This Report addresses three overlapping and interlocking domains; identity, community and citizenship. The Challenge will also explore the intersection of identity and community, and identity and citizenship, and the ways in which changing technologies are likely to impact all.

Common to all three domains is communication, between persons, persons and institutions, and persons and information sources. It is here that new technologies are central; as well as changing forms of communication, they make highly visible how pervasive communication is in our lives. Core elements of all three domains are collaboration, participation and engagement with, and within, both the real and virtual worlds, in which we are active as agents intersecting with other agents. Information is not just something we access via a conduit; it is negotiated, actively communicated – and modified through our engagement with it.

The implications for future education are that educational policies, practices and institutions need to equip young people with the critical and technical skills to interact with technology effectively, to facilitate the development of positive and empowered identities and relationships and to be responsive to barriers or resistances that may conflict with or impede such agendas.

The Challenge’s key terms have multiple, nuanced and ambiguous meanings:  as such, working definitions are necessary:

By identity I shall mean, broadly, the ways that feel authentic for describing one’s self, which include multiple ’selves’ appropriate in different contexts. Such identity may include a sense of efficacy and agency – or its absence.  Identity politics, for example, is the pursuit of empowerment among people who are disadvantaged or marginalised but nevertheless are firmly committed to their personal identities.

Within this definition, this Report will explore:

• the ways in which identity develops through individual self-exploration and experimentation in relation to ideas, others and the external world
• identities associated with group memberships, including gender, disability, generation, value-based, ethnic, regional and national
• sense of efficacy and agency associated with such identities and the implications for facilitating empowerment, for managing disempowerment, and for identity politics – social support and action, including resistance, designed to give voice to the identity group
• how each of these intersects with technology.

By community I shall mean groups whose association has coherence, function and meaning to its members.  The term ‘community’ is contested and it is changing as a consequence of social, political and technological developments.  Exploring these changes is part of the agenda that this Challenge has addressed.

Community will be explored in relation to:

• theories of what community means, its functions and practices and the ways in which a community builds and sustains those functions
• the core features that subjectively comprise membership of a community and an identity related to that community; these may include shared values, sense of place, lifestyle, locality
• the criteria, and means, by which a community includes and excludes members
• how communities communicate and respond to members and how technology is changing this
• how a community is defined externally and the implications of this for members
• how intergroup relations are connected to the development and maintenance of group membership
• the relationship between communities, identity politics and social change
• the role of technology in these.

Citizenship is also a contested domain. The Challenge explores some issues around citizenship status but primarily in this Report I will address questions around the changing boundaries of ‘civic participation’, and the factors which contribute to both the extent and forms of young people’s engagement, specifically:

• how the definition of civic participation is changing, from conventional activities to a wider range of action
• how changing technologies alter the means of participating and therefore the definition of ‘active citizenship’
• what factors, including identity and community factors, contribute to a sense of agency and motivation for young people’s participation
• what factors create or perpetuate inefficacy in relation to civic participation
• the changing boundaries of the domain within which persons are ‘citizens’ including participation as part of a self-identified community, whether local or global, and the relationship of this to the traditional citizenship of a nation state.

Any exercise in prediction must recognise its core limitations and therefore what its purpose can usefully be.  What WILL change? There are things that will not change at all. There are things that will not change fundamentally, yet the way they are practised, or the form they take, may change. There are things which, as a consequence of technological, social, political or economic developments, will change quite considerably.

Some changes we can predict. We know that the relative proportions of generations will tilt upward. As ‘youth’ diminish as a proportion of the population it is probable that ‘youth culture’ may become even more distanced from the adult world and more marginalised. As work patterns and the life cycle of work increasingly fragment, identities associated with work and its communities will adjust. Education will need to facilitate developing the competence for managing such identities.

In the three domains addressed in this Challenge, values play an important role. Our current values guide our thinking about preferable, as well as possible and plausible, futures. The dominant social values of Britain today are essentially ‘liberal’. They include diversity, equality of opportunity, religious tolerance, non-violence and participatory citizenship. However we should not take contemporary values for granted, nor assume that their public support will continue in its present form. In looking forward twenty-five years, we should be aware of the uncertainties of history. Twenty-five years ago Thatcherite neo-conservatism changed the face of British values and had a large impact on education. The current economic recession could have major consequences for how the public view our objectives.

While it is likely that educators will continue to have the objectives of overcoming inequality, exclusion and injustice, potential obstacles to their implementation might easily include emergent religious fundamentalism, neo-conservative values that re-emphasise competition, increased social disruption due to economic privation, nationalism and fears about immigration. ‘Threats’ from marginal groups – such as religious fundamentalists – tend to be seen currently as issues of ‘diversity’ and the management of minority interests. If major political and economic forces – national or international – tip the balance of public opinion towards a more defensive position for liberals, a different agenda may emerge.

Currently, we see both highly optimistic and highly pessimistic predictions, rooted in contemporary value concerns but which risk missing out whole areas of relevance. For example, some have argued that individually-controlled information retrieval and communication will make schools redundant, as students can access knowledge at their own pace, from their own homes, with minimal guidance and monitoring by teachers. This prediction makes huge assumptions about the function of the school as a social and moral community, and the mechanisms by which young people learn – and deal with obstacles to understanding. This Report reviews material that does suggest the need to transform the current school system but the ‘death of the school’ narrative fails to take account of the identity, community and citizenship functions served by a school-like institution.

The core questions of the Challenge concern how technological developments precipitate, facilitate or impede development and performance within each of the three domains, identity, community and citizenship. Some new technologies do not alter relationships or social practices, only the ways that these are conducted.  In other cases, the new technology transforms social practices and social institutions. For example, despite the different skills involved, the social function of emailing friends may be little different from writing them a letter. However, using the same skills to organise a mass demonstration may represent a transformation of practices. Phoning from a mobile is still a form of telephone conversation, but a landline is in a static place and a mobile is an individual body prosthesis so friends and family can be in perpetual connection, with very different boundaries of access and privacy.

I will focus on four developments, specifically relating to communication, that are central to the three domains of this Challenge.

One is the media, by which I mean professionally produced information, fact or fiction. The conduits of traditional media have proliferated enormously. They play a vital role in reflecting, reproducing and indeed modifying cultural narratives, values and norms, and will continue to do so, and so contribute to the formation of identity.

A second development is the capacity of everyone who has the equipment and minimal skills, to access information. Barring censorship, in principle all areas of human knowledge are universally accessible.

A third development is that access is interactive.  The individual can add, create and modify information, and can set up communication networks.  She can do this anonymously, or within her own identity or that of one or many avatars. This creates opportunities for exploring and experimenting with identities and communities.

Gaming is one manifestation of this development, providing huge scope for playful-but-serious explorations of identity and community, but also providing an interactive mode of cultural transmission via the narratives in the games and the way that they are played; Ian Bogost for example argues that games are rhetorical persuasive tools. Numerous ‘educational’ games are being produced to purvey desired cultural messages.  Because interactive technology facilitates influencing others in ways that were beyond the scope of most people until today, it has a major impact on citizenship. This may be democratising as it removes control of the flow of information (in either direction) from the traditional gatekeepers; however open channels can also give more power to technocratic filtering.

A fourth technological development concerns prostheses. Developments which can counter disability (for example deafness) have implications not only for diversity and inequality, but also for identity. We cannot assume that all persons with disabilities will wish to be ‘cured’, particularly if the ‘cure’ is only partial. Conceivable prostheses in the near future include pharmaceutical enhancements of mental function, which – whether legally available or not – would require a radical rethink of the time-pressured unseen examination. More exotic projections include implanted prostheses – for example tagging children’s and vulnerable adults’ bodies to keep track of them.

How does new technology enter life space, and how do people in different roles respond to it? Where are new technologies located in young people’s life spaces? How have they been transformative? What might or might not be durable? By ‘life space’ I mean how the individual interfaces with the external world through social and technological intersections, language and social practices.

A new technology initially performs existing social practices; it is an enhancing adjunct to current tools. In due course the additional potential of the new technology becomes apparent, and new social practices develop. However, what seems like potential to an ‘expert’ is not necessarily taken up by users in the way predicted. Unpredicted uses of new technology happen, and the way that social practices are transformed does not necessarily accord with the scenario of the designer .

Mobile phone penetration for adolescents in most industrialised countries approaches 100%. As the first widely used hand-held prosthesis it is the first experience we have of wholly individual agency in managing communication and sending digital information amongst one’s community – pictures, music, and other software. Even before possessing machines that could access the Internet, young people have become used to actively, instantly and autonomously mastering information digitally. As Justin Reich’s review shows, Web 2.0 has substantially increased informal communication in the hands of young people.  Adoption is rapid; two years ago over 50% of US teenagers had created pages on Facebook and MySpace; the number is undoubtedly higher today. Reduced costs and improved technology have transformed communication. Sharing information, whether personal or not, is possible for everyone, conversations can be global and blogs enable one to keep a ‘public’ diary and to monitor those of others.

This places young people as active agents in what they add to as well as take from the virtual world. It removes geographical boundaries of communication, and it blurs the traditional boundaries of public and private. As hand-held devices become less expensive, this will expand. Reich points out that in February of 2008 over 112 million blogs were tracked worldwide, with probably over 70 million more in China. As we shall explore more in the context of citizenship, Obama’s campaign depended on the blogging activities of millions of supporters – with very low cost and extremely rapid transmission of information.

The ‘life space’ opened up by new technology transcends previous boundaries, even before the individual enters the alternative virtual world of avatars, games and fantasy. Gaming is a major life space activity. Half of UK children between five and fifteen play computer or video games daily. Millions of people aged over fifteen are engaged in large-scale interactive games, often internationally. Gaming offers entry into an alternative culture in which values are played out in the game, and the intellect is challenged to multi-layered information processing.  This has stimulated creative thoughts on how gaming could be used for new ways of learning or to foster moral, social or civic awareness.

Eva Vass’s review documents how gaming requires “attention, motivation and perseverance for long stretches of time, quite often coupled with extensively delayed rewards.” Gaming also requires multitasking, cognitively complex and rapid problem-solving and information-processing, all of which take place within a collaborative and interactive context. Play has always been seen as essential for children’s development, and in the contemporary urban world free play is constrained by various physical and social risks. The world of gaming offers aspects of free play, including bridging thought and action, and engaging emotion as well as cognition. Vass concludes, “due to its fundamentally interactive and participatory nature, new technology provides a platform for the free exploration of a virtual landscape and participation in shared activities in virtual space.”  Gaming is relevant to all three domains of the Challenge.

The potentially transformative nature of new technology is also explored by both Reich and Vass. Vass reviews the question of whether our minds (and possibly brains) are being altered by interaction with new technology; James Flynn for example argues that the accelerated IQ scores in industrialised nations over the past century are due to changing ‘habits of mind’ consequent on ‘cognitive habituation’ to a more scientific way of thinking. Vass summarises the ‘new mindset’ in terms of habituation to complexity, propensity for experimentation, multimodal content, information foraging, democratic forms of social practice and growing capacity to collaborate with others.

First, thinking is embedded in the cultural context. Thinking involves negotiating meaning and understanding in continual interaction with others. It is not just a private act going on inside one individual’s head. Second, new technology requires different skills from those rooted in traditional formal education and the individual’s deep reading of hard copy texts. We now must work with a more complex interplay of written text, images, and graphics and sounds. Media material, including drama, is presented in faster, more swiftly changing units (such as the length of film takes) and the plots of soaps are multi-threaded. Information gathering and processing are participatory. As Reich discusses, the ability to modify wikis requires new skills of editing, and also opens up engagement with the text that is not present in traditional media.

These ways of thinking are practised in the world of leisure, and some are becoming increasingly routine in the business world.  However, adoption of new technology is both surprising and uneven. Some assumptions about who might be slow adopters, and why, have proved ill-founded; costs are dropping all the time and although there are still large sectors of the population who cannot afford the equipment, this may moderate considerably in the near future. In the history of most technology that becomes routinely part of our lives, we have seen barriers of age, gender, or lack of technical proficiency dissolve once the user interface becomes simpler, and the technology’s uses become more salient to one’s life space.  As we shall see when exploring how technology intersects with identity, community and citizenship, ‘need to know’ and changing social practices promote surprisingly rapid acquisition of both tools and techniques.

It is frequently asserted that gender is a ‘problem’ for new technology even though two variables that have long been known to contribute to gender effects are in fact highly malleable; the first is the nature of the material or task, the second is level of confidence in one’s skills. Both matter in women’s and girls’ performance with new technology. Louise Madden’s review of gender and the Internet explores some of the factors and myths, about women’s ‘resistance’ to technology.  Both location and the context of technology and its use are salient.

Any new expertise is best acquired through engagement in everyday activities, therefore those who have legitimate use of a machine are more likely to become experts. The person who purchases a tool is frequently its ‘owner’ in the sense of determining is primary use and location. The more routine the technology, the less formal the space in which it is located. Home television sets initially were centrally located within the family’s main social space, they then migrated to other leisure areas of the household as they became routine possessions. Computers, because of their mixed functions as ‘work’ and ‘leisure’ follow a slightly different path.

Computer technology tends to be purchased by men, although a prime reason for the purchase is children’s use (ostensibly educational but in practice also leisure use). ‘Ownership’ is also invested in expertise, which is likely to be shared by fathers and children, rather than mothers. Women’s use of a computer depends also on its location. A computer in the paternal ‘den’ locates the machine as the province of the father, with limited access to both spouse and children. A computer in the children’s bedroom limits parental access after their bedtime.

These territorial tropes have been used to explain women’s later adoption of technology and their identity as ‘non-expert’. However many activities involving technology rapidly become widespread as their cost drops – online banking has spread fast. Some areas of shopping are becoming routinely online, for both sexes.  Women’s use of computers is expanding rapidly, particularly email which is replacing letter writing and telephoning – traditional community-maintaining activities of women. A clear implication is that the spread of technology beyond the ‘young male geek’ stereotype is happening faster than some predicted. ‘Obstacles’ disappear once people find a ‘need to know’ reason to acquire the skills, especially to perform routine tasks.

Ellen Helsper’s review of young people’s responses to risks and challenges on the Internet also unpacks some assumptions – and pitfalls – about the take-up of technology. One narrative locates technical expertise as a generational phenomenon, comparing ‘digital natives’, those born after 1980 who grew up with technology and have – it is presumed – no problems with it, and ‘digital immigrants’, those born before 1980, who had to acquire new skill profiles. Helsper argues that this is both misleading and short-sighted.

Many inequalities in access to technology still remain and there is a wide range of actual skill, and also of confidence in one’s skills. One consequence is that young people who lack skills may adopt an ‘ostrich’ tactic both in relation to their limitations, and also in relation to the wide variety of risks that the Internet poses.  Helsper argues that a ‘digital native’ model militates against both skill acquisition, and the development of the competence to deal with managing risk and negative experiences. Such assumptions may create further obstacles to technological advances in education. Also today’s ‘digital natives’, insofar as they truly exist, will rapidly become ‘immigrants’ in the face of new developments.

For the future of education, identity is salient in the following ways:

• how young people locate themselves vis a vis social groups, which is likely to have a role in their motivation to learn, their identification with the dominant values purveyed within education, their sense of agency with regard to participating in society and their preparation for this via school
• the extent to which the marginalisation of groups on the basis of various forms of diversity is managed effectively within education, whether this means challenging discrimination and/or positively affirming difference
• how is identity development facilitated within the educational context?
• how can alternative and multiple identities be explored?
• what messages do the educational agenda and curriculum convey about culturally normative, or desirable, forms and expressions of identity? what are the dominant values, narratives and explanations inherent both in the curriculum and in how it is purveyed by teachers and by the structure of educational institutions?

What does new technology do for identity? First, it opens up new avenues for developing and expressing one’s identity, through new ways to connect with others, and new ways to communicate. It expands the people and groups with whom one can communicate. These experiences may facilitate:

• agency and choice; that one can be an active agent in developing, maintaining – and ending – one’s networks, and that one ‘belongs’ to a social group by choice not entirely by default.  One value message is that one has choice and should exercise it. The consumer’s right to choose, and to expect that choice to have outcomes, is a strong thread of some forms of youth culture, as Sarah Riley’s review explores.
• the boundaries of identity and how these may be expanded or altered, physically or in other technological ways.
• the expanded limits of identity including the management of multiple selves, in real as well as virtual life, and effective movement between these. This applies to multi-layered local and national identity as well as to movement between different social groups with whom one’s affiliation rests on shared values or interests.

Three things operate in the formation of identity. The first is the script.  Who we become as persons requires imagining possible future selves; throughout our development we make choices that steer us between the implicit scripts offered to us and modified by us, or those choices are made for us by circumstances. Cultural resources for scripts have expanded with the range of media available. As Sarah Riley’s and Thalia Magioglou’s reviews point out, the prolongation of financially dependent adolescence into a phase of ‘youth’ which may last well into the twenties allows young people a longer time to make such choices, and also, more time to try out alternatives. The addition of virtual role-taking and identity-playing activities, whether in fantasy games or in how one presents oneself on Facebook and in blog interactions, increases the potential for hands-on experiences of scripts and imagined selves.

A second dimension of identity development is social group membership, whether chosen or contingent. How strong is one’s identification with the social group, what are the reasons for it, and what are the consequences? A third dimension is location, and key experiences of that location are significant components of identity. Places have familiar memories and associations as well as symbolic reference. There are potential tensions around the relationship between this place and others. An oft-cited rhetorical example regarding immigrants and national identity was the ‘cricket test’; which team would an immigrant support if their ‘home’ team was playing a British one? This is a trivial example of a non-trivial point; to what extent does one’s attachment to one place, or national territory, create tensions with other attachments?

Identity is also about competence. For what demands of contemporary identity should education equip the growing person? One competence relates to mobility and to flexibility. Career patterns increasingly require relatively short-term commitment to a post, and often, career path changes through life. Many careers require relocation. Among other implications, this impacts on professional identity and such identity expressions as ‘I am a lawyer’ may come to mean more a domain of applicable knowledge than a job description. Planning one’s education for a lifelong career has become less salient than preparing the foundations for a range of options.

Mobile identity takes several forms. An increasing number of people will be working in several different regions and nations during their career, either physically moving or working via virtual means in several cultures. This will increasingly be the norm especially for the professional and managerial sector.   Such people retain their national identity but must be flexible and sensitive to the identities and perspectives of others. In addition, there is a pressure towards developing a wider or multiple, identity, being both British and European, engaging both with local and global issues . The practice of participation in international conversation, via blogging and wikis, as Reich describes, can lay the early foundations of these skills.

Another kind of mobile identity, that is likely to grow considerably over the next 25 years, is the phenomenon of young people whose parents may be of different nationalities, and who themselves have grown up in a series of locations as their parents move with the requirements of multinational employment. Currently, these young people tend to be educated in international schools but this may change as their numbers increase with multinational capitalism.  Such young people learn early to be flexible, adaptable and multi-lingual and to have a broad imaginary of their career options. However there is the question of their national identity and to whom do they feel civic commitment? They may be effective global citizens – but for whom do they vote?

A third category is immigrants. We are seeing the largest human migrations in history. In addition to questions of citizenship status, or discrimination from the host community, immigration has identity issues. National identity rests, for the ‘native’ population, on characteristics which are deemed inherent to the nation. This may include specifically defining as ‘other’, groups whose inclusion in the nation’s citizenship is resisted – for example the rhetoric around the ‘cultural threat’ of Islamic minorities. For those who enter the nation, whether as voluntary immigrants or as the colonised or invaded, acquiring a sense of, and commitment to, national identity means negotiating the adoption of ‘national characteristics’ in tension with retaining core features of the immigrant culture.  For nations (such as Britain) for whom as Denis Sindic’s review argues, multiculturalism is a central ethic of national identity, both these operate in tandem. In some other models, for example France, diversity is managed by attempting to subsume all identities to the dominant culture.

New technology does not invent imaginary space or media but it does make active participation with the imaginary possible. A question central to our imaginative lives is, ‘what if I did such and such?’ This becomes testable and its consequences managed, even if restricted by the parameters of a game.  First, this allows us to ‘produce’ an identity and explore it, and engage with others in playing it out. This is an active performance which also requires active management of the responses of others. While this can be seen as positive agency, as Sarah Riley points out it could also mean that “communication technologies are creating a situation where people understand aspects of themselves as only truly meaningful when offered up for the consumption of others”.

Broadly, there are three ways in which new technologies facilitate playing with alternative identities. There is reality self-presentation, interacting with others ‘as oneself’ even if there are several edited versions of this. This is the world of Facebook, and MySpace. This is ‘public’ to a degree not available before such technology. A second type of identity exploration comes from sharing narratives.  Kyoko Murakami’s review describes ‘digital storytelling’. Whether as an orchestrated or a spontaneous activity, technology-mediated interaction shares the description of an experience, creating collective memory and history. Meaning and a shared identity are co-constructed through the recollection and creation of the narrative. Murakami argues that this is a potential medium for giving disaffected and alienated youth empowerment and ownership of their identities.

Other initiatives using new technology have similar goals. One example is the World Film Collective, a group of young film makers working with disadvantaged young people in various parts of the world (Brazil, South Africa, Palestine) to make films using mobile phones as cameras. The young people make a DVD which presents their own experience authentically, as in digital storytelling. This has a citizenship component, making their voices heard, but they also acquire basic film-making and editing skills.

A third dimension of role-playing and identity experimentation is in gaming, where acting out an avatar role, usually within a complex scenario, involves many other people, requiring collaboration, teamwork, planning and considerable perseverance and attention. The key identity element is the interaction of the avatar with others, shaping and maintaining one’s alternative identity so that it works in the context, and the management of interaction with others in the sometimes threatening virtual world. Aubry Threlkeld’s review for example describes both bullying and unpleasant imaginary encounters in a queer virtual identity. On a more positive note, activities such as Second Life can be a sophisticated playing out of a complex alternative identity with positive products and outcomes.

Because ‘place’ is concrete it is a seductive explanation of identity. In one metaphor of place, virtual communities of the future are contrasted with the ‘real’ places of the past. Heike Doering’s and Nick Nash’s reviews show that this is a false distinction, and that it is highly likely that people will continue to define themselves in terms of a place-located identity and community. Place identity is as likely to be strengthened as weakened by the development of technologies. In diaspora societies, attachment to the ‘home’ town or region is largely sustained by a virtual network.

Nash argues that it is only when people engage in something that acts upon a place that it gains meaning – whether this is the physical or the social domain. For some, this ‘action’ is the conscious choice to locate to somewhere in particular. The meaning of that choice is located within, and contributes to, identity. Heike Doering’s review explores the concept of ‘elective belonging’ which is one manifestation of the ethic of choice.

The core question is, how do we make sense of a ‘place’? Making meaning of ‘place’ may arise from threat, whether natural or human. The work on risk perception provides a rich example of how people construct their local environment. They have clear ideas of what and where risk lies, how they will respond to it and what is tolerable within a local perspective. Air pollution for example may be acceptable where it comes from the factory that is the main source of income for the community.

National identity is problematic. A nation is a ‘place’, geographically but we largely experience our nation through metaphor, narrative and symbol – even if we claim that its familiar physical aspects are the source of our attachment. Denis Sindic’s review reminds us that national awareness arose in the 18^th century when print media became widespread, both purveying ‘national’ news and invoking the experience of sharing that knowledge with others who read the same media. National identity can be fostered by threat, creating solidarity based on the boundary between ‘us’ and the (alien) other. National identity also depends on heroes, as Sindic shows with regard to Scottish and Welsh devolution, who are invoked as icons that reflect national qualities of the nation, in narratives and stories through which members of the nation find an identity.

Will national identity survive in the changing world? There are several different discourses around this. First, globalisation may be either a goal for those who want to transcend nationalism, or a more gloomy prediction for those who see it as a manifestation of capitalism. Second there is the EU; is it a desirable transnational state, or the maw into which ‘our’ identity is lost?  Third, there is the virtual world, where because there are no boundaries, will people generate new communities defined by elective belonging based on common interests and values – or will they become de-individualised because they have no longer any roots?

While globalisation expands the scope of identity, it seems paradoxically, that this is dependent on a secure base of national or regional identity. Globalisation can be a perspective that allows for exploring a larger universe of discourse, within which it becomes easier to see, and care about, one’s own space.  Sindic’s review shows us that people feel both European and attached to their own nation. In the virtual world, it appears that people identify themselves as representatives of their nation, while entering into open dialogue across national boundaries. However, local national identity trumps EU identity even though increasingly our routine actions upon our environment confront us with our larger connection to Europe.

If the idealised goal is to create supra-national young people, it would seem doomed. If the goal is to use the opportunities of new technology to obviate the more negative aspects of nationalism there is more hope. The enthusiasm with which many young people are already routinely interacting with other nationals via new technology suggests that this may be fostering open and multiple identities. The more positive conclusion is that people are managing multiple identities comfortably and on the whole are not trapped either by place or nationalism.

We should be somewhat wary however; political, economic and social change can rapidly create nationalistic and xenophobic retrenchment. The perceived threats from immigration continue to fuel the BNP (5% of a sample of young people in a recent study supported the BNP) and the fear of terrorism can so easily be translated in anti-Islamic sentiment. While this is currently at bay, over twenty five years we may expect to see considerable fluctuations. We have also seen transnational ‘localisation’ based on values, including religion. The World Wide Web plays an increasing role in transnational evangelism and fundamentalism.

Sarah Riley’s review of youth cultures explores one aspect of ‘chosen’ social groups and identities. She argues that communication technology, a consumer society and an extended period of financially dependent (or financially uncommitted) youth all facilitate a ‘playful pick and mix approach’ to ‘a kaleidoscope of temporary, fluid and multiple subjectivities’. Within this there is scope for practising multiple identities and for managing easy movement between them.  Furthermore, these are desirable skills for twenty first century life.  However, young people are exposed to considerable commercial pressures and to identities which are heavily loaded with commercial interests – whether in terms of clothing, music, or body style. The ‘choice’ therefore is a choice between identities of consumption.

These choices are made also within the wider cultural value of neo-liberalism, which Riley argues emphasises individual freedom and an ethic of choice even though these are largely illusory. Within this value system, to be able to make a choice is a right, and by making a choice one is understood as being an agent and taking responsibility for one’s self. It also has the moral connotation that one’s appearance and one’s lifestyle are within one’s control, so a well-toned body reflects responsible choices, flab does not.  Even if the choice is potentially damaging, the act of choosing is a freely made rational act. This includes entitlement to excess, to the voluntary pursuit of hedonism and intoxication and even the right to choose a dangerous ‘lifestyle’ of anorexia.

The contemporary cultural value of neo-liberalism, manifested in political as well as youth consumer circles, is likely to remain a dominant value unless quite a substantial cultural shift occurs. Even if the recession cuts back consumerism and the display of goods becomes less acceptable, the personal value of freedom of choice may still remain, an ethic with which fluid identities and youth cultures is consistent. An alternative (though not necessarily conflicting) explanation of multiple and fluid identities is neo-tribalism, a concept developed by Maffesoli. This argument is that young people form, and move through, small groups joined by values or interests. These groups communicate virtually but may also congregate physically. They provide a sense of belonging but also a sense of being an island of sovereignty, in which only the group’s rules prevail in the here and now.  Once the person moves to another group – and there may be numerous such transitions within a single 24 hour period – the new group’s rules apply. Again the dominant value here is freedom to choose and to define one’s identity.

By ‘unchosen’ identities I mean those that arise from contingencies of one’s body or environment that present potential challenges for identity. How is an identity constructed amongst a marginalised social group? To what extent is this a consequence of the dominant social groups’ positioning? In what ways do marginal groups affirm a positive identity? And what are the likely effects on the culture of ‘identity politics’?

One example of the cultural construction of an unchosen identity also demonstrates the role of traditional mainstream media, which are often overlooked in discussions of the implications of new telecommunications tools. The media’s role as a cultural resource and framer of our narratives, metaphors and explanations has been extensively researched and theorised at least since Marshall McLuhan’s classic work forty years ago. This is likely to continue even if in a form increasingly moderated by more interactive media. Mainstream media reproduce culture and by implication have the potential to modify culture.  This will probably continue even as media diversify. Mainstream media are already increasingly in competition with other channels of entertainment which offer other cultural messages.

David Weltman’s review paper presents a case study of the media representation of the British white working class, especially males. Whoever holds power over communication sets the terms of reference for the cultural story. Current media control is held by the middle class, and Weltman argues that the white working class are seen through a middle class perspective, frequently pathologised as moral failures and lacking self-management. They are seen primarily in leisure and family contexts, in work or in political activity only in extreme circumstances, such as industrial disasters, when individual ‘working class heroes’ emerge, while the conditions that caused the disaster remain unaddressed. In contrast, the non-white working class are often presented as economically deprived and oppressed – fitting into the contemporary agenda of recognising diversity.

Two other kinds of marginalised social groups having several commonalities are covered in the reviews.  Ruth Gwernan-Jones considers three types of disability, and Aubry Threlkeld explores non-heteronormative sexuality. Both domains are characterised by marginalisation, stigma and the management of identities in reaction to those societal positionings. They have both also been subject to a ‘medical model’ of explanation and de-legitimation as well as, or in tension with, a social construction model.

The groups are marginalised because the dominant society positions them as ‘different’ or ‘deficient’. This marginalisation is not only through language but also manifests itself materially and structurally. For example, for disabled people, a world of tools and mobility that has been built for the abled, excludes or limits their engagement. For other marginalised groups, routes to personal growth and adult fulfilment are thwarted by the absence of publicly recognised and valued models of, for example, their sexuality, and/or the absence of legal recognition of their relationships. It is not only a matter of ‘I am not able, or allowed, to be what I authentically am’ it is also a matter of ‘How as a growing person, can I find out what it means to be what I authentically am?’

Within such a framework, when the dominant group tries to overcome marginalisation it tends to be by addressing discrimination and ‘diversity’ issues.  However, the minority group’s response may affirm an identity which denies the ‘disabled’ label altogether. Such identity politics aim to overcome not only discrimination but also the labelling as ‘other’. In response, the structures that support the normative may adjust to include the hitherto marginal and so normalise it – an example would be if in all new buildings the transit between levels is never by steps but only by ramps, escalators or lifts, as is indeed the case in many airports.

Gwernan-Jones addresses several kinds of ‘disability’ in these terms. As she writes, the ‘disability model’ challenges the medical model, “encouraging a trend toward active, vocal disabled people, many of whom perceive their disability as a part of a positive personal and social identity and…would prefer to keep their disability rather than have it ‘cured”. The case of deafness is a strong example. The Deaf community positively assert that theirs is an alternative linguistic culture with a rich language, and not a ‘deficit’ situation. Cochlear implants for example make them less than completely effective members of the hearing culture; technology does not necessarily ‘help’. Dyslexia is slightly different; there has been a cultural shift.  Partly because of the technologies that compensate for aspects of dyslexia, it has become a much less marginalising condition.  However, these technologies are not targeted at dyslexics, or not only; they are part of cultural changes which have, almost incidentally, reduced the exclusion, marginalisation and stigma of dyslexia.

Threlkeld explores the way that heteronormativity still prevails in education, despite the significant changes that have taken place within the dominant culture in the legitimation of queer experience. He argues that anxieties on the part of the education establishment regarding teaching about sex, prevent appropriate teaching about sexualities. By prohibiting discussion of, or exposure to, alternative sexualities, a culture of heteronormativity, with homophobia and bullying, is perpetuated and young gay people have no legitimate framework within education for developing their identity except as marginals, defined by the dominant group. Censorship about gay identity also operates within the world of video games geared to children. In contrast, even the mainstream media have greatly expanded and normalised the representation of queer life and identity, although with a rather restricted and glamorised stereotype of ‘gay lifestyle’. New technology and the virtual world provide extensive resources for defining and developing a variety of queer identities. Queer identity politics have successfully normalised gayness such that homophobia is – at least in some circles – the new ‘pathology’. Nevertheless, this is still in definite tension with the message that young people get about the marginality of gayness and it is a far from universal message.

In the foregoing discussion of identity, much of what has been covered applies to ‘community’ because so much of identity derives from community participation and membership.  For example one’s social group is a primary source of identity, and the management of identity through technologies such as Facebook and MySpace is in fact a community activity. Youth subcultures, as described in Sarah Riley’s review, are communities. The discussion of ‘place’ and identity, as discussed by Nick Nash and Heike Doering, are also manifestations of community.

The reviews by Doering, Nash, Magioglou, Riley, Gwernan-Jones and Threlkeld all present examples of how elective belonging to a community may be empowering. Identification with a group with common experiences of marginalisation can affirm an identity that resists and redefines the construction by the dominant group – as we saw in Gwernan-Jones’ and Threlkeld’s reviews.  Nash and Sindic describe how perceived threat or risk – whether natural, of human origin or political – lead to community solidarity both in constructing a shared meaning, and in promoting collective action. In intergroup relations research, the importance of external threat in shaping both ingroup identity and ingroup solidarity is widely documented, as Sindic discusses. The creation of new states, and the reconstruction of states that have been suppressed through invasion or annexation, are marked by a combination of collective memorialisation of a former community, and explicit rejection of the oppressor/enemy.

This narrows somewhat the discussion of community as a distinct entity. I will focus on broad issues of technology in the context of definitions of community.

‘Community’ is a diffuse concept, made more messy by its values baggage. Idealised versions of community as a place of safety, support and empowerment exist alongside perceptions of communities as pernicious agents of conformity.  Each rests on a somewhat different analysis of what community members do to and for each other. The centrality of community is also problematic; behind liberal (and neo-liberal) enthusiasm for individualism and autonomy lies the assumption that the individual can transcend or resist his or her community, a position critiqued by communitarians and also by cultural psychologists who argue that we are inherently ’social’ in all aspects of our lives.

But what constitutes a community? David Studdert’s review, for example, asserts that community is more than contiguity – whether local or based on common interests; a community involves shared ‘beingness together’, an interaction that carries commitment and mutuality, not just sociality.

What are the processes of ‘community’ and how may they promote public or individual ‘good’? The basis of Robert Putnam’s communitarian stance is that communities are bound together by groups engaging in leisure activities, they create bonds and bridges that both empower members within a common identity, and lay the foundations, through local engagement, for the larger stage of national civic participation. The community is therefore the source of social capital which is in Putnam’s view the infrastructure of the democratic process.

It has been a recurrent, almost moral panic that new technology destroys community.  The flight, supposedly, to individualised communion with machines or to technological communication stripped of face to face interaction and warmth reflects some of the value baggage described above, and to some extent, Studdert’s critique also. However, technology in the form of telecommunications has been sustaining community for over a century. The key questions commonly asked are whether digital technologies enhance community or lead to atomisation, and whether online communities replace or reinforce offline communities?

Manuel Castells for example takes a structural – and radical – view, that the ‘network’ is the basis of all societies, and what new technology does is to speed up, facilitate and make more explicit what has been around throughout history (and prehistory). We connect to others through sharing information. This is a two way process between persons and a multi-way process amongst social groups.  We can expand or contract our network by adding people with whom we share information. We can exercise power over our information and over persons by inclusion and exclusion, and selective information-sharing. This is the basic structure of any community. In early history when communities were small and face to face, the reciprocity was obvious. With greater distance and larger groups, the apparent vertical, and controlled, passage of information arose from the long time-lag between sending and receiving, but Castells argues that the basic structure was the same. Modern technology restores the swift reciprocity of the network. This can be democratising or it can lead to control.

To create online communities requires effort and skill, and individual agency to join them. The extent to which these confer the sort of ‘belongingness’ that Studdert’s definition requires is open to debate, but there appears to be consensus that  one basis for community – on or offline – is shared values or interests. People join groups because they like being with people like themselves. This is something easily facilitated in virtual space. Doering argues that a ‘cosmopolitan’ identity derives from a community – whether face to face or virtual – that is really the concatenation of people from different nations who have common lifestyles and experience and who are probably not entering into the ‘local’ community in the geographical space they inhabit.

Two further examples challenge the anxieties about the ‘death’ of the face to face community. Keith Hampton describes the difference between dystopians who consider that new technology is destroying face to face life, and utopians who see the virtual world as the new location of thriving communities; he points out that the ‘loss’ of the community as it is described by dystopians long preceded new technology, and that in fact relatively small numbers of internet users describe themselves as members of a virtual community (though this may be changing). Online communities often overlap with off-line communities. Hampton’s ethnographic study of a small, newly built community in which 64% of residents were ‘wired’ from the start of their occupancy found that those who were wired were more likely to interact with their neighbours on and off-line and were more connected to their community.

In a review of studies of young people’s use of the Internet over two decades, Valkenburg and Peter found that, in contrast to fears that it would be socially isolated young people who spent more time on the Internet, it was the more socially competent who became active in using the internet as part of their social networking. They integrated Internet interaction into their social lives.  However, more socially anxious young people do prefer the more distanced, less face to face aspects of computer interaction. The authors conclude that in general Internet connection makes it easier for young people to self-disclose – and self-disclosure is an important part of establishing connection. This benefits boys more than girls, and social isolates more than the socially skilled. But the overall conclusion is that Internet connecting strengthens and expands social networks and communities.

Like ‘community’, ‘citizenship’ is a contested term. This is for two distinct reasons. First, the changing landscapes of nationality, immigration and globalisation have raised questions about what constitutes entitlement to citizenship status, alongside the moves made by governments to both include ‘new’ citizens through various hurdles of ‘integration’ and to exclude potential new citizens. Second, civic participation, as the mark of ‘citizenship’, has become contested.  Much research and policy writing around participation concentrated until recently on conventional forms of participation, especially voting and party support activities. Both the realities of young people’s civic engagement and changing theoretical perspectives about ‘participation’ have extended ‘participation’ to include community action and making one’s voice heard through collective action.

