Plan of the Media Zoo
Links fixed 15 August 2012.
On 22/3/2007 I took part (in my ALT role) in a "round table" organised in Birmingham by Desire2Learn entitled "personalisation and innovation in education". Participants came from across the spectrum of English public sector education, including primary schools, secondary schools, technology colleges, city academies, universities. There was no hard sell from Desire2Learn: indeed, no sell of any kind.
We started off with a funny opening presentation by Gilly Salmon, who talked us through efforts being made, successfully it seems, to sharply increase the use of learning technology in course provision at Leicester University, where Gilly is Professor of e-Learning and Learning Technologies. Leicester's Media Zoo, and the projects that it leads to, with its chunky, almost charming, animation-laden interface, is worth examining in detail, along with the animal-acronym projects and services that Leicester has established. (Impala, for example, has plenty of useful stuff about podcasting.)
By far the most impressive part of the session was the time given over to reports from Balsall Common Primary School in Coventry, Longfield School in Darlington, King John School in Essex (web site built using Drupal), Walsall Academy in West Bromwich, Djanogly City Academy in Nottingham, about what they are doing to use learning technology to support the curriculum. Correction: about what they are doing to change the curriculum to make it learner-centred, and the role (sometimes only a small role) in this of learning technology.
For example:
- at Balsall Common Primary, children of 4 are acquiring a sophisticated vocabulary and framework for understanding their own learning, and leave the school fluent in the use of a wide range of digital technologies;
- Longfield, a secondary school, has over a two or three year period, moved from a "technology free" standing start to using ICT throughout the curriculum;
- at Djanogly City Academy (which has the freedom to largely ignore the National Curriculum, and which has an utterly non-standard building design), Year 7 pupils learn in large groups, continuously supported by 4 teachers with no set subjects, intensive and extensive use of the Web as a learning resource, and no disruptive moves between classrooms. (Typically learners in a National Curriculum face 14 different teachers per week, having arrived from primary school where they'll have been taught by one or at the most two teachers.)
Three things came across to me from the discussion. Firstly, that a far better term to use than "personalised" is "learner-centred": the learning is effective because learners, whatever their age, are committed, challenged, and given control (for more on this see Itiel Dror's 3 C's of Learning). Secondly, that whilst the National Curriculum exists as it is, and whilst schools are constrained by Government testing and reporting requirements, the push for personalisation (a.k.a. learner-centred provision) will come to very little. Finally, that learning technologists (for that is what all of us at the round table are), have a great deal in common, irrespective of whether we work in industry, adult learning, schools, colleges, or universities. Getting transfer of good practice between us is a worthwhile endeavour.
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