltraLab involved mainly in longitudinal research |  |
| PDF link for printable transcription | Stephen Heppell |
I didn't put this talk together until last night. It was very pleasant walking around in the reception, seeing some old friends. It led me to reflect on some of the things we have done in the past at the Lab. So I want to talk about where we're going with the children and learning communities, in the context of some of that previous work. For those of you that don't know, at UltraLab we're involved mainly in longitudinal research, software invention and development - blue skies research. We also have an intelligent toy project. With slightly different aims, we're hoping to make a toy that is stupid enough that as children try to teach it, they learn from it an ability to learn. And those kind of meta-level learning games result from it. We're, sadly, involved with the Millennium Dome in London, which I think will just be finished in time for maybe the next millennium. The good news is it'll be finished; the bad news is there's no transport. We have a long-term project of learning in the new millennium which has been a favourite of ours for discovering things in partnership with Nortel going way back to '93. It's a ten-year-long juvenile study and I'll show you a little of that a little later on. Probably at the moment one of the more ambitious large-scale projects, the Tesco School Net project that involves us putting a computer lab into every Tesco superstore in the country, however many hundred that is. We've got 11,000 schools registered and participating. What's vaguely interesting about that, in the context of what I'm gonna say right at the end, is that something like 12 million pounds of Tesco's (money so far) has effectively been used to build an empty server - and build the confidence that children will be able, willing and keen to fill it with their own content and their own materials. I guess what we're about fundamentally in the Lab, is about building learning tools, rather than building teaching machines. And building the biggest Internet project in Europe with no content until the children put it in, is indeed a brave departure. If you're interested in concepts like giving every child their own e-mail address and some of the consequences in terms of community and identity, watch our website in February for some detailed stuff. But you can talk over lunch maybe with me about how hard it is to build a website for eleven million people. It turns out to be non-trivial, as you'd expect. To give you some context of where we're going with our Internet, I want to look back a little at some of the work we've done over the years. A long way back in '93 we were faced by so many reports that children were mindless zombies as they played their computer games we thought we'd better have a look. Bring some children into the lab and spend some time looking at them playing the computer games. It was a fun time at the lab, I might say. The place was full of arcade machines and all sorts of cool technology. Well, were the children mindless zombies? Were they playing these addictive computer games? Of course they weren't. What we found was children with really tight problem-solving strategies, which was actually essentially: observe, question, hypothesise and test. They'd be looking at the screen, they'd be imagining a big spiky thing hurtling across the screen from the left-hand-side to the right-hand-side: 'It's making no attempt to disguise itself; probably it's predatory. Let me think about a strategy that might help avoid the beast.' Then we'd take the same children, walk them down to the ecology pond, have them stand and look at the water. And they'd look at the water and they'd see a big spiky thing moving across the surface of the water, making no attempt to disguise itself. But instead of saying: 'Yep, I know what that is,' they'd say 'was that it?' - because nobody told them that the problem-solving strategy that was working so well with their computer games had a place anywhere else in the world. There was no analogue between the computer game world, where they were so, so clever and the world of learning that was part of their school environment. It was a great fractured relationship, and that represented an enormous waste of their creativity and their talent. Just to take one tiny example you can measure yourselves: if you watch any child playing any game maybe on a little hand-held thing these days, When they get to Level 10 and beat the game's boss, they never ever rush over to their friends and say 'Look, I'm on Level 10 - nernernenerner!' You know, 'I've beat you.' They rush over to their friends and say: 'Let me show you how I got from Level 9 to Level 10.' They're obsessed with progress rather than product in the way that does not map, actually, on the sort of curriculum that we're giving them at schools. I have a little example here. We were watching a girl playing this early version of Sonic the Hedgehog, and we were filming something for television. As she was playing, we disconnected the video feed by mistake. She carried on playing for a short period of time. I'll try and give you that experienceŠ So imagine you're playing Sonic the Hedgehog, and this (sound) is all you've got to go on. That's tough isn't it? Well it wasn't tough for her. She'd picked up enough of the grammar, of the syntax, of the semiotics of sound of the order to trues and clues to just carry on playing. She knew where she was. She knew where she was going. As the video came back on, she was exactly at the