Globalisation does not offer citizenship and is unlikely ever to do so, but arguably, secure national citizenship enables the pursuit of global goals. The concept of the ‘global citizen’ is not therefore a status but a way of managing multiple layers of identity and having responsibility to multiple communities. Globally mobile and migratory people require the legal stability of clear national citizenship to protect and support their interests, their entitlement to participate in the democratic process, and also their identity. The EU creates another layer of citizenship status bringing with it additional rights and responsibilities. Whether or not there is tension or synergy between national and EU identity, EU citizenship status extends certain freedoms to members (e.g. the freedom to work, the range of institutions to which the individual can appeal for support).  However this also has the potential for increasing social and legal controls.

There has been much hand-wringing in many countries at the drop in young people’s voting in national elections. Gloomy prediction of ‘threats to democracy’ abound. How far the USA election in November 2008, in which 53% of young people voted compared to 37% in 1996, reflects a trend or a blip is uncertain . At the same time, young people’s increasing participation in other forms of civic engagement besides voting is being taken seriously. These data give a considerably more positive picture of young people’s civic engagement.

The shift in perspective began forty years ago as social movements such as civil rights and other forms of social protest emerged, and their role in political life was recognised.  Increasingly we are seeing research on the role that making one’s voice heard through collective action plays in the development of young people’s political identity.  Additionally, community action has come to be included in ‘participation’ both as a consequence of communitarian theory and also in the light of data that youth community action participation predicts adult engagement.

What promotes or fosters participation is also a contested field. Many writers have argued that knowledge is the key. However the evidence suggests that knowledge by itself does not promote motivation to engagement. Participation in hands-on civic experience especially if it can be seen to make a difference and is accompanied by reflection on the experience, appears to promote civic engagement as does experiencing a democratic classroom. As Reich notes, data relating specifically to new technology suggest that using blogs and wikis to make one’s voice heard, and gaming opportunities for proxy experiences of participation, facilitate civic engagement. There are caveats; making one’s voice heard via blogging may be as much about media self-expression as about really trying to have an influence on public opinion; more research on this is needed.

We need also to consider what creates political alienation and a sense of civic inefficacy.  As one example, in a 2005 British study, 25% of over 1000 11-21 year olds had not participated in any of the diverse civic activities listed (the list did not include online activities). Thalia Magioglou’s and Kyoko Murakami’s reviews explores the sense of civic inefficacy – powerlessness and disengagement – amongst many young people. One source may be that education in many countries still is based on authority and hierarchy which is sympathetic neither to the cultures of disadvantaged youth, nor to those youth who experience a different way of interacting with the world through new technologies. In addition, as Sarah Riley also points out, the extended period of ‘youth’, the ephemeral nature of much work, its associated insecurity and also mobility, are destabilising, and may contribute to uncertainty as to which community constituency one belongs. The research data strongly suggest that individuals for whom group identity is more relevant are more likely to participate in civic activities.  A consequence of this, Magioglou argues, is that many young people expect to participate in the future, rather than now; they feel like ‘citizens in waiting’.

The most comprehensive picture of youth involvement internationally comes from the 28 nation IEA study which involved over 90,000 young people aged 14-17. The data were collected in 1999. The countries included England, the USA and Australia, and several European countries, both ‘east’ and ‘west’, also two Latin American countries:

• 80% expected to vote in national elections in the future
• 59% expected to collect money for social causes
• 45% expected to collect signatures for a petition
• 44% expected to participate in a non-violent protest march; the figure for England was 28%
• about 15% expected to participate in various forms of illegal protest; the figure for England was about 11%.

In current civic action:

• 28% had been active in a school council; 19% in England
• 28% had  collected money for a social cause; 55% in England
• 15% had participated in an environmental organisation
• 6% had participated in a human rights organisation.

Three-quarters of students claimed that the strongest messages they received from school about civic participation concerned cooperation with others, understanding people who have different ideas and how to protect the environment.  In comparison, 64% had learned to be patriotic (54% in England) and 55% had learned the importance of voting (41% in England).

Four distinct patterns of current civic action emerged among the 2005 British study; conventional participation (such as voting), making one’s voice heard, helping in the community and ‘active monitoring’. The latter involves paying attention to the news and discussing current affairs with friends and family, but did not involve current civic action. It was however associated with expectations of future engagement .

Joseph Kahne and Joel Westheimer identify three kinds of civic engagement which both incorporate types of action and the political intent of the action.  These are ‘ideal types’ but they overlap with emergent data. The personally responsible citizen obeys laws, acts responsibly, volunteers in times of crisis, and believes that to solve social problems, citizens must have good character. The participatory citizen is active in organising community efforts and knows strategies for accomplishing collective tasks. They believe that to solve social problems, citizens must actively take leadership positions within established structures. The justice-oriented citizen critically assesses social, political and economic structures, seeks out areas of injustice, and knows how social movements can effect systemic change. They believe that to solve social problems, citizens must question and change established systems and structures.

This model reflects a strongly liberal version of democratic action and goals. As a contrast, Olga Ververi’s review critically describes the OECD’s parameters of ‘civic competence’ currently being drawn up for the direction of civic education in the EU. These include desired ‘intended behaviours’, knowledge and values, mostly deriving from work on civic engagement including the IEA study. She argues however that the emphasis in the EU proposals is on the local community as the place for addressing social problems, which avoids collective action or seeing issues in the larger political and economic context.

This derives from an explicitly communitarian perspective in which, according to Ververi, ’social capital’ is located in the face to face community. The proposal specifically removes from the list of goals anything relating to protest (which includes lawful demonstration, boycotting products or signing petitions), and ‘positive attitudes towards immigrants’ – on the grounds that this is ’sensitive’, being linked to right or left politics. In conclusion, she says “it seems that the EU perception of citizenship is about a citizenship modality which does not aim at radical social changes but it intends to perpetuate the current order of things.”  As we shall see, this is even more evident in how the EU perceive e-citizenship.

Participation in some form of service activity, or other contact with ‘real world’ issues, appears to facilitate engagement as long as students have an active role in planning the project, and in directly reflecting on the experience.  As an example, Westheimer and Kahne compare two projects. In one the task was to gather data on local opinion about community services; in the other, the task was to find out about deprivation, inequality of access and violence in their community. Both programmes ‘worked’ but in different ways. Both groups increased their sense of civic efficacy and their belief that the government had responsibility for those in need. The first group, however, showed increased knowledge and social capital. In contrast, the second group developed much increased interest in politics, leadership efficacy and personal responsibility, and structural explanations for poverty.

New technologies have greatly expanded the scope of participation. As Reich and Vass describe, wikis and blogs have become major means for making one’s voice heard. The Obama campaign capitalised on new technology, in distributing its message, in recruiting and mobilising an online community of support, and in disseminating news. Many argue that this has transformed campaigning forever, the entire process reflecting a grassroots model, being bottom-up not top-down, even though the ‘bottom-up’ engagement was orchestrated in part by the Obama campaign machine.

The beginning of web-based activism is often ascribed to the WTO protest in Seattle in 1999, where 50,000 people were recruited electronically to participate in a demonstration. Later followed anti-Iraq war actions worldwide. Website-based campaigns and blogs proliferate, even when unaccompanied by physical protest. As Lance Bennett, from the MacArthur Foundation initiative, points out, a positive interpretation is that young people are becoming more empowered via peer networks and online communication to express themselves and make their own creative choices. A more pessimistic interpretation is that, despite their increased sense of efficacy, youth are becoming disengaged from conventional political activity, but more involved in consumer politics, on MySpace for example.

Bennett sees a product of new technology being a shift from what he terms the ‘Dutiful’ to the ‘Actualising’ citizen. The Dutiful citizen is the ‘traditional civic education [textbook] ideal’ who feels an obligation to participate in government-centred activities, to use mass media to become informed about government issues, to regard voting as the core democratic act, and to join civil society organisations or express interests through parties that typically employ one-way communication. In contrast, the Actualising Citizen has a diminished sense of government obligation and a higher sense of individual purpose, voting is less meaningful than more personally-defined acts such as consumerism, community volunteering or transnational activism. The AC mistrusts the mass media and politicians and favours loose networks of community action, often sustained through friendships, peer relations and social ties maintained through ICT.

Jeffrey Juris describes the ‘cultural logic of networking’ – changing the underlying metaphors of social action: “The self-produced, self-developed and self-managed network becomes a widespread cultural ideal, providing not just an effective model of political organising but also a model for re-organising society as a whole” (p. 353). This reflects the same pattern of horizontal connection, open information and decentralised collaboration that Reich in his review attributes to new technology’s civic potential. But there are downsides of such developments; what happens, for instance, if no-one responds to one’s blogs, or only the already converted? How can we control offensive blogs – and the communities whom they serve? And how best can we develop civic curricula that enable young people to achieve the full political as well as personally-empowering potential of ICT?

Already a ‘bottom-up’ model of democratisation and e-citizenship may be being constrained. Olga Ververi unpacks how the OECD appears to see the potential of e-democracy for technological infrastructures to “mould citizenship into a narrow, quiescent and consumerist model of civic action”. Three OECD objectives suggest e-democracy exclusively operated by government as a means of disseminating information and controlling decision-making, dialogue and networking and the political agenda. These three objectives are:

• Information: a one-way relation in which the government produces and delivers information for use by citizens
• Consultation: a two-way relation in which citizens provide feedback to the government on issues that re-defined by the government, and where information is provided by the government
• Active participation: a relation based on partnership with government in which citizens have a role in proposing policy option and shaping the dialogue, but the final responsibility for policy-making falls to the government

These are clearly extensions of current consultation practices, which have indeed recently opened up dialogue considerably, but nevertheless they reveal the assumption that new technologies will make more facile and controllable what is already happening. Management of e-democracy is explored also by Stephen Coleman within the MacArthur programme. He points out that differing views reflect different conceptions of young citizens. On the one hand, in ‘managed citizenship’ young people are regarded as apprentice citizens in the process of transition; “they are human becomings rather than human beings.” (Coleman, 2008, p.191).  Their ‘apprenticeship’ entails learning how to exercise responsible judgement in a risky and complex world, including the Internet as an anarchic realm which is unsafe for young people “not only because their social innocence might be exploited by predators but also because they are politically vulnerable to misinformation and misdirection,” (p.191).

In contrast in ‘autonomous e-citizenship’, proponents refuse to see themselves as ‘apprentice’ citizens, they argue for themselves on agendas of their own making and youth is “a reflexive project in which narratives of emergence, socialisation and engagement can be renegotiated by each new generation,” (p.191). The very anarchy of the Internet appeals, a “relatively free space in which untrammelled creativity and acephalous [headless] networks can flourish,” (p.192).

Coleman sees the limitations of managed e-citizenship at least in part as over-protecting young people, avoiding ’sensitive’ issues, distorting the political world with its emphasis on friendliness, deliberation and consensus: “a virtual community of well-trained democrats who would be lost in any real political party, trade union or local council”. (p.192) On the other hand, autonomous e-citizenship can be dislocated from the structures and processes of effective power, preaching to the converted and paying little attention to opposing views or entering into deliberative debate, and focusing mainly on single issues.

I will finish with civic gaming. Henry Jenkins argues that the new participatory media offer “many opportunities for kids to engage in civic debates, to participate in community life, to become political leaders even if sometimes only through the ’second lives’ offered by massively multiplayer games or online fan communities”. Kahne, Middaugh and Evans explore the effects of “civically-oriented video game experiences that parallel the classroom-based experiences that previous research has found to promote civic outcomes”. Therefore they looked specifically at games in which players helped others, organised groups or guilds, explored social or ethical issues, learned about a problem in society, or had to make decisions about how a community, city or nation should be run. The study looked at the relationships between game-playing, civic participation and interest in politics.

The quantity of game play does not correlate with civic participation, but the characteristics of the game, and with whom it is played, do correlate. Those who play more civic-related games are on average 15% to 20% more likely to participate in civic activity than those who play fewer civic games. Playing the online game with others present is more likely to show an effect than playing online at a distance. The effect is considerably increased for those players who additionally participate in websites and discussion groups related to the game.  These data are supportive of the enthusiasm expressed by several people for gaming as an educational tool.

However sceptics remain, and more data is needed. For example, it is unclear yet as to whether a pre-existing interest in civic participation leads young people to play more civic-related games, or whether participation in such games expands ones interest in real life civic participation. Nevertheless, there is a clear relationship and the potential for future educational development is there.

I will focus on three issues, within technological development and each of the three domains:

• what will not change
• what are likely to be continuing trends and their implications
• what is uncertain, and the implications of this

At the beginning of the Report, the question was posed; ‘what will not change?’  It is my view that the following will not change:

• The need for a strong personal identity and sense of self, affirmed by one’s social circle. This encompasses also an identity which may incorporate as part of itself the capacity to move between versions of self and to be skilled in managing these in different social contexts
• The need to be part of a community. We are social beings and we function in connection with others. This connection includes affirmation of self, and the sharing of information. It also includes identifying with particular groups of perceived shared characteristics – be it place, work, values or shared interests. Technology has for a long time enabled these functions to be non-local, as well as enabling a strengthening of local face to face contact; new technologies extend these functions
• For many people, civic participation is primarily about maintaining one’s community. For some, it is about improving (and so changing) the condition of members of one’s own or another community; it is therefore about exercising influence on those with power.  The targets and methods may change in future but the function, I think, will not.

Technological developments:

• Technological developments will become less expensive, with more streamlined and more usable personal devices routinely owned by young people; many existing barriers to access will go, as costs drop and skills become normalised
• Both young people and adults will quite rapidly adapt to new technologies on a ‘need to know’ basis, and social practices will be modified by the potential of the new devices
• The opportunities for network communication will expand as will expectations that people will be available on networks
• Gaming will become more sophisticated and also more diversified in content
• Storing information on one’s personal device will replace other forms of storage

Identity:

• People are likely to become increasingly skilled at managing ‘multiple’ selves, and moving between them, in part because of increasing demands for flexibility in adult life/work, in part because this is an enjoyable activity both in the virtual world and in youth social life. This could be healthy, competent management of ambiguity and complexity, but for some it may be destabilising and fragmenting
• Minority identities are likely to become increasingly less marginalised through a combination of effective identity politics, modifying mainstream cultural discourses and technological developments overcoming some of the obstacles to full participation
• National identity is likely to remain a significant part of personal identity, but this may be less about a self bounded by criteria of ‘we’ versus ‘they’ and more a permeable self definition offered in interaction with other nationals
• With more permeable boundaries between different aspects of self, and between work, leisure and also location, how people choose to describe themselves may become more open; the increasing ‘public’ and informal opportunities for self-presentation (such as Facebook) permit this.

Community:

• Community is a fundamental human structure and likely to remain in a variety of forms.
• Communities may increasingly combine off and on-line interaction and virtual communities may occupy more people’s time with the development of Facebook and MySpace ‘communities’ where people ‘friend’ both known and not known people
• Face to face communities are likely to remain important where location is a significant part of identity, but communities based on common interests are likely to become increasingly significant, both on and offline

Citizenship:

• The current ambiguities around citizenship status are likely to become more complicated with increased immigration and there will be moves to regularise and control.
• Given international concerns, civic education is likely to gain a higher profile in the future. The enlargement of the curriculum to include innovative methods such as forms of gaming is likely, in view of the data supporting this. The ‘official’ civic agenda however may conflict with the already-developing goals and activities of young people who are engaged in participation
• The use of blogs and wikis for making one’s voice heard, and creating transnational pressure groups, is very likely to increase, particularly if major political issues become fore-fronted in the news and the subject of widespread blogging – such as the environment or human rights
• At the same time, there will be more consumer-related online activism and also more partisan/interest group activism of less liberal tone, which would proliferate under perceived threats (such as immigration or terrorist action)

Technological developments:

• The extent to which the gatekeepers of information will attempt to control access and use and how far will such constraints affect, if at all, young people’s access to information sources
• The extent to which information overload will cause people to self-censor or limit the network universe to which they ‘belong’
• How necessarily increased security both for hardware and software will be managed, to create a safe environment for communication

Identity:

• What would a ‘global identity’ mean, aside from the value of not being nationalistic; how will people manage the more permeable boundaries between nation, the EU, and the ‘global’, particularly under conditions of threat (such as increased immigration)
• How far will people wish to assert a dominant, or core, identity, and if so, in which life domain will it be?  How far will traditional classifications, often coded primarily for bureaucratic purposes such as ethnicity, nationality, disability, remain useful?
• Given the agency that young people have through technology to define their identities and experiment with identities, how can we equip them to do this safely?
• While multiple identities will be managed, there are many ways this can evolve

Community:

• The extent to which any community is strengthened by threat or adversity, as suggested by both communitarian and intergroup relations theories, or whether adversity prompts retreat into individual survival strategies, and under what circumstances each occurs
• How far online communities develop ’sociality’ and ‘belongingness’, leading to mutual affective support

Citizenship:

• A major uncertainty is about values: to what extent will economic pressures in conjunction with immigration and perceived cultural threats, precipitate a shift to more a conservative, exclusionary, public mood
• To what extent will the Islamic world become more unified within a moderate worldview, or become fragmented into factions which will affect both identity and civic issues for Muslims and other faith and secular communities
• How far might further environmental threat lead to greater resistance from young people, and how far to disillusionment
• To what extent will young people feel empowered to take risks in expressing their views, and to what extent will systems be put in place to limit their online power, or to delegitimise their use of it
• To what extent will the increased empowerment deriving from technological access be used for civic participation, and to what extent will it be diverted into consumerist action or self-promotion
• Civic status, and the criteria for inclusion and exclusion, may become more regularised but it is not clear on exactly what basis and how much freedom people will have to define their civic status
• The motivation for civic participation rests on a combination of personal efficacy, moral and social concern and belief that an effect is possible within the system. The political and economic situation can vary to the extent that apathy and alienation (include a retreat into individualism) may be a response, or a drive to collective action
• The dominant cultural values may change radically. Currently these are primarily ‘liberal’ in the broad sense with concerns about under-privilege, diversity, rights, freedom of choice and the environment. A more hostile economic environment, perceived cultural or military threats, or a moral reaction against a consumer-hedonic culture may each precipitate a considerable value shift in the next two decades
• What ‘globalisation’ means is diffuse; in all its versions it is ‘uncertain’, except possibly global multi-national expansion. While people may become more ‘globally aware’ – about other peoples and cultures, about identifying with a world religion that transcends national boundaries, about the environment, about the possibility of adopting a transnational identity – the form(s) these will take are highly uncertain

6.4    How might schools adapt?

Interactive media provide many opportunities for opening up new ways of knowing and working, and developing new competences (such as collaborative working) which are much more appropriate to contemporary life. In education however both adoption, and the transformation of practices, has been slow. Too often in the classroom technology is used as an adjunct to traditional methods, another source of information, not as a way of transforming how information is used. Pupils often report that the school use of technology is both boring and irrelevant. Vass and Reich both argue in their reviews that the disconnection between current educational culture and new technology is huge.

Access to technology is indeed one block. Developments may be constrained by unequal access to both equipment and skills. However this may be a temporary obstacle. It is very likely that within five years hand-held devices that can access the Internet will be affordable, or available to, everyone who now has a mobile phone. But is this the whole story behind slow adoption? In part there is a perceived cultural divide between leisure/pleasure versus learning. Currently many schools ban mobile phones. This distances even more the routine ‘leisure’ aspects of new technology from their potential for formal learning.

The trends are also subversive. One powerful message from this Challenge is that interactive technologies subvert the fundamental metaphors and rhetoric via which we have hitherto managed our relationship with information, especially in education. To a large extent, the basic metaphor of school-based learning has been that the teacher facilitates and channels information to students, in ways designed to maximise the students’ ability to process and absorb it. Within that there are a variety of means. These methods include direct knowledge conduits which are top-down. They may create opportunities for students to learn information through praxis or through discussion and collaboration. But these are usually choreographed to the extent that the opportunities have a known successful outcome. Another version sets up a framework in which the goal is to train students in a way of thinking itself, whether in the scientific method, in critical thinking or some other mode. In all of these, first, the teacher has a central role and is the orchestrater, even if off the scene. Second, the primary target is the individual learner’s performance, as an individual.

Shared participation in an action, and the action itself changing that with which it acts (for example editing and modifying wikis) both sidestep the role of the teacher as manager and authority and blur the boundaries between expert and novice. Interactive technologies are inherently ‘bottom-up’, driven by the agent who is acting on the information and its source, horizontal rather than vertical, and, potentially if not exclusively, collaborative. Many quoted in the discussion of citizenship claim that the very system ‘democratises’; it is a metaphor of democracy and interacting with it is an act of democracy.  This applies to identity and community functions as well as citizenship.  But it can also be a metaphor of anarchy. The apparently anarchic lack of boundaries, including boundaries between individual and collaborative thought and action, contrasts with conventional education and particularly with a model in which achievement depends on the individual working alone. There is a profound tension between investment in individual achievement and performance and the kind of open collaboration we see in new technology.

The tacit or explicit assumption that current institutions can graft on new technologies to existing practices is in my view misguided. In order to take advantage of new technologies, and to bring into formal education what are increasingly the routine and taken for granted practices and skills of the rest of the student’s world, schools will need to rethink the top-down model of education, and find ways to facilitate, and orchestrate, these bottom-up, often collaborative, practices productively.

One adaptation must be to enable students to work collaboratively and interactively, with distributed knowledge management as the objective, so changing the teachers’ role from a hierarchical conduit to a facilitator of collaboration, critical thinking and synthesising. Individual devices, whether notebook-style computers or future-generation iPhones, will need to be incorporated into the classroom as routinely as notepads and books are today.

The Report has focused on the implications for school education primarily because most of the available data referred to has been around school, or school-age adolescents.  It is also in the conventional school context that most of the gaps between practices are evident.  The evidence cited in the Report from a variety of out of school activities suggests that in more informal settings, the adaptation to new technology and new social practices is more flexible.  In tertiary education, though the Report has not addressed this, there has always been more scope both for individually-directed learning and for novel forms of pedagogy, even if the majority of teachers in such institutions do not adjust their own teaching practices. Lifelong learning, adult education, already has capitalised on new technology in a variety of innovative ways.

Four areas are explored in this Challenge.

• The relationship with technology, particularly how it is used
• The nature of identities, their development, location and processes
• How communities are created and  sustained, how they change
• What is citizenship and how is civic engagement fostered?

Reviewers were asked to consider the state of trends in the field within their chosen topic area, implications for educational practice and policy, and likely (probably, plausible and preferable) future directions.

Fifteen review papers were completed, the majority of which addressed the intersection of at least two of the four areas (in some cases touched on all four) with a focus on particular topics. The papers were commissioned mainly from younger researchers with recent direct research experience relevant to the Challenge. An Advisory Group of twelve senior experts in the field acted as advisors, commentators and reviewers. Two workshops with these participants, in September and November 2008, served to refine and develop the agenda and the dominant themes and ideas, under the chairship of the Challenge Lead.

Appendix 2: Participants

Professor Anna Craft

Professor of Education, University of Exeter and The Open University

Government Advisor, Creative and Cultural Education

She leads research projects in creativity and educational futures, and she has written or edited seventeen books in these areas.  She co-initiated and co-convened BERA SIG Creativity in Education.  She is currently Lead Editor of Journal of Thinking Skills and Creativity. She leads the Educational Futures Research Group at Exeter University, and she is writing a new book: Creativity and Educational Futures (publication 2010).

Professor Ian Davies

Professor in Education at the University of York, UK

He has extensive international experience in the field of citizenship education. Recent publications include co-editing The Sage International Handbook of Education for Citizenship and Democracy (Sage 2008) and co-editing the 4 volume reader Citizenship Education (Sage, 2008).

Dr Ruth Deakin Crick

Senior Research Fellow, Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol

Conjoint Professor of Education, University of Newcastle, Australia

Her research interests include the assessment of learning dispositions, learner centred pedagogies, citizenship and values in schooling; learning and leadership for social sustainability. Publications include Learning Power in Practice: a guide for teachers, London, Sage and Distributing Leadership for Personalising Learning, London, Continuum.

Dr David Eddy Spicer

Lecturer in Education, University of Bath

David’s research interests are in the organisation of schooling and educational innovation. His current studies focus on the dynamics of authority in settings of technology-enabled collective enquiry among school leadership teams. He is co-author with Martha Stone Wiske of a chapter in the forthcoming third edition of the International Encyclopaedia of Education (Elsevier), Teaching for Understanding and Teacher Education, which explores new approaches to professional learning through networked technologies.

Dr Jeff Gavin

Lecturer in Psychology, University of Bath

Jeff Gavin leads a programme of research into intimacy and trust in online dating and health support groups. This research explores how internet communications impact on identity in relation to relationship development and coping strategies online. He has recently published and presented work theorising ‘cyber-technologies of the self’, with a particular focus on the role of online profiles in identity construction and maintenance.

Dr Richard Joiner

Senior Lecturer in Developmental Psychology, University of Bath

Richard’s main area of research is the use of new communications technology for supporting learning. He has a particular interest in computer supported collaborative learning and the use of video games for supporting learning.

Wolff A, Mulholland P., Zdrahal Z . & Joiner R (2007). Re-using digital narrative content in interactive games. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 65, 3, 244-272.

Facer, K., Joiner. R., Stanton, D., Reid, J., Hull, R. & Kirk, D. (2004) Savannah: mobile gaming and learning? Journal of Computer Assisted Learning. 20, 6,399-409

Professor David Kerr

Principal Research Officer, National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) and Visiting Professor in Citizenship at Birkbeck College, University of London

His main research interests are in citizenship education policy and practice, the political socialisation of young people and the comparative dimension of these areas at national, European and international levels. Publications include Making Sense of Citizenship (2006).

Professor Brahm Norwich

Professor of Educational Psychology and Special Educational Needs

School of Education and Lifelong learning, University of Exeter

He has interests in the area of special educational needs and inclusive education, policy and practice, including futures work. He has organised a futures scenario planning workshop and produced a Policy Paper Future schooling that includes children with SEN /disability and written about the future of inclusion.

Professor Steven Reicher

Professor and Head of the School of Psychology. St. Andrews University

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, past Editor of the British Journal of Social Psychology and a Scientific Advisor to Scientific American Mind. His work centres on the relationship between social identity and collective action. He has studied such phenomena as crowd behaviour, leadership and political rhetoric, processes of national identity, and, latterly, the psychology of tyranny and intergroup hatred. This work (along with links to key publications) – which was televised by the BBC and has already entered the core psychology curriculum – can be accessed at www.bbcprisonstudy.org

Professor Valerie Walkerdine

Research Professor, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University

She researches community, identity, subjectivity, class and gender, as well as popular culture and new media. She has obtained considerable research funding in these fields from the ESRC. Her latest book is Children, gender, video games: towards a relational approach to multimedia, Palgrave Macmillan 2007.

Dr Leon Watts

Lecturer in Computer Science, University of Bath

His main research interests relating to the Challenge are on the effect of computer-mediated communication on group activity, especially in terms of identity, degree of participation and dispute.

Billings, M  & Watts, L. (2007). A safe space to vent: Conciliation and conflict in distributed teams.  In Bannon et al. (eds.) ECSCW 2007 Proceedings of the 10th European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Limerick, Ireland, 24-28 September 2007. Springer Verlag. pp. 139-138.

Ducheneaut, N  & Watts, L (2005) In search of coherence: a review of E-Mail research.  Human-Computer Interaction, 20 (1&2),11-48.

Watts, L., Nugroho, Y.  & Lea, M (2003) Engaging in email discussion: conversational context and social identity in computer-mediated communication. In Rauterberg, G.W.M., Menozzi, M. and Wesson, J.  (Eds.) Proceedings of INTERACT’03 Amsterdam: IOS Press, 559-566.

Professor Rupert Wegerif

Director of Research, School of Education and Lifelong Learning University of Exeter

Rupert has researched and published widely in the field of teaching and learning with ICT, teaching thinking and the philosophy of education with technology. His recent book: Dialogic, Education and Technology: Expanding the Space of Learning (Springer, 2007) develops a dialogic account of identity and the connection between educational technology and teaching thinking.

Heike Doering

School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University

Communities and Citizenship: paths for engagement?

This paper deals with current issues in the constitution and maintenance of communities and the effect on notions of citizenship and public engagement. This review looks at a number of studies concerned with the building of communities and the effects of structural changes on the maintenance of communities. It uses the decline of the nation as dominant scale for collective identification as starting point for two parallel trends: the increased importance of the local and everyday practices in the formation of communities and the development of cosmopolitan/global identities and citizenships. Examples are drawn from research into regeneration in former industrial regions as well as studies on youth engagement in rural and urban settings. Notions of politics and engagement need to be reconsidered to include small-scale, everyday political engagement which is based on residence rather than a status of citizenship conferred by the state. Technology can enhance and facilitate this process of becoming a local citizen. Digital inclusion can foster social inclusion. Accessibility to technology is therefore a major concern, not only in terms of affordability but also in terms of skills, confidence and trust. The ability to negotiate the offline world of changing boundaries and places for engagement translates into the ability to do so online: social and cultural capital becomes digital capital.

Keywords: community, citizenship, participation, place, accessibility

Heike Doering’s doctoral research interests lie in the field of state restructuring, community participation and socio-economic transformation. Since 2004 she has conducted research on regeneration and factors determining political and cultural responses to socio-economic change in two localities. Special emphasis is placed on the impact of local civil society and notions of community and citizenship in collaborative governance practices.

Ruth Gwernan-Jones

University of Exeter School of Education and Lifelong Learning

Identity and Disability:

A review of the current state and developing trends

Currently, disability is primarily viewed from a medical model that sees it as a tragedy resulting from impairment within the disabled person. The social model of disability views disability as the barriers that society creates for people with impairment. The social model has been the ‘battle cry’ of the Disability Movement, challenging the medical model, and encouraging a trend toward active, vocal disabled people, many of whom perceive their disability as a part of a positive personal and social identity, and as many as half of whom, given the choice, would prefer to keep their disability rather than have it ‘cured’. This paper looks at the wide range of identity issues that occur as result of a wide range of possible impairments, social and political changes relating to identity and disability, and issues around identity and disability that arise from medical and technological advancement, while whenever possible seeking to represent the perspective of disabled people rather than a stereotypical, non-disabled perspective, or the dominant professional perspective of disability.

The review of identity and disability draws attention to certain possibilities for the future of education, including the need for change in the structure of education, toward one that addresses disability inclusively, the need to direct focus onto the ways that education disables children and young people, the importance of listening to the voice of disabled pupils/students, and the need for developing conceptual models in education that encompass complexity, diversity and fluidity in identity and disability.

Keywords: Disability, identity, disability movement, social model of disability, universalism

Ruth Gwernan-Jones BA, MSc, Dip SpLD, AMBDA is pursing doctoral research on the socio-cultural aspects of dyslexia; her thesis involves life history research interviewing dyslexic adults to illuminate their experiences of being dyslexic, and how this relates to their cultural context.

Ellen J. Helsper

Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford

Digital Natives and Ostrich Tactics?

The possible implications of labelling young people as digital experts

The notion of a generation uniquely at home in a digital environment – the Digital Natives – is increasingly being challenged. Expertise and experience are just as important as generation in explaining activities that are considered indicative of digital nativeness. This means that people advocating the death of schools due to an irreconcilable gap between educators and students are wrong. Nevertheless, cross-generational understanding is hampered by an insistence on identifying all young people as digital natives, ignoring evidence to the contrary.

The findings presented in this paper suggest the erroneous identification of a whole generation as digital natives, might lead to an overestimation of young people’s skills in dealing with the risks and negative experiences associated with the Internet. Younger generations are less likely to seek help than older generations and more likely to ignore the risks they do encounter without taking action to prevent these from happening again – here labelled the ‘ostrich tactic’. ‘If young people can shed the ‘Digital Native’ identity they might be more likely to seek help when they need it.’

Another possible problem is an offline/online separation as regards risks and coping strategies in older generations, young people see online risks as part of everyday life just like offline risks. A continuation of this separation in the minds of adults could lead to Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants who speak different languages. This paper argues that future scenarios might be different, a disconnect between educators and students is not inevitable.

Keywords: Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, Internet, Risks, Coping strategies

Ellen Helsper PhD is Survey Research Fellow in Social Impacts of the Internet, Her current interest is in the use of new media in every day life specifically by socially excluded or isolated groups. An important aspect of her work is the development of quantitative and qualitative methodology in relation to media and policy research. In her current position the focus is on cross-national survey research in relation to technology and everyday life with a special interest in media literacy, digital exclusion and mediated social interactions.

Louise Madden

Cardiff University, School of Social Sciences

Integrating the internet into women’s lives

This paper explores how the internet is taken up and used by women in the everyday; how it enters their lives, and how it is integrated into other projects and areas of life. Internet use is treated as an activity that needs to be viewed in context, considering the rich social world that goes on around it, to understand how the internet emerges and is made meaningful through a set of embodied everyday practices. Women have historically been somewhat excluded from the internet, and the form of this exclusion has proved difficult to understand using traditional methods. This paper reviews a set of research and literature that attempts to contextualise use of these technologies to tease out some of what is particular to women’s experience of the internet.

This paper is located primarily within strand 2. (i) ‘How much is change and how much is more of the same?’ It has some elements of relevance to (ii) ‘The technological ‘gap”, in that it illuminates some gender differences on access to the internet, and a little relevance to (iii)’How do young people use personal technology? What purposes does it serve?’ in that it addresses these issues with regard to women, and there will likely be some commonalities.

Keywords: Women, internet, objects, bodies, email

Louise Madden is a PhD student in critical psychology. Her doctoral research investigates how women use the internet, and particularly how feminine subjectivities are constituted through relations with the internet. In-depth case-studies explore internet use through a range of methods both on and offline, to capture a detailed story of what the internet becomes in everyday usage.

Thalia Magioglou

Maison des Sciences de l’Homme de Paris, and CURAPP, University of Picardie

Young people’s reaction to a feeling of marginalisation and the role of technology; towards a new kind of citizenship

This review paper concerns the issue of citizenship, as it applies to young people, especially those who have a sense of inefficacy in the political system. Starting from a normative point of view in political philosophy, concerning the meaning of democracy, citizenship is defined as a way people relate to and create communities, especially as active participants, in the formation of common rules that are open to revision (Castoriadis, 1987). Citizenship is also defined as a cultural and social dimension of the self. Many studies in the last ten years underline the absence of younger generations from the traditional channels of participation of representative democracy (i.e. Haste and Hogan, 2006). Based on field work with Greek young adults, (Magioglou, 2008) but also on evidence from other European (British, French) and North-American populations, my starting point is that there is a feeling of inefficacy in the public sphere, but that new technologies already channel in democratic or less democratic directions (Bennett, 2008). In that sense, the role of education, state, community or groups, could be to empower young people so that they may assume responsibility for their actions in the local and global community.

Key words: citizenship, young people, self-efficacy, technology, public sphere, dialogical self, autonomy, community, democracy.

Thalia Magioglou ’s doctorate in social and political psychology is from the University of Picardie, France. She is currently affiliated to the laboratory CURAPP and the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris, as coordinator of a political psychology network (EPOPS). Her interests are societal creativity, democracy and globalisation, lay thinking, and social representations theory.

[In preparation] T. Magioglou  (ed) The Creative Dimension of Lay Thinking

Kyoko Murakami

Department of Education, University of Bath

Re-imagining the future: Young people’s construction of identities through digital storytelling

This review paper explores a relationship between young people’s identity construction and digital storytelling in the learning environment, especially those who are disaffected and at risk of being socially excluded. In particular, I will focus on the young people’s engagement in learning despite various efforts to tackle youth disaffection, disengagement in education and training and lack of aspiration for the future. As a theoretical framework, I draw on in particular a socio-cultural and cultural anthropological view of culture and mind (Holland and Cole 1995) and “history in person” (Holland and Lave 2000). The review links the current context of youth disengagement and disaffection to the increasingly popular practice of digital storytelling (technology mediated production of stories). Lastly, it would consider implications for the future of education, in particular with the role of the teacher in the 21^st century and the future of education as a technology-mediated learning environment.

Kyoko Murakami PhD is Lecturer in Education and a member of the Centre for Sociocultural and Activity Theory. She specialises in sociocultural and activity theory research drawing on discourse analysis and discursive psychology. She worked on intercultural projects on Anglo-Japanese reconciliation and UK-South African school partnerships. The current project includes a digital storytelling project titled ?ID-dentity? based in a secondary school in Wiltshire.

Nick Nash

Department of Psychology, University of Bath

Future Issues in Socio-Technical Change for UK Citizenship:

The importance of ‘place’

This paper emphasises the importance of place in relation to identity, community and citizenship. In considering future technological advances it is argued that these concepts will continue to be understood in relation to place.

Identification with place is an integral dimension of selfhood and evidence for a positive relationship civic engagement is discussed. People will continue to define themselves and their communities in relation to place in the future, although identities will be increasingly grounded in virtual spaces created by online community networks. Therefore, citizenship initiatives should be geared towards understanding the complexity of relationships to place and people’s place-based meanings. In addition, the growth of online social networks will enrich and extend offline social networks rather than replace them. However, communities will be increasingly based on shared interests rather than shared locations and communication devices will become more geared towards personal, rather than spatial networks. This will create problems for policymakers and it will be necessary to adopt more flexible initiatives. Finally, it is proposed that citizenship will eventually become more fragmented and dislocated from the nation-state. Policymakers should gear interventions towards multiple forms of citizenship spaces, identities and practices both online and offline.

Keywords: Place, physical space, virtual space, place-identity, local community, citizenship, internet, computer-mediated-communication, networked individualism

Nick Nash PhD completed his Doctorate at the University of Bath in 2006. His research looked at the social construction of physical space in the context of people’s perspectives on a local development conflict in England. Taking a discursive social psychological approach, he examined how particular accounts and descriptions of socio-political space constructed the conflict in different ways in accordance with speakers’ positions towards development.

‘Not in our Front Garden’: development conflict and the politics of naming place.

Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology (under review).

Justin Reich

Harvard Graduate School of Education

Reworking the Web, Reworking the World: How Web 2.0 is changing our society

Web 2.0 refers to a suite of technologies that have dramatically lowered the interaction costs of two-way communication over the World Wide Web, which has democratised the production of information and applications across the Internet. To sum up the Web 2.0 phenomena in a sentence: lower communication costs have led to opportunities for more inclusive, collaborative, democratic online participation. As the costs of communicating online decreased, more people, millions more, decided that it was worth their while to participate in these communication networks. These people did not just communicate more, they started communicating in qualitatively different ways than before. As these millions found new media for expression and collaboration, they opened possibilities for a more inclusive, open, democratic society, possibilities which may or may not be realised.

There is no doubt that this democratisation, these contributions from many millions of Web participants, has produced a series of profound social, political and economic changes that this paper will seek to document. The changes inspired by the democratisation of the Web, however, will not of necessity lead to a more equitable distribution of power and resources in our society. The future of the Web will depend upon the degree to which this blossoming of online participation will allow ordinary citizens and consumers to have greater voice and influence in shaping society and the degree to which powerful political and commercial interests can co-opt and constrain the surge of online enthusiasm in the support of the established hierarchy.

Keywords: Web, Web 2.0, change, future, society, identity, politics, economics, education.

Justin Reich is a doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the co-Director of EdTechTeacher.org, a professional development firm offering education technology training. He recently published Best Ideas for Teaching with Technology, A Practical Guide for Teachers, by Teachers with M.E. Sharpe Press. He is currently conducting research on the Web 2.0 digital divide and on the affordances of Web 2.0 tools for fostering 21st century competencies.

Sarah Riley

Department of Psychology, University of Bath

Identity, community and selfhood:  Understanding the self in relation to contemporary youth cultures

This paper discusses some of the key factors that shape young people’s identity in relation to contemporary youth cultures. It describes a tightening of relationships between identity, leisure and consumption that have interacted with developments in communication technologies and an understanding of the self as being dynamically (re)produced in interaction, constructed from the range of subject positions that may be contradictory or only partially formed. These identities may be personal or social, with the later being associated with neo-tribal theory. This context has opened up the possibility for young people to engage in a playful pick and mix approach to identity as they move through a kaleidoscope of temporary, fluid and multiple subjectivities that often celebrate hedonism, sociality and sovereignty over one’s own existence. Multiplicity and sovereignty however, involve complex interactions between contradictory values and are associated with a variety of stressors and inequalities that are strengthened through neo-liberal rhetoric of risk, responsibility and individualism. Furthermore, both neo-liberalism and neo-tribalism provide a context in which political and social participation shift to the local, informal and personal. For future education to provide environments where schools are fun, interesting, relevant and safe, a personalised portfolio model of education is recommended, where educators act as facilitators for the successful management of the self as a project; provide alternative discourses to neo-liberalism by working as ‘community enablers’; and act as protective stewards, shielding young people from some of the more aggressive aspects of technology, surveillance and commercialisation.

Keywords: youth cultures, neo-liberalism, neo-tribalism, consumption, leisure, political participation.

Sarah Riley PhD is a Lecturer in Psychology Her research is concerned with social constructionist theories of identity and qualitative research methods. Current projects include a study on leisure, identity and political participation and a co-operative inquiry project on ‘dilemmas of femininity’.

She is an editor of Critical Bodies: Representations, Identities and Practices of Weight and Body Management (Palgrave, 2008).

Denis Sindic

Instituto de Ciências Sociais, University of Lisbon

National Identities: are they declining?

The main question addressed in this review is whether national identities are likely to remain an important feature of our societies in the coming decades. Some have argued that national identities are declining, due to increasing globalisation, the growth of supra-national organisation such as EU, the increasing multicultural nature of our societies, and, in multi-national countries like the UK, the presence of separatist movements with substantial political support. However, the review of current evidence and current practices (as well as their likely evolution) suggests the following points: a) national identities (including British identity) are likely to remain important in the next decades, despite the alleged ‘fragmenting’ effects of globalisation and advances in technologies of communication; b) European integration and the possible development of a European identity are unlikely to lead to the disappearance of existing national identities, especially in the UK; c) The impact of strong sub-state national identities, devolution and separatist movements in the UK remain uncertain, but the scenario of an upcoming break-up of Britain does not seem the most likely; d) national identity is not necessarily incompatible with or threatened by multiculturalism, though it may be increasingly perceived as such in the UK. This review will also address the question of the consequences of national identities in term of relationship with others, arguing that this impact depends on how the boundaries and content of national identities are defined, and that such definitions are open to argument and political contestation. The review will conclude with some reflections on the possible role of national identities in future educational practices.

Keywords: National identity, globalisation, European Union, European identity, British identity, separatism, devolution, multiculturalism, intergroup relations

Denis Sindic’s doctorate from St Andrews University, was on national identity in Scotland and attitudes to the UK and the EU. His research interests are on national identity and political attitudes towards supra-national groups.

Sindic, D. & Reicher, S.D. (2008). Our way of life is worth defending: testing a model of attitudes towards superordinate group membership through a study of Scots’ attitudes towards Britain. European Journal of Social Psychology, DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.503.

David Studdert PhD

Centre d’Etudes sur l’Actuel et Quotidien (CeaQ), Paris

Community and CMC: the virtual absence of online communal being-ness

This paper examines the close relationship between the social sciences and offline interests (government, business, media and all general non-CMC communities) as a key to investigating how the Internet came to be the Internet it is today. It argues that potential online educational benefits as well as more general benefits from projects of social cohesion and community building are being limited by the manner in which the internet is conceived and constructed; that for projects and benefits potentially available to governments to be realised the net needs to be conceived in a different manner.

It seeks to understand why the discursive formation ‘community of interest’ has come to dominate and shape the contemporary internet. It argues that this domination limits the possibilities of CMC by privileging certain relationships, principally uni-polar forms, and thus hinders the potential of the internet for educational and community building processes.

Finally, it suggests ways in which a differently conceived CMC might encourage the Internet’s rebirth as a genuine social and public space.

Keywords: community, computer mediated communication, community of interest, multi- dimensionality, sociality.

David Studdert PhD Is a research academic with an interest in community both theoretically and empirically, particularly relational and phenomenological approaches. He has researched local communities and markets, and Muslim identity and community.  He is currently working on online communities.

D Studdert (2006) Conceptualising community beyond the state and the individual. Palgrave.

Aubry Threlkeld

Harvard Graduate School of Education

Virtual Disruptions:

Traditional and New Media’s Challenges to Heteronormativity in Education

Schools generally reinforce heteronormative discourses to the degree that queer representations surface primarily through traditional mass media, and new cybermedia sources.  In order to inspect possible future trends in the field of education, I review the most current research available on the role of media in shaping the perceptions of sexuality by youth. I focus primarily on representations of queerness that challenge heteronormativity in changing traditional media sources such as television and film, and in emerging media such as avatars in on-line virtual worlds and social networking websites.

These challenges, as virtual disruptions, open up discourse and offer opportunities to engage in critical pedagogy. In conclusion, I outline how teachers can begin to use critical pedagogy to leverage their knowledge of virtual disruptions in media in order to challenge heteronormativity in schools.

Keywords: Heteronormativity, education, queer studies, future , cybermedia, sexuality.

Aubry Threlkeld is a doctoral student in Human Development and Education at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education. His interests include adolescent literacy, learning disabilities, improving reading pedagogy and queer studies in education. Having been a teacher and lecturer in special education in New York City for the last four years, he attempts to connect his research and recommendations directly to positive classroom outcomes. His present research centres around professional development for secondary school literacy teachers.  In addition to his scholarly activities, Aubry has participated in queer activism intermittently for the last twelve years at both the local and national levels.

Eva Vass

School of Education, University of Bath

New technology and habits of mind

The centrality of technology in human life has manifested itself throughout history in all cultures and civilisations. This paper examines the role of new technology in restructuring processes of thinking and knowing, and its impact on social practices of knowledge building. It highlights the transformative force of new technology, necessitating changes in our ‘habits of mind’ to manage the increasing complexity of the contemporary information landscape. Also, it shows that convergent new technology remediates processes of shared knowledge building; creating virtual, collaborative, continuously evolving arenas of activity. Thus, new media contexts afford new forms of social collectivity in virtual space, requiring a fresh understanding of collective action and creation, the ability to belong to different social groups that may not meet face-to-face, the skills to artfully reconnect thought and practice in a simulated world and the confidence to establish new relations to authority.

Keywords: New technology and learning; habits of mind; information behaviour; convergence; participatory cultures, collective intelligence, participation and interaction.

Eva Vass B.Ed, M.Phil, PhD is a Lecturer in Education and has research interests in collaborative learning, with a specific focus on exploring processes of collaborative creativity, the emotional aspects of peer collaboration, and the role of new technology in children’s shared knowledge building.

Olga Ververi

Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol

“The Civil Society Project”

In this paper I examine the CRELL-Network research reports on active citizenship and civic competence. I argue that the specific institution promotes a particular view for citizenship aiming at a citizenship identity which cannot enable individuals to see themselves as initiators within democracy but as followers within the so called civil society. In the same vein, lies the idea of the virtual civil society while Civic e-communication resulting from e-citizenship seems to become a key skill in the citizenship agenda of Europe in the future. I claim that both actual and virtual civil society cannot bring about any changes as they promise but they seem to contribute to the preservation of the status quo. My suggestion is that learners should be encouraged to exert criticism using a different discourse aiming at the evolution of democracy. I have named the specific approach as “radical citizenship” in opposition to the active citizenship term which seems to have dominated the citizenship (education) discourse.

Keywords: active citizenship, (virtual) civil society, e-citizenship, civic e-communication, E.U., Lisbon strategy, Neo-liberalism, radical citizenship.

Olga Ververi’s doctoral thesis pertains to the examination of critical thinking in citizenship education. Through an interdisciplinary approach she examines the interactions of ideology, discourse and critical thinking focusing upon the CoE’s programme ‘Education for Democratic Citizenship‘.

Dave Weltman

Department of Organisation Studies, University of the West of England

Popular Representations of the Working Class:

Contested Identities and Social Change

Using examples from different forms of media, this paper argues firstly that there is prevalence of derogatory images which undermine the emergence of valued independent working class identities. However, attention is also given to some – albeit exceptional – more contradictory representations which may indicate more progressive lines of development. One particular common stereotype which is highlighted is that of working class people’s consciousness lacking potential for development except at the price of losing their working-classness. This, it is argued, is encouraged by the more general commonsense division between workers and thinkers, one which in fact goes against rich traditions of working class self-education. After discussing the educational implications of these observations, the review shifts to consider a recently intensified tendency in the media for ‘defending’ specifically the white working class as an oppressed ethnic group. Different examples of this phenomenon are discussed in the light of alternative perspectives based on historical insights into the possibility for transcending divisions within the working class. In this way the emphasis on white working class particularism is seen to be in danger of reintroducing assumptions of working class stasis and of crippling efforts – including in educational settings – to tackle racist viewpoints.

In light of these arguments future prospects for how media technology frames working class identities, including the role of Internet discussion forums, is explored. A historically informed perspective indicates the likelihood of social representations reflecting and refracting factors associated with a changing economic and political balance of forces, especially in a period of deepening global economic recession. It is in this latter sphere too, it is claimed, rather than in the technological setting itself, that one finds the fundamental factors shaping the challenge to stereotypes propagated through Internet forum technologies.

Key words: Working class, representations, media technology, identity, white working class, education, future.

Dave Weltman PhD is Visiting Lecturer in Organisation Studies. He has a long-standing interest in the ideological analysis of media representations, as well as in critical social-psychological approaches to class relations. His recent publications consider how the ‘utopian’ rhetoric of International Financial Institutions operates to obscure the class cleavages which underlie their field of work.

Weltman, D. and Upchurch, M. (In press). The ideal of non-coherence in the World Bank’s Social Capital reforms: A textual analysis of ‘gratuitous complexity’. Journal of Language and Politics.

This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation

Bar-On, D. (2008) The others within us; constructing Jewish Israeli identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Beck, U. (1992) The risk society, London: Sage.

Bennett, L. (Ed)  (2008) Civic life online; learning how digital media can engage youth, Cambridge, Mass:  M I T Press.

Bickerstaff, K. and Walker, G . (2006) Public understandings of air pollution; the ‘localisation’ of environmental risk. Global Environmental Change, 11, 133-145.

Bogost, I. (2007)  Persuasive games; the expressive power of videogames. Cambridge, Mass: M I T Press.

Buckingham, D. (2007) Beyond technology; children’s learning in the age of digital culture, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Castells, M. (Ed) (2004) The network society;  a cross-cultural perspective, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

Cliff, D., O’Malley, C. & Taylor, J. (2008) Future issues in socio-technical changes for UK education.  Bristol: Futurelab.

Coleman, S.  Doing IT for themselves; management vs. autonomy in youth e-citizenship.  In Bennett, L. (Ed)  (2008) Civic life online; learning how digital media can engage youth, Cambridge, Mass:  M I T Press.

Dede, C. (2007). Reinventing the role of information and communications technologies in education. In Smolin, L.,  Lawless, K. &  Burbules, N. (Eds.),  Information and Communication Technologies: Considerations of Current Practice for Teachers and Teacher Educators [NSSE Yearbook 2007 (106:2)], Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 11-38

Doering, H. (2008) Communities and citizenship; paths for engagement? Beyond Current Horizons Review paper, Challenge #2.

Flanagan, M. and Nissenbaum, H. (2007) A game design methodology to incorporate social activist games.  CHI 2007, April-May.

Flynn, J. (2009) What is intelligence?  Beyond the Flynn effect. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gee, J.P. (2007) Good video games and good learning, New York: Peter Lang.

Gee, J.P. (2007) What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

.

Gwernan-Jones, R. (2008) Identity and disability; a review of the current state and developing trends. Beyond Current Horizons Review paper, Challenge #2.

Hampton, K.N.  (2004)  Networked sociability online, offline.  In Castells, M. The network society; a cross-cultural perspective, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.217-232.

Haste, H. (1996) Communitarianism and the social construction of morality, J. Moral Education, 25(1), 47-55.

Haste, H. (2004) Constructing the citizen. Political Psychology, 25(3), 413 -440.

Haste, H.  (2005) Joined-Up Texting, Nestlé Social Research Programme #3, Croydon: Nestlé Trust.

Haste, H. (2005) My Voice, My Vote My Community, Nestlé Social Research Programme #4, Croydon: Nestlé Trust.

Haste, H. (2006) Assets, aliens or asylum seekers? Immigration and the UK. UNESCO Prospects, 26(3), 327-341.

Haste, H. (2007) Good thinking; the creative and competent mind.  In Craft, A., Gardner, H. & Claxton. G. (Eds)  Creativity, wisdom and trusteeship, Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, 96-104.

Haste, H. ( 2009) Culture, tools and subjectivity.  In Magioglou, T. (Ed) Culture and political psychology, InfoAge.

Haste, H. & Hogan, A. (2006) Beyond conventional civic participation, beyond the moral-political divide; young people and contemporary debates about citizenship. Journal of Moral Education, 35(4), 473-493.

Hayden, M. and Thompson, J. (Eds) (1998) International education; principles and practice. London: Kogan Page.

Johnson, S. (2005) Everything bad is good for you, London: Penguin.

Juris, J. (2004) Networks of social movements; global movements for global justice. In Castells, M. The network society, ; a cross-cultural perspective, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 341-362.

Helsper, E. (2008) Digital natives and ostrich tactics?  The possible implications of labelling young people as digital experts. Beyond Current Horizons Review paper, Challenge #2.

Hoskins, B. and Mascherini, M. (2008) Measuring active citizenship through the development of a composite indicator, Social Indicators Research, 90, 3, 459-488.

Kahne, J., Middaugh, E. & Evans, C. (2008) The civic potential of video games. MacArthur Foundation, www.digitallearning.macfound.org.

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Levinson, M. (1999) The demands of liberal education, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Littleton, K, Light, P., Joiner, R., Messer D. & Barnes, P.  (1998) Gender, task scenarios and children’s computer-based problem-solving. Educational Psychology, 18(3), 327 – 335.

Loader, B.D.  (Ed) (2007)  Young citizens in the digital age; political engagement, young people and new media, London: Routledge.

Madden, L.  (2008) Integrating the Internet into women’s lives.  Beyond Current Horizons Review paper, Challenge #2.

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Magioglou, T. (2008) Young people’s reaction to the feeling of self-inefficacy and the role of technology towards a new kind of citizenship. Beyond Current Horizons Review paper, Challenge #2.

McAdam, D. (2003) Recruits to Civil Rights activism. In Goodwin, J. & Jasper, J.M. (eds) The social movements reader, Oxford: Blackwell.

McLuhan, M. (1994) Understanding media; the extensions of man, Cambridge, Mass:  M I T Press [originally published 1964].

Morgan, W, &  Streb, M. (2001) Building citizenship; how student voice in service-learning develops civic values. Social Science Quarterly, 82(1) 154-169.

Murakami, K. (2008) Re-imagining the future: young people’s construction of identities through digital storytelling. Beyond Current Horizons Review paper, Challenge #2.

Nash, N. (2008) Future issues in socio-technical change for UK citizenship; the importance of ‘place’. Beyond Current Horizons Review paper, Challenge #2.

Paxton, R.O. (2009) Can you really become French? The New York Review of Books, LVI (6), April 9, 52-56.

Prensky, M. (2001) Digital natives, digital immigrants. On the Horizon, 9(5) 1-6

Putnam, R. (2000) Bowling alone; the collapse and revival of American community, New York: Simon & Schuster.

Reich, J. (2008)  Reworking the web, reworking the world; how Web 2.0 is changing our society. .  Beyond Current Horizons Review paper, Challenge #2.

Reicher, S. and Hopkins, N.(2001) Self and nation; categorisation, contestation and mobilisation, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Riley, S. (2008) Identity, community and selfhood: understanding the self in relation to contemporary youth cultures. Beyond Current Horizons Review paper, Challenge #2.

Rychen, D. and Salganik, L. (eds) (2001) Defining and selecting key competences, OECD/Huber & Hogrefe.

Salen, K. (ed)  (2008) The ecology of games, Cambridge, Mass: M I T Press

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Shaffer, D.W. (2006) How computer games help children learn, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Sindic, D.  (2008) National identities; are they declining? Beyond Current Horizons Review paper, Challenge #2.

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Taylor, C. (1991) The ethics of authenticity, Cambridge Mass:  Harvard University Press.

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Torney-Purta, J. Lehmannn, R., Oswald, H. & Schulz, W. (2001) Citizenship and education in twenty-eight countries; civic knowledge and engagement at age fourteen, Amsterdam:  International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA).

Valkenburg, P.M. and Peter, J. (2009) Social consequences of the Internet for adolescents. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18(1), 1-5.

Vass, E. (2008) New technology and habits of mind. Beyond Current Horizons Review paper, Challenge #2.

Ververi, O.  (2008)  “The civil society project”. Beyond Current Horizons Review paper, Challenge #2.

Weltman, D. (2008) Popular representations of the working class; contested identities and social change. Beyond Current Horizons Review paper, Challenge #2.

Wertsch, J. (1998)  Mind as action, New York: Oxford University Press.

Westheimer, J. & Kahne, J. (2004) Educating the ‘good’ citizen; political choices and pedagogical goals. www.democraticdialogue.com/DDpdfs/WestheimerKahnePS.pdf

Yates, M and Youniss, J. (1999) The roots of civic identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Youniss, J., McClellan and Yates, M (1997) What we know about engendering civic identity. American Behavioral Scientist, 40(5), 620-631

Endnotes

I am reminded of H.G.Wells’story of the sighted man in the kingdom of the blind.  Contrary to the ‘dominant’ platitude, ‘In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king’, the sighted hero’s sense is regarded with bewilderment by the inhabitants and he is pressed strongly to remove this unnecessary attribute.  What he can see is either experienced by them through other senses, and so is routine, or is incomprehensible and irrelevant.

In addition to the reviews by Magioglou, Murakami, Reich, Ververi  and Vass, I will draw upon data from the IEA 28 nation study, my own 2005 data on British young people, and studies from the MacArthur Foundation program on civic participation and new technology[3].

A somewhat curious side effect has been ‘astro-turfing’, the creation of spurious websites that purport to present a ‘grassroots’ viewpoint which in fact undermines the candidate.

In April 2009, young people in the former Soviet satellite of Moldova used text-messaging, Facebook and Twitter to rally 10,000 protesters within a few hours, to an anti-government rally in the capital Chisinau.

In February 2009 the Dutch government struggled with the tricky question of whether, and how, to control a wild card politician who was being offensive about Islam (in blogs and other media), yet is democratically entitled to freedom of speech.

Council of Europe

EDC is a citizenship education programme which aims at the cultivation of active citizenship culture.

Cliff, D., O’Malley, C. & Taylor, J. (2008) Future issues in socio-technical changes for UK education.  Bristol: Futurelab.

Bogost, I. (2007)  Persuasive games; the expressive power of videogames. Cambridge, Mass: M I T Press.

eg Shaffer, D.W. (2006) How computer games help children learn, New York: Palgrave Macmillan;  Salen, K. (ed)  (2008) The ecology of games, Cambridge, Mass: M I T Press; Gee, J.P. (2007) Good video games and good learning, New York: Peter Lang;  Gee, J.P. (2007) What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Bennett, L. (Ed)  (2008) Civic life online; learning how digital media can engage youth, Cambridge, Mass:  M I T Press;  Loader, B.D.  (Ed) (2007)  Young citizens in the digital age; political engagement, young people and new media, London: Routledge.

Haste, H.  (2005) Joined-Up Texting, Nestlé Social Research Programme #3, Croydon: Nestlé Trust.

Reich, J. (2008) Reworking the web, reworking the world; how Web 2.0 is changing our society.  Beyond Current Horizons Review paper, Challenge #2.

Bennett (2008) op. cit.: This is also part of the agenda of the MacArthur Foundation initiative on Digital Media and Learning.

Johnson, S. (2005) Everything bad is good for you, London: Penguin; Vass, E. (2008) New technology and habits of mind. Beyond Current Horizons Review paper, Challenge #2.

Shaffer, D.W. (2006) op. cit.

Flynn, J. ()2009) What is intelligence?  Beyond the Flynn effect. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press [cited in Vass]

Johnson, S. (2005)  op. cit.

Littleton, K, Light, P., Joiner, R, Messer D. & Barnes, P.  (1998) Gender, task scenarios and children’s computer-based problem-solving. Educational Psychology, 18(3), 327-335.

Madden, L.  (2008) Integrating the Internet into women’s lives.  Beyond Current Horizons Review paper, Challenge #2.

Helsper, E. (2008) Digital natives and ostrich tactics?  The possible implications of labelling young people as digital experts. Beyond Current Horizons Review paper, Challenge #2.

Prensky, M. (2001) Digital natives, digital immigrants. On the Horizon, 9(5) 1-6

Riley, S. (2008) Identity, community and selfhood: understanding the self in relation to contemporary youth cultures. Beyond Current Horizons Review paper, Challenge #2.

Magioglou, T. (2008) Young people’s reaction to the feeling of self-inefficacy and the role of technology towards a new kind of citizenship. Beyond Current Horizons Review paper, Challenge #2.

Sindic, D.  (2008) National identities; are they declining? Beyond Current Horizons Review paper, Challenge #2.

Haste, H. (2007) Good thinking; the creative and competent mind.  In Craft, A., Gardner, H. & Claxton. G. (Eds)  Creativity, wisdom and trusteeship, Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press. pp 96-104: Rychen, D. and Salganik, L. (Eds) (2001) Defining and selecting key competences, OECD/Huber & Hogrefe.

Buckingham, D. (2007) Beyond technology; children’s learning in the age of digital culture, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Hayden, M and Thompson, J. (Eds)  (1998) International education; principles and practice. London: Kogan Page.

Haste, H. (2006) Assets, aliens or asylum seekers? Immigration and the UK. UNESCO Prospects, 26(3), 327-341: Suarez-Orozco, M. & Qin-Holland, D.B. (eds) (2004) Globalisation; culture and education in the new Millennium, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Levinson, M. (1999) The demands of liberal education, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Paxton, R.O. (2009) Can you really become French?  The New York Review of Books, LVI (6), April 9, 52-56.

Murakami, K. (2008) Re-imagining the future: young people’s construction of identities through digital storytelling. Beyond Current Horizons Review paper, Challenge #2.

www.worldfilmcollective.com

Gee, J.P. (2007) op.cit.; Salen, K. (2008) op.cit.:

Doering, H. (2008) Communities and citizenship; paths for engagement? Beyond Current Horizons Review paper, Challenge #2;  Nash, N. (2008) Future issues in socio-technical change for UK citizenship; the importance of ‘place’. Beyond Current Horizons Review paper, Challenge #2.

Bickerstaff, K and Walker, G . (2006) Public understandings of air pollution; the ‘localisation’ of environmental risk. Global Environmental Change, 11, 133-145.

Reicher, S. and Hopkins, N. (2001) Self and nation; categorisation, contestation and mobilisation, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Haste, H. (2005) My Voice, My Vote My Community, Nestlé Social Research Programme #4, Croydon: Nestlé Trust.;  Haste, H. & Hogan, A. (2006) Beyond conventional civic participation, beyond the moral-political divide; young people and contemporary  debates about citizenship. Journal of Moral Education, 35(4), 473-493.

Mafffesoli, M. (1996) The time of the tribes; the decline of individualism in mass society, London: Sage.

McLuhan, M. (1994) Understanding media; the extensions of man, Cambridge, Mass:  M I T Press [originally published 1964]

Weltman, D. (2008) Popular representations of the working class; contested identities and social change. Beyond Current Horizons Review paper, Challenge #2.

Gwernan-Jones, R. (2008)  Identity and disability; a review of the current state and developing trends. Beyond Current Horizons Review paper, Challenge #2;

Threlkeld, A. D. (2008) Virtual disruptions; traditional and new media’s challenges to heteronormativity in education. Beyond Current Horizons Review paper, Challenge #2.

Reicher, S. & Hopkins, N. (2001) op.cit.: Haste, H. (2004) Constructing the citizen. Political Psychology, 25(3), 413 -440; Bar-On, D. (2008) The others within us; constructing Jewish Israeli identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Taylor, C. (1991) The ethics of authenticity, Cambridge Mass:  Harvard University Press:   Haste, H. (1996) Communitarianism and the social construction of morality, J. Moral Education, 25(1), 47-55;  Haste, H. ( 2009) Culture, tools and subjectivity.  In Magioglou, T. (Ed) Culture and political psychology, InfoAge; Wertsch, J. (1998)  Mind as action, New York: Oxford University Press.

Studdert, D. (2008) Community and CMC; the virtual absence of online communal being-ness. Beyond Current Horizons Review paper, Challenge #2; Studdert, D. (2006) Conceptualising community; beyond the state and the individual, London: Palgrave.

Putnam, R. (2000) Bowling alone; the collapse and revival of American community, New York: Simon & Schuster.

Castells, M. (Ed) (2004) The network society;  a cross-cultural perspective, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

Hampton, K.N.  (2004)  Networked sociability online, offline.  In Castells, M. The network society, ; a cross-cultural perspective, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 217-232

Valkenburg, P.M. & Peter, J.  (2009) Social consequences of the Internet for adolescents. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18 (1), 1-5.

Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and self-identity; self and society in the Late Modern Age, Oxford: Polity Press: Putnam, R. (200) op.cit.., Beck, U. (1992) The risk society, London: Sage: Haste, H. (2004) op.cit.; Torney-Purta, J. Lehmannn, R., Oswald, H. & Schulz, W. (2001) Citizenship and education in twenty-eight countries; civic knowledge and engagement at age fourteen, Amsterdam:  International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA).

http://elections.gmu.edu/voter_turnout.html

Giddens (1991) op cit ; Klandermans, B. (1997) The social psychology of protest, Oxford: Blackwells.

Youniss, J., McClellan and Yates, M (1997) What we know about engendering civic identity. American Behavioral Scientist, 40(5), 620-631; Morgan, W , &  Streb, M. (2001) Building citizenship; how student voice in service-learning develops civic values. Social Science Quarterly, 82(1) 154-169; McAdam, D. (2003) Recruits to Civil Rights activism. In Goodwin, J. & Jasper, J.M. (eds) The social movements reader, Oxford: Blackwell.

Haste, H.  (2005) My voice, my vote, my community, Nestlé Social Research programme #4, Croydon: Nestlé Trust

Torney-Purta, J., Lehmannn, R., Oswald, H. & Schulz, W. (2001) Citizenship and education in twenty-eight countries; civic knowledge and engagement at age fourteen, Amsterdam:  International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA).

Haste, H. (.2005) op cit

Westheimer, J. & Kahne, J. (2004) Educating the ‘good’ citizen; political choices and pedagogical goals. www.democraticdialogue.com/DDpdfs/WestheimerKahnePS.pdf

Ververi, O.  (2008) “The civil society project”. Beyond Current Horizons Review paper, Challenge #2; Hoskins, B. and Mascherini, M. (2008) Measuring active citizenship through the development of a composite indicator. Social Indicators Research, 90(3), 459-488.

Morgan, W, &  Streb, M. (2001) Building citizenship; how student voice in service-learning develops civic values. Social Science Quarterly, 82(1) 154-169; Yates, M and Youniss, J. (1999) The roots of civic identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Juris, J. (2004) Networks of social movements; global movements for global justice. In Castells, M. The network society; a cross-cultural perspective, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.pp341-362.

Bennett, L.  (2008) op.cit.

Juris, J. op.cit

Coleman, S.  Doing IT for themselves; management vs. autonomy in youth e-citizenship.  In Bennett, L. (Ed)  (2008) Civic life online; learning how digital media can engage youth, Cambridge, Mass:  M I T Press

Jenkins, H. cited in Bennett (2008).

Kahne, J., Middaugh, E. & Evans, C. (2008) The civic potential of video games. MacArthur Foundation, www.digitallearning.macfound.org.

Flanagan, M. and Nissenbaum, H. (2007) A game design methodology to incorporate social activist games.  CHI 2007, April-May.

Dede, C. (2007). Reinventing the role of information and communications technologies in education. In Smolin, L. Lawless, K. &  Burbules N.(Eds) Information and Communication Technologies: Considerations of Current Practice for Teachers and Teacher Educators [NSSE Yearbook 2007 (106:2)], Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 11-38

This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation

This report considers the potential effects of social and technological change on the character of knowledge, creativity and communication over the next three decades. It draws on evidence and insights from a set of 20 commissioned reviews in order to suggest longstanding trends and major issues of uncertainty for the future and the potential implications of these for education.

The purpose of this report is to enable people to rapidly access the knowledge, evidence and ideas identified from the challenge area reviews in order to support, inform and promote debates on the possible futures of education. It does not offer a clear consensus or set out to design the future.

A set of 20 reviews was commissioned that cover a broad range of topics key to the challenge of knowledge, creativity and communication and the futures of education. These include risk, identity, global expansion, neuroscience, affect, collaboration, participation and networking, innovation, representation, multimodal design, curriculum, argumentation, information, the role of institutions, learning, community, connectivity, convergence, literacy, and knowledge construction. The reviews are written by leading figures in the area of knowledge, creativity and communication drawn from the UK, Sweden, Germany, USA, Australia, and South Africa. (See Appendix 1).

Two consultative day events were held to inform the challenge (see Appendix 2). The events ensured that the Challenge outputs were informed by consultation with leading-edge science and social science thinkers from across a range of disciplines. The events included a mixture of presentations, workshop discussion and activities and were attended by participants from a variety of disciplines.

This section presents key socio-technological trends and issues synthesised from the reviews commissioned for the challenge area. What clearly emerges from the evidence is the need to look at the interaction between the social requirements of knowledge, creativity and communication and the practices that the development and use of technology is always embedded within.

A long-standing issue or trend is one that several reviews anticipate will be relevant to the landscape of knowledge, creativity and communication in 2025.  This section outlines ten long-standing issues and trends for the future:

1)    The practices and knowledge associated with dealing with increasing ease of access to increasing amounts of information.

2)    The potential for increasing collaboration across time and space and its effects on communication and creativity.

3)    The ever broadening extent of connection and networking that will characterise the future.

4)    The trend towards increasing personalisation and creative customisation of experiences, artefacts, learning and how this shapes communication and knowledge.

5)    Changes in the availability, and configuration of representational and communicational resources in the future, and the effects of this on how people engage with knowledge, creativity and communication.

6)    The ways in which literacy and information practices are changing will impact on the role of writing and the emergence of new forms of literacy.

7)    Diversifying location, space and site will have consequences for who we communicate with, and how, and sites of learning.

8)    The marketization of knowledge is briefly highlighted as a trend for the future.

9)    All of the aforementioned trends impact in key ways on changes in knowledge production, the role of the author and the relationship of production and consumption.

10) Finally, the trend towards the openness of ownership of knowledge is discussed.

There will continue to be an increase in the ease of access to the information that people have access to and control over, as well as the amount and quality of information. This will expand the possibilities for knowledge, creativity and communication. It will also place new demands and requirements on people, and the development of skills.

What information is and how adults and institutions control and exercise authority over information is shifting. Children now have access to alternative sources of information other than school and the family and this trend seems set to continue. The Internet and portable technology have dramatically increased access to information over the past decade, albeit unevenly.

There have been changes in both the quality and especially the quantity of information that is now easily accessible. With this technology, interaction and communication will be ‘transformed by objects, transactions and places endowed with the ability to speak themselves – an ability inherent in almost all schemes for the deployment of ubiquitous informatics now being contemplated.’ (Greenfield 2008:57 cited in Carrington and Marsh). The development of more sophisticated context-sensitive technologies will mean that people will have access to relevant information and texts at the point of need. Price et al, point out that intra-body interfaces that rely on proximity, can use the human body as a transition medium to allow people to store, display, and exchange information. Mobile phones and other multi-functional handheld or personal devices can be carried around, enable access to, recording of and communication of various forms of information and data, including photos, video, scientific measurements, and survey records. This serves to embed information in people’s personal experiences and interests. As mobile technologies develop to provide more on-demand services ‘cloud computing’ will enable people to access information and ‘take what they need’ whilst being mobile (Price et al).  Saljo and colleagues suggest that these digital tools (e.g. search engines, calculators,) serve as powerful extensions of the human mind and are increasingly sophisticated and powerful as cognitive amplifiers (Nickerson, 2005 cited in Saljo et al). Thus powerful human knowledge is built into the design and capacity of digital tools.

New types of literacy will be associated with the capabilities of accessing and handling massive amounts of textual information and the increasing significance of images and other forms of mediated communication (Saljo, Kress, Carrington and Marsh). New searching and writing processes are emerging and will continue to emerge, while some processes will remain constant (see 2.1.9). These changes have implications for cognitive processes and communication. Increases in the amount of information are likely to produce an information environment that requires increased collaboration among people with different knowledge bases and across time and space (see 2.1.2 – 2.1.3). Processes of searching this vast amount of information, and how to seek alternative synonyms for searches will become a key skill as will practices in checking the relevance of information gathered through diverse sources, and skills in the analysis, synthesis, reproduction and collation of information (Goodings).

Information on its own is not the same as knowledge: the latter involves interpretation and signification (Hendricks, 2005 cited in Gooding) which in turn pre-supposes a purpose in acquiring and using the information. The increase in information affects what is valued; in these circumstances our knowing to a considerable extent reflects our abilities to make productive use of such resources in accountable and creative ways for specific purposes (Saljo, Brown, Goodings). As well as who makes and circulates knowledge, the capacity to store knowledge electronically may well shift the central role of universities as the places where new knowledge is produced. People’s engagement with huge amounts of data in meaningful ways is, in some contexts, likely to increase the personalisation of information and the production of knowledge, authorship and ownership. Digital technology provides some solutions to the problem of storing information. It provides resources for building up a collective memory of an incredible magnitude (Brown, Saljo).

Socio-technological shifts will continue to facilitate a greater capacity and ease of collaboration across different locations and knowledge bases. This will involve changes in people’s customs and practices and have implications for the production of knowledge, communication and creativity as well as boundaries between the physical and the virtual.

Collaboration has, Horst argues, “become a ‘buzzword’ which defines the ethos, if not the ideology, of the digital age”. Gooding makes the point, drawing on McLuhan that technological environments are active processes that reshape people and other technologies, not passive containers. Technologies are increasing the connection and networks between people locally and globally in ways that redistribute information, roles, relationships and tasks across people’s work and home lives. Eventually increases in collaboration are likely to reshape the boundaries between digital and physical, virtual and real, and notions of distance itself. Face-to-face communication will not disappear or lose its cultural value, rather it will be taken on specific roles and meanings.