right place and carried straight on. So that's the sort of capability we were observing back in '93. It set us out on a path of absolute confidence about children's capability, about the lessons that were there from games and their ability to recognise them. We went a little further a couple of years later, to look at the same problem of children watching television. You know the great question: how much television is too much television? And of course, in a world when we're looking at immersive video environments, where we're talking about inevitable video walls with smaller annotated video handsets, and relating to them in a way perhaps that some of you might remember relating to radio. Perhaps if you're as old as me you remember sitting around the table listening to a radio as a family activity. Now radio is just part of an immersive social experience. If that's the way that television is heading, then what happens to people if there is such a thing as too much video. We asked a lot of children. We asked 500 children: How many television programs do you think you can watch at the same time? Interestingly, none of them said 'one'. The most ambitious said 'seven'. - Which is brave, I thought. We thought we'd test it with four. And here's what happened. I'll just run this little clip. The harsh facts were that they were extraordinary intelligent viewers. They were highly media-literate. We went on to bring a group into the lab, show them a video, ask them to talk about it with their friends afterwards, and then finally to complete a worksheet. A control group came in. We showed them a video. We said: 'while this is running talk all you like. There are worksheets on your chair. When the video finishes, you can finish the sentence you're on, but we'll take the worksheets in.' It was that group that were multi-tasking. They gave us the best work, how ever we measured it. And yet if you walk into classrooms all over Europe for sure, North America probably, you'll find teachers standing in front of classes saying 'I'm only asking you to do one thing so that you can concentrate'. Because fundamentally, one thing is too easy. And that's part of the reason why their attention is gone off the way, wondering away. We asked them tough, tough questions - meta-level observation stuff about character and plot and place - so we weren't just asking detailed observation things. They had good confident answers as well. So they weren't just watching for entertainment reasons. They were watching in quite a nice, analytical way. So you can see we're starting to build a picture now from this early work of children as competent, confident, highly literate with a broader range than we'd expected, with great strategies and a great feeling of ownership and identity for those strategies. What happened when we brought those same children into the Lab and set them the task of creating learning materials? We asked them if they could design a piece of software which would teach multiplication tables. A ghastly thing to have to learn. Not the sort of work we do at the Lab, normally. They came up with this (image). They coded it. We designed it. You'll notice all sorts of features about it: there's no text on it at all. You can see there's a kind of lever thing here. Teachers looked at it; they didn't know what it was. Kids saw it; they said: 'I'll start at level 2; that will be easy'. They asked for pressure, 'cause it's gonna be a very boring task, they said. So unless it's going to have a lot of pressure in it, we won't bother. They asked to be able to do it with other children that were better than themselves or worse than themselves. Children are very comfortable working with people who aren't born between two Septembers, which is typically the way we group them in schools. And this is what it looked like (image). Very simple. I'll start at level 2 because I'm not very good at these either. You can see the little pi-person here. The little pi-person here is pretty confident that I know the answer. But I don't know the answer and the confidence will start to wane a little. I can paint clues for myself here if I want - that helps a little. That's a golf club, so the answer is probably 'four'. And it turned out that 2 times 1 was pretty much the same as 1 times 2. So I can put it in as well. The key thing to take away from that is that the children were very intelligent designers of learning materials even when the learning task was extremely boring and extremely inappropriate. They had good design awareness. They didn't need to be given solutions, they were very comfortable to learn the solutions themselves. This takes us on finally in this context to thinking about children using tools as toys in an interesting sort of way. We were, back in the 80's, interested whether you could build simple tools that could themselves be fun to play with. This was '87, I think. There's a calculator. You could turn it on, you could make it work. 99 maybe take away 6. 