Collaboration can be understood, in part, as re-thinking the connection of mind, body and environment. It marks a moving away from an educational focus on the individual internal mind. The emergence of a new participatory culture is predicted that will be essential for effective engagement with contemporary meaning-making practice. The notion of Collective Intelligences argues that new online communities create access to a new kind of ‘knowledge space’ explicitly for the production and exchange of knowledge. Sawyer argues that the majority of creative production involves distributed cognition.  Most of today’s important creative products are, he argues, too large and complex to be generated by a single individual. Collaboration enables participants to build on each other’s ideas to jointly construct a new understanding that none of the participants had prior to the encounter. Collaboration thus moves knowledge, creativity and communication beyond transmission and acquisition, and engages with patterns of participation in collaborative activity change over time.

Sawyer suggests that collaboration in social networks accelerates innovation because more individuals can have more ideas.  This presents the challenge of how to design effective organizational systems that can allow ideas to be developed cumulatively over time in a creative manner. This suggests the need to create learning environments that move beyond opposition or competition. Technology that connects people at a distance will change some practices previously considered individual into collaborative practices. Various information technologies, including the Internet, have enabled new forms of collaboration such as mash-ups and modding. This form of collaboration and concepts such as distributed cognition and collective intelligence are important for conceptualizing and legitimating contemporary literacy practices. For instance, practices such as the selection of elements from a variety of sources that are then incorporated into a new text for a different purpose (what is referred to as ‘appropriation’).

An enhanced participatory and collaborative framework for communication and knowledge is likely to affect social relationships in the future. For example, this may include a shift to more fluid expert-novice learning relationships linked to specific aspects of tasks and technologies rather than traditional adult-child hierarchies (Carrington and Marsh; Goodings). Horst argues that collaborating with experienced members of the community through talk cannot replace learning by observation. She argues that learning by observing, doing and talking are intertwined, and central to participatory learning, suggesting that collaboration online will need to support a range of ways of learning at a distance.

Physical and shareable multimodal interfaces encourage communication and collaboration, and the increasing move toward embodiment, external representations, and physical manipulation of ‘digital objects’ will put collaboration at the heart of knowledge, creativity and communication (Sawyer, Horst, Carrington and Marsh, Price). Price et al suggest that technologies can provide opportunities for interaction and learning to be more active, hands-on, and directly related to physical contexts. This they argue can lead to new forms of communication and collaboration promoting socially mediated learning. New tools that aid external cognitive support include complex interaction, sense of presence and immersion or embodiment in virtual environments, reorganising and connecting ’spaces’ for collaboration. Tangible environments lend themselves to collaborative work, as usually a set of interaction objects can be manipulated both by a group and individually. They serve to increase collaboration by adding the advantages of concrete manipulation to shareable interfaces that encourage communication. Providing face-to-face interaction and multiple, simultaneous users enables the interactive properties of such shared interfaces to support productive collaborative knowledge building. How to translate some of the advantages of this kind of collaboration to collaboration across distances is a challenge for the future. One potential is that technology distributed across physical environments can be used to create collaborative dynamic simulations.

Web 2.0 spaces are significant learning spaces which support playful collaboration and support individuals to learn from others through sharing and discussing content online and scaffold people’s creativity through organizational templates that structure text-making (Carrington and Marsh).  Communication will become more collaborative and diverse ‘affinity spaces’ will develop to support more extensive means to engage in participatory activities (Horst, Goodings, Brown). Ito, et al (forthcoming, cited in Horst) identify friendship-driven and interest-driven genres of participation as two motivations which structure young people’s collaborative engagement with new media. These affinity groups correspond to different genres of youth culture, social network structure, and ways of learning. Finally, collaboration and affective relations built online (e.g. in MySpace), and the information and communication and networks of connection that they support, are increasingly discussed in terms of new forms of work (labour). Work that does not result in the production of a material object or output, but rather that produces a social relationship, this is often referred to as ‘immaterial labour’ (see Gooding, Jones, Saljo, Lauder et al).

A key trend that the reviews anticipate will continue to evolve in the coming three decades is the capacity to connect via different kinds of networks to knowledge, texts and resources, and people. Connectivity is itself seen as a key activity across a wide range of contexts and purposes, in work, education, and life. The practice of staying in ‘perpetual contact’ is supported by the increased availability of mobile and networked technologies and the continual drive to hang out, or to be ‘Always On’ or ‘link up’ (Horst, Carrington and Marsh).

Networked and digital media has dramatically altered the media ecologies of young people in North America, Western Europe and East Asia (Horst). Web 2.0 social networking sites (SNS) provide opportunities and drivers for children and young people to create dense, sophisticated texts that do particular kinds of social work on their behalf (Goodings, Carrington and Marsh, and Horst). They serve as ongoing representations and commentaries on the lives of users. A profile on a social networking site also serves a commemorative function which is highly shaped by the medium (Brown).These texts mash together print, audio, animation and image and allow individuals opportunities to speak to diverse audiences across geographic locations, to craft representations of self and to reinforce intimate social connections with friends and family.

Carrington and Marsh point out that a new generation is growing up in a culture where it is normal social practice to design and deploy an avatar (or many) in a range of online worlds. They suggest that the growth in social networking and virtual worlds online as social destination for children and young people is linked to the decline of public spaces in which young people can congregate and engage in social interactions. One reason such sites are attractive to young people, Horst argues, is that they are largely outside the purview of adults and parents and offer the opportunity for virtual interaction with a wide range of people.

As technologies that enable connectivity and networking develop so will the social practices that drive the need to be connected in everyday lives, and across public and private spaces (Horst). Ito, Okabe and Anderson (2005, in Horst) suggest three practices characterize the mobility of technology. These are cocooning – a personalized media environment; camping – portable media into public spaces; and footprinting – using media to track of information and to mark presence. Changes in photographic technology have shaped this process. For example, the ways in which people exchange, tag and annotate their own and others photographs on websites such as Facebook and Flickr has broadened the scope of visually mediated collectively remembering.

The use of mobile technology enables people to participate in creating and maintaining a range of connections using these sites that bridge offline and online contexts. The connectivity and portability of networked and digital media are tied to broader trends in the changing structures of sociability. The constant connectivity that comes with networked media has produced flexibility in schedules and enables people to coordinate and re-adjust their time. The emergence of ’social network sites’, or websites and software structured to maximize the possibility and frequency of connections between people, has altered the ways youth interact and develop relationships and stay connected to other teens who are not co-present (Ling, 2004 cited in Horst).

The division between public and private contexts may be dissolving or at least becoming more porous in an age of networked public culture (Horst). This demands different kinds of work for boundaries to be maintained and managed. It has implications for the colonization of different aspects of life by other people and institutions. Gooding discusses the difficulties and ethics of combining SNS with formal learning, as people attempt to balance and maintain the boundaries between aspects of their identities.

Overall, one-to-many communication is becoming more prevalent and creating diverse social contexts that effect for example, literacy and identity construction. This trend will continue to develop and will create more opportunities for creative knowledge production by individuals and groups. One of the fundamental questions in the digital age revolves around the extent to which new media and technology contribute to increasing connectedness, or to the atomization of society.

There is an increasing trend towards the personalisation of knowledge, and experience. Although it is important to note that not all commentators are convinced by personalisation as an argument or as an achievable aim within education. One of the lessons of emerging virtual worlds is that young people coming of age as literate citizens in the early 21^st century have an expectation of personalization through endless customization of experience and of self-representation.

This trend is intricately tied to changes in the social production of knowledge and the remaking of the boundaries between producer and consumer, as well as the commercial market, questions of location, space and place and the development of personal technologies. This trend is likely to continue, and is strongly associated with mobile and ubiquitous technologies that transform and re-mediate experience toward the individual and away from centralised systems and institutions (Price). Carrington and Marsh point out that this movement toward portable and personal technologies matches the ways in which adolescents engage with digital technologies outside the classroom. The use of this technology has the potential to lead to more authentic and engaging learning experiences that bridge school and community contexts, opening up new forms of inquiry.

The ways in which technologies enable data and experiences to be made, stored and manipulated by individuals serves to distribute knowledge in new ways. It is distributed over a series of nodal collaborations and networks shaped and motivated by interest and friendship rather than location (though location continues to be a factor). Thus personalization reshapes the notion of a centralized storage space from physical institution, to the institutional and commercial power of the network (e.g. Flickr or MySpace) that the individual is embedded within.

Personalization is linked with identity work. Goodings notes that the visual appearance of a Social Networking Site profile page is of great importance with many users spending hours modifying their profile page. The constant remaking and customising of a profile page exemplifies the wider web 2.0 genre that is obsessed with creativity and communication. VLEs offer many possibilities for activities that will allow students to recreate settings and experiences that promote creativity, communication and personalised routes through these (Gooding). Users deploy their avatars to create an identity, with physical, social and behavioural attributes (e.g. Second Life, MySpace.). This form of personalisation (and anonymity) offers opportunities to explore and experiment with the nature of self and identity, concepts and relationships. It also offers the potential to engage with views and behaviours of others that may be difficult to negotiate in the physical world. This is not to suggest that interaction in the virtual world is free of the tensions of social life in the physical world (e.g. online bullying).

Creativity is positioned as a key aspect of a personalised interest driven activity (Craft).  Sawyer argues that the goals of standard models of school and work, that is to ensure standardization, are becoming less relevant and that what is now required for effective learning is a move toward personalisation. A significant issue here is the need for new forms of assessment if learning is to be customized to the individual student. For example in the form of portfolios, flexible formative assessment and project based work.

Personalization is seen as a factor underpinning the design of digital environments. There is an increasing focus on learning environments as problem-orientated spaces that are flexible enough to accommodate different interests and to cultivate learning across a range of needs (Horst). Ito et al’s recent work on informal learning with digital media with young people found that personal, or individualized, interests were one of the primary motivators for using digital media for learning. Further, Price et al, suggest that giving young people opportunities to express themselves through the representations they create and the use of constructive kits that allow children to build their own, personalized models, stimulating their creativity and imagination, can support deeper learning. The use of digital technologies are recognised for their potential to promote learning that is ‘increasingly more personalized, informal and emergent – rather than the outcome of highly structured institutional practices’ (Ravenscroft and Cook, 2007, cited in Wolf and Alexander). This has prompted researchers to investigate how development of effective argumentation might be supported and enhanced with appropriately designed ‘digital tools’ that enable personalisation.

Significant changes in the representational and communicational landscape over the next 30 years is a theme across many of the reviews (Carrington and Marsh; Saljo et al; Price et al; Kress and Bezemer; Horst). Changing social demands and technological innovation will continue to shape and reconfigure existing representational resources and practices of communication.

The continued development of audio, sensory, and embodied communicational modes and technologies will alter the place of written, print mode in the communicational landscape. The use of representational and communicational resources will become increasingly reliant on a range of forms of communication, drawing image, writing, action, sound and so on, into new relationships (i.e. multimodal in character). It will offer new modes of expressing oneself, representing the world and manipulating it and new modes of articulating knowing and insight.

Despite the shift away from technologies of print, writing will remain an efficient way of communicating in many contexts. Being competent in writing and speech will, however, not in itself, be enough for negotiating the future communicational landscape and image, sound, and the body will be further elaborated and extended in the future communicational landscape.

Although concepts of embodiment are not new, current theoretical trends suggest that more importance will continue to be placed on embodied interaction. Sense of presence, immersion and embodiment is a trend that is connected with the emergence of mobile and ubiquitous technologies, but also with developments within cognitive approaches, multimodal theories, learning sciences and neuroscience. Increased hands on learning directly related to physical contexts offers increased cognitive external support for learning. The focus on mind is extended into the external world via a focus on interaction that moves away from mind as internal distinct and bounded and connects body and mind. There is a trend (e.g. tangible computing) for learning environments that increase the pairing of the physical, digital, social interface and human sensory systems. Through these developments technology is redefining understanding of embodied interaction, these include implantable interfaces, proximity interfaces, wearable computing, etc. It is likely, Price et al suggest, that representational resources will expand as technology develops to use of a range of sensory-specific interfaces, including olfactory, haptic and visual that focus on human senses as inputs (smell, touch, vision). The constantly and rapidly evolving relationships between the physical and the virtual body are likely to provide an increased focus on expression, affect and the body.

Increased combinations of representations require people to attend to and integrate diverse pieces of information from different data sources. The degree to which novices are able to focus on and extract appropriate information impacts on their abilities to engage in effective knowledge acquisition activities (deGroot, 1965; Glaser, 1992 cited in Price et al). The choice of mode and thus modal affordances will become more important for the work of design with respect to knowledge, creativity and communication. The layers of visual symbols, audio, print and hyperlinked meaning-making pathways will highlight the need for a deeper understanding of how modal layers create meanings. Added to this the development of the skills to bring these modes into different kinds of configurations and relations will increase in value.

Literacy and information practices will broaden in response to diverse texts, media, and new purposes for literacy. The desire and need to engage in social interaction and communication at the root of literacy practices remains. What is new and will continue is the range and type of media that facilitate this interaction and the emphasis that different media place on various modes. Writing will continue to be a key form of communication but other forms will emerge and become increasingly important.

It is broadly agreed that the communicational and representational landscape is changing in significant ways and that technologies are an integral part of these changes. Key future developments in literacy are likely to intersect with patterns in technological development in relation to ubiquity, convergence, mobilisation and personalization (Carrington and Marsh). The effect of these changes on how people engage with literacy and information practices is complex as the primary purposes of literacy and information have not, and are not expected to, change at the same rate or to the same extent. Saljo and colleagues make clear that what counts as literacy and change is itself contested, some argue that the use of technology might result in losses of traditional skills. Others claim that traditional literacy skills (reading and synthesizing) are more central than ever in engaging with complex and huge amounts of data. Meanwhile, others argue that there is nothing new, that scrolling, skimming and browsing is essentially the same kind of reading that we know from print.

Specific literacy and information practices will continue to become more significant, others will be reconfigured through technology, and some new practices will enter the literacy repertoires of young people and children. New purposes for literacy will continue to emerge from the ability to communicate across space and time with known and unknown people. These will be supported by developments of mobile and social networking technologies and the increasingly embedded character of these in the everyday will produce emergent and fluid sub-cultures and sharing networks which enable a broad set of practices with text. Overall, the blurring of traditional distinctions between producer (author) and consumer (reader) will escalate, and require a complex range of skills, knowledge and understanding.

The ability to understand, use, manipulate and distribute the power of images and sounds will be paramount in the 21^st century. It will be increasingly valuable to be able to create multimodal texts that can operate across a range of platforms, to recognize the affordances of a mode will become a key competency, along with the choice of media, skills in use of various modes, and ability to analyze multimodal texts, and to rapidly critique information from a range of sources. To be literate will be associated with a person’s potential to be a code breaker, to be a meaning maker, a text user or a text critic (Freebody and Luke, 1990, in Carrington and Marsh). Literacy practices will continue to change, if unevenly and to different extents, with the advent of digital technologies. These new practices will not replace existing literacy practices, rather they will overlay them. This will serve to increase the complexity of learning with the demands of multi-layered meanings and more complex semiotic systems (Higgens, Kress, 2003).

Letters, words and symbols will continue to be an integral part of many texts and print-based texts will continue to perform important social work for individuals and communities. Learners will continue to need to learn the principles of reading and writing print and writing will always be a significant form of communication with high cultural value. However, processes of writing will inevitably change with technological developments that will facilitate extensive on-screen writing such as the refinement of voice-recognition software. The range of multimodal texts and technologies in use are likely to lead to modes other than writing becoming pervasive when undertaking everyday activities. Likewise, repertoires of literacy practice will continue to expand and diversify across different technologies, creating a complex environment and challenging the dominance of writing.

Location, space and time will become increasingly important in mediating, constraining and providing opportunities for knowledge, creativity and communication. New sites of learning are emerging, and old sites are being reframed and brought into new relationships with one another. Future developments and social uses of wireless, networked and mobile technologies and virtual and mixed-reality will continue to push boundaries of where and how to distribute information in ways that offer the capability to change learning environments and outcomes (Dourish, 2001; Rogers et al., 2006 cited in Price et al). In the process, the division between public and private spaces is likely to dissolve into hybrid configurations. This may have significant impacts on the production, boundaries and purposes of knowledge. Places and communities that people learn in will continue to be intimately connected to social practices and knowledge, identities, as well as the semiotic resources available (Sefton-Green).

Initiatives to integrate ‘education’ into the home, or to turn the home into a new site for conventional education are likely to continue. The home, particularly the ‘digital bedroom’ (Livingstone, 2002, cited in Sefton Green) is positioned at the heart of the consumption and use of digital technologies and the marketization of education and thus within a larger socio-economic geography of learning (Sefton-Green, Carrington and Marsh). Differential access within the home to technological, economic and social capital will continue to shape future models of education.

The re-distribution of the function of schooling across other kinds of sites to form a network of learning is one vision for the future (Sawyer, Sefton-Green). This places significant responsibility on the learner in a further elaboration of personalisation of learning trajectories across a wider ‘ecology’ of education diffused across a variety of sites- schools, homes, play grounds, libraries and the museum – each of which has the potential to contribute in different ways to education (Sawyer, Sefton Green, Horst). These networks of sites provide potentials for educators to mobilize learning within, between and outside of the classroom in the future. Particularly when supported by context-based ubiquitous, wearable and mobile technologies that augment real-world contexts (e.g. museums, field trips) and geo-networking and physical web technologies that pair virtual online information from social networking sites with physical location and events in the real world (Price et al). This will have significance for the re-organisation of the time and space of education. As a result, the ‘geo-social’ relationships of learners to their home, communities, non-formal learning spaces, and virtual spaces are likely to be reshaped to offer different kinds of possibilities for engaging with knowledge, creativity and communication. Part of this is the remaking of home school relations and boundaries. Young and Muller drawing on Bernstein, argue it will continue to be important to differentiate learning in schools, colleges and universities from learning in homes, workplaces and communities as boundaries play an important role in creating learner identities and are part of the condition for acquiring ‘powerful knowledge’.

Learners position themselves in relation to the wider community beyond their immediate locale through a range of mechanisms including online and virtual communities. Flexibility will become a key feature of establishing new ecologies for learning in the future that facilitate pockets of flexible space, time and ways of learning, reorganize across age phases, curriculum areas, and collaboration. The potential to flex and de-centre time in the school (through the use of technologies) can be used to create a range of spaces for learning that may connect more easily across sites of learning (Higgins). The deployment of technologies will continue to create flexible virtual online spaces for learning many of which are leisure or informal spaces (e.g. games, social networking sites) which may open the door to more complex interactions as well as ‘mixed reality’ spaces (Price et al, Saljo). The use of features of mobility and sensor embedding technologies may provide new opportunities to re-think space and place organisation in fundamental ways. The notion of network also has implications for the porous character of the classroom and the relationship between schools and the rest of society. Network technologies allow learners to interact with adult professionals outside the school. The use of such networks may lead to learning will become more diffuse and relocated, such as the on-line virtual schools in the USA and Australia offering home-based activities organized at the level of neighbourhoods (Sawyer).  At its most radical this is a vision of a “de-schooled” future (Illich, 1973, cited in Higgins).

Sefton-Green argues the increasing currency of informal learning describes different processes and organisational structures of knowing in alternative and complementary time-spaces, driven by particular interests and purposes, and the development of new kinds of knowledge-communities. These suggest new ways of learning, being and knowing, that challenge the epistemological conventions of mass schooling. Although, as Gooding points out these may echo learning spaces in offline contexts (e.g. auditorium lecture theatres in second life). Experiments such as on-line virtual schools (Sawyer) and the Institute of Play that merges gaming principles of design with standardized curriculum (Horst), and the Schome project (Sawyer) are likely to expand. However, the school as a site of learning, although transformed and probably diversified is, likely to remain.

Access to knowledge and capacity for creativity, in a variety of forms, is claimed to be central to a competitive future in the knowledge economy (Sawyer, Craft, Sefton-Green, Guile). Knowledge and creativity are increasingly claimed to be equally or more important than land, tools or labour in determining a society’s standard of living (Sawyer, Jones). Although this claim is disputed, the direct linking of knowledge with the economy serves to reposition knowledge as a transferable market commodity and the child as a social resource for economic potential. This perspective stands behind the increased focus on generic skills and creative innovation industries and positions the development of and access to knowledge primarily in instrumental and competitive terms (Guile). Commercial market forces are powerful in many domains of children’s lives and the boundary between the private market and the public sphere continue to blur and shift in significant ways (Buckingham, Sefton-Green).

Several reviews fear that the commodification of skills, creativity and knowledge, will reduce the role of education to meeting the demand for labour (Craft, Jones, Lauder et al, Saljo et al).

Authorship and ownership of knowledge are being remade by new technologies, indeed in some scenarios knowledge is seen as diffuse and networked and ‘in the hands of the people’ in a range of activities. The distinction between producer and consumer will continue to blur to the point of hybridity and practices of remixing will increase toward an intensification of creative production and consumption.

The complexity and unevenness of this emphasis on the purposive action of participants in knowledge production is also noted in relation to structural inequalities that shape the parameters of participation in the new media ecology (Horst, Saljo, Kress and Bezemer).  In contrast, other reviews see these changes as superficial and with little real power with control of powerful knowledge remaining located in pockets (nodes) around the globe – in the form of the super research universities, elite universities and multinational corporations (Baker, Young and Muller, Lauder et al). Thus the questions of who is creating/authoring knowledge and who is enabled to access it is key to determining whether these changes will be superficial or not.

Increasing access to digital technologies and the capacities they afford mean text production will increasingly be informed by the processes of ‘remixing’, ‘mash-up’ and ’sampling’ which involves cutting and pasting, reformulating and recontextualising texts, which has implications for the development of learners’ ability to judge sources and evaluate their appropriateness. This remix culture will continue to raise questions of fair use, intellectual property and copyright. Carrington and Marsh argue this will lead to the democratization of the tools of remixing media across a range of modes, purposes and audiences and to a greater expectation of individual creativity rather than static reception of heritage text forms. Gooding supports this view of a move to a more open and free authorship of knowledge, arguing that the Convergence Culture signifies a form of participation that perpetuates the creation of user generated content on the Web that enables consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and re-circulate media content. Both see this process continuing and escalating into the foreseeable future.

Social and technological changes culminate in a trend toward the intensification of creative production and consumption and these have already led to an emphasis on agency. While this may well be illusory to some degree, young people do act out of such understandings of their power in relation to design and knowledge production (Goodings). In other words, the social changes manifest themselves in an assumption of significant agency on the part of the young in the domain of their own cultural production (Gooding). This trend is not fully developed with social class, race and gender differences in the access and skills that young people have in production. More subtle shifts in the relation between reader and author are a part of this trend, attending to the ways in which readers produce and remake texts – the possibilities for remaking are broadened by the multi-directional reading paths of digital texts and environments, the unsettled genres and practices of ‘reading’ digital texts, and the participatory culture of online environments. These unsettled spaces offer opportunities for innovation, control, risk taking and ownership for young people – spaces that education needs to understand how to create and harness.

Changes in knowledge production and authoring will intensify and raise questions concerning copyright and access to information. There will be a trend towards openness and collaborative sharing of digital information.

Web 2.0 is a platform for content creation and is built on the presumption that people will re-distribute content across the web. Goodings suggests that users are often unaware of the relevant legal, pragmatic and ethical guidelines. These sites also make use of the Creative Commons license that involves a number of re-use policies for the public to avoid being held liable for copyright infringements. Indeed the collaborative culture and Creative Commons License have enabled the production of a wide range of open educational resources. Gooding agrees with Jenkins (2006) that ‘powerful institutions and practices (law, religion, education, advertising and politics, among them) are being redefined by a growing recognition of what is to be gained through fostering – or at least tolerating – participatory cultures’. Goodings suggests that information and communication will increasingly become the currency of new Web-based products and services and that a growing numbers of media industries will look to the ‘meaning’ that people construct in communities of user-generated content as a highly marketable resource in the new media industry.  A move towards a more open and free use of information is the most likely direction for the future. Alternatively, at least in some contexts, copyright may be used as a powerful form of regulation to restrict and manage the circulation of information and knowledge and tie it to commercial interests. There are important questions about the degrees of freedom of knowledge and how knowledge will be regulated in the future. This also links with questions of authenticity and trust.

This section of the report highlights three areas of potentially major significance but which the reviews suggest there is considerable uncertainty about their future development and direction. The first relates to creativity, and the question of whether creativity will become more widely spread across the population, become democratized or if it will become ever more elite to become the right of the few.  The second concerns the management of knowledge and communication, and whether this will coalesce around individuals or communities. The third uncertainty is focused on information and questions of trust, risk and ethics.

Who has access to creative work and practices is a significant issue for the future, it is also surrounded by uncertainty – will creativity be available to all or will it be only for the elite echelons of society?

The reviews focus on the empowering democratising potentials of creativity – available to all, opening up the space for being creative, the increased engagement with creative production and consumption enabled by new technologies and a shifting communicational landscape in the future (Craft, Carrington and Marsh, Horst, Kress and Bezemer). These coalesce around the economic imperative of creativity for innovation in industry and services that, together with concern with student disengagement and social inclusion have helped to raise the profile and credentials of creativity in education more generally (Craft). Banaji et al (2006) note multiple distinctive discourses circulating in respect of creativity in education.

Sawyer, Jones and Lauder however both point to an alternative scenario with an increasingly myopic focus on the efficiency of the global economic landscape of labour and the standardization of working practices. The Internet is called upon as a democratizing force for knowledge in several reviews (Carrington and Marsh, Gooding, Horst) but Lauder argues that the ‘crucial point here is that data and information from the Internet needs interpreting and evaluating’. Indeed, Lauder sees creativity in the light of intensified ‘positional competition’ and greater elitism and selectivity. Rather than democratization of powerful knowledge and creativity, he suggests a more class-based outcome in which creativity and powerful knowledge will more likely reside with the few. Here knowledge and practice is automated and fostering creative abilities and opportunities is restricted to a small elite. Far from becoming increasingly democratized, fewer and fewer employees will be asked to exercise creative autonomy, choice and control in their work. Instead, the rise of a global elite of ‘creative knowledge workers’ will be complemented by increasingly standardized and routinized  (highly scripted and constrained) working practices for a majority with no ‘permission to think’ (Lauder et al) and no room for disciplined improvisation (Sawyer).  Sawyer and Lauder suggest that the automization of work, combined with increased globalization and the re-location of unskilled jobs to low-wage countries may create ‘a radically tiered social structure’; what Lauder calls ‘Digital Taylorism’

It is unclear how this tension between creativity and social inequity will play-out or inform policy and the future. In part this uncertainty is tied to the question of what the purposes of education are to be in the future in relation to work, economy, and citizenship. The future may bring further social stratification. Creativity will, Sawyer suggests, become central to the education of elite groups and restricted notions of creativity will inform the education of other groups. Democratic approaches to education employ notions of creativity to focus on the raising of standards for all to the same level. This serves to position the child as located in society/culture in which there is no such thing as a unique bounded individual. Creativity is a discourse of inclusion, empowerment and viewed as inherent in everyday activities. The other primary use of creativity is in the more competitive sense of standards and the gifted and talented. This is underpinned by a view of creativity as the uniqueness of the individual, and the self as personal project – creative genius, it draws on exclusivity, competition, and capacity to thrive in a market economy (Sawyer, Craft). If such a vision were to come to pass Sawyer (and Baker differently so) suggests this would pose the risk of a social order that reproduces itself through these imbalances in the education system.

Whether knowledge and communication will be primarily individual or communal is a key uncertainty for the future.

The extent to which knowledge and communication will be shaped by the ways in which people will be connected via communities, family and intergenerational relations, interests, identity and affinity groups. A key aspect of this is the extent to which the future may lead to an atomised or individualised society and in response how knowledge or communication may coalesce around individuals or communities/groups. This tension suggests two possible future trajectories, or configurations of these, one moving towards increasingly communal and social management of knowledge and information, and the other moving towards increasingly individualised and atomised management of knowledge and information.

Further, this remaking of communities around interests raises questions for how people maintain identities and culture across generations (Jones). One outcome that may pertain to the future is the increasing production of surveillance as a form of ‘connection’ where adults’ roles are to protect children, in which content and forms of communication are restricted through technology or social relations. For example, parents increasingly use mobile phones and online technologies to maintain communication, monitor and control the movement of their children outside of the home and the institutionalized context of the school (Ivinson, Carrington and Marsh, Horst).

Against the backdrop of ever increasing flow, access and storage of information and engagement in online economies, communities and identity work embedded in everyday life a number of reviews raise the theme of trust and authenticity, risk and ethics as central for the future (Brown, Goodings, Horst, Craft, Sawyer, Sefton-Green).

These issues may go in different directions in the future, which can be understood as the outcome of a combination of two factors. The first factor is either increasing or decreasing trust, and second, increasing or decreasing acceptance with information being held via others and systems. Underpinning the question of what direction these issues may take are broad issues of security and privacy, and attitudes regarding the potential of social and technological trends towards surveillance or empowerment.

Issues of authenticity of knowledge (that is trust in the value, correctness, and origin of information as well as who has produced or communicated information) will persist. These are likely to become increasingly important as knowledge is increasingly generated within complex systems and through collaborations and in online contexts in which it is relatively easy to find personal information. Mechanisms and strategies will need to be developed that serve to establish and maintain trust for the users of technology and equip them with enhanced skills to assess online authenticity and value. Many children are able to recognise and avoid risky behaviour (Livingstone, Bober & Helsper (2005) cited in Gooding). Here the need to understand how risk acts as mediator for interaction is key (Schillmeier).

Trust and reputation in online environments are increasingly built up over time and across people’s experiences rather than on an individual basis. These are constructed from markers such as discourse styles, use of the textual practices of particular affinity groups and the deployment of inter-textual references (Davies, in press cited in Carrington and Marsh), for instance in the forms of ratings to construct online reputations. Children and young people will need to develop strategies that will enable them to manage their online identities in terms of the level of detail they are prepared to share with different audiences – and sites and institutions will be increasingly called upon to monitor and maintain the privacy of their users. Changes in the character of knowledge are likely to have significant meaning for the basis of authority of teachers and teacher professionalism, as well as curriculum and processes of knowledge production in education.

This section highlights the key socio-economic factors that are likely to underpin future directions in the practices of knowledge production, creativity and communication over the coming years.

The key potential levers and drivers shaping knowledge, creativity and communication for the next 30 years are the continuing development of technology and its social use, the expansion of the global knowledge economy, the place of creative industries within this broader economy, the marketization of education, policy and technological focus on personalisation and the individual, and increasing diversity within the population.

Potential challenges that will force the trends for knowledge, creativity and communication identified in this report in different directions over the next 30 years include, legal and regulatory frameworks, tension between standards and creativity, social inequity, and the inability of education to respond to developments in technologies and changes in the population.

The continuing development of technology and its take up for social purposes is a key driver for knowledge, creativity and communication in a number of ways. In particular the use of open shared resources, social networking sites, the storage and circulation of information, images, video, music etc across sites are a part of the social collaborative and participatory culture. The use of mobile, network, ubiquitous technologies and perhaps more importantly the development of innovative ways to use and deploy these technologies for social purposes will support knowledge production and communication and provide sites for creative work and its dissemination.

The expansion of the global knowledge economy, supported by the use and development of networked technology to support collaboration across time and space is a significant driver for knowledge, creativity and communication. In particular the drive to speed the cycle of production from innovation to distribution through 24-hour production that ‘follows the sun’. These socio-technological trends will drive the role of knowledge, creativity and communication in the global economy in two parallel but distinct directions. On the one hand, work that relies on automated and routinized knowledge, severely limited possibilities for creativity with no ‘permission to think’, and highly scripted and regulated communication. On the other hand, a circuit of ‘talented’ elites will be required to engage in complex knowledge production, using creative skills and requiring sophisticated communicational resources. In the past it was assumed the knowledge economy would mean creative knowledge service work in the UK, however, with the rise of cheap specialist labour elsewhere, the role of the UK labour force in this global market is not clear. This will give shape the future labour force required in the UK. The degree to which educational policy will be tied to economic policy in the future is unclear.

Educational interest in creativity as an essential skill or disposition for the future is strongly linked to its anticipated economic benefits. The success and economic productivity of the creative industries is therefore a strong driver for creativity in the UK and globally.

The increased marketization of education is a driver that will have significance for knowledge, creativity and communication. In particular the increasing unbundling of education from the state as a central provider and the move toward online educational possibilities may serve to diversify and open up education. Hybrid private-public relationships in education may increase, for example between work and education. This may result in increasing social stratification of education as a market in ways that strongly shape the kinds of knowledge, creativity and communication that people have access to.

A general focus on the individual is driving educational policy and socio-technology agenda for personalization and personal technologies. At the same time as proposing an opening up of the space of schooling to the interests of students this raises many questions for what knowledge is in the school.

Increasing diversity within the population combined with increasing collaboration and networking is a driver for knowledge and communication. If the global economy becomes increasingly multilingual, or leads to increased circulation of global labour, this may lead to linguistic and cultural diversity within education which may have profound consequences for communication as well as curricular knowledge. This relates to issues of multilingualism and cultural pluralism, and identities across nation-states (Jones).

Anxiety and fear concerning the disenfranchisement of young people (a concern linked to diversity and the individual) is a key driver for the weakening of boundaries between disciplines and sites of learning that has implications for the status of specialised knowledge, and everyday knowledge.

2.3.2   Potential challenges

The increasing openness of technology is in a constant struggle with legal and regulatory frameworks with respect to intellectual property rights and copyright, as well as concerns for privacy and safety.  This struggle is connected with political, economic, and ethical issues as well as authenticity, trust and risk. The control and regulation of images, video, music etc on the Internet is vital, but may introduce forces that have a negative effect for the future of knowledge, creativity and communication.

There is much interest in personalisation, customisation, and creativity but how this interest will play-out with respect to standardisation is unclear. These two trends may be in tension, and if the weight is given to standardisation this may present challenges for creativity.

Social inequity, especially in the context of increasing marketization of education, may have profound consequences for how children and young people access and experience education, and exacerbate the social differentiation of access to knowledge and creativity. However, the unbundling of education may serve to provide schooling for a variety of people who are disenfranchised from education.

The failure of education to respond quickly to future technological developments is a potential challenge for the future trajectories of knowledge, creativity and communication identified in this report. There are many complex forces that operate on the school that make the changes technologies promise difficult to realise. This may result in the possibilities for knowledge, creativity and communication in educational sites being in a state of stasis.

The failure of education to respond to increasing diversity (e.g. through migration and globalization) may prove a challenge to the future direction of knowledge, creativity and communication. Diversity may be erased, smoothed over, through potentially monolingual contexts (physical and virtual) that develop over time. The question of how difference will be marked in the future remains very open.

The direction these factors will take will depend on social and political decisions that will be made about the role of education in the global economy.

This section addresses the potential implications of the findings presented in sections 2.1 – 2.3 for education with attention to the demands of a changing landscape, the goals of education, teachers and learners, organisation and governance of education, supporting learning and learning cycles.

2.4.1   The demands of a changing landscape

The changing landscape of knowledge, creativity and communication will place new demands on education with respect to the skills needed to participate in, navigate through, connect with and interpret this landscape.

Learning how to collate, search, interpret, evaluate and transform information into salient knowledge is increasingly important, as is the ability to authenticate information from diverse sources. People will need to assess and manage risk and establish trust in virtual spaces and work with risk as well as the politics of information, ethics and legality. People will need to be creative, self-directed and curious about new forms of knowledge and be able to manage complexity and risk taking.

People will need to be fluent in working with a complex range of static, virtual and blended texts. Literacy will need multimodal design at its centre and the interpretation and creation of meaning beyond language as its purpose, that said, the ability to write and read, and numeracy will remain relevant key skills.

Increasingly people may be expected to participate in a variety of textual knowledge production and the boundary between consumer and producer will continue to blur. The ability to engage with content creatively via experience is likely to be a growing demand for the future. This is likely to be the case in relation to finding individualised pathways through curricular knowledge. This will also pertain to the customisation and personalisation of spaces through the use of technologies and the creative expression of identities. The ability to work across disciplinary, technological and spatial boundaries will be essential in this changing landscape. The multimodal media ecologies of young people are expected to continue to expand and diversify, particularly with the growth and development of mobile and ubiquitous technologies. How to harness (and regulate) technologies will become important questions for education.

The increasing focus on networked connectivity will require people to have the communication skills and knowledge to support effective collaboration and communication. A central element of the changing landscape is the development of resources and spaces (in education, work and home) to support people to create and innovate. This may stand in tension with the potential that the knowledge economy may lead to the demand for a work force in which the dominant requirement will be the ability to follow tight scripts and automated routines.

2.4.2   The goals of education

The future of education is likely to continue to be focused on the following three goals: the need to project learners into official discourses of knowledge; an agenda for social inclusion, personal growth and active citizenship; and providing people with skills for work. Whilst these reflect the current goals of education, it is the context and conditions of their articulation that will be crucial for the future.

The focus on official discourses of knowledge looks to continue the move of mass education towards generic skills away from disciplinary knowledge. There is growing concern that the goals of education will become subsumed by the needs of the labour market. The rationales motivating investments in life-long learning (its functions and purpose and driving forces) will continue to shift from a means for promoting social inclusion, personal growth and active citizenship in a democratic society to a strategy for increasing a person’s chances to compete with others in a changing labour market in a global economy. This increasingly instrumental view has spread widely and dominates the debate in the European Union on future policies, where the prime role of schools and universities is to make people “employable”. This risks education being reduced to supplying an increasingly uneven labour market and may lead to the continuing marginalization of schools as institutions within society. This concern is accompanied by considerable uncertainty as to what it is legitimate and necessary to know in order to participate in a changing global context. Conversely the shifting balance in work, life, and education may shift the goals of education towards personal growth and development.

The question of how pedagogy and curriculum should respond to and manage the tension between the knowledge of learners outside of school and the official discourses of knowledge persists. The consequences of the stability, porous or boundaried character of disciplinary knowledge is a contested issue, as is how best to design these to meet the needs of future society. The question of how knowledge should be organised, whether people should be inducted into knowledge, or the degree to which people should be free to create the boundaries of knowledge around their own experience is a perennial problem within education and one that appears to be coming to the fore. Some call for increased porosity of the boundaries between knowledge disciplines and domains and others suggest that these are already in a state of semi-collapse. Children’s use of digital technologies is seen as a powerful tool in reconfiguring knowledge in the classroom, particularly through digital text production. From this perspective the challenge for schooling is, Saljo et al argue, drawing on Dewey “to connect to children’s everyday experiences and introduce new skills and knowledge in such a manner that they are able to bridge what they encounter in school with what they hear and see in other social settings. Schools must be seen as a form of social life in which children and young people engage in activities that they find relevant, meaningful, enabling and that are consequential in terms of learner interests and identities.” A call to weaken the boundaries of schooling can be understood, Young and Muller argue as a desire to adapt ‘to global trends towards greater flexibility and openness to change from individuals’. They emphasise the social differentiation of both knowledge and institutions, and challenge the assumption that boundaries are always barriers to be overcome rather than also conditions for innovation and the production and acquisition of new knowledge. One consequence of weakening boundaries would be that schooling would become less and less differentiated from other social institutions which may lead to an ‘over-socialised’ concept of knowledge. This is likely to lead to access to specialist knowledge migrating to elite and private sectors and institutions and public education becoming a competition within a context of ‘credential inflation’.

Concerns about emotional well-being are increasingly a focus of social policy, particularly in education settings, and the placing of new ideas about emotion and creativity and communication in curriculum content, pedagogy and assessment, in ways that are significant in redefining what it is to ‘know’ (Hayes and Eccelstone). This marks a fundamental shift in ideas about what education is for, and what it means to be human (Young and Muller, Hayes and Eccelstone). This focus on emotion and well-being needs to be understood in the broader context of the knowledge economy and the rising importance of creativity and the linking of emotion (e.g. low self esteem) with social exclusion by policy makers. More specifically this debate centres on the emotional well-being of youth in contemporary society, the disengagement of students from formal schooling, concerns regarding the commercialization of childhood, and the effect of ICT on the emotional development of children and young people all of which shapes educational discourses on knowledge, creativity and communication.

2.4.3   Teachers and learners

The changing socio-technological character of knowledge, creativity and communication outlined in this report will diversify what it means to be a learner, who it is that learns, and impact on the relationships between teacher and learner.

The age range of learners is likely to expand, with people starting education earlier and leaving later than before, and leading to increased diversity in the age, background and expectations of learners. This may serve to collapse some of the boundaries that separate learners and teachers in education.

Sites of learning are likely to diversify and a broader range of people are likely to be involved in teaching and learning in the future. The home will have an increasing role to play in education in a number of ways including increased connection of home to school via technology, home access to information via new media, virtual learning environments that merge the boundaries between home and school, and ‘edutainment’. This may draw parents and siblings more strongly into educational relationships with one another, perhaps giving new emphasis to intergenerational learning, peer-learning, independent learning and informal learning. These new relations may solve and generate problems for education. The community and neighbourhood may also take a stronger role in education in the form of teaching and learning hubs, raising the significance of mentoring and out of school sites of learning. Online collaborations across networks are likely to increase peer learning and mentoring on interest driven sites and within specialist affinity groups.

The policy and technological move towards personalisation may support flexibility in school curriculum and time schedules. Increasingly the Internet and other participatory online spaces including social networking sites will supplement or substitute aspects of schooling. There is likely to be ever increasing attention to the learner. This may increase peer and mentoring relationships and dissolve the stratification of learners by age. This flexibility may result in some shifting from linear processes of education to more iterative processes of education.

The role of the teacher and what teaching means may change both with respect to the current trend towards the personalisation of learning and the routinization of teachers’ work. In addition, technologies in the school may reconfigure teacher roles as that of guide rather than the main point of access to inquiry and knowledge production. There is a growing argument for the need to move toward dialogic teaching (Wolf and Alexander). As students are empowered, teachers may, some argue, be re-positioned alongside pupils (and the internet) as alternative sources of support and information, rather than gatekeepers of knowledge. At the same time this raises issues about students’ competence at taking on a more independent self-generated activity or role that this demands, and teachers’ ability or familiarity with facilitating learning. A particular challenge for education in the future is how to manage fluid and uncontrolled learning outcomes, and increased instances of small group interaction. Another possibility is that notions of pedagogy may change dramatically. It is becoming more common to try and merge social, cultural aspects of learning with individual notions of agency through personalisation and virtual interaction. The question that remains is the extent to which it is possible to create collaborative classrooms where personalized learning environments which are flexible enough to accommodate different interests and learning needs are cultivated and where tasks are problem-focused.

2.4.4   Organization and governance

The move towards a more diffuse and flexible ecology (and economy) of education will have significance for the organisation and governance of education. Sites of learning are likely to diversify although the school will remain although differently configured. This will raise new challenges for regulating and safe-guarding people.

The school will remain as a physical space at the heart of a diffused network of places and communities, both physical and virtual, including the home, play centred organisations, libraries and museums, and online environments. Each of these sites will contribute in different ways to education. People may flow through this network in different ways. There is likely to be increased attention on non-formal learning spaces, work and leisure spaces, and virtual spaces that offer different kinds of possibilities for learning, distinct leaning processes, experiences and activities. The potentials for mobilizing learning within, between and outside of the classroom and across school phases will most likely be enhanced by the use of a variety of technologies, in particular mobile, wireless, and ubiquitous.

Broadening the use of communication technologies within education will raises serious challenges about how to enable safe, accessible and innovative e-Learning strategies. Understanding of privacy and risk increases with age, and older teenagers tend to restrict access to the photos and videos, while older bloggers upload information in the context of informed acceptance or management of risk. With ever increasing access to the Internet children of all ages are going to be continually faced with some form of unwanted content. New benchmarks are needed to control the way that children are able to search the net, this stems from parental controls at home through to legislative responsibility to reduce the amount of harmful content on the Web. The paradox is that while firewalls serve an important role in protecting children from inappropriate digital content they often prevent teachers and pupils from effectively using e-Learning tools and technologies in education.

2.4.5   Supporting learning: artefacts, interventions and practices

Opportunities to engage with the complex and diverse multimodal landscape of knowledge, creativity and communication will be key to supporting learning. This will mean diversifying the kinds of artefacts that enter sites of learning and what gets done with and to them, and providing increased opportunities to engage in production. Learners will need to acquire skills in working with complex data sets and texts, particularly in critiquing and translating them into meaningful knowledge that is relevant for a particular purpose. How to authenticate information from a variety of sources and spaces in which learners need to assess, take and manage risk in virtual and physical spaces will be needed to support learning.

Increasing opportunities for learners to be networked with experts and others will support their learning skills and knowledge to support effective working across different boundaries. Online, mobile, network, and ubiquitous technologies will diversify the spaces for learning and open up new connections between school and other sites of learning both physical and virtual. Creating spaces where learners can collaborate with each other and people outside of school is central for supporting learning. In particular finding ways to support learners in working across interests and to harness these towards engaging with bodies of curricular knowledge. When it is appropriate to personalise and customise learning, and how this can be done effectively for all learners, remains a key question for education.

Designing educational uses of modularized, any-time and any-where learning may be used to ‘open up’ the curriculum space more generally. This may have significant consequences for what is taught in the school, the role of the curriculum, and the place of knowledge in the organisational space of the school. There is considerable debate about what (or indeed whether) disciplinary knowledge will be required to meet the needs of future society. The question of how knowledge should be organised is central, that is, whether people should be inducted into knowledge, or the degree to which people should be free to create the boundaries of knowledge around their own experience. This is a perennial problem within education and one that appears to be coming to the fore. How it is addressed is key to the organisation of education and how learning and assessment might best be supported in the future. There is an increasing call for the use of context-situated learning to embed learning content in experience (mediated virtually or physically) in order to increase opportunities for interest driven, authentic, and customised activities. The place of ‘powerful knowledge’ in a more porous and flexible educational system with a focus on repertoires of skills and attitudes requires consideration.

The trend towards customization will impact on the learning processes and expectations of individual students and may ultimately begin to shape, or put pressures on, the pedagogies of classroom instruction. The tension between the demand (and educational desire) for creativity and personalisation and discourses of standards may be a major tension for supporting learning and assessment. The conditions for education call for forms of assessment that are more fluid and adaptable to individual needs, and perhaps open up possibilities for a further emphasis on self-assessment. It seems that current constructions of the assessment regime are unlikely to be appropriate in the future.

2.4.6   Learning cycles in a lifetime of change

Education will need to respond to the effects of changing social demands and technological developments on learning cycles across people’s life-course.

Changing demographics will serve to shift the balance between life and work and education. Further, learning must continue through the lifespan in order to survive in a changing workplace and wider world where knowledge expands and changes rapidly. It is in part due to the increasing pace of technological and cultural change that the concept of learning to learn has been extended in recent years to encompass this expansion, and the need to become more effective, more efficient and more resilient learners. In the expansion of learning beyond formal educational systems the transition from education to work or between sites of work is reconceptualised from a matter of the acquisition of qualifications to one of the development of work related practice and entrepreneurial expertise.

The central place of education across the life course will collapse the previous separations of life into mutually exclusive phases of education, work and retirement. The increasing detachment of learning from schooling will result in the unbundling of learning from mass schooling leading to future education models that move towards greater individualisation, personalisation, collaboration and niche experiences. There is considerable debate on the viability of generic skills as transferable commodities (see Ivinson, Young and Muller, Guile). Drawing on Bernstein, Ivinson suggests that generic skills ‘create a fiction that learning can be disembodied and disconnected from persons, bodies and communities of practice’. Guile suggests the need to move towards an in-situ mix of knowledge, skill and judgement as for example in unpaid internships or work placements. This suggests that what is required is a less linear conception of professional formation.

Professor David Baker

Pennsylvania State University, U.SA.

The modernizing role of schools as institutions

Formal education transforms modern society and has generated a new type of society: the schooled society. Formal education has expanded and intensified to the point where along with effects on individuals, formal education generates new ideas about people, new privileged human capacities, new ideas about knowledge and its generation, new expanded social and occupational, positions. This paper describes two major consequences of the schooled society on knowledge and its acquisition: 1) the unprecedented growth of a knowledge conglomerate in universities, and 2) the change towards ever-greater value placed on academic intelligence in human society.

Professor Steven Brown

School of Management, University of Leicester

Learning, Remembering and Meta-cognitive/communication skills

The review highlights contemporary trends in the study of remembering and their likely future development. The review is organised around a set of key debates on memory collective vs. individual memory, the character of memory, memory and history, embodied memory, mediated memory. The review draws out how these debates effect knowledge, creativity and communication.

Professor Anna Craft

Education Department, University of Exeter and the Open University

Creativity in the school

This review discusses how creativity has been seen to be increasingly significant in education, within cultural policy discussions and has appeared as a guide to other major public policies around, for example, inclusion and the economy.  This ubiquitous use of the term, which rests on a ‘universalized’ conception of creativity, offers both opportunities and challenges in education. This paper explores the tensions and dilemmas arising from the mix of underpinning perspectives on creativity in education. The paper will consider, finally, wider questions about the nature and futures of education (Ref to Facer, Fielding, Twining, Craft etc), suggesting areas that need consideration in seeking to see beyond current horizons as regards creativity in education.

Dr John Cromby

Psychology Department, Loughborough University

The move from social explanations toward neuroscience

This review explores what neuroscience has to offer education, it outlines a number of ‘neuromyths’ that were prevalent have been decisively dismissed by neuroscientists, and calls for a more accurate assessment of its potential. It argues that despite its limitations, cognitive neuroscientists have made some striking progress with respect to the basic skills underpinning abilities such as reading and number. It also suggest that progress in applying neuroscience will be slow, and will continue to be bound up with other knowledge and events.

Lewis Goodings

Psychology Department,Loughborough University

Changes in knowledge construction, participation and networks

New communities that are formed around recent networking technological advances are explored for their potential to become effective learning space. The question of what such communities mean for knowledge is addressed. Issues related to the types of ethical rules, mutual goals, dilemmas and interests can be characterised in the social practices of these new learning spaces are examined as is the wider ideas of knowledge construction, participation and networks.

Dr David Guile

Faculty of Policy and Society, Institute of Education

Learning to work in the creative and cultural sector: new spaces, pedagogies and expertise

This review questions the link that policymakers assume exists between qualifications and access to employment in the creative and cultural sector. It identifies how labour market conditions in this sector undermine this assumption and how the UKs’ policy formation process inhibits education and training actors from countering these labour market conditions. The review demonstrates how non-government agencies -’intermediary organisations’ – are creating new spaces to assist aspiring entrants to develop the requisite forms of ‘vocational practice’ expertise to enter and succeed in the sector. It concludes by identifying a number of new principles for governance, pedagogic strategies and skill formation issues for stakeholders to address.

Professor Denis Hayes, and Dr Kathryn Ecclestone

Education Department, Oxford Brookes University

Affect: Knowledge, communication, creativity and emotion

This review examines concerns about emotional well-being that have recently become the focus of social policy, particularly in education settings. This is a sudden and unique development in placing new ideas about emotion and creativity and communication in curriculum content, pedagogy and assessment, but also in redefining fundamentally what it is to ‘know’. The review charts the creation of what the authors call an ‘emotional epistemology’ and draw out implications for educational aspirations and purposes and evaluates potential implications for these aspirations and purposes if trends we identify here continue into the future.

Professor Steve Higgins

Durham University

Learning to learn

This review focuses on learning to learn and future developments in education and provides a summary of evidence from leading-edge social science and science research.  It identifies key trends in learning to learn (with respect to individuals, groups and societies) which are relevant to knowledge production, creation and communication to 2025 and beyond. Evidence is presented about current interventions, developments and strategies (from education and other sectors) which respond to these different trends in terms of what the implications for educational goals, structures, methods and resources.

Dr Helen Horst

Education Department, University of California, Irvine

Connectivity, flow, convergence and communication: Mobile, portable and personalized

This review considers the implications of digital and networked media in out-of-school settings for conceptualizing models of learning and engagement. Focusing upon the mobile and personalized nature of mobile devices and the mobile learning spaces that digital and networked media enable, it examines how innovations in connectivity, communication, collaboration and convergence create new possibilities for the future of learning and education in the 21^st century.

Dr Gabrielle Ivinson

Education Department, Cardiff University

The relationship between the constitution/construction of knowledge and identities, community

This review examines how society continuously creates, recreates and reproduces knowledge and the boundary between the knowledge(s) produced within society and the knowledge that has been taught through official instruction in educational institutions. It engages with debates about whether the school curriculum should be taught as subject content or skills including ‘technical skills’ and ‘life skills’. It argues for the need to make a distinction between the classifications of forms of knowledge – the curriculum – and how knowledge is learned and investigates the struggle over curriculum and pedagogy, in relation to gender, class and changes in family structure.

Professor Ken Jones

Education Department, Keele University

The dynamic relationship between knowledge, identities, community and culture

This review outlines significant issues in current cultural and knowledge-related change in England, with particular emphasis on their impact on education and on young people. It draws together evidence to suggest that ‘culture’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘creativity’ denote areas of practice whose meaning varies according to their social location, and argues that issues of inequality and social differentiation -strongly affect how young people are positioned in relation to them. It concludes with reflections on future scenarios.

Professor Gunther Kress, and Dr Jeff Bezemer

Department of Language, Communication and Curriculum, Institute of Education, University of London

Multimodal Design: knowledge, communication and creativity

This review outlines key trends in knowledge, creativity and communication in education from the perspective of multimodal design. Multimodal design in education refers to the use of different ‘modes’, such as image and writing, to recontextualize a body of knowledge for a specific audience. It examines changes in multimodal design in education in the past, present and future, connecting them to social and technological change. Social change, such as shifts in the agency of learners, poses new challenges to design. The review illustrates trends in and connections between design, technology and education with key examples of learning materials for secondary education.

Professor Hugh Lauder, Department of Education, University of Bath

Professor Phillip Brown, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University

Dr Ceri Brown, University of Bath

The consequences of global expansion for knowledge, creativity and communication

This review examines the fundamental trends concerning changes to the division of labour within the global economy and its consequences for education with particular reference to knowledge and creativity. It examines the fundamental drivers of the rapidly changing global division of labour.  It argues that while the twentieth century brought what can be described as mechanical Taylorism characterized by the Fordist production line, the twenty-first century is the age of digital Taylorism. It shows how this involves translating knowledge work into working knowledge through the extraction, codification and digitalization of knowledge that can be transmitted and manipulated by others regardless of location.

Professor Victoria Carrington, Education Department, University of South Australia

Professor Jackie Marsh, Education Department University of Sheffield

Forms of literacy

This review outlines ways in which literacy is changing and reviews the implications for educational institutions in the future. A number of key themes are addressed in this review, including multimodal representational forms and configurations, new forms of literacy and knowledge production, new purposes for literacy and reconfigurations of resources in sites of learning. The review identifies key trends and emerging patterns of the current research base and indicates how these trends and patterns might develop and identify how educational institutions need to respond to them if they are to meet the needs of learners in the decades ahead.

Dr Sara Price, London Knowledge lab, Institute of Education, University of London

Dr George Roussos, London Knowledge Lab, Birkbeck College, University of London

Taciana Pontual Falcão and Dr Jennifer Sheridan, London Knowledge lab, Institute of Education, University of London

Embodiment/the body, knowledge, creativity and communication

This review begins by outlining the current theoretical underpinning of embodied cognition and embodied interaction and the implications for knowledge, creativity and communication in education.

It presents an overview of state of the art technologies, including key development trends, and their relationship with interaction and use; followed by a review of interaction and learning based research around these technologies. It outlines the implications of embodiment in today’s climate of technology and society, its role in thinking about learning – both theoretically and practically, and explore the potential impact of current trends and developments on shaping the way we think about and operationalise the development of, knowledge, creativity and communication.

Professor Roger Säljö, Dr Oskar Lindwall, and Dr Asa Mäkitalo

Lincs, University of Gothenburg

Technology, representation and knowing

This review addresses features of the discourse on the knowledge society and how it seems to lead us into characterizing the value of schooling primarily in its instrumental functions in relation to short-term economic goals. It goes on to discuss the manner in which technology has become a central part of many young people’s lives outside school – and what this development might imply in terms of the necessity of schools to adapt to the lives of students rather than the other way around.

Professor Keith Sawyer

Education Department, Washington University, St. Louis

The future of learning in the age of innovation

The innovation age requires people who maximize their creative potential, people who not only master existing skills and knowledge, but who are capable of creating new skills and knowledge.  To maximize innovation and knowledge generation, many societal factors must be in alignment-political, legal, cultural, economic.  This report focuses on the critical role to be played by schools. This report summarizes research on creativity, collaboration, and learning, and provides advice about how to design learning environments that result in creative learning. The report identifies a range of challenges, and six future scenarios, for teaching and learning in the age of innovation.

Dr Michael Schillmeier,

Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany

Risk as Mediation: Societal Change, Self-Endangerment and Self-Education

This review paper picks up the rhetoric of risk as an adequate discourse to reflect upon current modern societal change, self-endangerment and self-education. It offers an understanding of risk as a complex process of mediation of endangered futures that can be seen as central for rethinking (self-) educational efforts in world risk society.

Julian Sefton-Green

Director, West-Hampstead Arts Centre

Location, Location, Location: Rethinking Space and Place as sites and contexts for Learning

This review considers the role of context and site in common understandings of learning in general and describes models of learning that exist as complement, supplement or remediation with ’standard’ versions of schooling especially those invoked by the idea of informal learning. It then looks at the ‘geo-social’ relationships of learners, homes, communities, non-formal learning spaces, regions, schools, nations and the globalised economy trying to tease out what may or may not change in future scenarios to offer different kinds of learning processes, experiences and activities in all of these domains.

Dr Slyvia Wolf and Professor Robin Alexander

Education Department Cambridge University

Pedagogy: Argumentation and dialogic teaching

This review explores how a climate of compliance and accountability in education is currently undergoing challenge at different levels in the system and by internal and external forces centred around evidence from studies of classroom talk that indicate a strong link between dialogic forms of communication and advances in knowledge and depth of understanding, for students and teachers. The review explores implications of these shifts for the re-conceptualisation of knowledge and changing roles and relationships between teachers and learners. The review concludes by considering the challenges and risks involved in such enterprises for practitioners and teacher educators.

Professor Michael Young, London Knowledge Lab, Institute of Education, University of London

Professor Johann Muller Cape Town University

Thinking about the future: Lessons from the sociology of knowledge

This review draws on social realist approaches in the sociology of knowledge and in light of them constructs three scenarios for the future of education in the next decades. The focus is on the relationship between school and everyday or common sense knowledge. The different possibilities for how the school/non-school knowledge boundaries might be approached are expressed in three scenarios – ‘boundaries as given’, ‘a boundary-less world’ and the idea of ‘boundary maintenance as a condition for boundary crossing’. The educational implications of each are explored.

Additional reference

Buckingham,D.  (2009) ‘The Impact of the Commercial World on Children’s      Wellbeing’ DCSF/DCMS.

The scope of the challenge

A steering group was established to ensure that the scoping of the challenge area benefited from diverse expert knowledge drawn from Sociology, Social Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, and Media and Literacy. Steering group members:

Professor Michael Young, Institute of Education, University of London

Professor Karen Littleton, Open University

Professor Steven Brown, Leicester University

Professor Jackie Marsh, Sheffield University

The steering group participated in mapping of the terrain of knowledge, creativity and communication, identifying key trends, issues and drivers and leading authors in the area; to the challenge seminar events; and peer-reviewed the challenge reviews. The scoping of the challenge was also informed by discussion with key academics, the BCH Expert Advisory Group, and key literature reviews and reports within BCH.

Review topic areas

The rationale for selecting review topics was based on three elements: first, a focus on the essence of technological and social practice rather than specific technologies (e.g. the notion of mobility rather than the mobile phone); second, looking beyond education to see the broader context for knowledge, creativity and communication; and third, the desire to engage with the complexity and lack of consensus in this area.

A set of 20 reviews was commissioned that cover a broad range of topics key to the challenge of knowledge, creativity and communication and the futures of education. These include risk, identity, global expansion, neuroscience, affect, collaboration, participation and networking, innovation, representation, multimodal design, curriculum, argumentation, information, the role of institutions, learning, community, connectivity, convergence, literacy, and knowledge construction. The reviews are written by leading figures in the area of knowledge, creativity and communication drawn from the UK, Sweden, Germany, USA, Australia, and South Africa. (A full list of authors and review titles is provided in the reference section.)

Challenge activities

Two consultative day events were held at the London Knowledge Lab in Autumn 2008 to inform the challenge, one in mid-September 2008 and the other in mid-November. The events ensured that the Challenge outputs were informed by consultation with leading-edge science and social science thinkers from across a range of disciplines. The events included a mixture of presentations, workshop discussion and activities. These were attended by twenty participants from linguistics, multi-lingual studies and new literacy studies, semiotics, social psychology, cognitive psychology, philosophy, sociology, cultural studies, computer science, media studies, educational studies, and art and design.

Knowledge, creativity and communication: Event 1

Event 1 enabled key commentators from a range of disciplines to connect and engage with the futures for KCC. The event generated ideas to contribute to mapping the challenge area and reviews, and room to explore trends from a variety of perspectives useful to the challenge area and BCH program. The tensions and difficulties of futures work that arose during the day were valuable tools for thinking through the challenge. The day also enabled initial work to begin to imagine potential futures for 2025 – 2050. The outputs of the event, which informed the scoping and interpretation of the reviews, included: detailed comments on review areas, identification of major themes and additional themes and gaps in the scoping exercise, and factors considered by participants as foundational for futures. In addition, several review authors attended the event and found the day helped to contextualize the program and inform their reviews.

Knowledge, creativity and communication: Event 2

Event 2 explored the changing face of knowledge, creativity and communication with an eye to the long term and emergent trends pertinent to the futures of education. The day’s activities centered around three substantial presentations, each of which drew on a key set of review areas: 1. Changes in knowledge construction, participation and networks; 2. Creativity, entrepreneurialism and expertise; and 3. Rethinking distance, space and place. Each presentation generated a debate that focused on identifying key themes for the future. The day closed with a workshop on emerging scenarios, in which participants worked with the presenters and participants to identify key drivers and levers for change. The day’s outputs, which informed this report, included the identification of key drivers and levers for change and interpretative themes and questions for debate.

Event participants

Name, institutional affiliation

This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation

There appears to be a global consensus that argues for radical change in education, expressed as a belief that education is no longer fit for purpose. One strand of this draws on developments in neuroscience and the implications for learning and pedagogy. The chief argument here seems to be based on the thesis that the current design of schooling and the teaching and learning approaches which operate within formal settings are inappropriate or inefficient for children and young people’s learning. Certainly this has popular and intuitive appeal. ‘Brain-based’ and ‘brain-friendly’ approaches seem persuasive to the profession looking to enthuse and motivate their charges with the latest techniques inspired by scientific research (Goswami, 2006). After all who would argue for unscientific teaching or learning which was unfriendly to the brain? (For a more philosophical analysis of the relationship between neuroscience and learning see Davis, 2004.)

Another caucus in this consensus considers changes in technology and the rapid pace of development in society, arguing that the new ‘information age’ requires different skills for the workforce. The ability to adapt and retrain is central to the economic competitiveness of the nation as different skills are required in response to market forces. At the most radical its vision of the future is “de-schooled” (Illich, 1973) where learners acquire knowledge and skills in more informal settings and spaces over the course of their lives as required. The technophiles see ICT as contributing to this by enabling flexible “anytime, anywhere” learning with e-learning, ubiquitous internet access and “just in time” cyber-learning (Borgman et al, 2008). This has created a coalition of what might be called the new progressives, or Cuban’s (1993) ‘neoprogressives’ who are scientifically and technologically literate, making a persuasive case for radical change in education.

The nature of the learning environment is also central to these arguments, with a view that contemporary learning spaces are not appropriate or effective for learning. However the consensus does not hold as far as the solution to these problems. Some argue for change within schooling and formal learning environments to make them more learner- (or brain-) friendly, with others arguing that formal learning will become redundant and replaced by the flexibility and availability of information through technology.

Sections of the educational research community are also part of this broad consensus, though predictably less unified, but similarly arguing for change in education from differing perspectives from theory and research. Drawing on ideas such as radical pedagogy, constructivism, meta-cognition, situated learning and formative assessment they advocate change in schooling according to their particular personal penchant, like Aesop’s fable of the three tradesmen, who each argued that their own particular craft was essential to the defence of their city – from the bricklayer to the cobbler!

From Gutenberg to Google: plus ça change?

There have always been calls for education to change however. Each technological advance seems to have heralded the demise of the teacher and current forms of educational organisation, from the arrival of the printing press to motion pictures, with one of the wittiest analyses of this crafted by Harold Benjamin in 1939, using the sobriquet J. Abner Peddiwell:

“The wise old men were indignant. Their kindly smiles faded. “If you had any education yourself,” they said severely, “you would know that the essence of true education is timelessness. It is something that endures through changing conditions like a solid rock standing squarely and firmly in the middle of a raging torrent. You must know that there are some eternal verities, and the saber-tooth curriculum is one of them!”"

Benjamin, 1939

Through his satire he argued for the idea of learning to learn (or at least flexible and transferable Neolithic skills) as an important dimension of any curriculum. There are other historical instances of calls to reform education. John Dewey and the so-called progressive movement of the early 20^th century can be seen as a reaction to social and cultural changes in North America and the challenge of urbanisation and industrialisation (Ryan, 1997). Contemporaries of Dewey also saw technology (and multimedia) as the future of education:

On the average we get about two percent efficiency out of schoolbooks as they are written today. The education of the future, as I see it, will be conducted through the medium of the motion picture … where it should be possible to obtain one hundred percent efficiency.

(Thomas Edison, speaking in 1922, cited in Cuban, 1986)

What we need to decide for the present time is whether the current pace and scale of change is, on this occasion, of a sufficiently different degree or scale, or whether is this is another occasion when technology meets pedagogy, and, to paraphrase Larry Cuban (1992), pedagogy wins again. Certainly the way we interact with information is different in terms of quality and especially the quantity of information which is now easily accessible. Information on its own is not the same as knowledge, however, as the latter has a personal quality involving interpretation and meaning (Hendricks, 2005) which, in turn, pre-supposes a purpose in acquiring and using the information. The range and types of information are clearly changing with the advent of digital literacies, but these are not replacing other literacies. Rather they are overlaying them and increasing the complexity of what can and needs to be learned with the demands of multi-layered meanings and more complex semiotic systems (Kress, 2003).

So what is learning to learn?

In one sense learning to learn is a trivial idea, in that we all learn to learn. Humans have evolved to learn effectively by imitation and to be good at learning and acquiring new skills and knowledge. Just consider the rapid development in skills and knowledge from infancy through childhood. As social creatures the desire to learn to learn through participating is part of our early development (Berk, 2008). The concept of learning to learn has been extended in recent years, however, and encompasses the notion that we will need to become more effective, more efficient and more resilient learners due to the increasing pace of technological and cultural change; a response to Toffler’s (1970) Future Shock, perhaps. This will mean that we will need to learn for most of our lifespan in order to survive in a changing workplace and wider world. A range of more formal definitions of learning to learn exists, drawing on ideas of metacognition, thinking skills, self-regulation, self-efficacy and self-esteem (see, for example, Claxton, 2002). It is a well-used phrase in contemporary educational debates around the world, but the idea lacks conceptual clarity. In the UK, it is sometimes equated with lifelong learning or at least the foundational elements in lifelong learning skills (Cornford, 2002). It is widely acknowledged to require the development of meta-cognitive skills and techniques (Sternberg, 1998) as well as the development of self-regulation (Hautamaki et al, 2002) and independence more broadly (Rademacher, 2004). In policy terms, learning to learn is firmly part of the skills agenda supporting employability and increased economic competitiveness (Rawson, 2000), as we saw in the political appropriation of the term above. The complexity of what is involved can perhaps best be captured in the working definition used by Hargreaves (2005): “learning to learn is not a single entity or skill, but a family of learning practices that enhance one’s capacity to learn.” With this emphasis on learning practices, rather than a more individual or psychological description on skills or even a focus on personal dispositions (eg Perkins et al, 1993; Claxton and Carr, 2005) the academic focus has shifted towards learning activities and communities of practice (eg Wenger, 1998) as outlined in some of the publications from the Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP): see, for example James et al (2007). The implications are therefore that learning to learn can best be seen as a multi-dimensional concept involving an understanding of the learning identities which develop over time and through and in response to different situations and contexts (Sfard, 2005) and which involves the development of specific skills and knowledge as well as broader attitudes and dispositions to learning.

Claxton’s four generations of ‘teaching learning’ (Claxton, 2004) provide a helpful way of distinguishing some of the practices that can often be clustered under the general banner of learning to learn in practice.

Table 1: Adapted from Claxton’s (2004) four generations of teaching learning

In the UK, the Campaign for Learning, a national charitable organisation, has been supporting a Learning to Learn in Schools research programme since 2000 (Higgins et al, 2007) over four phases of research. Phases 1 and 2 mainly investigated Claxton’s third generation of learning to learn, with teachers in primary and secondary schools researching ideas such as emotional intelligence, brain-based learning and learning styles. Phases 3 and 4 have tried to integrate teacher and learner enquiry as part of an active process of learning as central to the process of education (Baumfield and Higgins, in press). The concept of learning to learn is based on a dispositions framework (readiness, resourcefulness, resilience, reflectiveness, responsibility) with an overarching definition of learning to learn as:

… a process of discovery about learning. It involves a set of principles and skills which, if understood and used, help learners learn more effectively and so become learners for life. At its heart is the belief that learning is learnable.

(Higgins et al, 2007 p8)

A similar development with remarkable parallels to this project which developed independently on the other side of the globe can be found in South Australia (DECS, 2005). This also started from the view that there is scientific evidence which can inform learning, but evolved a broadly similar model of professional inquiry and research to develop teaching and learning in schools. The outcomes valued as part of this project include learners:

• exercising choice responsibly
• using meta-cognitive skills
• taking responsibility for learning
• accepting alternative viewpoints
• working with greater persistence
• expressing greater hope for a future with expanded opportunities
• experiencing improved progression in site-based programs
• able to articulate their learning
• self-assessing their learning.

These principles draw on a well-established set of ideas which see educational systems as ‘loosely coupled’ (Goldspink, 2007) and recent advances in the application of complex systems concepts to organizational management (DECS, 2005). These concepts, and the UK and South Australian examples, suggest some possible benefits from using self-organizational properties to improve institutional learning. Unlike more rationalist management and market approaches, this alternative model brings to the fore the need for a focus on people and relationships as key aspects of learning rather than structures or centrally determined standards for conformity (Goldspink, 2003). Both approaches emphasise the role of teachers and professional inquiry as part of learning to learn in schools in order to ensure that the difficult balance between complex and sometimes competing educational aims is achieved.

A team based at Bristol University (Deakin-Crick et al, 2004) has developed a research-based approach to learning to learn based on a concept of learning power. The aim was to identify the characteristics and qualities of effective lifelong learners and to develop tools and strategies for tracking, evaluating and recording people’s growth as effective real-life learners. Learning power was defined as: “A complex mix of dispositions, lived experiences, social relations, values, attitudes and beliefs that coalesce to shape the nature of an individual’s engagement with any particular learning opportunity (Deakin-Crick et al, 2004 p247).

The assessment of these is through the “Effective Lifelong Learning Inventory” (ELLI) with inter-related aspects of learning beliefs and attitudes about learning. Those whose profile is low on these dimensions appear to be fragile and dependent as learners. Strategic awareness appears to be a learned dimension or something which can be developed and taught over time, and in some ways seems to work as the individual’s monitoring of the other dimensions. These ELLI learning dimensions appear to be a reflection of the formal curriculum in that they are affected by all subjects and disciplines in the classroom and beyond (Deakin-Crick et al. 2007). What is clear from the data gathered from learners of different ages is that over time, and throughout the course of formal schooling, students tend to become less confident on all of the learning dimensions, especially in terms of creativity. At the same time they tend to become more dependent and fragile as learners. This suggests that in the current system, and at the present time, learning to learn and the development of an increased confidence in one’s own learning capabilities is hard to achieve.

Similar to the Campaign for Learning and South Australian projects, a school-based development and research approach involved teachers working with these learning dimensions to understand how they might be helpful to promote learners’ self-awareness and confidence in the classroom. They also used this information to decide on new approaches to develop students’ learning power. These interventions made a difference to students’ learning power profiles after two terms. They became more resilient and more strategically aware of their own learning and less dependent and fragile. There were also some indications that students achieved more in terms of traditional learning outcomes (Deakin-Crick et al, 2007).

The key themes underpinning all of these interventions into learning to learn were the development of teachers’ professional vision and values, supporting positive interpersonal relationships in both classrooms and staffrooms involving trust, affirmation and challenge (Hall et al, 2006). Other common features included the quality of dialogue and discussion and the use and development of terminology and language to talk specifically about learning. A further similarity is in the focus on dispositions (rather than learning objectives) as a way to ensure some of the longer term goals and aims of education are not drowned by short term targets and assessments.

Some similar aspects of assessment and engagement for students and the situational nature of learning also form a central feature of the UK’s Teaching and Learning Research Programme’s Learning How to Learn project. This research focused on the how (rather than the what) and took a narrower view of learning within the curriculum and the development of students’ understanding of their academic learning through a focus on formative assessment and feedback in classrooms (Sadler, 1998; Black and Wiliam, 2006). Again key issues such as metacognition and self-regulation by students and the importance of engaging teachers in the process are central to the research (James et al, 2007).

In the European Union learning to learn is one of the key generic or ‘transversal’ competences agreed as part of the Lisbon framework in 2000 for international progress towards shared goals, and which developed into the European Reference framework of key competences (Fredricksson and Hoskins, 2007; Hoskins and Fredricksson, 2008). Competences have emerged as a significant educational outcome as a result of the demand from policymakers to identify what individual learning outcomes are needed for a citizen to contribute to a modern globalised society, both economically and democratically. The idea of learning outcomes as competences is a blend of the usually separate components of knowledge, skills, attitudes and values. Competences are usually assessed in relation to real-life tasks in terms of being able to do things effectively rather than reproduce knowledge passed from one generation to the next (Hoskins and Deakin Crick, 2008) emphasising the importance of an active and first-person perspective. Again the rationale is based on a conviction that this conception of knowledge will be the most useful for a rapidly changing technological and globalised world, where it is not possible to predict what knowledge will be needed in the next five or ten years, let alone for a lifetime.

“… it takes a holistic notion of the individual combining the values, attitudes of the individual such as the desire to learn from others in interaction and the valuing of different knowledge with the cognitive processes of building on prior learning and the capacity to develop strategies and solve problems to learn something new.”