93. And it's just a boring calculator. But it became fun when you could break it. And I just smash a lot of keys here. Straight away I've got a real good problem - not the least of which: how I can clear the thing. Mathematicians spend ages and finally decide to multiply by five. But not the children. Turn it on and off; works pretty good. How do I get the 99 back? Well I could create it in this kind of way: 88+11 gives 99. How do I get the minus 6 or whatever it was I did? Really tough. You can see already you're engaged with this as a problem, rather than just looking at a piece of software. We're going to have to go to the minus memory key here sooner or later - which on your calculators is the one with the dust on it. You can see that if you can turn standard tools into toys too, you can have a lot of fun, but good learning fun can come out of it. So we're starting to build a picture here of highly creative, critically-aware, media-literate, intelligent children, massively under-stretched by the learning tasks that are typically around them in the curriculum. It doesn't always work out perfectly. We made a program with the BBC where we set children down, had them play with Lego, with Microsoft's Barney the Dinosaur, and with some regular bricks. And the children were very critical of Barney, which is very much a kind of drill-and-practice thing. You know: 'make your choice now. Wrong, review evidence' sort-of-stuff. But when we came to sit the children down and ask them to be honest about their view of the toys, it wasn't just the problem solving and the critical awareness that won over, it was the cuddliness. And we just play this little extract, which was deeply depressing for me. It was depressing in a way, but I think we shouldn't lose sight of the point that was made strongly, I think, just before I came up here. Which is that play and toys do matter above all else in this. You know the cuddleability was actually worth something. Moving on then to online communities, we have an interesting challenge ahead of us. How can we take advantage of all that capability, of all that literacy, of all that confidence, of all that competence, of all that meta-level awareness of learning and all that skill in building and understanding and designing a learning environments and put it into an online community? Let me talk a little about the Nortel project. Back in '93 we connected up children of all ages with scientists and engineers right across Britain with just an intention of wondering what happened if we stood back - and of course left teachers in the equation. I must say that teachers were enormously important in all this. They were the catalysts that made things happen. Let me just play this little clip of the findings in phase 1, which we published in '95 or '96. I think that's an extraordinaryly comforting message. But I think the notion that children were part of the tapestry of learning, were key contributors was something that we all sort of picked up at the School Net project, where we've children all over Britain at the moment, rushing around, exploring, interviewing, discovering and building the content. This is curriculum materials by children, for children. You can imagine: 11,000 schools times however many children at each school are engaged turns into an enormous curriculum resource. But as a curriculum resource that is by the children, for the children not for the children by an external publisher. And that's what gives it not only its authenticity but also gives the children their ownership and identity. And of course, because it all sits on a huge object database, you can do a lot more than just create stuff. You can get a sense of audience from it. The great model of learning isn't just about doing, isn't just about being mediated. It's about having a sense of audience for what you're doing, and also having some mapping, some sort of referencing of your own progress. You'd get all that and more from the people who visit and annotate your work than in when you produce one cute feature. Let me say about that Tesco project that kids all over the country can see each others' work while it's work in progress, but no adults can see it until they pull that lever and determine that it's finished. So to move to the last possibility really. This is very much where we're going with our online learning communities. It turns out I think that some schools don't fit some children. There's no surprise is there? It's worth just thinking for a minute why that misfit, that mismatch occurs. Typically, to succeed in school, the age of many of you that are here I think is you needed to be good with text, you needed to be good with notational form, you needed to be able to read other people's stuff, represent it and regurgitate it, maybe work a bit of video, maybe not work a bit of video the way things are today. And that was pretty much it. And you had to do it on your own for sure. You had to do it in private, probably otherwise it would be cheating. Well of course, we knew the system, and were trying to master the symbolic manipulation of this system. So I think games for me were about the social context with my friends that I played them with, and the mastery of the symbolic system. Still a lot of people play board games and involve the same dynamics. The second technology that I was very wrapped up of when I was a kid was models. Little models of ships and planes you could spend hours and hours constructing. First you start with very simple models. Plastic or wood. They snap together at first, then you glue, and they get more and more elaborate. When you start out, you build these little models and then you play with them. You know: 'I have an aeroplane, whooo-whooo'. Put the ship in the water float it around. And do new things with them. As you get further and further down the road of model making and your skill goes up, you start making more and more elaborate models, you make those elaborate ships with rigging and futile little knots and all the little ropes. |
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url: DOORS OF PERCEPTION |
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