(Hoskins and Fredriksson, 2008, p11)

At the heart of the European conception of learning to learn is the changing nature of knowledge as a result of technological innovation, and the importance of economic competitiveness with an essential component of a student’s education seen as the ability to learn to learn effectively. (For an analysis of developments across Europe see, for example, Moreno and Martin (2007), or for a broader overview see Fredricksson and Hoskins, 2007) There is a further dimension to the European learning to learn agenda, however, in the development of indicators or assessments to track progress towards these objectives. Whilst this is understandable from a political perspective, from an educational viewpoint it raises the possibility of high-stakes assessments (Nichols et al, 2006) and a scenario of learning to learn tests and performance monitoring. The assessment of such competences at national and international level is likely to influence the development of learning to learn in practice, and the greater the stakes the more profound the impact, though the wider impact is likely to be complex (Au, 2007).

At a more profound level the concept of learning to learn is an epistemological one and some of the tensions in the application of the term relate to different understandings of the nature of knowledge and learning. Learning to learn emphasises the process of learning or of coming to know and implies a difference in the quality of knowledge achieved through purposeful activity on the part of the learner. As such it aligns closely with the philosophies of writers such as Dewey, Merleau-Ponty and Freire in terms of the relationship between the learner and what is learned. It emphasises the relationship between the knower and the known not so much as separable, but integrated in the same way that dancing creates both the dancers and the dance itself (Gill, 1993): knowing is an interaction or transaction between the knower and the known (Dewey and Bentley, 1949). Much of what is discussed as learning equates rather to the retention of information assessed through the application of specific academic skills with a logical separation of knowing and known. Conceptually this is difficult, as such acquired information can only really be described as knowledge once it is applied actively. An important facet of this relational quality of knowing is dialogue and interaction, or the application of these ideas creatively by the learner in expressing their understanding through discussion. Of course, Dewey would argue that this is still a limited conception of knowledge, as such activity could still be somewhat artificial and it is only valid once such information is applied in some purposeful inquiry.

If one is not able to estimate wisely what is relevant to the interpretation of a given perplexing or doubtful issue, it avails little that arduous learning has built up a large stock of concepts. For learning is not wisdom; information does not guarantee good judgement.

(Dewey, 1910, p106)

A version for the 21^st century might replace “arduous learning” with “diligent searching” and “concepts” with “internet weblinks“, but the underlying point remains the same. Learning is about developing the quality of one’s judgement and the facility to use the skills, knowledge or understanding in order to resolve a challenge or problematic situation, but above all this is through action. Such judgements are refined through experience and can be supported with the guidance of a teacher or mentor but are dependent upon transactional inquiry. The nature and availability of information changes the skills and judgements required, but does not alter the challenge of translating information into active knowledge, except perhaps that the increasing scope and scale of available information may increase the complexity of the challenge.

This intrinsically evolutionary and pragmatic stance towards knowledge conceives it as neither ideal or pre-given but discovered in purposeful action. ‘Knowing’, from this viewpoint, is always a creative act. Creativity in this sense includes how a child learns to crawl as well as how a musician composes a song. For Dewey, effective learning through expressive or purposeful action was not a gradual approximation to some ideal concept or form or any abstract proposition. It is knowledge because, like good science, it opens up creative possibilities for new ways of perceiving the world and for taking action within and upon it. This conception of knowing and learning seems more appropriate for a rapidly changing technological world where information is widely available, but it is learning, and in learning to learn what information to apply and how to apply it purposefully, that becomes the crucial issue.

The physical architecture and learning to learn

The second theme in this chapter is the nature of physical settings and locations for learning. In the development of learning to learn in schools there has often been a focus on the learning environment and the influence that this has on learners. This has been evident in teachers’ focus on creating appropriate conditions, with aspects such as ambient music and access to water. This has its most dramatic expression in the UK’s ambitious Building Schools for the Future Programme (BSF) which will see a £45 billion investment which aims to rebuild or renew 3,500 state secondary schools over the next 15 years. A key aim is to create “21st-century environments that will inspire new ways of learning” (CABE, 2007). This section therefore turns to considering the importance of learning spaces and environments, and the question of how designing spaces for learning might differ from spaces for learning to learn. Although the physical aspects of learning environments have effects on both teachers and learners, these are not as profound or direct as most people believe (Woolner et al, 2007). The most important aspects are poor temperature control, bad lighting, poor air quality and acoustics, all of which have negative effects on concentration, mood, wellbeing, attendance and, ultimately, attainment. It is therefore important to ensure that these aspects meet a basic level of adequacy. For the most part this can be achieved simply by conforming to the appropriate standards and regulations, which at least recently were not being achieved by a quarter of secondary schools (Ofsted, 2001). However, the overall relationship between aspects of the physical environment on learning is hard to identify. In a review of the environmental effects in education, Weinstein (1979) was quite cautious about any impact on learning. She concluded that although the ‘weight of the evidence suggests that design features can have a significant influence on students’ general behaviour … and on their attitudes’ (1979, p584), it is difficult to find reliable evidence of a definite effect on achievement. (1979, p599). More recent reviews have tended to be more optimistic about positive evidence for direct as well as indirect effects of the environment (see, for example, Moore and Lackney, 1993), yet many of these effects relate poor performance in schools with poor environments: an accurate and a significant correlation perhaps (eg Schneider, 2002; Young et al, 2003), but not necessarily a causal connection. Implications for designing spaces and planning for learning are much more speculative. Beyond the advisability of meeting basic standards, there is not enough evidence to give clear guidance to policy makers, planners or teachers on how to design for learning or to evaluate the relative value for money of different design initiatives. There are a small number of physical improvements to the environment which are related to improvements in attainment, but once the environment reaches a reasonable standard, a complex interaction of effects comes into play (Woolner et al, 2007) and it is hard to make specific recommendations without deciding on the particular learning purposes for which a space will be used.

Learning environments can also be thought of as composed of different dimensions: the physical, social and the cultural (Horne-Martin, 2004). Although the major concern of those planning and building schools or other learning spaces tends to be the physical elements, any hopes for the effect of changes in the physical environment on learning must be based on an understanding of this complexity of learning spaces. Schools are systems in which the physical architecture and environment is one of many interacting factors, including the pedagogical, socio-cultural, curricular, motivational and socio-economic. Getzels (1975) suggested that the changes in the typical United States classroom, from rows of desks in a rectangular room through a circle of tables to open classrooms, reflect changes in the cultural conception of learning. This relates to the idea of the symbolic meaning of a particular environment (Proshansky and Wolfe, 1975; Rivlin and Wolfe, 1985; Maxwell, 2000) and such conceptions are clearly behind attempts to improve or revive through physical regeneration. For example, the headteacher at a recently opened school commented:

‘This is more than just another school in Hackney: it is a symbolic school, an emblem, saying these places should be where children from all backgrounds in inner city areas should come and be successful’ (Ward, 2004).

The relationship between people and their environment is a complex one and any impact from changes to a setting are likely to be produced through a complex causal chain. It is an understanding of these mediating chains that is paramount and must take account of issues relating to ownership, relevance, purpose and permanence, especially in understanding the difference between learning and learning to learn. If positive changes are chosen and made by the teachers and learners who used them, this might then produce further positive changes, whereas negative aspects might cause a cycle of decline. Externally imposed changes, regardless of how beneficial their potential, are likely to have less of an effect than changes brought about through genuine consultation and an inclusive design process. Large-scale investment, particularly that which is heralded as ‘future-proofed’, will necessarily be less organic and rooted in the needs of specific communities than smaller-scale projects.

One of the schools in the Campaign for Learning’s Learning to Learn in Schools project (Higgins et al, 2007) investigated how to create a ‘learning to learn’ classroom by removing all the furniture and equipment and then re-introducing what was needed to support learning and learning to learn. They created learning zones in the classroom to support self-initiated learning in their mixed age Reception and Year 1 classes. However they also reported that there were significant challenges in terms of the curriculum and timetabling. Overall the school was also positive about the impact on children’s creativity and self-esteem but recognised the limits of what they could achieve within current expectations (Furnish and Tonkin, 2004).

It is certainly the case that the built school environment can be altered and is open to change and improvement so that, even if such changes are likely only to have a small and uncertain direct impact on learning these changes can be defended, particularly in schools where the students are disadvantaged in other less immediately alterable ways (eg Moore and Lackney, 1993; Young et al, 2003). ‘Change, for its own sake, can be a stimulating experience’ (Gump (1987, p703) and is potentially catalytic in terms of its effects on learning. The idea that reviewing and trying to change the nature of the learning environment is in itself empowering is discussed by a number of writers (David, 1975; Horne, 1999; Horne-Martin, 2002). This of course needs to be a genuine or authentic process (Dudek, 2000; Clark, 2002). A contemporary text at the time of experimentation with open plan education (IDEA, 1970), argued that all staff need to be involved to realise the potential of the space, while ‘there must be extensive involvement of the parents in the planning as well as in the implementation of the programs; otherwise, the new school is doomed before it is even opened’ (p20).

The ecology of schools is complex, however, and the forces restraining the use of new and flexible spaces in the other direction are also strong. The indications from previous large scale attempts to change schooling are clear and there are obvious lessons from the past (Woolner et al, 2005). The phrase “part of the furniture’ does not mean ‘comfortable’ and taken for granted for nothing. As Rivlin and Wolfe commented ‘It is rare for a person to move a chair once it has been placed-even in one’s own living room’ (1985, p7). It is crucial, therefore, for the growing trend of user involvement in design of learning environments to become embedded in normal practice. Learning to learn may need to involve learning to design or at least configure your learning space.

The key message from this synopsis is that considered and targeted environmental improvement is worthwhile but that the solutions are likely to vary widely across the country and should involve both teachers and learners in developing their understanding of learning spaces. The history of ambitious school building programmes (Woolner et al, 2005) warns us that interactive whiteboards and the spacious glass atria of today could be the typing suites and flat roofs of the middle decades of the 20th century. Overall, the evidence is consistent about the importance of involving those who use the learning spaces in defining and solving design problems in schools. A necessary consequence of this is that design solutions for learning (and learning to learn) should be individualised, organic and local. Indeed, the most successful are likely to be those which are seen as temporary or interim solutions and which have within them elements of flexibility and adaptability for new cohorts of learners and teachers, as new curriculum demands and new challenges enable more effective learning and learning to learn in schools.

The pedagogical architecture for learning to learn

One of the regular features of schooling is the arrangement of one teacher to large groups of learners, usually 20 – 30 in most types of schools. This places constraints on the kinds of interactions which are likely to occur. It typically makes the default pattern of exchange in the classroom very focussed on the teacher. The dominant pattern is where the teacher asks a question, a pupil responds and the teacher gives some kind of evaluative feedback. These exchanges are quite brief, lasting only a few seconds (Sinclair and Coulthard, 1992; Smith et al, 2006) and punctuated with only slightly longer explanations and instructions from the teacher. It has been described as Initiate – Respond – Evaluate/Feedback (I-R-E/F) and has clear advantages in terms of control (Mehan, 1979) as each of the episodes of interaction is started and finished by the teacher. It is therefore an effective way of managing didactic interaction with large numbers of students. The aspirations of those who advocate dialogue about learning (eg Alexander, 2004; Wegerif, 2008) may simply not be realistic unless the ratio of teachers to learners changes significantly. It is possible that the structure of this default pattern of exchange can be re-designed to enable more authentic exchanges using particular teaching strategies and techniques (Leat and Higgins, 2002; Smith and Higgins, 2006). Certainly some changes can be achieved by altering the groupings that students work in, such as through co-operative and collaborative group work (Baines et al, 2007) and by approaches such as peer tutoring (Robinson et al, 2005). Even in these situations however the focus of the interaction is still usually determined or at least managed by the teacher. With learning to learn, learners need the opportunity to initiate and determine the direction of their learning, at least for some of the time, so that their sense of themselves as learners can include a sense of control and self-determination.

One of the characteristics of learning to learn projects in classrooms is the change in focus to include explicit discussion of the process of learning (Deakin-Crick et al, 2007; Higgins et al, 2007; James et al, 2007). Many of the structural features remain similar but teachers create space for learners to talk to each other about learning, rather than simply the learning content. Devices such as role play, storyboarding or cartoon structures (Jones and McMahon, 1994; Wall et al, 2006) may also encourage reflection on learning, as can commentaries on learners’ portfolios, though again the challenge is to ensure the use of these approaches remains authentic rather than part of the ritual exchanges of schooling. An anecdote from a recent visit to a learning to learn classroom may illustrate this. A Year 6 pupil in one of the Campaign for Learning schools was explaining his digital learning portfolio (created using Microsoft’s Powerpoint) to the researchers. He commented incidentally that he was always getting into trouble from the teacher because he was so slow at getting started with adding a new entry, especially as the school year drew to a close, but explained “I like to look through what is in there first so I can see what I did before and what I’ve learned before I add anything new”. The balance between time spent on reflection on one’s progress and completion of learning tasks or even the learner’s recording of that progress may therefore need redressing if learning to learn is to become embedded in the culture of schools. Certainly one of the challenges that teachers acknowledge in developing learning to learn in schools is in finding the time to address it effectively with the competing demands of curriculum coverage and assessment (Higgins et al, 2007).

There is evidence that collaborative use of technology can be beneficial in enabling more authentic dialogue in formal learning situations (Mercer et al, 2004) and in establishing more effective learning interactions between learners. This is both by structuring the interactions (such as through the interface or software design for turn taking or by pacing a sequence of exchanges) and by scaffolding those interactions, such as by choices, prompts and feedback (Wegerif et al, 2003). From this perspective the technology is integrated into the pedagogy as both a physical artefact and a participant in the discourse: both a psychological and a physical tool (Säljö, 1999).

Challenges for the future

A number of further structural aspects of education strongly militate against the changes envisaged by the visionaries of informal, anytime, anywhere learning. Some learning may need to be in formal settings for social and economic reasons. Basic skills of literacy and numeracy will still need to be mastered. Classes of 30 equally inexperienced children may not be the most efficient or effective approach when looked at from the point of view of an individual child, but it may be effective and efficient when viewed from a cultural and societal perspective.

Technological change may have been slow to have an impact on schools and classrooms (Cuban, 1986), but in the UK at least digital technologies are having an more visible impact on classrooms. Becta’s Harnessing Technology report (Becta, 2008) indicates that there is now an average of 18 interactive whiteboards in each primary school and 38 in each secondary schools (compared with none a decade ago). The pupil-computer ratio in primary schools is 14 pupils to each desktop computer and an average of 32 pupils for every laptop. In secondary schools, there were an average of about four pupils for every desktop computer, with an average of over sixty pupils for every laptop. Digital technologies are now very much part of the equipment of schooling.

Technology is, however, very much still in the foreground. It tends to dominate rooms in which it is present and it still requires the space around it to be configured to incorporate it. Three-fifths of teacher respondents agreed that pupils enjoy lessons more if they use ICT than if they do not. The salient point here is that lessons with technology are still a pleasant change from lessons without, even if the actual technology is perhaps a little disappointing from the learners’ perspective (Robinson et al, 2008). In the future it seems likely that technology will be more integrated into the background or the fabric of the learning environment as part of the furniture of schooling. Smaller devices with distributed computing, clouds and wireless networking are likely to be more integral to learning environments in the future, with seamless connections between learners’ personal devices and school technology. Intelligent agents or virtual teaching assistants (Johnson and Rickel, 2000; Ashoori et al, 2007) may be programmed with the likely mistakes and misunderstandings that students can encounter (and perhaps programmed with an adaptive learning algorithm themselves so that they can improve over time).

Whether children will actually sit at home and learn virtually through their avatar in an online virtual learning environment seems at this juncture unlikely, unless this scenario offers significant advantages for particular learners, such as those who cannot attend in person or who have specific personal needs which can be better met in a virtual environment. This is especially true for younger learners who need supervision for physical safety. One of the sociological functions of schooling is to enable their parents and carers to be economically productive. A number of universities already run virtual courses in Second Life, but these courses are aimed at those looking for distance or part-time learning (Berge, 2008). Most learners prefer a face-to-face experience as we are innately social creatures who thrive on social interaction. Virtual social interaction may offer an alternative to no interaction but it is different and not without its challenges (Twining et al, 2007).

What of learning to learn and technology? If learning to learn is about learning to make choices about what to learn as well as how to learn (and furthermore to be aware of how well you have succeeded) in order to develop a confident learning identity over time then technology’s role is clear. It should support the learner in taking responsibility for these choices and in developing his or her own judgement about such learning. Sophisticated learning environments may add to the efficiency or effectiveness of this process, but at the heart of learning to learn is the idea of self-determination, so, in my view, the choices about the future of education and learning to learning to learn remain fundamentally ethical and educational, rather than technological.

Will the seamless integration of technology into learning environments really change schooling itself? It is over forty years since John Holt argued that the kind of knowledge schools taught was inappropriate:

Since we cannot know what knowledge will be needed in the future it is senseless to try to teach it in advance. Instead our job must be to try to turn out young people who love learning so much, and who learn so well, that they will be able to learn whatever needs to be learnt (Holt, 1964).

Holt’s argument may be persuasive and has been interpreted as meaning that formal curricula and formal schooling will be redundant in the brave new digital world. However, although the specifics of the curriculum may indeed be relatively unimportant and even irrelevant to the knowledge we need for later life, in order to learn to learn you have to learn something to base this understanding of learning upon. To be the effective and enthusiastic learners that Holt envisaged means that learners need to have become effective learners by learning something (and preferably lots of things). Something needs to be taught (or at least learned) to create these avid learn-to-learners. Expertise is therefore the development of complex learning skills and capabilities. Technology will be a part of learning to learn, in the same way that it will be a part of the world that learners study. Whether technology itself will determine the nature of learning to learning seems more doubtful.

There are some significant challenges posed by any increase in informal learning which replaces schooling. Technology may offer the possibility of anytime, anywhere learning, but it still has to take place sometime and somewhere. This poses a series of questions which the advocates of informal learning need to answer. Will all learners have equal access to the technologies they need for anytime, anywhere learning? Where will they be? Will the environment be conducive to learning? Who will be responsible for the learners? One of the advantages of the current system is that the state undertakes a duty of care for learners from 5 -16 and this enables their parents and carers to be economically productive. Who will support and scaffold the choices that learners make if the learning of young children becomes more informal, or will it be survival-of-the-fittest at learning to learn? This seems likely to perpetuate or exacerbate existing inequalities. These ethical questions dominate the debate about the future of technology and learning to learn. Although schooling, like democracy, may be inefficient and at times ineffective, it may be preferable to the alternatives on the grounds of equity.

Conclusions

Learning to learn is a diffuse and complex concept, with different aspects emphasised in different contexts. It is a global phenomenon with similar ideas about learning to learn articulated around the globe. The common features associated with the idea are those of lifelong learning to ensure economic competitiveness, as well as expressing some dissatisfaction with aspects of the current education system in terms of its appropriateness for contemporary society and culture. The key advantages for the development of knowledge production, creativity and communication in education is in the repositioning of the learner in relation to what is learned in terms of responsibility, choice and interest. This repositioning is most apparent in re-balancing the goals and longer term aims of education, in thinking about how the process of education influences the development of learning dispositions in the longer term. The learner becomes central in regulating their learning and in determining the development of their own learning history and identity. The educational research which has attempted to understand the beginnings of these evolutionary changes has also shared some common features. One key characteristic has been to see the teacher as a learner and to base the development of learning to learn on active professional inquiry, to balance short term targets and curricular goals with broader aims of education in developing dispositions for lifelong learning. There are, however, significant challenges. There is no consensus about what learning to learn entails or involves in formal or informal settings. Exactly how it relates to the assessment of dispositions towards learning is a key question which will determine its evolution. It threatens to be derailed by formal comparative assessments or by the persuasions of science and technology in determining what can be done because it is technologically possible rather than pedagogically desirable. Learning to learn reminds us, however, that education is a moral and political enterprise, as well as a scientific and technical one.

A future based on learning to learn does imply a qualitative difference in education. It suggests a change of emphasis from an absolute to a relative measure of performance or from simple to compound measures. Today’s learners are measured by the distance that they have travelled or by their their speed through the curriculum. Perhaps tomorrow’s learners will be assessed by the acceleration they show or the increase in their progress through a curriculum of skills, knowledge and active learning experiences, coupled with the development of their beliefs and confidence about themselves as learners. Additionally, rather than thinking of progress as a linear measure through the curriculum, the distance travelled, perhaps the breadth of development will also be important, the area of learning as a measure. This would represent a step change in understanding what it is important to assess in education, from progress as speed to the idea of acceleration or from distance to area of learning mastered, and a focus on the learners’ potential as well as their progress. The role of technology is hard to predict in the short-term, without beginning to consider the future beyond the current horizons. Technology will undoubtedly be a part of the world that future learners inhabit and therefore a part too of the pedagogical architecture through which they learn. Such developments should be driven by what is pedagogically desirable, rather than what is technologically possible. It is, however, essential that learning to learn does become a key feature of the future of education, to ensure that at the heart of education is learning to be human and to take responsibility for one’s place in a society which encourages and enables participation by all its citizens, to enable them to fulfil their own potential and shape the future for subsequent generations.

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This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

Embodiment in the context of this review centres around the notion that human reasoning and behaviour is defined by our physical and social experience and interaction with the world. Although concepts of embodiment are not new, current theoretical trends are placing more importance on the role of embodiment in understanding human behaviour. Several factors have contributed to this change, not least the emergence of technologies that enable radically different forms of interaction with them and through them, than traditional desktop computing. Ubiquitous computing technologies can be integrated into the environment, in unobtrusive and ’seamless’ ways. This offers opportunities to build on familiar real world ‘natural’ interaction practices through various forms of digital augmentation, eg enabling interaction with contextually coupled information. New technologies also provide opportunities for interaction and learning to be more active, hands-on, directly related to physical contexts, with new forms of communication and collaboration promoting socially mediated learning, and new tools that aid external cognitive support. Furthermore, graphical interface development extends possibilities for more complex interaction, sense of presence and immersion or embodiment in virtual environments, bringing new ’spaces’ for learning.

Psychologists and philosophers have long argued for the important role of sensori-motor interaction with the world for cognitive development (Piaget, 1972; Vygostsky, 1978; Clark and Chalmers, 1998), but with the growth of ubiquitous computing the possibility for enhancing physical environments and physical interaction have brought discussions around embodiment to the forefront, and driven forward research into understanding the interaction between mind, body and the environment. Collectively, these views and possibilities have wide-reaching implications for education, particularly in terms of the potential for influencing the way we teach and learn, and how education may be organised. At the heart of this it is important that we understand the underlying rationale for emergent theories of embodiment (embodied cognition, embodied interaction), how these intersect with technology development, the extent of research investigating the role and potential roles of ‘technology for embodiment’ in learning settings, and the potential implications for education.

This review begins by outlining the current theoretical underpinning of embodied cognition and embodied interaction, and the implications for knowledge, creativity and communication in education. We then present an overview of state of the art technologies, including key development trends, and their relationship with interaction and use, followed by a review of interaction and learning based research around these technologies, focusing on technologies embedded in physical learning spaces, virtual environments including gaming, and mixed reality. The discussion draws on this work to both theoretically and practically explore the potential impact of current trends and developments on shaping the future for education, highlighting the key opportunities, challenges and issues that emerge.

2. Embodiment

2.1 Embodied Cognition

The emergence of mobile and ubiquitous technologies has led to increased interest in embodied cognition, and the grounding of ubiquitous technology use in concepts of embodiment. Recent changes in thinking across a number of disciplines emphasise the role of embodiment in cognition. In cognitive science there is a shift from viewing the mind as separate from the body – where cognition is described in terms of abstract mental processes, with an emphasis on symbolic reasoning and internal representation, to one where the mind is intricately connected to sensori-motor experience, with greater emphasis placed on interaction with the environment and real-world thinking (Anderson, 2005; Smith and Gasser, 2005). Work in artificial intelligence has moved from modelling intelligent systems as agent-independent representations of the world to embodied agents evolving through interaction with the environment (eg Almeida e Costa and Rocha, 2005). In philosophy the move is away from Cartesian ideas where reason is considered separate from the body, to cognitive functioning being an inter-dependent relationship between mind, body and the environment, where the mind is extended into the external world (Clark and Chalmers, 1998). In psychology there is a shift in focus from the cognition of the individual to a situated, socio-cultural approach to cognition, together with an understanding of the role of sensori-motor interaction in cognitive development and cognitive functioning. Furthermore, recent work in neuroscience provides supporting evidence for such links between sensori-motor and cognitive functioning.

The bases for current thinking on embodied cognition fall into two broad categories (Garbarini et al, 2001): (i) the grounding of cognitive processes in neuro-anatomical and biological processes, and (ii) the derivation of cognitive processes from sensori-motor (or physical) experience, which is embedded in the psychological and cultural context (Varela et al, 1991). Neuroscientific research shows evidence for direct links between action and perception at the neural level (eg Gallese, 2000; Kohler et al, 2002, cited in Garbarini, 2001). The discovery of mirror and canonical neurons provides evidence for the direct perceptual coupling between object shape and object function, and neural system activation shows a “relationship between control of action and representation of action” (Gabarini and Adenzato, 2004 p103). This suggests that representation is closely linked to action, and is constructed through dynamic interaction with the environment. It also changes traditional conceptions of symbolic representation, tying it more closely to physical experience with the world.

Evidence for grounding cognition in sensori-motor experience is more extensive. Principally, our multi-modal sensory systems (Smith and Gasser, 2005) provide an interrelated experience of vision, hearing, touch, and action (Titzer, Thelen, and Smith, 2003, cited in Smith and Gasser, 2005), which contribute to our understanding and perception of the world. A number of themes about the sensori-motor experience and cognition relationship are outlined:

• Action-perception relationshipThis relationship emerges from Gibson’s (1977) theory of affordance – the way we perceive the world or objects, ie shape, size and spatial relations, will afford or guide particular kinds of action. Recent experimental studies suggest that perception and action are intricately linked, eg participants respond more quickly to visual tasks when accompanied by cues that relate to action (Smith and Gasser, 2005). Furthermore, representation of self in space rather than location per se, is shown to be important in understanding the interplay between perceptual and motor activity (Markman and Brendl, 2005), suggesting that the role of embodiment is more complex than simply a relationship between perceptual and motor functioning.

  At the same time action or engagement with the world forms the basis for our understanding of the world (Dourish, 2001). This is exemplified through links between children’s understanding of object permanence and the developmental stage of their loco-motor ability (Smith and Gasser, 2005). Action also forms the basis for learning the ability to self-generate goals and strategies for problem solving. When learning to reach for an object infants adopted different strategies depending on their initial type of activity (eg flailing arms, placid inactivity) (Corbetta et al, 1996). This facility to explore the physical world through different ways of interacting are key to developing unique strategies that result in the uniform outcome of a reaching action (Smith and Glasser, 2005).

• Conceptual systems grounded in bodily experience.
  Bodily experience and sensori-motor interaction are thought to form the basis for meaning making, eg conceptual definition and rationale inference, and physical concrete concepts form metaphorical analogies for abstract ideas (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). Off-line cognition is also argued to be body-based (Wilson, 2002), ie the activity of the mind is grounded in processes that have evolved for interaction with the world. So, even when thinking away from particular contexts our ways of thinking continue to be grounded in physical experience. In relation to recent technology development this conceptual coupling is significant, where emphasis is placed on meaningful coupling between objects, actions and representations (Ishii, 2008).

• Situated cognition
  Theories of situated cognition highlight the need to understand and explain cognition in terms of ’situation-appropriate behaviour’ (Wilson, 2002; Anderson, 2005). Studies showing how the particular context of a task shapes activity and cognition (eg Lave, 1988; Suchman, 1987), re-introduce the importance of situated practice (both social and physical) for cognitive functioning. Cognition also needs to be understood in terms of time-pressured real-time interaction with the world (Wilson, 2002), where cognition is conscious (and therefore time intensive) in unfamiliar situations or tasks, but becomes ‘unconscious’ in familiar situations. The aim is not necessarily to distinguish situated from non-situated cognition, but to bring to the forefront the importance of context (that encompasses cultural and historical influences) in shaping cognition.

• Environment as external support
  The external environment plays a role in supporting cognitive functioning. At a basic level the physical world reduces cognitive processing, ie people do not pay attention to what is before their eyes because they don’t need to remember what they can see (Smith and Gasser, 2005). At a more abstract level environmental space and gesture support memory and communication (Richardson and Spivey, 2000), and external tools or systems are effectively used to support computation (eg Larkin and Simon, 1987; Stenning and Oberlander, 1995). Theories of external and distributed cognition emphasise the relationship between internal (mental) and external representations. This sits in contrast to computational models of reasoning which fail to take into account either the interaction or social context of engagement with external representations.

2.2 Embodied interaction

Dourish (2001) coined the term “embodied interaction” to describe “the creation, manipulation and sharing of meaning through engaged interaction with artefacts” – or a merging of tangible interaction with social computing. Tangible computing is where a person interacts with digital information through the physical environment (eg Ishii’s work at the MIT Media Lab). Social computing, on the other hand, describes the intersection of social behaviour and computational systems and is most often associated with online communities (eg Facebook and MySpace). Dourish characterises embodied interaction as grounded in skilled, engaged practice.

However, as technologies move away from desktops and into real world environments or even inside our bodies, increasingly new fields and ultimately forms of embodied interaction are emerging. For example mixed reality games enable players to interact in the real world with online guides, virtual characters moving in real space and unwitting bystanders (Flintham et al, 2003). New theories of embodied interaction pair the physical, digital and social interface with the human sensory system, making it a mix of the virtual and physical, intangible and tangible, reality and fantasy. The rise of graphical virtual spaces such as Second Life (secondlife.com) also provide channels for exploring embodied interaction with or as an embodied agent – intelligent agents that interact with the environment through a physical or virtual body within that environment. iRobot’s Rooba (http://www.irobot.com) is an example of an embodied agent with a physical body, while an avatar in a game (Isbister, 2006) or in Second Life (Yee et al, 2006) is an example of a virtual embodied agent. Research suggests that embodied intelligent agents have the potential to significantly affect behavior, eg Roomba, which is simply a vacuum cleaner, has been shown to affect how families interact with each other and their pets (Forlizzi, 2007).

Embodied interaction in physical or virtual spaces allows us to explore neuro-engineering and notions of embodied intelligence. Current research is exploring how mind-body development shapes our perception, cognition, co-operation and social intelligence, the role of form and material properties in shaping behaviour, and designing for emergence (Pfeifer and Knoll, 2006). Pfeifer and Knoll’s view is that thought is not independent of body and that embodied intelligence has important implications in our understanding of both natural and artificial intelligence (2006).

At the heart of embodied interaction and technology is communication – we are less concerned with what innovative devices exist as how we use them as tools to stimulate thought and action. The inner workings of a mouse are invisible to the non-expert – what is important for the non-expert is what skills are required to use the mouse to perform particular actions. Technologies for embodied interaction, then, require an understanding of skill acquisition. Perhaps even more important, is how we interpret those skills, as the one performing or reflecting upon the embodied interaction.

2.3 Implications for knowledge, creativity and communication

Embodied cognition and interaction suggest that intelligence lies in the dynamic interaction of brains and the environment, and is centrally dependent on social and cultural worlds (Anderson, 2005). From this overview we can begin to identify some key implications for knowledge creativity and communication in education in the social, technical landscape of today. A key aspect is that sensori-motor experience and interaction with the environment are central to meaning making and conceptual understanding, and provides the basis for learning self-generation of goals and strategies for problem solving. Thus, it not only plays an important role in knowledge construction but also supports other kinds of knowledge such as learning strategy development. Another key aspect is evidence for the role of the external environment and external tools in supporting interaction in social contexts and cognition, especially with current technologies that provide more scope for communication and social interaction, and new ways of recording, collating, storing and re-representing information. The potential of mobile and ubiquitous technologies can also be mapped to other key features of embodiment, eg activities that exploit context-related learning, physical interaction and that are grounded in skilled, engaged practice, eg inquiry-based experiences.

3. Intersection with Technology

Embodied interaction with technologies is realised in many different ways. Table 1 outlines six “hot” topics:where interaction occurs, characteristics of each topic, and the particular focus of the topic. These topics and categories are not mutually exclusive – as technologies become cheaper, faster and more accessible they often slide between the various topics, interactions, characteristics and focus.

Ubiquitous Computing refers to information processing embedded into everyday artefacts and environments (Weiser, 1991). Ubicomp comprises a wide range of technologies including distributed networking, sensor networks, human-computer interaction and mobile computing (Weiser et al, 1999; Greenfield, 2006). Until recently, ubicomp was seen as the opposite of virtual reality – where interaction is placed inside a virtual world whilst ubicomp places interaction and computation in the ‘real world’. However, wireless computing, social networks and mixed-reality continue to redefine our understanding of embodied interaction and ubiquitous computing, and have the potential to push ‘traditional’ boundaries of where and how to distribute information, offering the capability to change learning environments and outcomes (Dourish, 2001; Rogers et al, 2006).

Proximity Interfaces Intra-body interfaces rely on proximity, using the human body as a transition medium to allow people to store, display, and exchange information (Zimmerman, 1996). They can act as social networking objects to exchange information about relationships, through common gestures such as a handshake (Kanis et al, 2004) or electronic wallets. This area is rapidly expanding as applications for mobile phones pair social networking information with physical location. For example, BrightKite (brightkite.com) and Twitter (twitter.com) allow social networking colleagues to see where each other are, meet up with others close by, or list interesting events in close proximity.

Table 1. Table of ‘hot’ research topics.

Wearable Interfaces are worn on the body, removable, and often considered extensions of the human body. Whilst pioneering applications such as the inverse surveillance system (Mann, 2001) or the early head-mounted displays worn by ‘cyborgs’ (MIT) seem more like science fiction, recent technology developments have led to mobile phones becoming the most ubiquitous wearable computer and are particularly well suited for mobile multitasking. For example, a wearable headset paired with a mobile phone allows users to drive a car whilst answering incoming phone calls. The fashion industry has taken a keen interest in wearable computing, (eg Joanna Berzowska (www.berzowska.com), and Maggie Orth (www.ifmachines.com) and the recent addition of DIY electronic kits such as the LilyPad Arduino board (www.arduino.cc) have introduced embodied interaction, and technology-based interactive fashion into the classroom.

Sensory-specific Interfaces focus on human senses as input. Olfactory interfaces focus on smell; haptic interfaces on touch; visual interfaces on vision. The least explored area is olfactory interfaces with its realisation only just becoming available in applications such as fire fighting and surgical training. Sensory specific interfaces are often multimodal – haptic and tangible interfaces are often paired with sound and vision.

Implantable Interfaces Implantable interfaces are fixed inside a body, but because of associated health risks they have long been the domain of medical research and healthcare applications, and often focus on enabling greater accessibility among disabled and challenged patients. However, performance artists are also exploring interaction with implantable interfaces and the ethical and cultural issues and long-term effects associated with extreme surgical intervention, eg Orlan (www.orlan.net), Stelarc (www.stelarc.va.com.au), Eduardo Kac (www.ekac.org), as well as cybernetics researchers such as Kevin Warwick (www.kevinwarwick.com).

Looking in more detail at developments in the past three years, Table 2 outlines the current trends and the biggest movers. Important to note is that all of these fields are motivated by particular agendas, eg a software computing company, which sponsors a conference, will tend to select papers, which relate to their technology.

Table 2. Current trends in hot research areas described in Table 1.

3.1 Implications for knowledge, creativity and communication

Mobility In 2008, technology is all about mobility and connectedness. Increasingly technologies are moving from the labs into real-world spaces such as the home, outdoor environments and even nightclubs and festivals (Sheridan et al, 2004). As mobile and smart phones provide more on-demand services and options “cloud computing” will emerge, ie people only ‘take what they need’ whilst being mobile, and leave everything else at work/home/virtual repository. Furthermore, assuming that learning is not restricted to classrooms, increasingly connected mobile devices and similarly connected augmented environments would help bridge gaps between learning contexts, and contribute to the construction of general knowledge.

Multimodality and multi-tasking Following on from this, people will want to do more things simultaneously. Multimodality and multitask devices provide new means for expressing creativity, in an increasingly fast and demanding society. However, current trends indicate that people want devices and applications that are specific to their immediate needs rather than generalised across devices and applications.

Connectedness and collaboration in the real world Associated with mobility and constant access to information, the social interaction provided by the increasing connectivity within communities (and the environments) potentially leads to more collaboration, as communication becomes easier and ubiquitous.

Context-based Ubiquitous, wearable and mobile technologies provide capabilities for bringing new concepts of authenticity to learning environments, by, eg augmenting real-world contexts, like museums, field trips; augmenting physical role play; and augmenting real-world spaces with virtual overlays of authentic contexts for learning.

Convergence versus divergence Applications beyond time and space (always on, anywhere) versus tailoring to individual and immediate need (only on now, just here).

Geo-networking and the physical web Pairing virtual online information from social networking sites with physical location and events in the real world.

4. Technology-based learning research

4.1 Physical space

Biological and psychological aspects of learning have been acknowledged since the 18^th century (Jean-Jacques Rousseau) when the use of games, manual works and direct experience, moved learning away from purely memorizing rules and procedures. Hands-on learning has been advocated (Pestalozzi, 1803), implemented in kindergartens (by Froebel in 1837), and largely adopted in schools worldwide (Daltoé and Strelow, 2005), through the use of simple materials and manipulatives like Cuisinaire rods (Fig. 1A) (fractions and proportions), golden blocks (Fig. 1B) (decimal system) amongst others, to stimulate children to express themselves through perceptual-motor activities, and language and play (Colella, 2000).

(A) Cuisinaire rods

(B) Golden blocks

Fig. 1 – traditional manipulatives

In the 1980s, computers became popular tools in schools, providing diverse transformative experiences for children’s development (Papert, 1980). However, with traditional computers, interaction is screen-based, restricted to mouse and keyboard input devices, thus lacking the advantages of concreteness, physicality, and connection with real-world environments. Recent technological innovations through embedded and ubiquitous computing bring technology-based interaction closer to the so-called “real world” (Weiser et al, 1999), providing new learning experiences that rekindle opportunities for learning through physical activity, engagement with physical objects and real world environments (Eisenberg, 2003; Moher et al, 2008).

4.1.1 Physical interaction

Mobile and sensor based technologies have been used to link physical activity to conceptual ideas, through mapping physical activity to visual or audio representations of abstract concepts, thus encouraging combined physical and cognitive development. Smartstep and Floormat (Scarlatos et al, 1999) used sensor-embedded floor mats to link children’s physical movement (eg walking up and down the mats) with screen-based visual representations of mathematical concepts (eg discrete number line). The mapping of physical action to abstract concepts was thought to “make the activity more meaningful for the child … partly because the physical objects help children to see – and therefore better understand – abstract concepts in a new way” (Scarlatos, 2006, p295). More recently configuration of Wii controllers is being used to support applications where physical activity is promoted through digital augmentation. Kahol and Smith (2008) showed that a Wii game (Marble Mania) designed to support movements required for performing surgery, increased surgical dexterity skills. Applications using a Wii remote to measure acceleration of a swinging pendulum, and forces involved in freefall, by transmitting acceleration data in real-time (Vannoni and Straulino, (2007) have also been developed to teach force, velocity and acceleration. More recently, investigations into mapping physical activity with such physics concepts (motion and acceleration) will provide new insights into the value of embodied interaction in learning (Sheridan et al, 2009).

4.1.2 Interacting with physical objects

Similarly tangibles are used to combine the benefits of concrete manipulation with digital technologies to enhance interaction experiences. Tangibles are digitally augmented objects used as input devices to trigger digital effects on a display surface (O’Malley and Fraser, 2004). Tangibles are thought to be beneficial for learning due to the opportunity to exploit their familiarity of interaction; flexible linking to different forms of representation; their affordances for constructive activity; and opportunities for new forms of collaborative interaction.

Several popular (and therefore familiar) toys have been transformed into technological artefacts, eg Bitball (a transparent sphere that records and transmits information about its own movement (Resnick, 1998)); assembling blocks that involve concepts of behaviour patterns (Stackables, Programmable Beads (Resnick et al, 1998)); and system dynamics (FlowBlocks and SystemBlocks (Resnick et al, 1998; Zuckerman et al, 2005)); and blocks that are used as tangible programming elements (Wyeth and Purchase, 2002; Schweikardt and Gross, 2008) to make programming easy and engaging for children.

Other kinds of assembly or constructive kits allow children to build their own, personalized models, stimulating their creativity and imagination. For example, Topobo (Raffle et al, 2004) enables children to build creatures out of digitally embedded pieces, which can record and playback physical motion. Research suggests that this process of creating models helps develop a greater understanding about the functioning of things (Klopfer et al, 2002). Children produce knowledge by expressing themselves through the representations they create (Marshall et al, 2003), ie the artefact embodies the children’s activity and thoughts.

While familiarity may engage children, ambiguous or less familiar representations can promote curiosity and exploration (Rogers et al, 2002). With Chromarium, a system to explore colour mixing through physical and digital tools, children experimented and reflected more with less familiar representations. In this case, children investigated the properties of a model built by someone else (Marshall et al, 2003). Knowledge is produced through exploration (leading to conclusions), rather than expressivity, and therefore there is less space for creativity, suggesting expressive and exploratory systems lend themselves to different contexts.

Tangible environments also lend themselves to collaborative work, as usually a set of interaction objects can be manipulated both by a group and individually. Combining tangibles with tabletops (Reactable (Jordà, 2003), Sensetable (Patten et al, 2001)) increases collaboration by adding the advantages of concrete manipulation to shareable interfaces that encourage communication, providing face-to-face interaction and multiple, simultaneous users. Recent work suggests how the interactive properties of such shared interfaces supports productive collaborative knowledge building (Pontual Falcao and Price, under review).

4.1.3 Interacting across physical spaces

Technology distributed across physical environments can be used to create collaborative dynamic simulations, which take advantage of whole physical spaces, like classrooms. This typically includes the use of mobile devices, as a way of freely exploring the environments (Klopfer et al, 2002), and embodying meaning-making in activity contexts (Rogers and Price, 2009). Participatory simulations enable students to act as embodied participants (Moher, 2006), as the systems are layered on top of the real world. Instead of watching a screen, students interact with technology distributed across the environment and become part of the simulation, while abstract concepts turn into experience (Colella, 2000). Such simulations might be seen as large-scale microworlds, as they present scenarios (with context-based information (Klopfer et al, 2002)) mediated by rules and open to knowledge production through investigation and experimentation (Colella, 2000). For example, in the environmental detectives system (Klopfer et al, 2002) students investigate ecological issues using portable computers; in a virus activity participants explore the spread of disease, by collecting information and communicating through wearable computers (Colella, 2000); in the Ambient Wood (Rogers et al, 2002) children discover complex ecology processes whie exploring a digitally enhanced woodland; in Savannah (Facer, 2004) children work in teams to learn about animal behaviour and longer term survival, using handheld computers that map the virtual environment to the school playing field; and in Frequency 1550 mobile phones are used to “transport” children into the past allowing them to explore previous societies (Huizenga et al, 2007). Many of these experiences also engage students in forms of inquiry learning, with the facility to collate diverse sources of data that can be re-represented in the classroom, often using integrated visualisations.

While virtual simulations can overcome and ignore human limitations, the constraints of the human body are naturally taken into account in these systems through “authentic physicality” (Moher et al, 2008). This represents a shift in the concept of direct interaction, which in the past referred to manipulating agents or parameters through an interface or virtual world. ‘Embedded phenomena’ is a technology instantiation where scientific phenomena are mapped to classroom physical space (Moher, 2006). Local and partial information about the state of the system is distributed through media across the classroom in a persistent manner, to be monitored and manipulated by students throughout an extended period of time (weeks). Several embedded phenomena systems have been developed and tested in classrooms (RoomBugs, HelioRoom, RoomQuake (Moher, 2006)). The Wallcology environment (Moher et al, 2008) expands this framework by enabling distributed collaboration, increasing physicality and expanding the activity sites. The embedded phenomena framework uses ambient media to support embodied interaction, and draws on situated learning and psychology theories that support action as the origin of thought and bodily interactions with the world as the base of cognition (Moher, 2006).

4.2 Virtual space

Embodiment forms a key theme within virtual worlds and computer gaming, where immersion in the activity is considered central for learning (Gee, 2007). Learning content is embedded in the experience, so that meaning making and knowledge construction take place within an appropriate context, rather than a series of facts removed from the activity. Virtual worlds, like physical worlds, are based on the senses, where vision, touch, and hearing are supposed to function, and are, therefore, perceived in similar ways to the physical world (Biocca, 1997). In contrast Egoyan (2007) describes the concept of embodiment in virtual worlds as performance rather than as sensation. Through performative experience, changes in our understanding of emotion, actions and behaviours can take place. Important components for interacting in virtual spaces include creativity (constructing identity), communication (the ability to express through an avatar) and performance, but all are bounded by the constraints of the tools available and the design of the game. For example, design may cause release from embodiment through anomalies with the real world, eg walking through walls. This release from embodiment may, in fact, be a seam around which learning may be mediated – through encouraging different levels of engagement and reflection (Ackerman, 1996).

4.2.1 Creativity

Avatars form the physical instantiation of self to act and interact in a virtual space, which is often made ‘real’ through objects, spaces, properties and behaviours. Through avatars users create an identity, with physical, social and behavioural attributes of their choice, eg Second Life, MySpace. On one hand this offers opportunities to explore and experiment with the nature of self and identity, and concepts that are difficult in the physical world (Egoyan, 2007) eg relationships, views and behaviours, where interactions with others actually takes place. On the other hand, through avatars people have a tendency to represent their concept of ‘me’ (although this may change over time) and often express whether they feel ‘comfortable’ or not in their ‘virtual skin’ and strive to feel ‘right’ (Taylor, 2002).

4.2.2 Performance

Although the development of performances in virtual environments such as Second Life are relatively new, they promise exciting possibilities for challenging the way we communicate with each other, perceive our bodies and our relationship to space. Since performance is a reflexive activity, through performance in virtual space we can “reveal ourselves to ourselves” (Turner, 1986, p81). Virtual environments also provide a space for mediating interaction between performers and audience through improvisation and construction of alternative narratives. This not only reveals theoretical possibilities for embodied interaction but also new technical possibilities. New software for creating different identities, for chatting between participants, or even game controllers (such at the Nintendo Wii Remote) challenges how we act with our physical bodies in virtual space.

Performance in general is fundamentally about making things seem real when they are not (Morse, 1998) and much of this theory can be applied to our understanding of embodied interaction in virtual space. For example, emerging avatar performance companies such as Second Front (the first performance art group in Second Life), use performance theory to explore of virtual embodiment, online performance and formation of virtual narrative (slfront.blogspot.com).

Performance, and in particular performance art, has a unique role to play in education. Garoian (1999) claims that performance art is both pedagogical and post-modern. He suggests that a collapsing of the difference between academic and creative work would promote critical thinking in any discipline and that performance art pedagogy represents the “embodied expression of culture as aesthetic experience – that is pedagogy as performance art and performance art as pedagogy”

4.2.3 Communication

Communication is a key component to attaining a sense of presence, which is grounded in both the physical activity of the avatar and social practice. The concept of boundaries, in a physical and social sense, are examples of embodiment and presence, eg the sense of someone else (through the avatars) being in ‘your’ space. Furthermore, “much as in offline life [...] digital bodies are used in a variety of ways – to greet, to play, to signal group affiliation, to convey opinions or feelings, and to create closeness.” (Taylor, 2002, p.41). Virtual avatars can also generate an aura of societies in which there are no boundaries between e.g. cultures, religion. At a different level of interaction, virtual worlds can create a space for inhabiting worlds devoid of these kinds of boundaries, and provide a space where people get to choose how to communicate and how to play out their world in ways that are different from the real world (McIlveny, 1999).

Researchers are seeking to understand factors that trigger high levels of motivation, and activities within ‘gaming’ settings that might contribute to learning. Prensky (2007) goes beyond this, suggesting that the physical structure of brains is different for those growing up in a digital world (cf: Luria 1979 – environment and culture affects the way we think; different cultures think differently), and that there is a different blend of cognitive skills that is a product of exposure to multiple digital media. However, the need for interactivity, immediate feedback and response, to maintain attention is highlighted, together with the concern that this is coupled with less time and opportunity for reflection (Prensky, 2001). One focus of gaming research, rather than advocating games per se for learning, is to take lessons learned in terms of learning principles that can be found in game culture.

Gee (2007) outlines 15 features of video games that form the basis for good learning. Some key features that are useful to consider in the context of this review include (i) Identity (for real learning the learner needs to make a commitment through identity in games) and customisation (the ability for the player to choose roles that suit them) are both concerned with self and preference. This raises issues of whether it is educationally important or not to encourage students to take on unfamiliar roles or to do the things they find harder (ii) Risk taking: (offering the opportunity for positive failure and therefore encouraging risk taking, and which maps well to current thinking about the value of exploratory learning) and well ordered problems (the need to order problems so that they always build on ones solved earlier, thus avoiding the issue of exploratory learning where creative solutions may be found, but don’t lead to good learning about how to solve later problems (see Elman, 1991)) suggest the complexity of integrating good learning practice into education (iii) Challenge and consolidation (games follow a ‘cycle of expertise’ – ie get a set of challenging problems which are solved many times until routinised and then more problems given) suggest similar strategies used in some traditional teaching in school, suggesting evidence of a good strategy worth continuing (iv) Performance before competence (offering the facility to perform before you need to be competent) is akin to exploring, discovering, an underlying ethos to a number of learning experiences with mobile and ubiquitous technologies.

4.3 Intersection between physical and virtual space

Mixed reality, also known as ‘augmented reality’, describes the intersection of the real and virtual – where interaction in the real world with physical objects effects interaction in the virtual world with virtual objects and characters (and vice versa). With the introduction of smaller, cheaper and mobile technologies, mixed reality opens the possibility for new kinds of embodied interaction in educational settings. Mixed reality in teaching environments provides opportunities to explore embodied interaction through self and remote learning. The MiTRLE project is a mixed reality teaching environment, which pairs local students with remote students through a virtual world in a higher education setting. The aim is to foster a sense of community amongst remote students on the basis that avatar representations of teachers and students will help create a sense of shared presence, engendering a sense of community and improving student engagement in online lessons (Gardner et al, 2008).

Mixed reality environments also have real-world implications. Geo-networking merges information from social networking sites with real-world physical locations. Live Geo Social Networking applications such as Twitter merge this information in real-time so that participants can post and search geo coordinates of time critical items. For example, a person can use a mobile phone to post information about an event they are witnessing in real time and all other interested parties in the vicinity can search, see and get directions to the event. These applications could have wide reaching implications for remote and collaborative self-learning in mixed reality settings although attention needs to be paid to the risks involved in sharing such information.

5. Discussion

Technology-based applications can create new kinds of learning spaces – both physical and virtual, that bring opportunities to exploit the value of embodiment for learning and interaction. Assuming that learning content is embedded in experience and knowledge production should take place in appropriate contexts, immersion in learning activities is also fundamental. Technology interfaces presented in this review can support engagement in directly active and participative ways, for example, through physical activity and experience in authentic contexts, exploration, discovery and experimentation, use of new external tools that can mediate action and thought, collaboration and communication (including that which occurs through forms of expression), creativity through expression and production, learning activities and situations that provide new catalysts for reflection and discussion around learning domain, and inclusion of students with physical disabilities and/or learning difficulties through multimodality and collaboration. Collaborative and communicative activity changes offering new forms of interaction and activity including sharing of information, eg embedded phenomena, transferring of data through physical proximity, eg participatory simulations, and expressions of knowledge or creations through production, eg virtual worlds, MySpace, re-representations of collated data, eg Ambient Wood/ Savannah; and expression or communication through performance activities, eg avatar performance art groups like Second Front. In addition, different relationships between student and teacher (eg as facilitator/guide) can be promoted, which maps to the emerging prominence of independent learning in the current (science) curriculum (Lombardi, 2007). At the same time this raises issues about students’ competence at taking on a more independent self-generated activity or role that this demands, and teachers’ ability or familiarity with facilitating learning.

However, such opportunities also raise a number of issues and challenges for education. Here we provide two scenarios derived from ideas raised earlier to identify and discuss the key opportunities, challenges, risks and demands that emerge within the context of embodiment, technology and education. With each scenario we identify some specifically related opportunities and issues, and then discuss the general risks, challenges and demands that such scenarios might bring.

5.1 Scenario 1: Embedded experiences

Opportunities Features of mobility and sensor embedding technologies provide new opportunities to re-think space, place and classroom organisation. Applications like the ‘embedded phenomena’ engage large groups of children in science learning in radically different ways within a classroom setting. The ‘persistent’ concept in this model of augmented learning, where the phenomena run over weeks or months, and where the activity is related to but asynchronous with the regular flow of instruction in the classroom, illustrates new openings for rethinking models of instruction and classroom practice (Price, 2007). In ‘embedded’ experiences, students are repeatedly exposed to different pieces of information distributed across the physical space of the classroom, and given opportunities for role-play, providing them with experiences from different perspectives and the means to build a collective and comprehensive understanding. Research has illustrated how this might work in science learning, but we could also imagine structuring history and geography learning in similar ways. Imagine learning a time period in history or geographical changes (climate or landscape changes) where events over time are experienced within the classroom across a several week period. In history this might follow a series of pertinent events from the start to the end of a world war. In geography this might illustrate the formation of the ice age with speeded up time events and examples of the changes taking place on the land and the people living there. Students could be alerted to particular events taking place at appropriate points in time and access video showing events, take environmental measurements that demonstrate the climate change, or even have opportunities to take part in political debates at pertinent times as historical events unfold. Such interaction promotes extended exposure to a topic, enabling reflection over time, but furthermore provides new opportunities for students to experience and understand causal events over time.

Challenges/demands Integrating learning activity that is distributed across extended periods of time, and across the classroom space brings challenges and demands for restructuring of classroom practice, particularly use of space, time management, dealing with interruption, and organisation of student activities. The requirement for students to work in groups independently from the teacher, taking more control of organizing their activities to reach their goals, poses challenges for changes in teaching style and student expectations about learning.

Risks Evidence for the potential of this scenario exists in scientific domains, but not other subject areas, although geography, history or even language learning could be supported in new ways using this design of embedded technology experiences.

5.2 Scenario 2: Shareable interfaces

Boundaries between physical and social spaces, and between different kinds of knowledge or learning contexts (informal/formal) are also changing, offering opportunities for ways to integrate everyday experience and interaction for learning. Mobile technologies offer opportunities to extend learning beyond the classroom, bridging the gap between home and school, and between field-work and classroom. Mobile phones and other multi-functional handheld or personal devices can be carried around, enable access to, recording of and communication of various forms of information and data, including photos, video, scientific measurements, survey records. Such tasks are freed from the classroom and can become living experiences, enabling learning to be more embedded in students’ own experiences and real-world topics of relevance. Both horizontal and vertical surfaces can be used in the classroom to display data uploaded from the different sources, which can then be used for sharing, explanation and discussion in classroom settings. Flexible use of large displays could exploit both small group and large class interaction. For example, table-tops are particularly suitable for small group interaction, but can also be combined with large displays to provide a forum for sharing student information with a broader audience. Such table-top interaction also provides opportunities for student expression, explanation and demonstration.

Challenges Particular challenges in this scenario include teacher development in managing fluid and uncontrolled learning outcomes, and their ability to manage increased instances of small group interaction, managing resources, eg number of artefacts available might limit number of participants (what will the rest of the class be doing?), physical location of the technology hardware within the school, in a specific room (need for pre-planning and booking resources and possible “dispute for resources” among teachers) or within the classroom (having technology at hand to be used whenever needed, as support tools), managing firewall issues with internet access, including security and privacy issues, practical management of integrating personal devices/multiple devices with school-based technologies.

Risks Insufficient provision of technology resources might limit the number of participants (how will teacher manage this?). In addition, the use of personal devices (rather than school distributed resources) might create unequal opportunities among children due to socio-economic issues.

5.3 General challenges, demands and risks across scenarios

Key challenges and demands

While offering new ways of learning, technology also raises challenges for teacher education, training and professional development, not only in terms of practically implementing changes, but knowing what kind of changes are needed. This is essential to avoid concerns that technology is often not integrated into education/teaching in a way that is likely to be successful (Selwyn, 2007). Changes in learning space and time demands developing the curriculum creatively to accommodate learning activities that support different learning processes (rather than specifically targeting factual learning, which should occur through effective activities and teaching practice), and to support re-structuring of the school day (to promote new forms of classroom interaction). This would promote new use of technology rather than mapping to current teaching practice. Teachers themselves need to become more familiar and proficient with developing and changing technologies, and the potential implications for their teaching practice.

A key challenge is how best to design learning experiences within the context of current knowledge on technology, embodiment and learning. Learning experiences described here were designed and developed through large multi-disciplinary groups. For educational contexts technology must be developed together with pedagogical aims guided by the teacher’s planning and scaffolding (Moher et al, 2008). This raises challenges for the development of technology-based learning experiences which requires multiple expertise, and demands not only the involvement of teachers or school-based technicians in the design process, but also having the personnel with skills to modify, apply and orchestrate learning experiences for different groups of students or subject domains. This requires competent programmers to develop the different activities, and skilled technicians in school to run and maintain the technology experiences.

In terms of students’ learning, flexible use and linking of information through digital communication and augmentation, requires careful design and management. Increased combinations of representations require learners to attend to and integrate diverse pieces of information from different data sources. The degree to which novices (students) are able to focus on and extract appropriate information impacts on their abilities to engage in effective knowledge acquisition activities (deGroot, 1965; Glaser, 1992), suggesting the need to understand how experiences can be designed to effectively provoke learning (Price et al, 2008). A further challenge is moving beyond the ‘experience’ itself, and mapping this to other forms of knowledge. Consideration needs to be given to the kind of knowledge that technology-mediated experiences effectively promote (eg procedural, factual, creative, or different forms of skill development), and how to integrate it with other forms of knowledge or learning activities. At a more general level, this requires re-thinking what constitutes ‘learning’ within ‘education’ together with specifying desired outcomes or end goals.

Broadening the use of communication technologies beyond the classroom raises serious challenges about how to enable safe, accessible and innovative e-Learning strategies. Firewalls serve an important role in protecting children from inappropriate digital content, but they often prevent teachers and pupils from effectively using e-Learning tools and technologies in the classroom. Heavy restrictions placed on the use of everyday communication tools, such as email (eg file size, file type) or more advanced tools such as Skype and YouTube filter external Internet content, but affect the quality and type of information that teachers can present in the classroom. However, communication technologies can disrupt the classroom and internet misuse is widespread. For example, many bright pupils are able to by-pass government approved firewalls to access X-rated and violent websites, and statistics in the UK suggest that one quarter of pupils at every school is avoiding firewalls.

Key risks

Radical changes in technology use and implementation in education demand significant financial investment in technology hardware, software and skilled personnel. A key risk is that insufficient financial and training/development opportunities will reduce the likelihood of successful educational transformation. If technology is to be embedded in useful ways, then teachers need to have more competence and familiarity with working with different technologies. Furthermore, the need to attract appropriately skilled designers and developers, and educationally based technicians is of paramount importance to effectively embed ubiquitous technologies into educational practice.

Ubiquitous technologies provide opportunities to re-think (some) learning activities to exploit the everyday interactions young people have through their own technology devices, promoting motivation through (for them) familiar forms of interaction (eg Gee, 1999; Prensky, 2001). However, a key risk here is focusing on engagement to the detriment of learning. It is important to note that despite bringing about positive effects, physical action and entertainment do not, on their own, guarantee learning benefits. This again highlights the need to re-consider what ‘learning’ entails.

6. Conclusion

Taking into account evidence and theories arising from embodied cognition and interaction, developments in computing technologies, and evidence from research, the future for education is set to change. Paying attention to and integrating up-to-date technology into education is of paramount importance, as it inevitably forms a central part of everyday life, but much work is yet to be done to establish effective ways of using these technologies to promote learning – both in formal and informal contexts. Of emerging significance are the potential changes in learning activity and learning process that are precipitated through technologies. Ubiquitous learning experiences demand different kinds of endeavours and activity than (some) traditional learning activities. We can see how ubiquitous learning environments (both physical and virtual) can provide ’spaces’ within which learners can explore, discover, experience concepts/ideas, and which can serve as a discussion forum, eg getting students to think about different issues and different boundaries. Inherent in this process is the re-thinking of what education means for developing learners; what are the central components of learning and the kinds of skills that learners will need to acquire to engage fruitfully in adult society and life. This requires not only understanding the underlying drivers for learning, but also the implications for teachers (their role, practice and training) and the development of curriculum and educational establishments. Research effort and evidence is needed exploring effective ways for teachers to know how to use and adopt technologies.

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This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

Memory is a key contemporary theme within the social and biomedical sciences. Treatments of memory range from discussions of individual capacities to recollect events accurately, through studies of collective and cultural memory, and to investigations into the immune system’s ability to ‘remember’ and distinguish self from non-self. Given the sheer diversity of these treatments, there has been considerable debate about the scope and limits of memory as concept. Tulving (2007), for example, claims to discern at least 256 different technical uses made of memory in the psychological literature alone. Part of the difficulty here is the difference between the commonsense notion of memory as the recollection of times past and the bewildering range of modalities through which this deceptively simple process might occur, along with the vast array of ways in which this might be studied.

The roots of our modern notions of memory lie in classical philosophy, where remembering is seen as inseparable from questions of moral judgement. Remembrance is the drawing together of the past in the present for the purposes of evaluation and making choices (Sutton, 1998). The Roman philosopher Cicero saw memory as integral to prudence – knowledge of good and bad and the differences that lie in between. She or he who speaks publicly of the past enters into a set of obligations about how to act in relation to the events and times they recount (see Yates, 1992; Margalit, 2002). For the past is rarely neutral. It comes with implications about present circumstances and future courses of action. These may appear in the form of continuities or breaks, succession or branching. A consideration of the past rarely indicates directly some future-to-come. It is better thought of as an interpretative puzzle with numerous solutions, all of which have differing consequences for the present.

In classical terms, memory is also intertwined with the question of ‘truth’ and how it should best be revealed. Platonic philosophy, for example, treats the practice of reminiscence as one of the means by which a scattered, dispersed original truth of things can be recovered and brought together. Platonism also initiates a view of memory as a faculty or an intrinsic aspect of mind. This ‘intra-psychic’ approach to memory became embedded in Medieval scholasticism and ultimately into the forms of philosophy of mind from which 19^th century psychology emerged (Sutton, 1998). Thus for early psychologists, such Wundt and Ebbinghaus, the relevant questions to be asked were around the relationship between the faculty of memory and perceptual processes. Experimental studies typically sought to measure the capacity and the accuracy of human memory (see Ebbinghaus, 1913). This constituted the dominant psychological approach to remembering through much of the 20^th century. The so-called ‘cognitive revolution’ of the 1960s-1970s elaborated new conceptual models taken from cybernetics and ergonomics to study memory as a multi-level system. Baddeley’s (1987) influential theory emphasised in particular the relation between a short-term ‘working memory’, longer-term storage areas and various executive control processes. More recently, Conway’s notion of ‘autobiographical memory’ has emphasised the role that current perceptions of self play in mediating both what can be recalled and the form it may take (see Conway and Pleydell-Pearce, 2000).

The dominance of the ‘faculty’ approach to memory in psychology has not been uncontested. Wundt himself proposed the study of the cultural transmission of local history to be conducted as complementary to experimental psychology (Danziger, 1990). Bartlett’s (1932) early work on memory sought similarly to show how continuities and discontinuities between past and present were refracted through cultural configurations (see Middleton and Brown, 2005). His notion of ’schema’ or ‘organized setting’ had typically been understood with reference to mental processed alone. This is a very narrow reading of the concept that omits Bartlett’s broader concerns with the cultural context and setting in which recollection occurs. Recollection itself is as much a process of reconstruction as veridical recall – ‘We mingle interpretation with description, interpolate things not originally present, transform without effort and without knowledge (Bartlett, 1932, p96). Indeed Bartlett famously proposed that the focus on accuracy as the major criterion for approaching memory was in error, since it failed to grasp that ‘in a world of constantly changing environment, literal recall is extraordinarily unimportant’ (Bartlett, 1932, p204).

Work such as this has been recuperated within ’sociocultural psychology’ (Valsiner and Rosa, 2007). This approach follows the seminal work of Lev Vygotsky (1962; 1978) in treating psychological capacities as interdependent with the tools and social structures in which they emerge. The individual’s capacity to remember is then restructured by the acquisition of tools such as language and writing, and through their participation in the communities in which they develop, learn and live. Wertsch’s (2002) work, for example, focuses on the cultural tools (such as narratives, technologies, educational policies) which mediate individual and collective remembering. Wertsch is particular concerned with cultural narratives which structure national identity by providing a common orientation to the nation’s past. Similarly work in ‘discursive psychology’ (Hepburn and Wiggins, 2007; Edwards and Potter, 1992) has studied remembering as a collective, interpersonal accomplishment wherein accounts of the pasts are shaped by the interactional contexts in which they occur (see Middleton and Edwards, 1990). Middleton’s work, for example, explores how individual recollections are interdependent with the settings and collectives in which they are expressed, such as families, workplaces or care homes (see Middleton, 2002; Middleton and Brown, 2005).

Although psychology is pre-eminent amongst what Hacking (1995) calls the ’sciences of memory’, numerous other disciplines currently lay claim to memory as topic, notably sociology (following the work of Maurice Halbwachs on ‘collective memory’); history; politics and international relations and cultural studies. In the past decade the term ‘memory studies’ has been used to refer to these diverse clusters of interest (see the journal of the same name, launched in 2008). Despite the difficulty in synthesising the range of approaches involved, it can be observed that the common wisdom around memory which emerges here is to treat remembering as practice that is at once both individual and collective, personal and public, wherein the past is contested as a moral, cultural and political concern. To some extent this is a return to a ‘pre-psychological’ understanding of the complexity of remembering as a domain of human activity, although insights from modern psychology have nevertheless been welcomed.

It against this backdrop that I want to situate what I take to be the most interesting contemporary trends in the study of remembering and their likely future development. The review is organised around a set of key debates.

1. Collective vs. individual memory

One of the key difficulties to be addressed in studies of memory is around the most appropriate level of analysis. For psychologists human memory is, per se, a process that occurs within the cognitive architecture of mind sat within a neurological superstructure (Schachter, 1996). For example, the division between explicit and implicit memory (ie conscious/reflective memories vs. learned familiarity with something) appears to have a neurological basis (Schachter and Bruckner, 1998). Although culture and society have a role in shaping both what is remembered and how these processes operate, ultimately ‘individuals are the ones who do the actual remembering’ (Manier and Hirst, 2008, p254). By contrast, from a sociological perspective the primary processes are social in nature. What we remember is constrained by the publicly available symbols, meanings, rituals and rules of a given culture. These constitute a set of ‘mnemonic practices’ (cf. Olick and Robbins, 1998) which define collective memory and in turn frame individual acts of remembering.

The relevance of this distinction is that it begs the question of whether the transmission of the past, including past values, is best supported at the level of individual rememberers or collective practices. The tradition in psychology has been to focus on the individual, and hence to treat learning as a personal accomplishment. Assessment regimes based on individual testing and examination mirror the experimental methods used by psychologists to investigate memory in the laboratory. However if remembering is an interactional process then it follows that the individual cannot be considered the sole unit of assessment. Joint recollection, where members collectively contribute to a group effort to reconstruct past events, would more accurately model the everyday ecology of memory.

The difficulty presented by the individual-collective debate is that it is unlikely to be resolved by further evidence at either level. Doubtless advances in neurology will deliver more evidence about the pathways involved in specific kinds of acts (eg verbal accounts of episodic memories). But clarifying the mechanisms supporting such acts does not solve the conceptual problem of organising the relationship between levels of analysis. Indeed the very distinction between individual and collective may ultimately prove unhelpful. Much of the current debate stems from Halbwachs’ influential (1925/1992; 1950/1980) work on ‘collective memory’, which seems to imply that social groups are the ones ‘doing the actual remembering’ (see Wertsch, 2002). This overlooks the very subtle reformulation of individuality which Halbwachs performs, such that the person is considered first and foremost as a social being whose place in a memorial framework is established well before they begin to rehearse and express formal memories of their own (see Middleton and Brown, 2005).

An alternative distinction is provided by Assman (1995, 2008). He distinguishes ‘communicative memory’ – relatively informal, non-specialised talk of the past grounded in a particular family, group or culture – from ‘cultural memory’ – the objectified, formal versions of the past contained in public symbols, monuments, archives, etc. Communicative memory lives and dies with the interacting generations who share it (usually no more than three), having a horizon of about 80 years at most. Cultural memory, by contrast, has an institutional character that elevates it to the level of tradition. Based on Assman’s estimates, we would assume that the content of communicative memory in 2025 has a window of intelligibility stretching back no further than the generation born in the late 1950s/early 1960s. Anything before this will belong to the distant past of formal record and cultural/institutional memory. The implications here are that events which fall within the frame of cultural memory are far more likely to be contested and to vary as a function of the community background of the rememberer. The differing ‘authorised versions’ of such events are likely to held by the communities themselves rather than by a common definitive source, and attempts to overrule cultural with institutional memory are likely to prove problematic. There is more at stake and greater sensitivity will be required in discussions of the recent past.

Assman’s work has been influential in recent studies of intergenerational memory. One of the major questions here has been the relation between ‘generationality’ (the shared experiences of a generation) and ‘generativity’ (the transmission of the experiences to succeeding generations) (Reulecke, 2008). In a study of three generations of German families, Welzer et al (2002) described a common process whereby memories of the first (wartime) generation were discredited and mistrusted by the second (baby boomer) generation, but re-interpreted and re-evaluated in a positive light by the third (post-reunification) generation. If robust these findings would seem to indicate a kind of skipping of generational identification which might have relevance for understanding changing social identities across generations.

For example, recent debates about radicalisation in British Muslim communities have focussed on inter-generational conflicts. Second and third generation British born Muslims are seen as potential at risk of rejecting a coherent national identity in favour of a turn towards radical politics and ‘extremism’. From the perspectives of Welzer’s work such conflicts are to be entirely expected. One point of engagement might then be through exploring the nature of the positive identification between first and third generations, and the way the experiences of the former are re-interpreted with respect to national identity by the latter. Another might be through understanding better how the second generation carries the burden of ‘vicarious memories’ (cf. Hirsch, 1997) of the experiences of the first (eg of prejudice, racism, violence) which have hitherto been considered unspeakable. The second generation may then struggle with the role of acting as witness to these memories without the support (or blessing) of the first.

2. The ‘memory wars’

The term ‘memory wars’ has been used to refer to a set of debates about the nature of ‘recovered memories’ that emerged during the 1980s and early 1990s in the USA and Northern Europe (see Campbell, 2003; Haaken and Reavey, 2009). The term was originally used to describe memories of past trauma, typically child sexual abuse, that re-emerge in adulthood having been previously unacknowledged. In the majority of cases of recovered memory these arise during the course of psychological therapy (see Bass and Davis 1988). A movement of advocates claiming to speak on behalf of those with recovered memories emerged around this time. It involved therapists who were concerned to advise their peers on how best to help clients identify and cope with recovered memories. It also included womens and childrens rights activists, lawyers and adult survivors themselves. This movement made some notable accomplishments, such as supporting survivors in bringing legal cases against their abusers, who were usually, but not always, a parent (see Commonwealth vs. Landon Carter Smith, 1990).

By 1992, a counter-movement coalesced with the formation of the ‘False Memory Syndrome Foundation’ (FMSF). Set up by Pamela Freyd, whose husband had been accused of childhood abuse by their daughter (Jennifer Freyd, a cognitive psychologist who later published Betrayal Trauma). The FMSF claimed that recovered memories were actually fictitious and were invented by vulnerable clients under the systematic influence of therapists. For the FMSF, therapists were centrally responsible for the rise in ‘false memories’. They referred to the phenomenon using the medical sounding term ’syndrome’, although no medical authority had actually defined it as such (see Campbell, 2003). The board members of the FMSF consisted of a eminent body of mainly academic psychologists, including Elizabeth Loftus. FMSF board members acted as legal experts, usually for the defence, in cases of abuse accusations following recovered memory, and wrote a number of powerful critiques including Richard Ofshe’s Making monsters and Loftus and Ketcham’s The myth of repressed memory.

Following extensive reports by both the British Psychological Society (BPS) and the American Psychological Association (APA) and several relatively even-handed contributions (Haaken and Reavey, 2009), much of the intensity has passed out of the debate. However a number of important lessons about the nature of memory have been learnt as a consequence. There is now little disagreement that individual memories are reconstructions rather than literal depictions of past events (Schachter, 1996; Engel, 2000). This makes sense in neurological terms – brain activity reconstructs past states rather than preserves them directly – and cultural terms – our accounts of the past are continuously evolving through the narratives and contexts in which they are told and re-told. If this is so then the ’storehouse’ metaphor often used to describe memory (see Draaisma, 2000) is in error, since it fails to capture to dynamic, transformative relationship to the past that seems to characterise memory.

The shift to a transformative account of remembering means acknowledging the context-sensitive nature of memory, or, as it is sometimes called, the ‘ecological’ aspects of recollection (Neisser and Winograd, 1988). The context in which recollection takes place has a shaping effect on both the availability of what can be recalled and the form in which it is recalled (Engel, 2000). The school, as an ecological context in which remembering occurs, will always have such a shaping effect – it is simply not possible to imagine a purely neutral context for remembering. The question then becomes one of either refining or increasing the ecological diversity of memory.

Another lesson is that what is meant by ‘truth’ is relation to memory is not a straightforward matter. Haaken (1998) argues that memories of abuse may not be strictly accurate, but may instead act as a ‘master narratives’ for all manner of routine, casual oppression suffered by women. The memory is not false, since it is made up of entirely real experiences which have nevertheless been re-arranged into a pattern imposed at a later date. It has been argued that this difficulty is resolved when an individual memory is treated on its merits and subject to fair test (ie external corroboration). However some groups of rememberers – notably women, children, persons with mental health issues – find their testimonies subject to systematic mistrust and suspicion. They tend not to be regarded as ‘reliable rememberers’ (see Campbell, 2003). The assumption that children’s testimony may be unreliable has wide and far reaching consequences for the interface between schools and welfare services, particularly in the light of the Every Child Matters agenda. Teachers must clearly be alert to the recollections and testimony offered by children, whilst at the same time sensitive to complexities of how a child may recall a given event. Motzkau’s (2006) studies of social workers, police and judges demonstrate that these different professional groups often work with very different conceptions of what counts as ‘good testimony’ by a child and of children’s capacities to remember accurately.

It might appear that the solution would be to wait for a clarification of exactly how children’s memories function – are they given to inherent distortion or is the norm towards accurate recall? However a more realistic alternative might be to find ways of tolerating this ambiguity in memory. Children’s memories can be reconstructive and transformative, introducing new elements and reappraising and refiguring existing elements. Yet at the same time, children are capable of veridical recall and as vulnerable rememberers stand in need of protection of their right to bear witness to their own past (cf. Reavey and Brown, 2006). These two versions of how memory functions need not be seen as contradictory. We ought to expect that a child who offers an imaginative reconstruction of a given event is entirely able to offer a detailed accurate account of another. This is so because memory is not an individual capacity or aptitude but rather and interactional dynamic between the individual, group and setting. Greater consideration of the variety and organization of the interactional contexts in which children are either invited to remember or have the opportunity to spontaneously recall within school would be a better starting point for exploring these tensions.

3. Memory and history

The distinction between history and memory is superficially easy to make. History refers to formal, public, shared accounts of the past, subject to matters of record, whereas memory is constituted by informal, personal experiences. This overly neat distinction has been rendered problematic for some time. Studies in the oral history tradition, in cultural history and commemorative practices have all treated ‘history’ as a contested terrain which is given shape when social groups attempt to secure the dominance of their own particular collective memories of past events (Misztal, 2003; Hutton, 1993). It is then perhaps more appropriate to speak of the historical as underpinned by a ‘politics of memory’ (Hodgkin and Radstone, 2003). For example, Schwartz et al (1986) demonstrate how the Jewish story of the collective sacrifice at Masada in AD73 took on a completely new life during the founding of Israel and its early years. The historical is then transformed when it becomes a vehicle for the embedding of collective memories of the early years of the Jewish state.

There is a strong counter-position that the conceptual conflation of history with memory is itself a political act (Klein, 2000). Pierre Nora (1989) argues that the term ‘memory’ has gained currency at precisely the time when the local commemorative practices and traditions in which community memory is transmitted are under threat – ‘we speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left’ (1989, p7). For Nora, modern culture is under the sway of an immense drive to archive and preserve the past, orchestrated by what Lowenthal (1985) sees as the ‘heritage industries’. The past is stored up as ’sites of memory’, gigantic empty symbols which are evacuated of all meaning and which prevent an active relationship to the past, leaving us merely with the duty to remember but with no terms of participation.

The problem, as Nora and Lowenthal see it, is a failure to make the past directly relevant to the present. What Nora calls ‘living memory’ is a relationship to the past marked by continuous debate and with ongoing implications for current actions. Life in small rural communities, for example, is structured by such living memory, with daily events informed by a rich common past. By contrast, the heritage industries render the past as a commodity which is seen to have value in its own right but does not speak directly to present concerns. One way of addressing this might be to explore ways of transforming heritage into living memory by connecting it to live issues faced by local communities. Following Nora, the key would be to situate this at the local rather than the national level, since it is the empty gesture of supporting a generalised sense of national identity by commodifying the past in general that is seen as problematic.

In a similar vein, Huyssen (2003) observes that ‘monumentalism’ – the attempt to capture the past in a grandiose architectural testament – no longer adequately functions as a means for urban and national communities constituted by diverse social groups. By their very nature, monuments typically function as what Eco (1989) calls ‘closed texts’ – objects which promote a single reading or interpretation of the events of which they speak. Inevitably this favours the historical consciousness of one group over another. For example, the debates around the statue of Arthur ‘Bomber/Butcher’ Harris erected in London in 1992 demonstrate that monuments can be used as a means for one group to attempt to settle an interpretative dilemma.

The attempt to settle the past through monumentalism might then be better characterised as collective forgetting, rather than collective remembering. The sheer scale of monumentalism can render what is commemorated as no longer a matter of debate or concern. We build monuments in order to forget, to have done with the past as a live matter for debate. It is this tendency which has led to a counter-trend of monuments which function as ‘open texts’ by promoting multiple interpretations and discussion around past event. Maya Lin’s Vietnam war memorial in Washington, which seems to equivocate between commemorating the dead and commenting on the senseless of loss on such scale, is one well known contemporary example. However, such monuments tend to attract controversy if not outrage (Sturken, 1997) – in Lin’s case a separate monument based around more traditional military themes has been built opposite the official monument. One of the difficulties here is with the commemoration of problematic or traumatic pasts – for instance, how do state authorities manage to commemorate terror that was previously enacted in their own name? The Berlin Holocaust Museum and Buenos Aires Memory Park are recent examples, and the New York Twin Towers site and Madrid Atocha station memorial are ongoing.

Holocaust memorials are a particular case in point described by Young (2000). The recent trend amongst artists and architects seeking to commemorate the Holocaust has been to design ‘counter-monuments’ which resemble elaborate puzzles (such as the Gerz’s ‘disappearing monument’ against fascism in Harburg). These monuments set up complex, often unsettling experiences for viewers which encourage reflection rather than soothing the duty to commemorate. Young observes that many such monuments are designed by artists who have no direct experience of what they seek to commemorate, although in many case they are only one generation’s remove. Hirsch (1997) uses the term ‘post-memory’ to capture the dilemma which this second generation face. Since they have grown up hearing the stories of survivors, is not the Holocaust also a part of their own past, albeit in this vicarious way? As with the intergenerational conflicts described before, the second generation face the particular dilemma of feeling burdened with the task of commemorating the first generation’s experiences which have hitherto been considered either private or unspeakable. An illustration of this is provided by the graphic novel Maus by Art Spiegelman. This offers a narrative of his father and mother’s experiences in Auschwitz intertwined with a narrative of his own anxieties and ambiguities in telling their story. Commemoration is then combined with reflection on both the interpersonal difficulties of his relationship with his father and the on what it means to take ownership of telling the story of his experiences.

4. Embodied memory

It is a legacy of faculty philosophy to consider each of the different organs of the body as being the ’seat’ of a particular aspect of psychological functioning. Thus the heart is the emblem of the emotions, the stomach and digestive system the symbolic site of worries and anxiety, and the brain as the repository of memory and identity. And yet we also share in a common sense experience that our bodies think and act for themselves outside of our conscious control. Our fingers appear to remember a telephone or pin number as they type it out, our bodies seems able to navigate the car we drive without requiring our sustained attention. Popular culture is replete with stories of transplant patients who have acquired something of the memory of the donor, usually in the form of preferences or desires, along with the donated organ. Common sense and paucity of evidence suggests this to be highly unlikely, not least because if the brain is not really a storehouse of the past, than neither is the heart of the kidneys. So what is the status of these body memories?

Young’s (1995) analysis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) notes the emphasis placed on the body in this condition. Although the dominant symptom is the presence of chronic intrusive memories, another strong symptom is consistent autonomic arousal, manifesting as irritability, explosive violence, hypervigilance. Young notes that chronic trauma has long been associated with ‘body memories’, most significantly in Freud’s work. In part this is because the psychological concept of trauma was directly modelled on the physical concept. But this need not lead to the view that mental images are contained throughout the body, but rather it suggests that a link to the past persists through symptoms expressed by the body. Such a link may have its own logic that is distinct from mental logic, Young claims. The body has acquired habits and norms of behaving that effectively reverse the flow of chronological time – it behaves as though it were still preparing itself to endure the original trauma.

The philosophy of Henri Bergson (1905/1991) developed an influential notion of ‘habit memory’ that usefully clarifies Young’s claims. Bergson proposed that in recollecting the process of learning or acquiring a skill, memory could be divided into distinct memories of the actual occasions on which learning took place (‘reminiscence memory’) and the overall changes in one’s skill (‘habit memory’). What is learned becomes a ‘bodily automatism’ – the body is oriented towards and anticipates the act without need of conscious intervention. Whilst this distinction clearly resembles the later psychological division of ‘explicit’ and ‘implicit’ memory, in Bergson’s philosophy it also marks a distinction between time and space since reminiscences are a part of the ongoing flow of lived time, whilst habits establish our attunement to the concrete world of action or ‘attention to life’. Habit memory connects us to space and place, whilst reminiscence connects us to the unfolding of time.

This relationship of habit-memory to place is further explored by Casey (2000). Drawing on phenomenology, Casey treats the body not as pure physical anatomy but rather as a ‘lived body’, the surface or contact point of our experience in the world. All experience, for Casey, is experienced through the body, through the ‘concrete feeling of bodily efficacy’ (2000, p175). This feeling is the substrate for all conscious reminiscence since it is what connects to the world. Thus the more elaborated our memories become, the more they tend to leave behind the body. For example, an amorous experience that left us ‘tingling’ for days afterwards eventually becomes transformed by narrative rehearsal into a description of people and places. However lived, embodied experience remains at the core of memory as the central fact of experience.

Feminist work has argued from a similar phenomenological basis that experience can becomes normalised or discredited when its felt, embodied basis is excluded from recollection. Haug et al (1984) developed a methodology known as ‘memory work’ as a corrective. The basis of memory work is for participants to write individual memories around a trigger word which evokes a specific bodily sensation. The memories are deliberately written in a concrete descriptive form with attention to specific details rather than narrative elaboration. The group then discusses the memories collectively and offers reactions and analysis of each. The guiding idea is to strip away something of the layers of cultural normalisation that are built up around the experience and offer them up for renewed questioning (see also Crawford et al, 1992). Here body memories are not treated as neutral but rather as the root to a political analysis of women’s experiences which are usually excluded from narrativisation.

The implication of this focus on embodiment is to shift the focus away from cognitive processes per se and towards the body as integral to remembering. This broadens the range of the aptitudes which are seen as relevant to memory. Emotions and capacities for sensory experience play a role in the process of recollection. For example, an early childhood memory involves the physical and sensory experiences of a child’s embodiment. Pedagogic practice then requires an additional sensitivity to memory as an embodied process – we remember through sensing, feeling and acting. The learning environment needs to offer opportunities for physical engagement as well as abstract recollection.

Connerton (1989) also offers a political analysis of body memories, but in top-down rather than bottom-offer account. He observes that commemorative rituals tend to involve stylised or ritualised movements – for example, the taking of a communion wafer or saluting during a parade. These movements are invested with symbolic value. They literally establish a moral order involving obligations, correct behaviour and relations of dominance and submission. But since they are also automatic, so do the values that they establish which become transmitted during the ritual without conscious reflection. Hence social groups and institutions will entrust to the body the role of transmitting values which they wish to preserve without debate or contestation.

This work has been influential in offering a reading of how control over the body – primarily through ritual – is central to control over the past. From this it follows that interpretative flexibility around the reading of past events also involves ‘de-ritualisation’. There are interesting implications here for debates around the role of religious belief and the wearing of religious symbols in schools. Symbols and rituals are the prime means – according to Connerton – for establishing an automatic, unreflective relationship to the past. As such they are not merely occasions or markers of a particular kind of identity, but also preserve a particular perspective on history and collective memory.

5. Mediated memory

Aby Warburg is a founding figure in art history (see Michaud, 2007). One of his major projects Mnemosyne was the creation of an atlas of images, both classical and contemporary, from low and high culture. The images were designed to be subject to repeated re-arrangement. No auxiliary commentary was to be included. This was to be ‘art history without a text’. The idea of the atlas was that the transmission of certain kinds of gestures, experiences and values could be revealed through taking this random walk through cultures, exploring the relationships between images directly.

Eighty years later, trawling through the bricolage of images and icons which litter the interconnected pages of a social-networking site such as MySpace or Facebook one cannot help but be reminded of Mnemosyne. For here too it might be possible to reconstruct the links between past and present – what is preserved, what is lost, continuities and discontinuities. Social networking sites are complex arrays of symbols, images and texts which serve as ongoing representations and commentaries on the lives of users. As such, a profile on a social networking site also serves a commemorative function. However, the commemorative work which is done is highly shaped by the medium. For example, on MySpace routine updating of profile pictures tends to be the norm, hence there is a re-invention of self as much as a commemoration. Furthermore, since profiles can be commented upon by other users – typically friends and relatives – there is a need to fashion the past so that it does not attract controversy or ridicule (ie making inflated claims about one’s life and previous experiences). Social networking sites are illustrations of a distinctively contemporary way of performing personal history, one which requires continuous updating and sensitivity to the claims of others.

Warburg’s work highlights the mediated nature of memory, and specifically the role of the image in such mediation. A significant body of work explores the role that photographs play in sustaining family memories (see Barthes, 1980; Kuhn, 2002; Kuhn and McAllister, 2006; Hirsch, 1999). Domestic photography is a common strategy for drawing individual memories into a collective framework for narrativising the past. This is typically done through organising, displaying and collectively reviewing photographs. Photographs may also serve as points for contestation – what is depicted and what is left out serve as resources for telling alternative and counter-narratives of family life. This is even more so when family photographic albums become historical artefacts. Here they take on the status of interpretative puzzles whose organization needs to be decoded.

Changes in the technology of photography and photographic reproduction have tended to shape this process (see Lury, 1997). For example, exchanging, tagging and annotating one’s own and others photographs on websites such as Facebook and Flickr has broadened the scope of visually mediated collectively remembering such that it need not depend on face-to-face interaction. Developments in this area, such as accessing these sites through mobile phones, are likely to further widen this.

Brookfield et al (2008) discuss the practice of life-story work amongst adoptive parents. Here adults involved in the care of adoptive children attempt to document the child’s life using photographs and other materials in order to provide a form of continuity for the child (and also between carers). However due to the precarious nature of the adoption process it is inevitable that some periods of the child’s life are either not documented, or the materials which are available are considered unsuitable (eg photographs in which the child is apparently neglected). Adoptive parents are then confronted with a dilemma – should some aspects of the past be avoided, or ‘airbrushed’, or perhaps invented altogether? Brookfield et al offer examples where inventing the past, using the ‘powers of fiction’ may ultimately be beneficial.

Middleton and Brown (2005) describe how family websites similarly create continuities in the collective memory of the family. Through the use of picture collages, calendars, separate pages for family members and so on, a kind of coherent family identity can be staged. But such websites can also create discontinuities, such as between images and text, or ambiguities in relation to common memories (such as memories of an absent ‘home’ or a deceased family member). Lury (1997) argues that images often overtake memory. Images do not so much mediate as reformulate memory, offering up new possibilities for elaboration through combination. Digital imaging, in particular, with its capacity for manipulation, provides an uncertain transformative relationship to what is apparently depicted. For example, the images around the destruction of the Twin Towers building on 9/11 might be thought to serve as clear and unambiguous records of what occurred. However an awareness that such images can subtly altered or edited has made these images central to conspiracy theories around the events – alternative versions of the events are built around pointing to possible signs of distortion in the images. There is a strong contrast here with the footage of the Kennedy assassination where the images were considered capable of potentially settling rather than perpetuating the controversy. Digital imaging unsettles memory.

Sturken’s (2008) work reverses the direction of the analysis. Taking recent cultural memory in the USA as her object, Sturken argues that meditational objects such as kitsch images and comfort objects (eg Twin Towers snow globes) serve to tame rather than elaborate the past. They remove the burden of questioning the past and replace it with an already settled sentimental relationship to trauma and loss. This is another instance of the sort of commodification and simplification of the past identified by Nora. Sturken suggests that the circulation of such objects and images serves the ideological purpose of estranging North Americans from their own recent history.

Summary

Research around memory has broadly shifted in the past hundred years from a focus on remembering as an abstract process of restoring awareness of past events and retaining information to one of studying remembering as a highly context-sensitive process of reconstructing the past in the present. As a consequence, there has been a corresponding shift from asking questions as to the literal accuracy of what is recalled towards questioning how and why particular sorts of things are remembered as circumstances change. The methods and approaches used to study these processes have also vastly expanded. In one direction this has led to more fine-grained studies of the neural mechanism thought to be involved in the formation and recollection of memories, and in the other to a greater awareness of how memory is integral to maintaining cohesion to groups, institutions and cultures.

The five domains that seem to me to best represent modern ‘memory studies’ deal with changing formulations of the individual/collective division, different versions of ‘truth’ and ‘accuracy’ in memory, the shifting borderline between history and memory, growing awareness of the embodied and phenomenological dimensions of remembering, and change in the modalities through which memory is mediated, most notably the technological means through which representations of the past are created and managed. These domains have been affected by both specific historical events (eg the ‘memory wars’; recent forms of Holocaust commemoration) and by general social/cultural shifts in how the memories of collectives are considered within the historical awareness supporting the nation-state.

Over the next fifteen years it seems likely that these domains of concern around memory will diversify further. For example, the awareness that the contribution of cognitive processes needs to be set alongside physiological, emotional, proprioceptive and neurological mechanisms will doubtless led to more complex descriptions of remembering as an activity requiring complex relationships between differing systems. Equally, the trend to speak of collective memories existing in parallel states rather than a single version of the historical will certainly increase given the relative inability of national identity to serve as an coherent principle for organising the past. Further clarification of the relationship between the social/cultural dimensions of memory and the strength of the investments group members make in particular versions of the past will prove useful.

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This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

CMC can be defined in two ways: a broad definition where Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) is defined as any communicative transaction which occurs through use of two or more networked computers (McQuail, 2005) or a narrow technologically determined definition which stresses popular forms of interactive CMC, including email, video, audio or text, chat, conferencing, instant messaging, bulletin boards, list-serves, and weblogs. In this paper CMC is being defined broadly, as per McQuail’s definition.

Two definitions of Community

In ‘Conceptualising Community: beyond the state and the individual (Studdert, 2006)’ it is argued that in the traditional sociological approach (widely shared among social scientists) community is positioned as a passive, apolitical object, defined from an unacknowledged Archimedean point, intrinsically beset with problems or potential, reductively discursive, characterized by a foundational utility, open to instrumental usage by one project or another, powerless, transparent, narrow and essentialist.

Studdert also argues that within this traditional sociological approach ‘community’ could never described inter-relationally or as a unity important unto itself. Thus the claim here is that traditional social scientific conceptualisation situates CMC community within a pre-given, but unacknowledged framework (Bauman, 2001) which constrains the possibilities offered by the internet as a social space. Rather, what typifies traditional investigation is a series of questions centred around what afflicts community (Giddens (1998), Putnam (1993, 2000), or, in the case of CMC communities in particular, what offline interest(s) it can serve and how it will develop. These questions nullify other questions and lines of enquiry, principally relating to what community does as a social formation, and how inter-relationality functions to create communal being-ness.

Suffice to say that within this traditional view of community, an online community is a social formation constituting some or all of the three following requirements

• Simple entry and presence in CMC online (Etzioni and Etzioni, 1997)
• An activity in common (Wenger, 1984)
• Sociality (ie any social interaction at all)

However there is an alternate view of community which states that the static term ‘community’ is substituted by the phrase ‘communal being-ness’ which acknowledges the dynamic, actioned nature of social interaction. Thus communal being-ness is defined as ongoing dynamic sociality between groups of whatever size, whose conduct when with each other is governed tacitly by certain conventions. These conventions are maintained by a dynamic interaction of communal power and co-operation, and which always contains within it, in addition to the particular manifestation of the actioned sociality itself, all elements, subjective and objective, of the wider ‘web of relations’ (Arendt, 1958).

This definition explicitly acknowledges that Community is not an object, but is an inter-relational hybrid activity in which the actions of multiple communality contain, create and hold meanings, power and identity of that community. Thus this version of ‘communal being-ness’ is not a pure mechanistic formulation isolated from other demarcated entities and united only in the workings of the mechanistic ’society’ machine (Latour, 1993; Studdert, 2006). The contrast between these two approaches establishes the foundation for the argument and for the investigation of the various accounts of CMC and online community, as well as providing the basis for extrapolation regarding the possible and probable futures of online community.

Research

Academic research into online communities falls neatly into two categories: works offering some generalised account of ‘online communities’, or the specifically ethnographic works studying one online site in detail.

Category one – overview: General philosophical

This work largely stems from Rheingold’s ‘The Virtual Community’ (1993). Since the publication of this landmark work, discussion regarding CMC has centred on the formulation and practices of online community. Rheingold’s work studied different forms of CMC including The Well, Usernet, internet relay chat rooms and various multi-user sites principally MUD. Its notions of community were largely linked to practices involving a narrow version of CMC, and Rheingold had a preference towards the more ‘exotic’ uses of the internet – chat rooms and so on – which were more predominant in early CMC activity. His work predicts potential benefits from online communities and suggests online community would be the outcome of the accumulation of ’social feeling’ sourced in sustained public discussion, utilizing the opportunities CMC presented.

Rheingold remains the leading name among early theorists who viewed CMC and the internet in a progressive light. Over the intervening period many other commentators have pointed in various discussions to the potential offered by CMC.

Kollack (1999) offered a taxinomy drawn from cognitive psychology which suggested three non-altruistic user motivations for participating in online communities. Others utilize the work of Putnam to claim that virtual communities developed bonds enhancing ties of social capital and civic engagement. According to the early online social capital theorists Blanchard and Horan (1998) these qualities are best achieved when online communities are situated in an “encompassing community” (see also Wellham, B. et al (2001).

Many commentators such as Preece (2000, 2004) provide suggestions which could the feeling of community being-ness online. Preece draws attention to the pitfalls of the new medium and indicates that enhanced technology could be the best means to overcome aspects of CMC sociality not conducive to communal feeling. Like Kollack (1999), Preece constructs a taxinomy for CMC communication within a particular chat room and classifies postings with psychological qualities, some of which are deemed valuable and conducive for communal being-ness.

Castells (2000) views CMC networks as the fundamental unit of emerging modern society where key social structures and activities are organized around electronically processed information networks. He distinguishes this mode of network from previous long standing social networks by asserting that online networks “process and manage information and are using micro-electronic-based technologies” (Castells, 2000). According to Castells “networks constitute the new social morphology of our societies”, a claim which, of course, links him to a wider search by Giddens (1990, 1994) and others (Fukuyama, 1995; Wittle, 2001) for some new social space, as well as with claims that these new social networks represent a qualitatively different form of community and inter-relationality, one replacing old notions of community bound together by location. Of course this attempt to assert and locate a ‘new non-political space’ (Honig, 1993) is characteristic of liberal political theory (Joseph, 1988), as it is the very claim to difference and radicality in which these approaches locate themselves (Descombes, 1993).

Wellman is another who speaks of networks (1996) which, though they have limited social presence, often allow communication that is uninhibited, creative and blunt. He also uses social capital notions of strong, intermediate and weak ties. Etzioni and Etzioni (1997) list the virtues of online and offline communities and the different social roles they can fulfill. Many authors stress issues like the impact of CMCs on local communities (Mele, 1999; Castells, 2002) or the problems associated with a two-tiered information society and questions around inclusion (Wegerif, 1998; Preece, 2002; McConnell, 2000). Others explore how technologies can impact and improve upon democratic practices (Barber, 2002; Biesta and Lawy 2006; Kerr, 2005). The capacity to dissolve boundaries has also been a frequent topic: Lipnack and Stamps (1997) and Mowshowitz (1997) point out how virtual communities can work across space and time, for instance. Others refer to the web’s freedom for the assumption of identity pointing to Second Life and game playing sites as examples (McKenna, 2004).

Other topics include social identity (Campbell, 2004; Wood and Smith, 2005; Thomas, 2007), group process (Garton et al, 1997; Siegal et al, 2002), educational possibilities derived from online community building (Michinov, Michinov and Toczek-Kapellel, 2004); creating emotional resonance conducive to communal behavior offline (Schrock, Holden and Reid, 2004); linguistic signifiers conducive to positive CMC in online settings (Barab, Kling and Gray, 2004; Herring, 2004), codes of conduct for CMC communal spaces (Rheingold, DATE?) encouragement of certain emotions (Preece, 2002).

Recently there have been a series of theoretical papers using concepts derived from other disciplines: Ma and Agarwal (2007), Wilson, and Peterson (Annual Review of Anthropology, 2002) among those utlising the notion of artefacts from archaeology, applying the term to non-material objects such as online reputation and utilising social psychological tools to create a model of interaction.

In recent years commentaries have turned to problems of methodology. Moheddian (2004) suggests that static communication dominates research, and attempts to develop a methodology and uniformly define community. Schimdt (2007) proposes a general model for comparative analysis of the different uses of the blog format. Buchan interrogates limitations of current methodological approaches (2000), while Rutter and Smith (1999) and Gatson and Zweerink (2004) question the limitations and opportunities presented for ethnographers in online CMC research.

Some authors, such as Kim (2007), in fact, have even gone so far as to contest this notion of CMC as inherently democratic, pointing to the potential difference between structured online communities (message boards, chat rooms, etc, of the sort more predominant overall in Rheingold’s time), and more recent individual-centric, bottom-up social tools (blogs, instant messaging). Kim suggests the latter are gaining in popularity, and her comments could be applied just as easily to privatized dedicated social sites such as MySpace and Facebook. Herring, Kouper, Scheidt, and Elijah L. Wright centre their investigation around the difference between online practice and public discourses. In particular they pose interesting questions concerning why female and teen bloggers are under-represented in public discourse about weblogs.

Finally, it should be noted that within these studies there is a characteristic blurring of boundaries principally around the usage of the key terms CMC and community. It is never quite clear whether CMC is limited to a narrow technical definition or whether it includes the entire internet. There is also a conceptual blurring around the term ‘community’, which is a long standing traditional social science practice (Studdert, 2006).

Ethnographic studies

Recent years have seen a plethora of what can be broadly described as ethnographic studies of various online sociality, usually on a specific site. This strand of research presents ethnography as the emerging tool for online research (Thomson, et al (1998); Ward, (1999); Sack-Beck. (2004)). Clearly this work functions as a reaction against the work described in strand 1, much of which is now seen as ungrounded in actual online practices. The papers themselves utilise a wide array of methodologies to investigate online community such as discourse analysis, grounded theory, social psychology.

Recently commentators have studied older Chinese groups (Xie, 2008), female fan sites (Bury, 2005), cancer communities (Tamar, 2008), chat rooms Merchant, 2001; Trochia, Janda, 2002), ESL learning communities (Zhang, 2007), Chinese political bulletin boards (Robert, 2007), skinheads (Campbell, 2006), health groups (Maloney-Krichmar; Preece, 2005), general blog sites (Hookway, 2008; Williams, 2007), same sex attracted sites (Yip, Dowsett, Williams, Ventuneac; Carbello-Diegeuz, 2008), just to name a few.

Overall the findings are rather uniform although several key elements are common to virtually all accounts: various forms of technical CMC’s facilitate various psychologically defined qualities, there is sociality online, the groups created online are largely ‘communities of interest’, and the online space exists overwhelmingly as an adjunct and facilitating tool for pre-existing off line communities.

The commonality of these findings sits side by side with the constant presence of micro-suggestions that tend to concentrate upon adjustments to technology. The accounts of these studies also exhibit a subtle displacement. In these ethnographic studies, there is barely a mention on any specifically online derived communal being-ness. In ‘Creating a Sense of Community: Experiences in a Swedish chat room’ (Sveningsson, 2003), for example, the transcribed conversations show less engagement overall than might be found in a conversation you might have with a stranger in a queue. The transcripts show social interaction certainly, but it is short, hesitant and superficial. Nor is this diminished social interaction uncommon within these ethnographic accounts.

What is revealed in many of these accounts is not ‘communal being-ness’ in the sense describe earlier, but rather commonality, the commonness of being, the commonality of the mass, the customer, the citizen. This widespread investigative slippage between communal being-ness and commonality is exemplified by the influential educational work of Wenger who defines community of practice as “groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly” (Wenger, 2002).

This traditional definition positions community as an empty stage where communities appear through a simple conjunction of individual interest, much in the same way that mushrooms appear after rain. Wenger’s approach confirms Dumont’s point that in traditional social sciences we pass from the individual to the communal only in terms of a conscious design (Dumont, 1983). This is a major problem for these accounts and though many allude to it, few interrogate it directly. And the reason it is a major problem brings us back to the central question of this section: if there is a unique social formation termed online community, then it surely must be created within CMC and the online space. In the light of this question, it is telling that these ethnographic studies contain virtually no sociality derived specifically from online settings.

To summarise, these ethnographic accounts show two overwhelming tendencies within CMC practice: offline communal being-ness dominates the construction of online identities and online meanings, and there is virtually no sociality derived specifically from online settings.

The next section argues that these two contradictory findings explain each other; for if existing identities are filling the space of online sociality, where is the space from which something specifically communal and specifically online can emerge?

Argument

So the question is “why?” Why has the social network of the web spectacularly failed to produce any sign of online communal being-ness.
Studdert believes it clearly relates to two issues: the predominance of offline interests, and the mode of investigation.

Offline interests, ie identities created and sustained outside online CMC space, utterly dominates the contemporary internet. These range from government laws or legislation, government agencies’ codes of practice, information sites, health education sites, through business sites, sites specifically relating to bodily identity, same sex attracted sites, third age sites, sites for cancer sufferers, through educational spaces to privatised spaces of sociality like MySpace, Facebook and Second Life. All these sites offer some form of CMC to facilitate social interactions and indeed, CMC permeates the contemporary internet.

These sites of interest construct a narrow one-to-one relationship inherently at odds with the notion of communal being-ness. In fact it is far closer to the privileged and defining social relationship of both the state and the social sciences, that is, the state/individual axis. Interest is an inherently individual pursuit and constructs a relationship which is therefore inherently a rational choice made prior to entry into an online setting. As such it excludes community from any role in the construction of subjectivity or communal power.

Tsure argues that even apparently named social sites like ‘MySpace’ and ‘Second Life’ are sites not for online sociality, but for information, display and individual construction of identities (Tsure, 2008). To identify these sites of interest as community is to erect an inherently impoverished form of community confined to the singularity of the state/individual axis. The predominance of uni-dimensional relationships drives multi dimensional CMC, communal multiplicity and hybridity to the margins of the internet.

This figure of the rational individual is cast online and in the online literature in many lights: client, blogger, stakeholder, life-styler, user, lurker, poster, cancer survivor. These are all individualised roles where the terms of the singular relationship are decided somewhere else. If communing exists within this framework it is nothing more than the commonality of individual interest and role. Unfortunately, for notions of online community, they constitute the predominant form of social interaction on the web.

The degree to which sociality within the online space is controlled by offline identities and interests ranges across a spectrum. Clearly at one end lie the online service locations, exemplified by the ‘pay your road tax on line’ sites. Here, one is being ascribed a pre-exiting identity by passing through a serious of previously defined, codified and understood steps, and this action of sociality – the passing through the steps – allows the individual to be recognised and inscribed as a citizen. Sociality in these cases is almost entirely commonality as a citizen. There is no space for any unique online sociality. In these circumstances the unique sociality from which cooperative communality is formed (Arendt, 1958) is utterly absent. Similarly, in business sites, CMC is exclusively one-to-one and again a series of demarcated steps agreed in advance guide the buyer and inscribe an identity. Once again CMC serves simply to shape the identity created prior to the online sociality and in doing so leaves no space for unique sociality.

This sort of privileging of interest is even present at the other end of the spectrum in blogger sites, where invariably a moderator and a code of practice have the overwhelming influence in shaping what is apparently a social space into an individualistic and known form. The primacy ascribed to the social relationship of interest above all others limits and relegates multi dimensionality. There is no horizontal CMC discussion across online site barriers demarcated by interest, nor is it encouraged, for example, that road tax payers should use the online service to talk to other road tax payers, much less ‘MySpace’ users, in one simultaneous online action of CMC.

The privileging of interest has constructed an internet not of multi-dimensionality or online communal being-ness, but rather one demarcated to the extreme. It has effectively closed the online space to moments of unique sociality necessary for any communal being-ness to develop. For this reason it has become almost impossible to speak of an online community in the wider inter-relational sense, because quite simply very little unique sociality is found online.

In the development of the internet, the state and the social sciences have held a mirror to each other. The current mirroring regarding online communities is illustrated in all the ethnographic accounts. Not only are the studies dominated by the framing concept of interest, there is little multi-dimensionality beyond the interest, little contact outside the demarcated spaces and aside from some minor linguistic tropes, which could simply represent a one time outcome of adjusting to the keyboard, little sign of anything unique to the online space itself. It is clear why a community of interest, so designated by the social sciences and created by offline interests, represents a limiting of the possibilities for both a richer, denser web and something creative of online communal being-ness.

Futures

Is it possible for CMC to be used and configured in a manner which allows the inter-relational hybridity and multiplicity creative of communal being-ness online to emerge? Is it possible for instance, to envisage an online educational CMC space that is productive of communal being-ness? It is accepted that such online classrooms require a multi-dimensional CMC sociality and that having such an online environment appears to improve people’s sense of community (Lysoff, 2003) What would that sort of CMC space look like, if these findings were generalised across the web?

Possible and Probable Futures

The state and various aligned hierarchies of power continue to shape and contain CMC and online sociality in line with their general position as the defining agent of the social (Bauman, 2003). Hand in hand, the social sciences, in line with its role as the ‘ideology of modernism’ (Bauman, 2003), continue to term these static formations ‘communities’ and thus continue to provide the state and aligned entities with the ammunition to do exactly the same. This creates a situation productive of results entirely predictable from both parties and for CMC online interaction.

This result, needless to say, also diminishes the social potential for the internet simply because it produces inherently limiting forms of social relationships. Thus educational projects, projects of social cohesion and community building are also inherently limited, both by how initially the possibilities are conceived, and the manner in which this impacts upon the net in real CMC interaction. Thus, for example, we will see the uptake of CMC facilitating interaction such as the Nesai online classroom as a means of dealing with excluded students and children in care who require an education. However, the technology itself simply duplicates the socially constructed hierarchy of the predominant educational setting, rather than positioning itself as a multi dimensional horizontal mode of communicative interaction.

It is envisaged that more demarcated health sites and sites supposedly dedicated to establishing links between various interest groups, such as the elderly, the medicalised, the ‘disabled’, the expatriate and so on will appear. In this future, online space and CMC will continue in an overwhelmingly uni-directional form, as an outcome of financial imperatives, and guided by the domination of offline interests. In such circumstances the process will contain mutually interdependent elements of surveillance and control (Rose 1999) accompanied by good intentions of the liberal variety in the service of idealised and noble causes.

In such a scenario, CMCs that currently offer an online space for relatively unmediated conversation will become marginalised and heavily moderated. Additionally, the internet itself is becoming openly censored either through filtering or legislation of the sort recently introduced in Australia, and this will continue.

Preferable Future

The fact that there is currently barely a ripple of a specifically derived CMC online communality is not because such communal being-ness is impossible, but rather because of the way in which the contemporary internet has been created.

In relation to academic approaches a number of inter-relational strands are currently emerging, which utilise a variety of work ranging from Latour to Deleuze. An interrelation and longitudinal study (Studdert, 2007), based on the development of the skeletal inter-relational outline of Arendt (1958), discovered online communal being-ness in which a specific communal identity-in-common was created and sustained online. This work centred around a blog site and involved a group of approximately twenty to forty regular posters. More such work of this nature is clearly required. However, such an interrelational approach presents possibilities for enlarging our capacity to actually perceive communal being-ness. Furthermore it touches directly upon our capacity to imagine a different internet.

Is it possible, for instance, to conceive of a CMC space deeper and wider in its communicative reality, with general inter-relationality throughout and truly empowering CMC technology? Is it possible to imagine a situation where the internet functions as an untrammelled space for the action of sociality and does so in circumstances allowing all manner of interaction?

For that to happen online space must be open to the possibility of its own unique sociality. Such an internet fundamentally requires the overturning of the privileging of interest both within the web itself and within social science literature.

Early theorists conceived of CMC as creative of an open, multi-dimensional space where social action and communal being-ness were prioritised over all other elements. Ethnographic research simply confirms that this is the polar opposite of the way in which CMC has developed. The elevation of interest as the defining totem of social interaction has given us a stunted and impoverished version of community in the online space. A new vision of the web centred around the idea of online space as first and foremost a public space is required. This space would be every bit as public as the street, and where whatever government intervention occurs should be governed, just as it is on the streets and in other offline spaces, by laws and procedures, regulating and restricting not the communal but the state itself. Business presence should also be low key, serving online maintenance costs only. Whatever form governance of the web takes it should be accountable to users, not to governments, to the communal being-ness and not to the dictates of interest.

The potential for fully utilising the possibilities of CMC are vast – in education, in community building, in offsetting social alone-ness and disconnection. For these reasons the potential of CMC must be realised. The first step to realising this is to conceive of community and communal being-ness in a different way, which allows offline interests to appreciate and encourage different forms of CMC sociality.

The work of Lysoff (2003) indicates how little of this CMC potential has been exploited in the service of education, or, for that matter, in the service of the social as a whole. The fact that the opportunity to create this sort of socially centred internet was bypassed in the age of neo-liberalism is perhaps no surprise, but it is still potential to be realised and it is still possible to realise it. Online CMC needs to be re-imagined in a manner centred on the privileging of a widespread multi-dimensionality and an inter-relational hybridity of social and public space. This would be a socially determined online space, where perhaps even communities of dis-interest could emerge.

References

Alperson, Phillip. ed.(2002) Diversity and Community. Malden MA, Blackwell.

Antonijevic, S. (2008) ‘From text to gesture online: a microethnographic analysis of nonverbal communication in the Second Life virtual environment’. in Information, Communication and Society, vol. 11 (2)

Araujo, Ildemaro; Araujo, Iván, (2003) ‘Developing trust in internet commerce’. in, Proceedings of the 2003 conference of the Centre for Advanced Studies on Collaborative research, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Arendt, Hannah. (1958) The Human Condition. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Argyle, Michael. (1991) Co-operation. London, Routledge.

Arrow, Kenneth. (1974) The Limits of Organisation. New